MEMPHIS, Tenn. — When one of Martha Jane Pierce’s sons peeled back the white sock that had been covering his 82-year-old mother’s right foot for a month, he discovered rotting flesh.

“It looked like a piece of black charcoal” and smelled “like death,” her daughter Cindy Hatfield later testified. After Pierce, a patient at a Memphis nursing home, was transferred to a hospital, a surgeon had to amputate much of her leg.

One explanation for Pierce’s lackluster care, according to financial records and testimony in a lawsuit brought by the Pierce family, is that her nursing home, Allenbrooke Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, appeared to be severely underfunded at the time, with a $2 million deficit on its books in 2009 and a scarcity of nurses and aides. “Sometimes we’d be short of diapers, sheets, linens,” one nurse testified.