Neighborhood Enraged by Plan to House Inmates

When state officials decided to put 75 mentally disabled patients in a Pomona center, they figured they had solved a three-year problem about how to care for a group of people set adrift by a changing health care system.

Instead, they triggered a grass-roots rebellion by neighbors whose empathy was outweighed by fears of sexual predators and plummeting housing prices.

At least 900 people jammed a meeting in Walnut on Thursday night, furious that potentially violent offenders would be living next to their homes and certain that the Pomona center had tried to slip the plan past them without proper notice.

The patients the state wants to move into the Lanterman Developmental Center are called “forensic clients,” people with mild to moderate mental retardation who have been charged with crimes but were deemed incompetent to stand trial because of their conditions. Experts say that they are often manipulated into criminal activity, or do not understand the wrongful nature of their acts; most have a mental age under 12 years old.

Once the developmentally disabled enter the criminal justice system and acquire the “forensic” label, people just don’t want them in their towns.

“I don’t care if the guy has the brain of a carrot,” a Diamond Bar resident who lives near the Lanterman center said in an interview, speaking on condition of anonymity. “If he can point a gun at you, you’re just as dead.”

The state’s forensic clients have been moved around since the Stockton and Camarillo developmental centers closed over the last three years. Now, a Napa hospital temporarily holding some of them is running out of beds. The state Department of Developmental Services wants to place the clients at Lanterman by building a $4.9-million addition on the 320-acre property, which currently treats 700 residents who have developmental disabilities including mental retardation, autism, epilepsy and cerebral palsy.

Founded 72 years ago in the rural outskirts of the county, the Lanterman property sits on a pastoral sliver of Pomona, wedged between tract homes in Diamond Bar and Walnut.

The forensic clients--whose alleged crimes are usually petty but can include arson, rape and murder--will be living on a property that abuts a quiet neighborhood and an active Little League field. A YMCA, day-care centers and schools are nearby.

The clients will stay in three buildings surrounded by double 16-foot fences and 26-foot observation towers, according to the state officials.

To neighbors, that sounds like a prison.

Diamond Bar residents, some of whom live just across a chain-link fence from Lanterman, learned about the project more than a year after it was first discussed with local elected officials. Enraged about not being informed, they launched a campaign to stop it and have threatened to recall their entire City Council if they lose.

“We get more notification when a restaurant that’s serving alcohol is coming into the area,” said Sue Sisk, head of a residents task force that was appointed by Diamond Bar city officials last month. “I got no input in this.”

On Monday night, the Pomona City Council voted to oppose the project and threatened to sue the Department of Developmental Services if it goes through. On Tuesday, the Diamond Bar City Council and the county Board of Supervisors formally asked the state to place the patients elsewhere.

Assemblyman Bob Pacheco (R-Walnut), who hosted Thursday night’s meeting, said he would request a joint hearing of the state Senate and Assembly to find out why the plan was approved without direct notification of neighbors.

Construction of the expansion is scheduled to begin this summer and the clients would move in September 2000.

“Our hope is that people will see that this is a needed program,” said Lanterman’s executive director, Ruth Maples.

The developmental centers, once called state hospitals, have been in flux since 1993, when the state agreed to reduce their residential population from 6,300 to 4,300 over five years. The decision settled a lawsuit filed by parents and advocates, who protested poor conditions in the hospitals and argued that certain clients could be better served in community facilities.

With the shrinking institutionalized population, the state closed the centers in Camarillo and Stockton, both of which offered specialized treatment for the relatively small but growing population of forensic clients. About 340 are currently in the system and each by law must remain committed for three years. Only the Porterville Developmental Center is currently serving them.

Lanterman officials said the public often mistakes the developmentally disabled for the mentally ill, who show more erratic and psychotic behavior. Most mentally retarded clients are arrested for property crimes or low-level sexual offenses, like public masturbation, experts say.

They can easily land in prison because they don’t have the financial and intellectual resources to defend themselves, and don’t understand such vital abstractions as Miranda rights.

As an example of a possible client charged with a more violent act, Lanterman officials cited one mentally retarded man who lashed out with a baseball bat when a group of young men taunted him and stole his jacket. He inadvertently killed one of them, they said.

Some residents said they had mixed feelings about such clients. Tammy Rivera of Diamond Bar said she would not oppose the “Of Mice and Men” type--a reference to John Steinbeck’s good-hearted but slow-witted character Lennie, who killed a woman because he was frightened and unaware of his own strength.

Others believe the clients should stay in a more isolated facility, like Porterville or Sonoma, where they are less of a threat to neighbors.

“Send them to Barstow!” one man shouted Thursday night.

Adding to the controversy, Lanterman almost lost its Medi-Cal certification this fall because of serious problems with staffing, treatment and client oversight, according to the state Department of Health Services.

Residents, aware of these troubles and escapes from other centers, wonder if there would be adequate staff to properly follow security guidelines.

In October 1995, a 27-year-old man escaped from the Stockton Developmental Center and allegedly raped a high school senior at knifepoint in a school restroom. The escape prompted a local state legislator to write a law tightening security for forensic clients.

In 1997, three forensic clients climbed a 10-foot fence and escaped from the Porterville Developmental Center. Police found them less than three hours later. But neighbors were furious.