San Antonio State School worker fired for sexual abuse

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By John Tedesco and Karisa King - Express-News

An employee at the San Antonio State School was fired in December after he forced a male resident with mental retardation to perform a sex act on a male resident who also had mental disabilities, according to a state investigation.

The Department of Aging and Disability Services, the agency that oversees Texas' 13 state schools, substantiated the allegations against the employee, who had been hired on a probationary basis in August 2008.

“I can say with absolute certainty that this is not tolerated,” DADS spokeswoman Cecilia Fedorov said. “This is not acceptable in any way to this agency.”

The sexual abuse occurred during a Nov. 30 lunch outing in a van, according to the state's investigation.

Two state-school employees took a group of residents to the drive-through of a barbecue restaurant to grab lunch, and they went to a roadside picnic area to eat.

After lunch, it took about five minutes to get everyone together. One employee was outside the van assisting a resident. The other employee was in the van with at least three mentally disabled residents.

At that point, according to the report, the employee in the van physically forced a resident in the back seat to perform oral sex on another resident.

“I didn't want to,” one of the victims told an investigator. “He made me do it, punched me in the stomach, told me to do it.”

A resident who had been sitting in the front seat later said he was thinking to himself: “Those poor people.”

He said the state-school employee warned everyone in the van that he would break their necks if they told anyone.

The sex act was over by the time the second employee got in the van, according to the report. He heard someone say, “You made me do it.”

The group returned to the San Antonio State School and the employee who had been outside the van told a colleague that during the outing, “Something sexual happened.”

He said he didn't know exactly what happened, and remarked: “I don't want to know.”

The names of the people on the outing and their ages were deleted from the investigatory report, which was released through a request under the Texas Public Information Act.

State officials declined to provide the age of the victims for privacy reasons. The investigatory report indicates both victims might have been teenagers or in their early 20s.

The taxpayer-funded state-school system cares for more than 4,700 adults and children with mental retardation. The same month DADS opened an investigation of the sex-abuse allegation, the Justice Department told Gov. Rick Perry that the state schools are failing to protect vulnerable residents from harm.

On March 10, Corpus Christi police said they obtained mobile-phone videos of “fight club”-style altercations between residents that were organized by employees of the state school there. Beth Mitchell, managing attorney with Advocacy Inc., a federally funded group that protects people with disabilities, said the San Antonio and Corpus Christi cases result from a culture of abuse in the state schools. She said the cases are similar because, in both instances, staff members incited residents to harm each other, and employees who witnessed the abuse failed to report it.

A resident at the state school reported the incident.

“I don't know when the State of Texas is going to get the message clearly enough that these aren't isolated situations,” said Mitchell, who has asked lawmakers to halt admissions to the schools.

For parents like Nancy Ward, whose 47-year-old daughter lives at the Denton State School and is unable to speak, the allegations of abuse pose alarming concerns.

“It's a worry whenever you have to see this and realize that your children are there,” said Ward, who also is a member of Parent Association for the Retarded of Texas, a statewide group that supports the schools.

While others view the recently publicized cases of abuse as reasons to close the schools, Ward said the San Antonio case bolsters the argument for lawmakers to increase funding for the facilities to attract better employees.

“I hope that all these things that are happening will show that we need more monitoring and we need the resources to do the job,” she said.

The case is rare because state investigators almost never confirm allegations of sexual abuse.

Last year, the Department of Family and Protective Services, which also investigates abuse and neglect at the state schools, recorded nearly 870 allegations of sexual abuse statewide.

Of those allegations, investigators confirmed only three cases.

During the investigation of the Nov. 30 incident, officials were alerted to other allegations against the employee who was accused of instigating the sex act.

He was accused of forcing a resident to eat shaving cream. In another case, the employee was accused of spraying a can of deodorant in the face of resident in a shower. And in a third case, he allegedly put a resident in a chokehold.

All three incidents were alleged to have occurred at the state school after Nov. 30, the day of the lunch outing.

Fedorov said the employee was fired Dec. 30 at the conclusion of DADS' investigation.

The employee who'd been outside the van was placed on probation for a year. Fedorov said probationary employees can be fired for any reason, and he was later “let go.”

She said state-school employees undergo a criminal background check before they are hired, and officials check registries that track allegations of misconduct against healthcare workers. Fedorov said the background checks found no red flags for the employee accused of abusing the residents.

“It's really not a question of the screening process,” Fedorov said. “If you look at any business — especially a 24-hour care setting — you're going to find that there are bad people in the world who will take advantage of more vulnerable people.”

She emphasized that state schools have a “zero-tolerance” policy when abusers are discovered.

“It's really important that people understand that our top priority is the health and safety and the quality of life of the residents we serve,” Fedorov said.