"Disabled & Abandoned"

INVESTIGATIVE CATEGORY

Austin American-Statesman
9/22/2022

In late 2020, an employee in a group home for the disabled in Fort Worth told Joann Pierson that a bedroom dresser crushed her daughter to death. Kept at a distance by law enforcement, Pierson didn’t see that her daughter’s body was bruised by belts latched across her chest and throat. State officials never told her that they suspected foul play or that the company managing her daughter’s care had a long track record of client maltreatment. A first-of-its-kind, yearlong Austin American-Statesman investigation uncovered the horrific details of Kristi Michelle Norris’ death and revealed that thousands of vulnerable Texans like her are suffering in the state’s collapsing system of home and community care for people with disabilities.

Pierson’s 36-year-old daughter with cerebral palsy and a host of related medical conditions could not talk or move independently. She endured decades of abuse and neglect before her tragic death. She died alone, choked by belts that secured her to a wheelchair after struggling to break free for nearly two hours. Others like her have faced brutal sexual assaults, violent beatings and crass indifference. Without medical attention for days, some have silently endured broken bones, third-degree burns and brain injuries. Their abusers were rarely held to account.

The Statesman investigation revealed how decades of underfunding and lax oversight have turned a system meant to care for and protect more than 100,000 of the state’s most vulnerable residents into a too-often violent and sometimes deadly environment.

The series began as a fairly straight-forward enterprise piece about how tens of thousands of Texans often wait up to seven years to obtain community-based services. But as investigative reporters Caroline Ghisolfi, Tony Plohetski and Nicole Foy began reporting, they unearthed a system beset by crises that state lawmakers have knowingly neglected for decades.

The system is endangering the lives of clients as well as workers, the investigation found.

Employees are paid poverty wages, as low as $8.11 per hour. They often receive little training. And they are regularly left alone with multiple challenging clients, sometimes for days at a time, we found in a review of thousands of pages of government and legal records. The exploitative work conditions, along with scant funding, inadequate regulatory oversight and decades of legislative inaction, have led to dire staffing shortages and an influx of worker injuries.

“Disabled & Abandoned” relied upon data-intensive research and on-the-ground reporting across Texas.

We launched a monthslong data collection effort to trace the consequences of the system’s shortcomings, which state officials had failed to monitor for three decades. When federal and state agencies repeatedly rejected our requests for investigative reports and data, our team used advanced data mining techniques and natural language processing tools to collect information from thousands of lawsuits and identify dozens who were exploited, mistreated, injured and killed in the system. We spent hundreds of hours interviewing victims and their attorneys, and traveled by both plane and car to seven counties, including several in the state’s far borders, to interview families and workers.

Desperate pleas for help, lawsuits, injuries and deaths have largely gone unheeded by state officials overseeing waiver programs. The Texas Health and Human Services Commission is working to expand the system to meet the skyrocketing need for care for disabled people, but doing little to address the underlying systemic failures.

Our work exposed an enormously complicated and catastrophically broken system and galvanized lawmakers in the Texas Legislature to propose unprecedented action to improve the care and safety of thousands of vulnerable Texans and those who care for them.

In response to the Statesman’s reporting, Sen. Charles Perry, a Republican from Lubbock, and Rep. Donna Howard, a Democrat from Austin, vowed in January to lead reforms. Perry committed to nearly doubling the workforce’s base wage to $15 an hour. Howard is considering requiring workplace violence prevention programs in waiver programs and plans to begin talks with state offices to address systemic gaps in oversight the Statesman identified.

The deftly written series painted a grim picture that cannot be ignored. We created a foundation for a more efficient program and a template for how to improve safety and conditions for clients and workers alike.

Thank you for considering “Disabled & Abandoned” for the Headliners Foundation Showcase Award for Enterprise & Innovation in Journalism.

LINK to content online

ADDITIONAL CONTENT
"How our Statesman investigation led lawmakers to take action on care for the disabled"

Submitted by Tony Plohetski.