Homes for the Retarded: Portrait of Human Misery

Sheresa lay on the floor and stretched her arms toward the sunlight that lit up the frosted glass window at the end of the hallway.

She is a small, childlike figure, who, at 22, has the mind of an infant. She speaks only an occasional word and walks with difficulty. Still, she could see the sunlit window at the end of the hallway and cried to go outside. She was left lying on the hallway floor for about two hours that morning, resisting an occasional attempt to move her.

Sheresa lives at the Lynwood Care Center in South-Central Los Angeles, operated by Beverly Enterprises Inc.

4 in L.A. County

While the company is best known for its nationwide chain of nursing homes for the elderly, Beverly also runs facilities for hundreds of mentally retarded and physically disabled people. Four such facilities are in Los Angeles County. Financed almost totally with Medi-Cal funds, these four homes have proven profitable during recent years. Even allowing for consistent losses by one facility, the four homes combined made more than $600,000 in before-tax profits during the period from 1984 through 1986.

These homes are called “intermediate care facilities for the developmentally disabled.” The bureaucratic phrase does not begin to describe the magnitude of human misery inside these institutions. Many of the people there are severely mentally retarded and physically deformed. Some cannot hear or see or speak or walk. Some wear helmets because they repeatedly bang their heads against walls or mittens to keep them from mutilating themselves. Some must be diapered like infants and fed every bite they eat.

Many have been abandoned by relatives and placed by the state in these facilities. Of the 90 patients at one of Beverly’s homes for the retarded in Pomona, only a dozen or so have parents who are known to administrators. At the Lynwood Care Center, the definition of an involved parent is a mother who calls from New Jersey twice a week.

Beverly officials say these homes present big challenges in providing good care and ongoing training in basic skills for the patients and that the company is trying harder than ever to meet them.

But state health inspectors report disturbing conditions and incidents at the homes.

At Beverly’s Country House in Pomona, a young woman--retarded, blind and deaf--was raped by a staff member last April, according to state reports and court records. The staff member was fired and pleaded no contest to the charge.

The previous October, another patient at that facility, who was under doctor’s orders to receive close supervision during meals and to be fed only bite-size pieces of food, choked to death on an entire boneless chicken breast while left unsupervised, according to a state citation.

At Beverly’s Glenridge Center in Glendale, inspectors found one morning last year that 21 patients had been put to bed in their street clothes the night before.

At the Lynwood Care Center, last June, a retarded patient wandered into the street, sat down, was hit by a car and hospitalized after exiting the home through a door with a faulty alarm that had gone unrepaired for six months, according to a state citation.

Patients With Eye Problems

At the same facility, state inspectors found 10 patients with eye drainage and noted that, after meals, patients were being wiped off with “common towels” that were also used to wipe dirty tables.

Initially, Beverly agreed to allow Times reporters to inspect any of its facilities on 20 minutes’ notice, but then reconsidered and insisted on 24 hours’ notice. A reporter visited several homes under these conditions. But, to ensure an unvarnished view, another Times reporter presented himself at some facilities as the relative of a retarded person needing care.

Visits to Beverly’s homes for the disabled in Los Angeles County revealed them to be dreary institutions, except for the Edgewood Center in Azusa, which appeared clean and bright and has a better inspection record than the other three facilities.

During a visit to Country House in Pomona, about two dozen patients--most in wheelchairs, some with their heads lolling helplessly, some crying and moaning, most staring vacantly into space--were lined up in front of a television set for their afternoon activity: “Charlie’s Angels.”

In another room, a red-haired woman named Dolores, who is severely retarded, sat in a wheelchair whimpering and slamming her fist into her nose as blood ran down her face and onto her arm. An attendant sat in a chair no more than 10 feet away without interfering.

Gene Clarke, Beverly’s newly hired director of government program compliance, said that it was “not acceptable” that Dolores was allowed to beat herself bloody at Country House.

But Clarke was not critical of the staff for lining patients up in front of “Charlie’s Angels” as their afternoon activity. “They certainly should, as any other individual, be provided the opportunity to be stimulated by whatever recreation was on television,” he said. “Whether or not they are capable or not of understanding that particular level is another issue.”

Neither did he criticize the Lynwood Center staff for allowing Sheresa to lie on the floor for two hours.

“Was she harming herself?” he asked, and added that maybe she simply wanted attention.

Overall, he said, “There are things that happen in other facilities that are a thousand times worse . . . .”

Jack MacDonald, vice president of Beverly, acknowledged that there are “significant problems” in some of the company’s homes for the developmentally disabled.

He said that newly hired administrators at the Lynwood Care Center have implemented an “active treatment program” and that the facilities at Pomona and Glendale are under study by company officials.