Teacher Says Method That Helps Disabled Ruined Him : Courts: Autism sufferers, using a ‘facilitator’ to communicate, accused teacher of sexual assault. Charges are dropped but he plans to sue for $2.5 million.

Some mental health experts say they have found a technique to pierce the walls of silence surrounding thousands of children and adults who suffer from autism, a condition that causes severe communication, behavior and sensory problems.

Skeptics say the technique, in which a human “facilitator” helps an autistic or other developmentally disabled person move his hand over a keyboard to spell out words, is nothing but pseudo-scientific hokum, no more reliable than a Ouija board.

But for Gregory Cracchiolo, a 27-year-old former teacher of severely developmentally disabled students in the Whittier Union High School District, the argument goes beyond a scientific dispute.

Cracchiolo says that facilitated communication ruined his career, leaving him unjustly tainted as a sex offender.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, relying solely on evidence generated from the “facilitated communication” technique, charged him with sexually assaulting four developmentally disabled students. It is the first criminal case in the United States based on the controversial technique.

Recently, the prosecutor dropped the charges.

“I’m innocent,” Cracchiolo said. “I never did any of those things, never.”

One thing is clear in the Cracchiolo case: Someone came out of it a loser. If facilitated communication works, as its adherents believe, then four victims of a heinous crime have been denied their say in court. But if it doesn’t work--and the preponderance of scientific evidence indicates that it does not--then Gregory Cracchiolo was accused of a terrible crime for which there was no shred of evidence.

The facilitated communication technique was developed in Australia in the late 1970s and was brought to the United States a few years ago. Several thousand people in the United States have been trained in the technique, with basic training taking only a few days.

Facilitated communication is a human technique, not a technological breakthrough. A variety of ordinary keyboard devices have been used to allow the autistic person to spell words with the help of a facilitator who steadies--some would say guides--the autistic person’s hand.

For example, the students in the Cracchiolo case used a Brother P-Touch electronic labeling device, which costs about $150.

There are stories of autistic children with IQs of 30, children who had never been able to communicate, who after being paired with a facilitator, scored 130 on IQ tests and are making plans to attend college--accompanied by a facilitator.

But others in the scientific community greet facilitated communication with increasing skepticism. They believe the facilitator, not the developmentally disabled person, is doing the communicating.

Douglas Wheeler, a psychologist for the State of New York and co-author of a soon-to-be-published study of facilitated communication, said that a blind test of 12 autistic individuals and their facilitators showed that “in virtually every instance, the facilitators were either directly or indirectly influencing” the autistic person’s responses through the keyboard.

For example, if both the facilitator and the autistic person were shown an apple, the person typed “apple.” However, if the autistic person was shown an apple and the facilitator was shown a lemon, what appeared on the page was “lemon.”

Wheeler said he’s convinced that the influence was “very much an unconscious thing on the part of the facilitators. They don’t know they’re doing it, but they are.”

Wheeler likened the process to a Ouija board, in which an indicator seems to move of its own volition to point out answers, but actually is being moved--unconsciously--by the hands of the players.

In the Cracchiolo case, one of his students allegedly said last March, through facilitated communication, that Cracchiolo had sexually assaulted him. The accusation was made shortly after facilitated communication was introduced at the Career Assessment and Placement Center at the Sierra Education Center in Whittier, an adult education program operated by the school district. The student who made the allegation was completely unable to communicate verbally.

Ironically, Cracchiolo said in a recent interview that he was enthusiastic about the technique when it first was introduced at the school. “I wanted to believe that it worked.”

School officials immediately notified the Whittier Police Department of the accusation, which they are required to do by law. Detective Sal Prisco said that during the subsequent investigation, he watched three other male students of Cracchiolo’s make similar accusations of sexual assault against the probationary teacher, all of the students communicating with the aid of facilitators. All four students are autistic or otherwise severely developmentally disabled, and for all practical purposes are unable to communicate. All were between 18 and 20 years old.

Cracchiolo, meanwhile, was “assigned to home” after the initial accusation, the equivalent of suspension with pay. Cracchiolo, who lives with his parents in Huntington Beach, said he was unaware of the exact nature of the allegations against him until a month later, when he was placed on permanent “assigned to home” status. His job with the school district was terminated at the end of the school year.

Cracchiolo said he was devastated and bewildered by the accusations. He said he is a lifelong heterosexual, and his goal was to spend his life helping developmentally disabled people.

“I couldn’t believe it was happening,” he said. “All I ever wanted to be was a special education teacher. And then this happened. In some ways it was worse than being accused of murder.”

Cracchiolo said he voluntarily met with Detective Prisco to discuss the allegations and try to explain the problems with communicated facilitation. But Prisco wasn’t buying.

“They can say whatever they want,” Prisco said when asked about studies questioning the value of the technique. “I believe that what I saw was a communication by an individual that a crime had been committed.”

Prisco said he does not believe that the facilitators who assisted the students when they made the allegations--identified in the police report as Bonnie Bolton, Darlene Hanson and Joaquin Mendibles--were consciously or unconsciously influencing the students’ statements.

The facilitators declined through a spokesman at the Career Assessment Center to comment on the Cracchiolo case. However, when asked about facilitated communication in general, Hanson said she is convinced that developmentally disabled people can communicate through the technique.

“We do not have a scientific confirmation,” Hanson said, “but I know people have typed out things with me that I did not know.”

Supt. Lee Eastwood of the Whittier Union High School District, also declined to comment on the specifics of the Cracchiolo case. But he said of facilitated communication in general, “I’m not convinced that it works in all cases, but . . . where I’ve seen it demonstrated, I believe it worked in those cases.”

Cracchiolo said he cannot explain why the facilitators involved would have consciously or unconsciously influenced the students to make such serious charges against him.

“I don’t know why,” Cracchiolo said. “They (the facilitators) always seemed so nice to me.”

After a monthlong investigation, Prisco recommended to the district attorney’s office that charges be filed against Cracchiolo. Last September the teacher was arraigned on 11 felony counts of forcible sodomy and forced oral copulation, and after spending a few hours in a police holding cell, was released on $60,000 bail. He faced a maximum sentence of 88 years in prison.

Both Prisco and Deputy Dist. Atty. Ronald Geltz, who handled the case, acknowledge that there were no third-party witnesses or physical evidence against Cracchiolo. The charges were based entirely on the statements allegedly made by the students through the facilitators.

But Geltz said that after interviewing the students--with the aid of their facilitators--he was convinced the technique works.

“I feel it can be very reliable,” Geltz said, assuming the facilitator is competent. He compared using a facilitator to the use of a translator for a witness who doesn’t speak English. Geltz discounted any contention that the facilitators had influenced the students’ alleged statements.

But Cracchiolo’s attorney, Gerald Klausner, expressed outrage that his client was being prosecuted based on such scientifically suspect evidence.

“How would you like a guy with a Ouija board to accuse you of molesting somebody?” Klausner asked.

A hearing in Whittier Municipal Court to determine whether facilitated communication testimony by the alleged victims would be permitted in Cracchiolo’s trial was scheduled for Jan. 7. But the day before the hearing, Geltz told The Times he decided not to proceed with the case.

He said there just wasn’t enough scientific evidence available to make facilitated communication testimony admissible.

“I still believe these things occurred,” Geltz said of the allegations against Cracchiolo. “I’m saddened that (the students) will not have a voice in court at this time.”

“Nonsense,” countered Klausner. “He had to dismiss it in the face of overwhelming evidence that this (facilitated communication) is nothing but a ventriloquist show.”

All charges against Cracchiolo were subsequently dismissed by Municipal Court Judge Abner Fritz.

Although Cracchiolo’s was the first case in the United States in which criminal charges were filed based on accusations made through facilitated communication, a number of non-criminal cases have been based on allegations of abuse made through the technique.

In two U.S. child-custody cases in which such testimony was an issue, both in New York state family courts, judges ruled that facilitated communication was not admissible because the technique has not been accepted by the scientific community.

Gina Green, director of research for the New England Center for Autism in Massachusetts, said she is “astounded that social service agencies and the legal system would aggressively act on these reports” without first requiring that facilitated communication be subjected to rigorous testing.

“There’s some really serious harm being caused” by facilitated communication, Green said.

“The outcome of every study that I know of is that no individual with a disability was shown to be communicating this way,” Green said. “The studies are showing that it is 100% facilitator influenced. The most conservative conclusion I can draw is that the technique is, at the very least, extremely susceptible to facilitator influence.”

Psychologist Bernard Rimland, head of the San Diego-based Autism Research Institute, a clearinghouse for information on autism, said he was an early believer in facilitated communication. But a spate of recent studies, he said, have made him more skeptical of the technique’s usefulness.

“I still think it works in a very, very small percentage of cases,” said Rimland, who served as technical adviser on autism for the film “Rain Man,” in which Dustin Hoffman portrayed a moderately autistic man. But Rimland adds that he thinks the courts would be “barking up the wrong tree” if they allowed facilitated communication testimony in court.

Cracchiolo, meanwhile, has filed a claim for $2.5 million against the school district, the Whittier Police Department and other parties for slander and malicious prosecution. Such a claim is usually the first step in filing a lawsuit.

He said that despite the dismissal of the charges against him, he is still paying a price.

“It’s been a nightmare,” Cracchiolo said. “And not just for me. My parents have aged 10 years during all this.” Cracchiolo added that the stress of the case caused a breakup between him and his longtime girlfriend.

He also doubts that he can ever teach again. Although he can petition to have the arrest as an accused sex offender expunged from his state teaching credential, he fears that word of the accusations will follow him wherever he goes.

“I don’t think I have a career in teaching anymore,” Cracchiolo said. “I keep thinking that even if I did get another teaching job, if I pat a student on the shoulder are the people going to think I’m trying to commit sodomy?

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Cracchiolo said. “I just want my life back.”

Community correspondent Suzan Schill contributed to this story.