Each year, dozens of Florida's frail and feeble die under suspicious circumstances in state nursing and boarding homes -- forgotten fatalities afflicted with bruised bodies and broken hips, head wounds, rib fractures or infections.

A Miami Herald review of hundreds of adult deaths over the past five years shows that these deaths, even in state- sanctioned facilities, are often a result of abuse and neglect.

The fatal injuries go undocumented in medical records, unnoticed by welfare workers, unchallenged by police and prosecutors.

Frequently, family members don't even know what happened to their relatives in the very shelters licensed by the state to protect them.

"I was shocked when I looked at the death certificate and saw 'blunt head trauma,' " said Tony Rosco of his 88-year-old mother. She died while a patient at the Meridian Nursing Home in Plantation earlier this year, emaciated at 74 pounds. "More shocking than that is that I still don't have any idea what happened to her. Can you imagine what that's like?"

When Harriet Roberts Martin last saw her grandmother Idora Smith in a Dade County foster home, she was horrified by the 83- year-old woman's condition. "Her face was caved-in from dehydration, her eyes were back in her head, she looked like something in a horror show," Martin said.

Four weeks later, her grandmother was dead, a victim of neglect and infection. The stories of these forgotten fatalities have been chronicled from hundreds of pages of Florida autopsy and abuse reports, investigative files and state welfare documents. They tell a troubling tale of death among the elderly and disabled in licensed facilities.

They include:

* Maude Weiss, 87, who died of gangrene and infection of the left leg after living in two Broward County nursing homes. Abuse investigators determined that she was mistreated at both Aviva Manor in Fort Lauderdale and later at Beverly Manor in Pompano Beach. She died bruised, with bedsores that cut to the bone. Administrators at both facilities said she was not abused.

"What happened to my mother was terrible," said Constance Konen, her daughter. "I'm still not able to cope with her unnecessary death."

* Vera Frazier, 65, a cancer patient at the Ashley Manor Nursing Home in Miami, who died after suffering second- and third-degree burns. She was left unattended with a cigarette that dropped in her lap and set her on fire. Her undergarments smoldered unnoticed for several minutes, and healthcare workers waited almost 10 hours to send her for emergency medical help.

Kenneth Hawkins, administrator at Ashley Manor, said he could not comment on the case because he wasn't in charge at the time of her 1990 death. Since then, he said, the home has undergone a complete management change and "turnaround."

* Maria DeBertran, 92, a resident of El Ponce de Leon Convalescent Center in Miami, who developed a stomach infection and slowly starved because her abdominal feeding tube malfunctioned and wasn't repaired. She arrived at the hospital emaciated, covered with sores. She had been chronically underfed, abuse reports show. Nursing home officials declined to comment on her case, but Michael Segal, an attorney for the nursing home, said: "Obviously, there was no proof of any serious abuse, or something would have happened."

* Della Heltz, 99, who died of heart disease. She lived in an unlicensed Miami boarding home owned by David Winfrey. There, she lay dead for hours -- maybe days -- before care-givers called someone to pick up her body. She was found clutching a pillow, her body badly decomposed. An HRS abuse report found: "It is difficult to believe that a prudent person could live in a house for any reasonable length of time with a decomposed body that is not only stinking but the body has been dead for so long that the insects had eaten parts of the body away."