State Shuts Group Home : Officials Close Facility for Mentally Disabled Over Staffing Problems

A group home for the mentally handicapped that had been under attack from neighbors and an assemblyman, was shut down early Thursday morning by the state Department of Social Services, which said the facility was chronically understaffed.

An investigation of Ventura Villa Inc. was prompted by the April 1 death of a diabetic patient, 44-year-old Vicki Groman. Although the official cause has not yet been determined, DSS officials said the lack of proper staffing may have contributed to her death.

The facility’s owners said Groman had been found in her room after choking on a piece of food when she did not come down for her daily insulin dose. DSS alleges the woman refused her morning insulin injection and then did not show up for her afternoon injection. She was found unconscious at 10:20 p.m. and died a short time later.

But David Dodd, a spokesman for the department’s community care licensing division, said the facility was shut down mainly because Ventura Villa did not correct the staffing problems, despite repeated visits by state officials during the past nine months. A written complaint also noted a variety of other problems, saying that medicines were not distributed properly, that patients were allowed to smoke in prohibited areas and that patients were not properly monitored.

The DSS also echoed complaints of nearby residents, who had charged that clients drank alcohol in public, exposed themselves, had sex in public, panhandled and participated in drug deals.

Department officials and police arrived unannounced at 7:30 a.m. Thursday to serve a temporary order suspending the license for the facility housing 113 mentally handicapped residents.

Owners Konstantin Goldenberg and Staci Marmer said their facility’s clients were not responsible for problems in the neighborhood.

“It’s all political,” said Marmer, who said she bought the facility with Goldenberg in 1993. “We didn’t neglect the clients.”

Throughout the day, Ventura Villa residents carried their belongings, clothing, paintings, clocks, television sets to the sidewalk along Ventura Boulevard before being loaded into vans that would take them to other residential facilities, some as far away as Long Beach.

“This is turning their whole lives upside down,” said Traci Sherman, an activity coordinator for Alliance Health Care in Northridge, who showed up for work only to find her clients packing up to leave. “It’s like someone coming into your home and ripping you out of it.”

Through her activity program, Sherman had made friends and built up trust with the clients in the past eight months as she taught them hygiene, nutrition and weight management. She worried that now the residents will find it hard to trust someone again.

“I respect and love everybody here,” said Bart Kearns, a 36-year-old manic-depressive with a seizure disorder, who was being transferred to a home in Arleta. “I’m losing a lot of people I’ve come to know and care about.”

Kearns, who supports Goldenberg, said he planned to complain to Assemblyman Wally Knox for leading the effort to shut down Ventura Villa. Prejudice against the mentally handicapped also lead to the campaign by neighbors against the home, he said.

Ventura Villa, a former retirement home, has been under attack from neighbors and from Knox, who called it a magnet for prostitution, drug dealers, vandalism and crime. But DSS officials said the decision to shut down the facility did not come from the community complaints.

The facility was understaffed when DSS officials made six surprise inspections in the past two months.

But Marmer countered that DSS officials deliberately inspected the facility at off-hours, when Ventura Villa was not required by law to be at full staff.

Nearby residents welcomed the closure. “I think it’s great they’re cleaning it up,” said Brent Seltzer, a member of the local Neighborhood Watch who had been an outspoken opponent of Ventura Villa. “I’m delighted, but I feel kind of bad for Konstantin because he put a lot of his own money into that, but that kind of business didn’t really belong in that intense residential area.”

In 1990, the Ventura Retirement Villa was a home for the elderly whose owners were unsuccessful in getting city approval to convert it into a halfway home for convicted lawbreakers. When Goldenberg and Marmer bought it in 1993, it had been converted to a home for the mentally disabled, but it did not have a city permit for that use until January, 1994, Los Angeles officials said.

They did not get a license from the state Department of Social Services until June, 1994, after officials discovered that owners were using the license under the previous owner’s name, DSS officials said. They were given a three-year probationary license.

Under the temporary suspension order issued Thursday, Ventura Villa’s owners have 30 days to file an appeal, but Marmer rejected that idea.

“There is no point in appealing,” she said. “They can give our license back but they can’t give our people back. What would we do with an empty building?”