A dozen more people are alleging elder abuse by a nurse's aide who was accused Wednesday of raping a resident of a Salt Lake City long-term care facility.

Some of the new allegations "sound serious; they're similar type crimes," said Salt Lake City police detective Jared Wihongi about Jacob Mut Bolith, a certified nurse's aide who is being held without bail in the Salt Lake County Jail. Most of the complaints stem from his employment at other nursing homes in Salt Lake County, specifically South Salt Lake and Holladay, Wihongi said.

Bolith is accused of raping an 85-year-old woman living at Christus St. Joseph Villa on July 1, several weeks after losing his CNA license on charges of inappropriately touching a patient at Avalon Valley Rehabilitation Center last December. St. Joseph hired Bolith in December after first doing a criminal background check on him and consulting the CNA Registry, which at that time reported no negative findings.

The Utah Department of Health, which regulates CNAs, is not required to alert a facility when a nurse's aide is sanctioned. "We don't track employment on any of these folks, so we have no way of knowing where they're working," said health department spokesman Tom Hudachko about the 25,000 CNAs currently registered in Utah. Although the department could send out a system-wide alert to all care facilities, it doesn't do that either.

But that process may change, Hudachko said. "Certainly there are ways we can improve communication with facilities to keep these things from happening." The department has begun discussing ways to do this, he said.

Reports of sexual abuse at nursing homes are "infrequent but not unheard of," said Shauna O'Neill, executive director of Salt Lake County Aging Services, who said she hears of two or three a year in the county. "But I'm sure I don't hear about them all."

Last year in Utah there were nearly 2,400 reported cases of elder abuse, including physical abuse, neglect and financial exploitation. Nearly 80 percent of these occurred in the elder's home, with 10 percent to 15 percent in care centers, according to Chuck Diviney, clinical trainer and information specialist with state Adult Protective Services. That would mean 240 to 360 instances of abuse in care centers. Two percent to 3 percent of those are sexual abuse — in other words a handful of cases.

But it's estimated that only 10 percent of elder abuse cases are ever reported, Diviney said. "Many of these people live in a generation that believes that what happens behind closed doors stays there or they don't know who to call or they fear retribution."