Bounds of Silence : Deaf Man Who Spent 29 Years in Mental Wards Hopes for New Start in Life With Settlement of Lawsuit

Nobody is a stranger to Alberto Valdez. He greets visitors with a warm smile, a wave and sometimes a hug.

But on this particular day, Valdez is tense. He knows he is going with friends to a nearby park to have his picture taken, but he doesn’t understand why.

Valdez, who is deaf and never learned to speak, becomes increasingly frustrated as he tries to communicate. He wants to talk about Metropolitan State Hospital, where he lives and where he spent the morning loading furniture.

When he finally gets his point across through broken sign language and mime, his face glows with an innocence that makes him seem much younger than his 37 years. Eventually, he relaxes, and through an interpreter he talks about his dreams for the future. Most of all, he wants to leave the hospital for good. Then he wants to marry, drive a car, own a home and hold a steady job.

There’s lots of small talk. “It’s a nice day,” he says. “I should have worn my swimming trunks.” He writes his name on a sheet of paper and asks for money to buy ice cream from a vendor. He appears trusting and carefree, oblivious to what some consider the injustice of a system that deemed him retarded and sentenced him to a life in state hospitals.

Valdez has lived in mental institutions since he left his family’s Santa Ana home at 8 years old, first at Fairview State Hospital, then Camarillo and Atascadero--the state hospital for the criminally insane--and finally, for the past nine years, at Metropolitan in Norwalk.

It began in 1958, when Valdez scored 33 on an IQ test and was diagnosed as severely retarded. For years, the score remained on his records. Then, at Atascadero in 1975, doctors retested him and changed the diagnosis from mental retardation to environmental deprivation. The next year, another test measured his intelligence at average or above.

Lupe Valdez, his sister and guardian, sued the state in 1977, claiming that Valdez had been misdiagnosed and held in state institutions unnecessarily. She claims that for 18 years he received inadequate training and education.

The lawsuit is believed to be the first of its kind filed against the state of California, attorneys on both sides said. In October, a trial began in Orange County Superior Court.

But last month, the state agreed to a settlement in which Valdez would receive $60,000 annually for two years, then $50,000 for three years, then $30,000 a year for life. The money would go to a trust administered by a conservator to pay for educational, medical and other services that would allow Valdez to live independently.

The state Legislature must approve any settlement over $70,000. Valdez’s attorney, Barbara McDonald of Laguna Beach, said she hopes a bill will be passed this session so that Valdez can be released by September.

The state settled for economic reasons and with no admission of wrongdoing, said Randall Christison, the deputy attorney general assigned to the case.

Diagnosis Called ‘Proper’

“There is no question he was diagnosed properly. He has been retarded from the date anyone has ever touched him. He functions as a retarded person now. Talk to any psychologist . . . and ask if there is any distinction between functioning at a retarded level and a person who is retarded. They will tell you that you’re playing a word game, because it’s the same thing,” Christison said.

According to Christison, it costs taxpayers $60,000 or more a year to maintain Valdez at Metropolitan. If he returns to a state hospital, the cost of his care will be paid from the settlement.

“It’s an experiment, but if it works, it’s wonderful,” Christison said. “He’s out of the state system and he will become a productive person, and that’s best for everyone.”

But Christison doesn’t think it will happen like that.

Records show that Valdez has a history of violent and unpredictable behavior, Christison said, that he picks fights with patients and staff and could be a menace outside.

‘A Charming Guy’

“I’ve met him a couple of times at Metropolitan. He’s a charming guy. That’s what makes him so dangerous. He’s happy and smiling and ready to please. He’s got a kind of teddy bear look, and everybody wants to cuddle him. He has that quality about him and probably that’s why so many people have tried to help him over the years,” Christison said.

“Fortunately, he has always been in settings where there were other people to pull him off before he caused major or permanent damage. He has not made it anyplace before, because every single time he attacks someone. Typically, he attacks women or men who are smaller than he.”

McDonald blames the state for the many ill-fated attempts in the past to find outpatient placement for Valdez.

“When you raise someone without language, without the ability to communicate, you are going to have behavior that is not civilized, not social. Other than imitation, they have no way of knowing what society expects of them. Alberto has spent all his life in schools for the developmentally disabled and hospitals where there are psychotic people. The behaviors to imitate there are not very good.”

Alberto is the second of six children born to Margaret and Isabel Valdez, Mexican immigrants who moved to Santa Ana 40 years ago. Margaret, now 56, was a housewife and Isabel, 61, worked in a tennis shoe factory while the children were growing.

Neither parent spoke much English, and nobody in the family knew sign language. So Alberto, who was either born deaf or lost his hearing when he was about 18 months old after contracting meningitis, communicated with his family through home signs.

“We didn’t notice him being abnormal. . . . We played with him and he played with us. We never had any problems. We were just a normal family,” said Lupe Valdez, 36. “If he wanted something, he would point to the object and it would get through what he wanted. There was never much of a problem when it came to communicating.”

That system worked well for the family until Valdez reached school age. At that point social workers began pressuring the family to provide an education for him, Lupe said. It also was something the family wanted for him, but nobody knew how to go about it, she said.

According to McDonald, the family first tried to place Valdez in the California School for the Deaf in Riverside at age 7 1/2, but he was denied admission because officials determined that his mental development appeared to be around age 4 1/2 and they did not think he would fit into their program designed for children with average intelligence.

The family then tried to place Valdez in Pacific State Hospital. He scored 33 on a test there and was deemed severely retarded, McDonald said. However, the psychologist who administered the test said the score did not accurately reflect Valdez’s potential because the test is designed for hearing people. That 33 IQ score remained with him, McDonald said.

The family later agreed to place Valdez in Fairview State Hospital, which had been open only a few months. According to Lupe, the family was told that Fairview would include a school for the deaf and that Valdez would be taught sign language and other skills. But that never happened.

“Mom would see his little certificates that said he was doing well and that he was learning, and we all thought he was doing great. She knew things were different from the way it was with us in school, but she thought that was the way things happened at a special school for the deaf. They never did tell her there was no school for the deaf there,” said Lupe, a part-time clerk at the Fountain Valley post office. “We never knew he was in there because he was mentally retarded. We thought he was just getting a good education.”

During his 16 years at Fairview, Alberto was allowed to visit his family on weekends. By the time he and his siblings were in their late teens and early 20s, their relationships began to change, Lupe said.

“When we all started to grow up, we noticed he was a little different. We started taking the family car, and that upset Alberto because everyone was moving ahead of him and getting a chance to drive the car. He would get very angry, and that became mostly our big argument at home, why everybody else could drive and he couldn’t,” she said.

Violent Behavior

At Fairview, Valdez began displaying violent behavior. He picked fights with patients and staff and was given tranquilizers. In 1975, he was transferred from Fairview because he became a security risk, Christison said.

“We were dealing with mentally handicapped people who don’t have fighting skills, and he was a danger to them. They had to spend a substantial amount of time watching him,” Christison said.

“If somebody frustrated his will, he attacked them. It didn’t happen every day or every month, but sometimes there would be two or three attacks in one month and then a few months of good behavior. Fortunately, he never learned fighting skills either. He grabbed, punched, strangled, but he never learned how to do it well. That was his major problem, that he attacks with the intent to cause harm, like a 2-year-old would do, but he’s in a man’s body.”

Virginia McKinney, director of the Center for Communicative Development in Los Angeles, a school for deaf adults that Valdez attended briefly around 1978, said Valdez was expelled because he was extremely aggressive.

“I remember him well, as does everyone here. He was able to learn some sign, but he had difficulty relating to peers and staff. He became easily agitated with other students. Usually a staff member would try to counsel with him and calm him down. There were not a lot of fights because someone always intervened.”

But then Valdez attacked a teacher who had tried to correct one of his papers, McKinney said.

“She still trembles when we mention his name. He took a bite out of her eyebrow, and it took five people to pull him off her,” McKinney said. “The teacher was bending over correcting a paper of his, and he suddenly jumped up and attacked her. It didn’t take anything overt for him to do it--that was the whole problem. It was just ordinary interaction in school that could trigger it.”

In 1979, Valdez was sent to live with his sister Lupe in a small apartment she shared with a roommate. In his third month there, he had a violent disagreement with the pregnant roommate and pushed her onto the bed, McDonald said. Police were called and Valdez was led away in handcuffs to UCI Medical Center in Orange. A few weeks later, he was admitted to Metropolitan.

“He was thoroughly traumatized by that. To this day, if the subject comes up in signing or pictures, he lets you know it was bad. He has a great deal of fear and anxiety that goes along with that,” McDonald said. “It was just more than (Lupe) could handle. Basically this man had been dropped on her doorstep.”

This time, things will be different, McDonald said.

If Lupe Valdez’s settlement with the state becomes final, Valdez will live with a family of deaf people or in his own apartment with a 24-hour companion who knows sign language. He will continue taking sign language classes and independent living courses that will help him integrate into society. He will receive job training and possibly find a job.

Placement Difficulty

“The most desirable alternative is to place him with a family that has signing members,” McDonald said. “But it’s not as easy to find a family as it is to find a paid companion. It would give him something closer to normalcy, and he would have the nuclear family setting. He would have an opportunity to learn language with people who are exercising it all the time,” McDonald said.

But McKinney, director of the development center in Los Angeles, said she fears that whatever program is set up after Valdez’s release won’t teach him to control the violence. She said he needs to be under constant supervision of a psychologist or trained therapist.

“I’m concerned they are just ignoring the problem by saying he is only deaf and that it is the only problem he has. They are saying, ‘Well, his aggressive behavior is because he can’t communicate.’ We have many students at the center who learn their first sound and their first noun here, and aggressive behavior has nothing to do with the inability to communicate.”

Karen Bowman, an independent living skills instructor, said Valdez has become less violent since she began tutoring him almost two years ago at Metropolitan. Bowman, who also is deaf, is teaching Valdez social skills, ranging from personal hygiene to how to use public transportation.

“Instead of communicating, he would respond in action. If he felt threatened, he would hit. If a person made him mad, he would hit them. Now he goes to the appropriate person to report it. That’s a big improvement,” she said through an interpreter.

“He has a long way to go, but his social skills have improved tremendously because he now understands what is appropriate and inappropriate. Before, he was afraid of security guards and he would go and shake their hand repeatedly. Now he’s not afraid of them. He just says hello, or he just walks along. He also has good common sense.”

Larry Stewart, a psychologist and superintendent of the Illinois School for the Deaf, tested Valdez during his early years at Metropolitan and determined that he had serious communication limitations but that he was not retarded.

“Part of the problem is that many psychologists and psychiatrists have not been trained to test deaf people,” said Stewart, who also is deaf. “And many doctors work with them when they have no business doing so. But who is there to say stop?”

Like Stewart, Bowman said she is convinced that Valdez has never been mentally retarded and that he can survive outside the state hospital with training.

“Alberto is very, very intelligent,” Bowman said. “If he had been (taught to) sign as a child, he would be the same as me.”

GROWING UP IN MENTAL HOSPITALS

Since he was 8 years old, Alberto Valdez has spent 29 years in and out of state mental hospitals. This is a chronology based on information from legal documents, state officials and Valdez’s attorney.

Fairview State Hospital: January, 1959-February, 1975. During that 16-year period, he was released for a total of 18 months to a board and care home in Santa Ana.

Atascadero State Hospital: February, 1975-January, 1976.

Camarillo State Hospital: January, 1976-May, 1976.

Atascadero State Hospital: May, 1976-December, 1976. He was released for a few weeks to another board and care facility.

Camarillo State Hospital: January, 1977-February, 1977.

Released to board and care homes: March, 1977-May, 1979.

Lived with sister, Lupe Valdez: May, 1979-July, 1979.

Metropolitan State Hospital: August, 1979-present.