Group home owner, state sued after sex assault

Lawsuit: State-contracted caretakers failed to protect vulnerable female resident

The guardian of a developmentally disabled young Santa Fe woman who was raped last summer after running from an Albuquerque-based group home is suing the home and its owner, as well as the state Department of Health, saying a series of failures to ensure the woman’s safety exposed her to abuse.

Opti Health Inc., a state contractor that owns and operates the Hendrix House, should have known the 21-yearold woman was unable to make decisions for herself, had a history of fleeing from her family home and care centers, and faced a high risk of being exploited, the lawsuit says. Still, it says, the company “permitted her to roam the streets of Albuquerque without the capacity to protect herself.”

The New Mexico Behavioral Health Institute in Las Vegas, N.M., where the woman was placed for treatment following the attack, also is named as a defendant in the complaint, which says she was sexually assaulted there by another client just six weeks after the first incident.

“It’s really an outrage,” said Santa Fe attorney Linda Hemphill, who filed the lawsuit earlier this week in state District Court in Santa Fe on behalf of a longtime friend of the woman who is serving as her legal guardian. “… She needed to be carefully monitored.”

With fees of nearly $300 a day at Hendrix House to care for the young woman, Hemphill said, the facility’s shocking failure to protect her points to an overall breakdown in New Mexico when it comes to providing quality services to some of the state’s most vulnerable people.

Opti Health representatives did not return calls to comment on the lawsuit,

and staff at the Behavioral Health Institute referred questions to the Department of Health.

Paul Rhien, a spokesman for the agency, said in an email that “the New Mexico Department of Health is unable to comment about pending litigation.”

Hemphill said the state’s Adult Protective Services Division allowed a severely disabled woman with impulsive behaviors and other mental health issues to languish for at least two years without the aid of a guardian — even after her need for the assistance had been identified by both law enforcement officials and medical professionals.

“Nobody was taking the bull by the horn and getting her a guardian,” Hemphill said.

Following the sexual abuse, the attorney said, she and a woman who had befriended the victim years earlier through the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, finally were able to complete the guardianship process, and the disabled woman is now receiving services at an out-of-state facility.

Hemphill said that, too, came after a lengthy battle with the woman’s Medicaid provider.

According to the lawsuit, the disabled woman began to engage in dangerous behaviors as a teen, such as running away from home and climbing into the cars of strangers. She was jailed for several days in 2015 on charges of battery on a household member and assault on a police officer. A doctor later found that she was not competent to stand trial, the suit says.

The woman was placed at Hendrix House in February 2016, the complaint says, but staff members there failed to follow her safety plan, “maintaining an absurd fiction that [the woman] could ‘voluntarily’ leave Hendrix House.”

One day in August 2016, after she left the home alone, the suit says, the woman was brutally raped, possibly by a man she had known. Albuquerque police officers took her to a hospital for treatment, but she escaped the facility and returned to Hendrix House, covered in blood. Then she left the home, the suit says, and was found wandering, “disoriented and aimless,” on an Interstate 25 frontage road, where she picked up by a good Samaritan and returned to the hospital for a sexual assault screening.

Weeks later, while undergoing inpatient treatment at the Behavioral Health Institute in Las Vegas, the suit says, she was raped again. The complaint says the assault was due to the institute’s failure to properly screen, monitor and care for the woman “in her fragile condition.”

The complaint accuses Opti Health of breach of contract and violations of the Unfair Practices Act, and it accuses the Behavioral Health Institute of negligence. It charges the state Department of Health with failing to monitor contractors providing care through its Developmental Disabilities Waiver program.

The lawsuit speaks to an overall lack of appropriate services for disabled people, Hemphill said, including underregulated group homes. “I just think it’s a huge problem in this state trying to get services for disabled people.”