The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘ATMOSPHERE OF CONSTANT MENACE’
Brother of patient reportedly abused by multiple staff members testifies at hearing
The brother of the Connecticut Valley Hospital patient at the center of a state probe into alleged widespread abuse by at least 10 staff members gave powerful testimony during a Public Health Committee hearing Monday at the state Capitol in Hartford.
“I am here today to give you a name, to tell you his story, and to encourage you to continue your investigation,” Al Shehadi told lawmakers on the panel.
During the morning session, state departments of public health, mental health and addiction services administrators testified and answered questions from legislators. That portion of the proceedings, which was expected to last an hour, took more than four.
Following that session, 33 members of the public signed up for their chance to speak.
The paid suspension of 31 Connecticut Valley Hospital Whiting Forensic employees, on leave for alleged policy violations or accusations of criminal acts, and the arrests of 10 staff members who have been charged with multiple instances of cruelty to persons and disorderly conduct prompted the day’s hearings.
The state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services oversees CVH.
Charges stem from warrants that detail a 24-day period — from Feb. 27 to March 22 — during which authorities allege Shehadi’s brother suffered a sustained pattern of attacks and provocations.
The victim was not the “primary aggressor” in any of the recorded incidents, officials said.
Shehadi explained that his brother’s early life was one of success. “He was a good student, interested in government, an amateur photographer and he graduated from Greenwich High School and got an associate’s degree,” Shehadi said.
At 21, however, his brother sunk into a deep depression and became “seriously mentally ill” and was diagnosed as psychotic. Since then, his brother has been institutionalized, the past 15 years at Whiting, Shehadi said.
“My brother is also not an angel,” he said. “He killed my father 22 years ago — our father. Because of his illness, he didn’t know what he was doing.”
Shehadi told the legislators he counted 50 incidents of alleged abuse in those 24 days. He read aloud two alleged incidents from the arrest warrant, one in which a staff member reportedly poured a cup of water over his brother’s head and then used a mop to repeatedly mop his brother’s head.
In another instance, a staff member picked up his brother’s mattress while he was lying on it and flipped it onto the ground, then pushed the mattress on top of his brother, Shehadi said. Other staff members were present during these instances, according to the warrant.
“Beyond almost daily acts of similar abuse, the videos I saw convey an atmosphere of constant menace: not just kicking my brother, but in periods in between kicks, staff resting their feet and legs on his bed next to his body and chest, their feet constantly tapping, moving, as if to remind him that they could kick again whenever they wanted,” Shehadi told the panel.
The videos, Shehadi said, “convey an atmosphere of constant menace.”
“It wasn’t just pushing him down on his bed, or flipping him off his bed, it was the staff circling around his bed, leaning over, staring at him. It was the feeling of cats playing with a cornered mouse that was most disturbing to me,” he told lawmakers.
“The sheer scale of the abuse is incomprehensible,” said Shehadi, who added that he first learned of the allegations involving his brother after a reporter called him for reaction.
“We have never seen signs of anything this ... I don’t want to say organized, but this sort of pervasive and systemic (abuse) within Whiting that has this number of individuals involved,” Miriam Delphin-Rittmon, commissioner of the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, told the panel Monday.
Delphin-Rittmon said fear and intimidation was what led to this being kept quiet for so long, but she doesn’t believe that culture of fear that allowed the abuse to continue for so long is systemic.
“I don’t believe that’s characteristic of a broad culture at CVH,” DelphinRittmon said. “My sense is that this is not pervasive system wide.”
She said the human resources investigation into the allegations began three weeks ago because DMHAS officials did not want to interfere with the police and criminal investigations and staff have completed 90 interviews.
Dr. Michael Norko, acting director of the Whiting Forensic division, said they’ve asked the nurses to do an evaluation of any of their patients who are “particularly vulnerable,” such as people with communication skills that might be limited or who might not be able to advocate for themselves and to make sure there were no signs any of them were being abused.
“Going forward, we’re going to work closely with our patients,” Norko said. “I’m going to involve them directly in trying to figure out what we need to do in order to make sure that if anything of an abusive nature were to happen it would be reported and that we’d know about it.”
Shehadi said his brother has trouble “reading social cues and is prone to ritualistic behavior,” such as walking around a room, touching the walls over and over again, or flipping light switches on and off. He acknowledged his brother is “not easy” on his caregivers.
“I tell you this last part not because it is relevant to the abuse or what he suffered,” Shehadi said. “I tell it to you precisely because it is irrelevant to the abuse. I tell it to you because some of you may already have heard what they call in soft whispers ‘blame the victim.’ ”
DMHAS leadership, he said, said the allegations involving his brother are isolated incidents.
“For anybody familiar with the facts, it strains credibility that what happened was simply an isolated incident,” Shehadi said.
“The culture of Whiting is not pretty,” he said. “I might describe Whiting as the awkward marriage of prison and a hospital with a culture of hardness, insularity and control more commonly found in a prison usually winning out over the culture of compassion, respect and recovery that one expects from a hospital.”
On a break during the testimony, state Sen. Heather Somers, R-Groton, who is cochairwoman of the Public Health Committee, said more time and another forum is needed to explore systematic changes DHMAS could potentially make.
“What we heard from the commissioner is a lot of things going forward but not a lot in retrospect on exactly how it broke down,” she said.
“We don’t know how good those changes are until you evaluate them, until you audit them and servey them in X amount of time to see how they’re working,” Somers said. “I don’t think we can come up with a plan that says, ‘OK, here’s the plan. It’s working.’
“It has to go through constant evaluation and that’s why I have been impressing the idea of internal audits, because that’s what an audit does. It evaluates the process to see if the process is working, and it’s clear that that is not happening at the Whiting facility,” she said.
Attorney Kathleen Flaherty, executive director of the Connecticut Legal Rights Project, which provides legal services to low-income adults with serious mental health conditions, said change is needed.
“It was very clear they had a lot more questions of the department, and that they hadn’t gotten answers to some of the things that had already asked,” she said.
“We do not need another task force to study the issue. We need this state to implement recommendations for change which have been repeatedly made in the past,” Flaherty said during her testimony. “We should reexamine the laws that restrict the liberty of people with mental health conditions and infringe on their legal rights to make choices about the treatment they receive.” CT News Junkie Editor-in-Chief Christine Stuart contributed to this story. Managing Editor Cassandra Day can be reached at cassandra.day@hearstmediact.com.