Hardin Home: Sex Offender Nurse Employed Two Years - TN
That is not an allegation. That is what the administrator said out loud, to a federal inspector, at 3:30 in the afternoon on September 18, 2025.
The inspector asked whether he was aware LPN A was on the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation's Sex Offender Registry. The administrator said yes. The inspector asked whether LPN A was currently employed at the facility as a direct care nurse. The administrator said yes. The inspector asked whether he was aware that sex offenders should not be employed at a care facility. The administrator said yes.
Three questions. Three admissions. No explanation recorded in the inspection report.
LPN A was placed on the TBI Sex Offender Registry on March 28, 2023, for aggravated statutory rape, exploitation of a minor by electronic means, and solicitation of a minor. Five months later, on August 30, 2023, the facility ran a criminal background check. That check returned a felony conviction for aggravated statutory rape, solicitation of a minor, aggravated rape, and soliciting sexual exploitation of a minor. The following day, August 31, 2023, Hardin Home hired him.
The background check did not bury the findings in ambiguous language. It returned a felony conviction. It returned multiple felony convictions. The facility reviewed that document, and someone made a decision to proceed.
Tennessee's rules on this are not complicated or subject to interpretation. The Tennessee Department of Health permanently prohibits employment in long-term care facilities for anyone with a disqualifying event that includes specific sex-related offenses. Permanently. The word means what it says. There is no petition process described in the inspection findings, no waiver, no exception that applied here. The convictions on LPN A's background check placed him in the category of people who cannot work in a long-term care facility in Tennessee. The facility hired him the day after receiving that information.
Hardin Home's own written policy, reviewed by inspectors during the complaint investigation, states that each resident has the right to be free from abuse, that residents must not be subject to abuse by anyone including facility staff, and that the facility must not employ individuals who have been found guilty of abuse, neglect, exploitation, or misappropriation of property by a court of law. The policy further states that facility administration should report to the nursing board any knowledge it has of court actions indicating an employee is unfit for service.
The administrator, by his own account, had that knowledge. The inspection report does not indicate that any report was made to the nursing board.
The residents at Hardin Home are not named in the inspection report. What the report does say is that all 24 of them, every person living in that facility, were affected by the failure to screen out LPN A before he was hired. The inspection classified the level of harm as minimal harm or potential for actual harm, and noted that few residents were directly affected. But the classification of harm level in a CMS inspection report reflects what inspectors could document, not necessarily what occurred. What inspectors documented here is that a man with felony convictions for crimes against children was employed as a direct care nurse, with physical access to a population of vulnerable adults, for more than two years, with the full knowledge of the person running the facility.
Direct care in a nursing home is not an abstract role. A licensed practical nurse provides hands-on care. Bathing. Wound care. Catheter care. Medication administration. Physical contact with residents who may be cognitively impaired, non-verbal, bedridden, or otherwise unable to report what happens to them or recognize that something is wrong. The inspection report does not document any specific incident of abuse involving LPN A and a resident. It documents something that precedes incidents: the conditions that make them possible and the decision-making that allows those conditions to persist.
The complaint that triggered this inspection is not described in the report. The report does not say who filed it, what they alleged, or what initially drew investigators to this question. What it records is what they found when they looked: a hire date, a background check, a registry entry, and an administrator who confirmed he knew all of it.
The inspection was conducted on September 18, 2025. The deficiency was cited under F0606, the federal tag governing a nursing home's obligation not to hire anyone with a finding of abuse, neglect, exploitation, or theft. It is among the more straightforward tags in the federal inspection framework, because it does not require inspectors to weigh competing accounts of what happened in a room or evaluate whether a care protocol was followed correctly. Either the facility checked, and either they acted on what they found. Here, they checked. They found a registered sex offender with multiple felony convictions. They hired him.
There is a version of this kind of failure that looks like a broken system, a background check that didn't route to the right person, a registry search that fell through the cracks, an administrator who genuinely didn't know. That version does not describe what happened at Hardin Home. The administrator's own words, as recorded by the inspector, describe a facility that knew, and hired anyway, and continued employing a registered sex offender in direct care of elderly residents for more than two years.
The 24 residents living at Hardin Home during that period had no way of knowing who was providing their care. They had no way of knowing what the background check had returned, or what the administrator knew, or what decision had been made on their behalf before LPN A ever walked into the building. They trusted, or had no choice but to trust, that the people responsible for their safety had done the basic things required to protect them.
Someone decided that was not necessary.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Hardin Home from 2025-09-18 including all violations, facility responses, and corrective action plans.
Additional Resources
Data source: Official federal inspection data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
Editorial process: AI-synthesized regulatory data, reviewed for accuracy by our editorial team.
Professional review: All content reviewed by Christopher F. Nesbitt, Sr., NH EMT & BU-trained Paralegal.
Last verified: June 27, 2026 · Our methodology
HARDIN HOME in SAVANNAH, TN was cited for violations during a health inspection on September 18, 2025.
That is what the administrator said out loud, to a federal inspector, at 3:30 in the afternoon on September 18, 2025.
Health inspections identify deficiencies that facilities must correct. Violations range from minor documentation issues to serious safety concerns. Review the full report below for specific details and facility response.