An investigative report by The Navarro Report Staff
For more than a year, San Diego County fought in court to keep secret what its own investigators had already documented: a pattern of racial hostility, sexual harassment, and outright theft inside Edgemoor, the 192-bed county-run skilled nursing facility in Santee that cares for some of the region’s most medically fragile residents. Voice of San Diego finally forced the records into daylight this week, after Superior Court Judge Matthew C. Braner ordered their release. The fallout was immediate — the county fired its behavioral health services director, Nadia Privara, effective Aug. 26 — but the deeper story is not really about one administrator. It is about what happens inside the institutions built to catch San Diego’s most vulnerable elderly and disabled residents, at the exact moment those institutions are being asked to catch more people than ever before.
The Edgemoor records, spanning 2023 and 2024, describe a workplace investigators themselves struggled to characterize as anything but dysfunctional. One substantiated case found a staffer used the term “Negra” and admitted she may have called Black colleagues and patients who frustrated her “fucking Negras”; the employee who reported it described housekeeping staff routinely using derogatory language toward Black patients and coworkers. Separate investigations documented a facility employee circulating sexual images and a video of himself and a female coworker without her knowledge; a food services supervisor terminated after roughly $1,100 in high-end meat and extra charcoal disappeared from county-ordered event supplies; a senior housekeeper who stored a sex tape in a colleague’s locker and was later placed on leave before retiring; and a case of unwanted touching in which a housekeeper massaged and “cracked” a secretary’s back and neck against her wishes. At the county’s separate psychiatric hospital, investigators substantiated two additional sexual harassment cases in the same window.
Perhaps most striking: an administrative analyst who was recorded during a countywide cultural-responsiveness training saying, “I thought this wasn’t going to be political, but what do you expect when it’s taught by a bunch of Black people,” was promoted to program coordinator five months after county investigators concluded the incident occurred. County spokesperson Tim McClain confirmed the promotion but declined to describe any discipline, citing personnel confidentiality — a pattern that repeats across nearly every case in the record release. County officials maintain executives only learned the specific details after the lawsuit, because personnel decisions are handled at the department level. Privara, who is now weighing legal action against the county, says she never condoned harassment or racism and prioritized “a culture of belonging, safety, and equity” during her tenure.
Edgemoor is not an isolated data point in San Diego’s elder-care landscape — it is one node in a system already showing broader strain. The county has 21 Medicare-certified nursing homes with roughly 2,358 beds, and the wider San Diego metro area (including Carlsbad, Escondido, and San Marcos) counts 81 nursing homes and skilled nursing facilities in total. San Diego’s average CMS quality rating, 3.8 stars, technically outperforms California’s statewide average of 3.1 — a comparison that flatters the region only because California’s baseline is so low. Nationally, nearly nine in ten nursing homes fail to meet expected staffing levels, understaffed by an average of 24 percent daily, according to the Long Term Care Community Coalition; California separately posts one of the country’s most severe nursing shortages, with roughly a 26 percent staffing gap and nurse turnover in San Diego running close to 11 percent. Understaffing of this magnitude is not a background statistic — it is the documented precondition for the kind of neglect, delayed care, and unchecked workplace dysfunction that the Edgemoor records describe in granular detail.
That strain is colliding with a demographic wave the county has known was coming for over a decade. SANDAG, the region’s planning agency, projected San Diegans over 55 would grow 55 percent between 2012 and 2035, and Serving Seniors, the county’s leading senior-services nonprofit, put the over-55 population at 170,000 in 2017, rising to a projected 225,000 by 2026 — with the fastest growth concentrated among those 65 and older. Every one of those residents is a future nursing-home referral, a future in-home care client, or, increasingly, a future entry in the county’s homeless count.
That last trend is arguably the more urgent crisis hiding in plain sight. San Diego’s 2026 Point-in-Time Count found overall unsheltered homelessness fell 11 percent — but adults 55 and older now make up 33 percent of the county’s unsheltered population, up from 29 percent just a year earlier, even as the total declined. More than half of unsheltered seniors counted this year were experiencing homelessness for the first time in their lives, up four percentage points from 2025, and older adults now endure the longest average stretches of homelessness of any age group tracked — 234 days, against a 193-day average across all ages. Advocates describe a population increasingly composed of first-time-homeless women, often living out of vehicles after a job loss, medical crisis, or the death or divorce of a spouse — each event frequently compounded by the simultaneous loss of health insurance. Paul Downey, president and CEO of Serving Seniors, has called the trend a crisis the region is “not prepared” for; County Supervisor Nora Vargas has called spending seniors’ final years on the street “a travesty.”
Edgemoor’s population makes the stakes concrete. The facility exists specifically to serve residents with complex medical needs, many of whom also carry behavioral health conditions — precisely the population least able to self-advocate if care quality slips, and least able to simply leave for another provider. Quality-rating data show real variation even among licensed facilities countywide: independent nursing-home trackers rate 8 of the county’s 21 Medicare-certified homes at a B grade or better, while flagging at least two for persistent, serious concerns — underscoring that oversight gaps are not confined to one county-run building. For families making placement decisions under emotional and financial pressure, the Edgemoor disclosures are a reminder that a facility’s public reputation and its internal culture can diverge sharply, and that the gap is often only visible once a lawsuit, rather than routine oversight, forces it into view.
The county’s own explanation for the delay compounds the concern. Spokesperson Tim McClain said most personnel decisions, including discipline and promotions, are historically handled at the department level rather than escalated to county executives — meaning the structures meant to catch this kind of misconduct instead let it move upward through the org chart unexamined. That structural gap, more than any single bad actor, is what the county says it is now working to close.
The throughline connecting Edgemoor’s internal dysfunction to the county’s rising senior-homelessness numbers is capacity — or the lack of it. Every dollar and every staffing hour absorbed by scandal, litigation, and remediation at a county-run facility is a resource not spent expanding the shelter beds, subsidized housing, and preventive services that keep aging San Diegans off the street in the first place. And every family that loses confidence in county-run elder care, after watching a facility go a year in court to avoid disclosing its own substantiated misconduct findings, is a family less likely to trust the public safety net at the exact moment more of the county’s residents will need it. The county says it is now consolidating HR, finance, and oversight functions to “identify and address issues sooner.” Whether that consolidation arrives before the demographic wave — or after the next records lawsuit forces the next set of findings into public view — will determine whether San Diego’s elder-care system can actually meet the population it was built to serve.
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