An elderly man suffering from dementia wandered four blocks from a group home in Mahwah in March and was found standing in the middle of a busy intersection. Aides had left the front door open to let in fresh air, according to state inspection and police reports.

A woman broke her spine in a fall in July after she climbed out a second-|story window at a similar group home in Somerset County. State investigators reported that staffers had turned off the window’s alarm.

An 89-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s disease was found slumped in a chair and unresponsive by her nephew at a group home in Paramus in May. He told state inspectors that he had urged the staff to call 911, but four days passed before the woman was brought to the hospital. She died a few weeks later.

“Every time I visited her, I could see she was deteriorating,” said the nephew, the Rev. Alexander Santora, who filed a complaint with the state against the home. “They didn’t do anything about it.”

These incidents, documented in state records, occurred at facilities operated by Memory Care Living at Potomac Homes, which specializes in a relatively new kind of senior care that is not as highly regulated as nursing homes. The for-profit chain advertises itself as an alternative to institutionalization for people with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. Its airy, suburban houses have picket fences and comfortable furnishings. Aides provide mostly personal, not medical, care. Residents are given more freedom to use porches and yards than they would be in a nursing home.

The homes, concentrated in the most affluent areas of Bergen County, are a response to the public’s growing demand for smaller, neighborhood settings, and they have attracted satisfied customers.

“They want the comforts of a home, and that’s what we offer,” said Erik Hammerquist, Potomac’s senior vice president.

But state inspection records reveal a history of serious safety violations at Potomac’s group homes — so many fines that even company officials acknowledge they have been cited more than any other operator, though they say they are being unfairly targeted and dispute many of the allegations. State regulators have repeatedly characterized Potomac’s homes as a “chronic offender” in documents. The citations, along with lawsuits by families of former residents, raise questions about the appropriateness of the care provided, whether the homes are adequately screening potential residents, and how the homes are regulated.

The Record reviewed the inspection files going back to 2000 and found hundreds of citations for things like failing to adequately screen residents, not discharging them when they developed a more serious condition, allowing uncertified aides to dispense medication, making errors in keeping medical records and having malfunctioning or deliberately disabled gates and alarms. Potomac has been fined $100,000 the past three years, although many of those fines were recently put on hold as the company presses the state to change regulations it says are being misinterpreted and misapplied in some of those cases. There have been numerous examples of residents’ wandering away from the homes. In one case, a man who climbed out his window in a Cresskill home was later found by police lying half-dressed in the snow. He died soon after, with hypothermia listed as a contributing cause.

The inspection records reveal concerns about whether Potomac’s staff responds quickly enough when a resident’s physical and mental status deteriorates. Inspectors have ordered dozens of residents to be transferred because they developed bedsores, had trouble feeding themselves or could no longer evacuate the home unassisted in an emergency.

An attorney representing Potomac called the violations “overzealous” and said the information contained in inspection records should be viewed as “allegations,” not as proven facts.

“The important thing is to try to provide the safest and least restrictive environment for people to have quality of life and to preserve their dignity,” said Lisa D. Taylor, the attorney. “Were you to put everybody in a straitjacket, then nothing would happen. But then you wouldn’t have quality of life.”

Potomac has contested many of the violations and fines. For example, in the case of the woman who fell from the window, the company appealed the citation, saying it was “factually unsupported” — though state inspectors quoted an employee at the home who said workers knew the alarm had not been set.

The homes are licensed as boarding homes under a decade-old dementia-care designation rather than as health care centers and, unlike nursing homes, there are no nurses on duty around the clock. Relatives often don’t understand the group homes are limited in the care they offer, said Donna Russo, an attorney who sued Potomac in 2011 for admitting a man whose condition, she said, required a nursing home.