Suddenly off-limits were matters that once were the meat and potatoes of prior administrations, such as evidence of insects and rodents, dirty bed linens, unsanitary kitchens and bathrooms, medication errors and furniture that was too decrepit to support residents.

Hearne recounted a visit he took to an ALF where he was aghast watching a caregiver scream at an elderly man with Parkinson’s disease, a neurological disorder that made the man’s hands tremble and quake. When the man spilled his soup while struggling to grasp his spoon, the caregiver launched into a tirade.

“How would you like it if somebody spoke to your granddad like that?" Hearne asked.

Hearne repeated the story a month later when he spoke before a work group appointed by Gov. Rick Scott to recommend reforms of the state’s ALF program following the series in The Herald, which found 70 cases of death by abuse and neglect in homes since 2002.

Over and over again, the newspaper found, the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration, which has primary responsibility for policing ALFs, ignored violations of state law and allowed troubled homes to remain open and unpunished. Hearne criticized the new inspection policy yet again at a Nov. 15 meeting of South-Dade volunteers.

He was notified in writing that he’d been dumped from the program two weeks later.

He said the new policy amounts to “acceptance of whatever the facility owners want, regardless of the impact on our most vulnerable population.”

Fields, who is a professor emeritus of government and politics at St. Petersburg College, a position he took after a 22-year career in the U.S. Army, says he exchanged heated words with state Rep. Matt Hudson — a Naples Republican who has sponsored several bills that critics say would weaken the program — at an ombudsman meeting in Tampa Bay last November. Later, he said, he was “accosted” by the state’s deputy ombudsman and a local administrator. Fields said he was told his comments were “not consistent with the goals of the program.”

“It sounds like you are suggesting I should resign. Is that what I’m hearing?” Fields said he asked. “Yes,” he says the deputy replied. “That might be best.”

Larry Polivka, an expert on aging at Florida State University’s Claude Pepper Center who chaired the governor’s ALF work group, said he was not privy to the reasons behind Fields’ and Hearne’s departures. But, he added, if Hearne “got fired for speaking to us and saying what he said, I do not support it, and I find it disappointing.”