Former CNA Admits To Beating Patients, Gets One Year Sentence
Apr 15, 2019, 10:47 PM
FARMINGTON, Utah – From inside a courtroom, Jason Harold Knox apologized to two families of patients that he admitted to beating while they were in his care.
The family of 71 year-old Richard Crossley, a Vietnam Veteran, placed a surveillance camera inside his room, after they found unexplained bruising on Crossley.
Daughter Kellie Bingham says Crossley, is unable to speak, but kept motioning for his chest one day, while she was visiting him at the Chancellor Gardens assisted living facility, in Clearfield.
This is Richard Crossley, the Vietnam vet and Alzheimer’s patient who was abused by Knox. Just spoke with his daughter. Interview on @ksl5tv at 5&6. pic.twitter.com/UJt44jMZ2Z
— Mike Anderson (@mikeandersonKSL) April 15, 2019
“He finally grabbed my hand, and shoved it into his shirt, so that I looked and saw the bruise on his skin and on his chest,” Bingham said.
Knox told Judge Edwards that during the past six months in jail, he’s been taking courses in anger management, substance abuse, and PTSD.
Edwards ultimately gave Knox a second chance, sentencing him to one year in jail, without credit for time already served.
Knox will be released on probation afterward, and can be put in prison if he violates one of many terms of his probation.
Some of those terms include: no further offenses, no alcohol, or drugs.
The sentence is nowhere near the maximum one to fifteen years in prison for each of the two assaults, but Bingham says she is hopeful Knox will change for the better.
“I’m not a vindictive person, but I want him to make some changes,” Bingham said.
Bingham, along with other family members also made those surveillance videos of Knox, assaulting her father public, Monday.
She says the family made that choice, in an effort to bring light to the issue, and the need for better protections for Alzheimer’s patients. She plans to work with Utah lawmakers, to institute some of those changes.