An 83-year-old Navy veteran with dementia spent four hours trapped in a walk-in freezer while staff watched just 48 residents — alone. His body temperature dropped to 66°F. His family found out because of a Ring camera.
William “Gene” Ray didn’t die in combat. He didn’t die with his family by his side. The retired Navy chief petty officer — a man who spent his life in service — died shivering and barely conscious on the floor of a commercial freezer at a Florida assisted living facility, according to a lawsuit filed in May. He was 83 years old. His body temperature: a fatal 66 degrees.
Ray, who suffered from dementia, had been a resident of The Waverly Assisted Living and Memory Care facility in Pasco County, Florida since May 2025. Staff knew from day one that he was a wanderer — he frequently left his room searching for his wife of 55 years, who did not live at the facility. He had been found walking into other residents’ rooms, mumbling, and on one occasion, wandering outside the building entirely.
None of that stopped what happened on the night of September 26, 2025.
At 12:30 a.m., surveillance cameras captured Ray leaving his room. For the next four hours, he roamed the facility completely undetected — walking in and out of the kitchen and the walk-in freezer multiple times. At approximately 4:30 a.m., the freezer door shut behind him and locked. He was trapped inside.
No alarms went off. No staff noticed. No one checked.
It wasn’t the nursing home that raised the alert — it was his family. Shortly after 7 a.m., Ray’s daughter Kristen Spencer spotted her father missing from his room on a Ring camera and called the facility. Staff began searching. Around 8 a.m. — nearly four hours after he became trapped — they found him. He was rushed to a nearby hospital but never recovered. He died of hypothermia.
“The director came in and said they found him, and then she said he was in the freezer,” Spencer recalled. “I said, what do you mean he’s in the freezer? I couldn’t even believe the words I was hearing. From there it was just unbearable.”
A subsequent investigation by the Agency for Healthcare Administration revealed a disturbing detail: on the night Ray died, only one staff member was monitoring 48 residents at the facility.
The lawsuit, filed by Ray’s family, alleges wrongful death and negligence — arguing that had the kitchen doors been locked after hours, or had staff been adequately monitoring residents, Ray would be alive today. Attorney Steve Barnes called it “systemic failure.”
The Waverly issued a statement saying it “strongly disputes the allegations” and intends to fight the lawsuit in court. The facility has not addressed the staffing ratio publicly.
For a man who once served his nation at sea, his final hours were spent alone, in the dark, in freezing cold — 50 feet from the people paid to keep him safe.
