State moved to close ALF after man’s deadly fall. Jackson still sent people there

By the spring of 2023, Billy Ray Corbin had lost more than 15 percent of his body weight and was woozy and wobbly on his feet. He had tripped and fallen repeatedly.

Though Corbin’s healthcare workers recommended that staff watch him carefully when he moved about his elder care home, records say, only one staffer was on duty watching 10 residents when Corbin toppled head-first to the floor on the night of May 14, 2023. The caregiver found him face down, broken and bloody.

Corbin fractured his jaw in two places, busted his upper arm, and lacerated his lip. He died later from a brain bleed.

Corbin’s death, coupled with the home’s litany of violations, led Florida healthcare regulators to pull Calvinelle South’s license and ultimately shutter the 10-bed Miami assisted living facility.

But in the 30 months the home fought to stay open, Jackson Health, Miami-Dade’s taxpayer-funded safety net system, kept moving patients in — despite regulators’ claims the home was unsafe, a Miami Herald investigation found. Four Jackson patients were evacuated from the home after inspectors found it operating without a license.

In the last decade, Jackson has paid a Miami company more than $35 million to discharge mostly frail patients with nowhere to go into assisted living beds. The Herald investigation found Jackson knew little about the quality of care their former patients were getting — or the conditions of the homes where they were sent.

READ NEXT: How Jackson, Homeless Trust paid millions to woman whose ALFs state punished

Roxana Solano, who runs five Miami ALFs under the Villa Serena brand, owns the company, Unlimited Senior Solutions. Solano, 57, discharged at least 23 Jackson patients to Calvinelle South between 2020 and the end of 2025, Jackson records show.

Solano sent 13 Jackson patients after Corbin’s 2023 fall – a time during which inspectors reported residents were left hungry, residents claimed caregivers “yelled at them and treated them as though they were children,” and housed them in a building in such disrepair that it was “unsafe.”

On Aug. 3, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) signed a final order shuttering Calvinelle South, ending more than two years of litigation.

The University of Miami’s former director of bioethics, who worked with Jackson administrators for three decades, called Jackson’s contract with Solano’s company “damning, completely damning.”

“Everybody agrees [the patients] don’t need a hospital level of care, and they need to get out,” said Kenneth Goodman, the recently retired head of medical ethics for the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine.

But, Goodman said, “This woman and her company should not be getting the Public Health Trust’s money. There is really compelling evidence that this company is not fit for the purpose.”

“Who was responsible to prevent this?” Goodman added. “Who is responsible to fix it?”

In the weeks after the Herald asked Jackson detailed questions about the hospital chain’s discharge program, Jackson administrators tacitly acknowledged they could have done more to protect their patients — and began fixing it.

In an Aug. 13 statement to the Herald, spokeswoman Krysten Brenlla said Jackson would now “explicitly require notification to Jackson … leadership of any complaint, disruption, regulatory matter or other issue involving an ALF serving our patients.”

“These assisted living facilities are independently licensed and regulated; therefore, Jackson would not typically receive direct notification from the regulatory agency regarding any investigation or finding at an individual facility.”

When Jackson’s ALF contracts expire, Brenlla said, “We will once again conduct a competitive … process to ensure we have the strongest possible network of providers to meet the complex needs of this vulnerable population.”

That might include extending Solano’s contract, or others, “as appropriate,” she added.

Jackson’s records, obtained by the Herald, show Solano transferred 673 patients to Miami ALFs between 2016 and July 31 of this year — admitting 28 percent of them, or 189, to her Villa Serena chain.

Large cockroaches and a ‘foul odor’

Calvinelle South is part of a chain of ALFs owned and operated by Calvin Brown, 40, and his mother, Gayon Dunn, 70, a mental health counselor and psychiatric advanced practice registered nurse. Jackson’s records show Solano discharged 125 Jackson patients to homes operated by Brown and Dunn.

Solano declined to speak with the Herald. In a prepared statement, her attorney, Kristen Jackwin, said that “for over 30 years, my client has served mental health and indigent communities. She has always complied with the law, put patients first, and treated them with respect and professionalism. Her reputation for excellence and the utmost integrity is well earned. Any assertions or allegations to the contrary are patently false.”

Neither Brown nor Dunn returned calls from the Herald. In sworn testimony filed as part of his litigation to keep Calvinelle South open, Brown called his treatment by the state “grossly unfair,” and suggested his troubles began when an inspector targeted the home for discipline.

“That man came back with vengeance,” Brown said of the state inspector. “I mean, my staff literally cried” when he arrived to monitor the home. “It’s a very quiet, chill place for this guy to come in there on the warpath.”

Since 2014, health inspectors have documented 63 violations of state law or administrative code at the home. Ten of the violations were for the most serious infractions under Florida law, including lapses in care or supervision.

One of the serious violations involved Calvinelle South paying $8,500 in fines in 2020 after a state report said the home improperly allowed a man to remain there after his mental illness and aggression made him a threat to others. The man had been entered in a felony jail diversion program. His charge: battery on an elderly person.

The resident’s social worker documented that he needed to be “in a more appropriate residential facility” than Calvinelle South, where, records say, he threatened another resident. A staff member tried to protect the other man. “I heard [the resident] yelling and threatening another resident in the morning. I asked him to stop, but he was very agitated and in a rage,” the caregiver told an inspector.

The resident attacked the caregiver, sending him to the hospital. The attacker went back to jail.

The inspection, dated June 4, 2019, also said the home was in disarray. One bed had no sheets or blanket. The stuffing of a comforter on another bed was hanging out. Several rooms were missing window blinds. Someone had punched a hole in a door. A floorboard was cracked. There were missing tiles, unhinged closet doors, large cockroaches, a dirty rug and “dirty pillows with a foul odor” in two rooms.

“The administrator acknowledged he needed to make some improvements,” a report said.

’How did he break both jaws?’

By 2023, Calvinelle South’s conflict with the state escalated. AHCA filed an amended administrative complaint in December of that year, accusing the home of 17 separate violations, including inadequate supervision, failure to prevent falls, failure to arrange healthcare, failure to have “enough qualified staff” on duty and failure to “provide a safe and decent living environment.”

The complaint, which detailed the May 2023 fall and subsequent death of 63-year-old Corbin, led the state agency to begin the process of shutting down the home, on Northwest 41st Street off 17th Avenue in Miami.

Corbin’s family had lived for many years in Kentucky, though court records show he was born in St. Petersburg. Corbin had been in Miami-Dade for about two decades, working in construction before he became disabled. He was divorced and had two daughters. He’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia, his autopsy report said.

County records show about 40 arrests under Corbin’s name, mostly for “aggressive” panhandling.

State health records show Corbin had begun to settle down some by 2013, and was admitted to the home around the next year. The arrests stopped during this period. His autopsy report said that he also stopped drinking and using his “drug of choice,” cocaine.

Within a decade, though, Corbin’s overall health was declining. In a 2013 arrest report, Corbin was listed at 160 pounds. By February 2023, he weighed 114, and he had lost another 18 pounds by his May 14, 2023, fall.

Hospital records following Corbin’s fall include a diagnosis of “severe malnutrition,” and a condition where his body was breaking down its own muscle and fat for energy.

Both staff and other residents reported Corbin needed help just to walk. One caregiver said Corbin was “always dizzy and rocky on his feet. When he wakes up and goes to the bathroom, he would stumble,” a report said. The staffer said Corbin “had fallen multiple times.”

Corbin’s daughter told investigators her father wanted to leave Calvinelle South and return home.

“He stated that they were not good to him,” she was quoted as saying in the December 2023 administrative complaint, which did not name her.

Corbin told paramedics on the night of May 14, 2023, he fell while walking from his room to the bathroom. A Calvinelle caregiver said he heard a loud thud coming from upstairs. Corbin was lying face down on the floor. Both his face and the floor below it were coated with blood.

The caregiver told inspectors he grabbed Corbin’s shirt to wipe the blood off his face. He called 911 from a phone downstairs at 4:54 a.m.

At the hospital, doctors documented “multiple untreated old sores that appeared to have healed on their own.”

In his sworn testimony, Brown blamed his client’s death on Corbin’s medical providers, saying they never told him how frail Corbin had become, or how badly he needed fall precautions for his safety. “This falls upon [them],” he said, “to allow me to know this information.” The provider “never, never made [it] aware to me.”

Corbin’s daughter told investigators that Calvinelle’s administrator “told her [Corbin] fell but he did not hit his head or anything,” the December 2023 administrative complaint said. The daughter didn’t buy it. She asked an investigator: “If he did not fall on his face, how did he break both jaws?”

The home’s “negligence in supervising and caring for [Corbin] directly led to his preventable falls, injuries, and eventual death,” a state judge later wrote.

In the months after Corbin’s Aug. 5, 2023, death, AHCA investigators continued to document violations at the home — 27 in all. And Jackson, through Solano, continued to send its patients there — 11 in all, after the state filed its December 2023 complaint.

Jackson discharged its last patient to Calvinelle South in November 2025, hospital records show — eight months after a state administrative law judge wrote an order recommending the home’s license be revoked.

The 28 violations included: staff swiping diapers and other goods from terminally ill hospice patients; a resident with pus in her eye waiting two days before a caregiver administered prescription eye drops; and a caregiver escorting a resident through the home who was wearing only a diaper and a towel.

Furniture was falling apart. There was a hole in a wall and damaged flooring. One bathroom had no toilet seat and there was no lighting in a stairwell used by elders unsure of their footing.

Food was a source of particular scorn: One resident claimed the food portions were “not enough for even a dog.”

A resident asked to take a discarded piece of bread from another resident’s tray as a state health inspector watched. A caregiver refused, walked away with the tray and offered nothing else to eat.

“I understand it’s a business,” one resident told a health inspector, “but we shouldn’t be treated like this.”

In her statement, Jackson’s Brenlla said it was Solano’s responsibility to oversee the ALFs to which she sent patients, and the hospital network would have taken “immediate action” if alerted to concerns.

In April, state health regulators reported one last violation against Calvinelle South: Nearly two weeks after the home’s license was formally revoked, it was still operating as an unlicensed facility. State elder welfare workers evacuated seven residents. Four of them had been Jackson patients, the hospital confirmed.

Even then, Calvinelle South argued it should be allowed to reopen, saying in a June court pleading that shuttering the home would “directly and adversely affect [the home’s] business, property, and professional interests.”

On Aug. 3, health regulators had the last word: Calvinelle South could operate no longer.

This story was originally published August 27, 2026 at 11:12 AM.