AUSTIN – Two years after the U.S. Justice Department found widespread abuse and neglect inside a Lubbock institution for people with disabilities, federal agents are coming back to Texas – this time to investigate the Denton State School.
Gov. Rick Perry's office confirmed Wednesday that the Denton facility is under review by the department's civil rights division, and officials at the agency that oversees the state schools said they'd cooperate fully with the investigation.
"We welcome the scrutiny," said Laura Albrecht, a spokeswoman with the Department of Aging and Disability Services.
Randy Spence, superintendent of the Denton State School, directed all calls to the department.
The Denton State School, home to 600 people with physical and mental disabilities, has made headlines since 2002, when an employee punched, kicked and slammed a resident to the brink of death while coming down from a drug-induced rage. Since then, dozens of family members have spoken out and reported allegations of abuse and neglect at the facility.
"This is the biggest institution in Texas, the flagship. And it has an ongoing history of horrific acts of violence," said Jeff Garrison-Tate, an advocate for people with disabilities who supports closing the state schools. "I want to believe a lot of the advocacy, the screaming and yelling that's been going on, has led to this. The planets have finally aligned."
Officials with the state disability agency said they're not sure when inspectors will arrive or how long they'll stay. The last and only time the Justice Department investigated a state institution – the Lubbock State School – they documented conditions for a year and a half.
A report on the Lubbock State School sent to Mr. Perry after that investigation cited poor medical care, improperly restrained and sedated residents, and more than 17 deaths at the Lubbock school during an 18-month period. At the time of the investigators' visit, 66 percent of residents at the facility had been injured by another resident.
In one cited case, employees found a woman unresponsive but failed to perform CPR or call for help for a half-hour. Paramedics determined she had been dead for hours because rigor mortis had already occurred. In that case, investigators found that employees had falsified reports to indicate someone had been checking on the woman.
Denton State School's highest-profile abuse case involves Hasib Chishty, the young man who was bludgeoned into a coma in 2002 by employee Kevin Miller.
The school first tried to tell Mr. Chishty's parents that he had been injured by a seat belt in a van and that he wasn't taken to the hospital for more than a day. By the time Mr. Miller confessed to the beating – and to the fact that he and other employees on his shift had been using crack, marijuana, Valium and a slew of other narcotics at work – Mr. Chishty was nearly paralyzed. Mr. Miller was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Mr. Chishty, now 34, uses a wheelchair and must be fed through a tube. Mr. Garrison-Tate said Mr. Chishty's family has met extensively with the Department of Justice, probably prompting the inquiry.
For some parents, it's hard to imagine why the department would have reason to investigate the Denton State School. Nancy Ward has had her daughter, who has mental retardation and cerebral palsy, in the school for more than a decade – and the family couldn't be happier.
"They have a wonderful program, a wonderful staff, and Diane has been extremely happy," Ms. Ward said. "It's really a protection thing for her."
Since the Lubbock inspection, the state has installed across-the-board changes at that state school, from appointing a new management team to hiring new medical directors and incident managers. They've also beefed up staffing.
Advocates are hopeful they'll see similar progress at Denton – or even an across-the-board consensus that the state schools need rethinking. A Dallas Morning News review last year of the 13 state institutions for people with disabilities found thousands of allegations of abuse and neglect – hundreds of them confirmed.
In one 2006 case at the Brenham State School, a nurse assistant kicked and punched a mentally disabled resident on the bathroom floor, breaking three ribs and puncturing the resident's liver. In a 2000 incident at the Abilene State School, an aide ignored a resident who was found hours later in a trash bin, naked.
Other state school employees have left residents covered in feces and urine for hours, made them eat off plates where they had vomited, and fallen asleep on the job, waking only after residents engaged in sexual acts.
But some officials say that these types of problems are best resolved in-house and that federal reviews are "no-wins" for state agencies. The civil rights division doesn't have minimum standards for approval, they say, and often threatens legal action without giving the agency a threshold to meet.
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