Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 7, 1991 TAG: 9104070103
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A/1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Through the dim light, the social worker saw a tiny black-haired woman in a wheelchair.
Kennedy walked around to the front of the garage and removed the cinder block holding the wooden doors shut.
The 27-year-old woman, mentally retarded and paralyzed below the waist, had no clothes from there down. A urine-soaked quilt covered her lap.
She shivered from the cold. Her feet were swollen and bleeding.
When social workers took Shirley Ryan from the house in Northwest Roanoke to a hospital emergency room, doctors said her feet might have to be amputated. They were infected, one doctor said, either by rat bites or by some untreated illness.
More than 100 lesions covered her body.
Kennedy's discovery of Ryan on March 1 brought him face to face with the vulnerability of thousands of elderly and mentally disabled Virginians who live in a submerged network of private-care homes.
Unlike board-and-care or nursing homes, these homes are not licensed. State welfare and mental health officials do not regulate this growing cottage industry, and they have almost no control over how residents like Shirley Ryan are treated.
Little can be done when residents do not get decent care, even when caregivers are receiving residents' pension or disability checks as payment.
Welfare and law-enforcement authorities in Roanoke say it is clear Ryan was badly neglected by whoever was supposed to care for her.
But Betty Jo Anthony, a city prosecutor, said there is no specific criminal-neglect law in Virginia that applies to the case. Caregivers for elderly or mentally disabled people generally can be charged with neglect only when a resident dies.
Anthony is researching the law to see if any other statute could apply.
Ryan's mother, Bessie Meiss, says her daughter disappeared seven years ago into the underground of private-care homes.
Now that her daughter has been found, Meiss is angry - and she wants somebody to pay for what happened to her daughter.
"If it had been a dog that had been mistreated, they'd have had somebody in jail," Meiss said last week. "I can't understand it. I'm burned up about it."
When her daughter was 21, Meiss was nearly destitute and unable to cope with caring for Ryan, who is mildly mentally retarded and has spina bifida, a birth defect that leaves the spine incompletely developed.
Meiss said a mental health worker - from which agency she is uncertain - arranged for her daughter to leave Roanoke and live at a private-care home in Harrisonburg.
After some people came and picked Ryan up, Meiss said, she got one phone call from her daughter. Then she didn't hear from her daughter again.
Meiss said she tried the telephone number she had been given for the home, but it was not a working number. Her letters to Shirley were returned, stamped "addressee unknown," she said.
Meiss said she had no luck tracking her daughter down. Recently, she said, she got the idea of buying a classified advertisement in the Harrisonburg newspaper. But before she could do that, her daughter turned up. "She was right here in Roanoke all the time."
Social workers and law-enforcement officials say it is unclear whether Ryan still was being cared for by the people who had picked her up years ago. It also is unclear how long Ryan had been at the house at 3903 Richland Ave. N.W. or how she got there.
Thomas Hall, the man who had been caring for Ryan there, could not be reached for comment. Hall's mother, Lucille Bass, said Friday that he was out of town and that she had not been able to get in touch with him.
Bass said her son had done nothing wrong. He has worked at licensed adult homes and has experience working with people like Ryan, Bass said.
"He likes to help people," Bass said. "This was more than he could handle, as far as she was concerned. . . . You had to bribe her to get her to do for herself: `You don't get a soap opera book if you don't do this.' "
Bass, who owns the house, said Ryan had been there for six or seven months. Bass said she did not know where Ryan had come from.
Authorities believe that an aunt of Hall's received Ryan's federal disability check each month and then passed it on to Hall.
Hall, 30, was caring for two other mentally handicapped adults in the house but was not obligated to follow any government regulations.
In Virginia, people who earn money by caring for adults in their homes must get a license if they house four or more residents. The state does nothing to regulate private-care homes that care for three or fewer adults.
Some social workers and owners of licensed homes have urged the state to regulate these operations, but no regulations have been created.
State policy-makers also have not heeded pleas from advocates for the elderly and mentally disabled for a criminal-neglect law.
Even without a criminal neglect law, state officials can revoke the licenses of nursing homes or adult homes that neglect residents. But residents in unlicensed facilities do not have even that much protection.
Ryan will not talk about what happened to her before social workers found her. But she said she is happy now living with her mother. Her feet are beginning to heal, and her room is decorated with balloons that nurses at Roanoke Memorial gave to her on her 28th birthday, March 8.
Ryan's case came to the authorities' attention after they received an anonymous tip that Hall might be caring for four disabled adults without a license. Two welfare investigators and a mental-health worker went to Hall's home March 1.
A welfare investigation report gives the following account:
The home, a brick Cape Cod-style house on a well-kept street, was chilly, cluttered and dirty. Hall said he had had the gas heat turned off. He said two residents lived upstairs but that no one lived in the basement.
One of the welfare investigators, Kennedy, went into the back yard and noticed that three laborers, who had been plastering the second-floor stairwell, were huddled behind the unattached garage, whispering.
He walked around to the side of the garage and saw Ryan through the window.
The social workers asked if she wanted to stay or leave.
"Leave," she said, then turned around to see if any of the plaster workers had heard her.
The social workers wheeled Ryan into the basement room she said was her bedroom.
The room reeked of urine. There was an electric space heater, but it was off. The bed had only springs on it - no mattress.
Hall insisted that there had been a mattress on the bed, but that the men must have taken it outside to air it out. The social workers asked him to show them the mattress, "but he was never able to produce it."
It was 11 a.m., and Ryan said she had not eaten since the day before.
The social workers decided to remove Ryan and another resident, a mental-health client, from the house. But they could do nothing else about Hall's operation because with only three residents, the home didn't need a license.
At Roanoke Memorial, doctors found what they believed to be the impressions of sharp bedsprings on Ryan's back and legs.
Hall's mother, Bass, says the whole thing has been blown out of proportion.
She said workers were painting Ryan's room and one of them put her in the garage. "He knew he had to get her out of the paint. Rather than putting her out in the air, he just put her there in the garage until the job was done."
Welfare officials said they saw no evidence anyone had been painting Ryan's room.
"She was supposed to be taking care of herself, up to a point," Bass said. "Everything got off schedule that particular morning."
Ryan's feet were swollen because she often refused to prop them up, Bass said.
"I think she was getting good care," Bass said. "By him being a man and her being a women, there were things he was limited in doing. He couldn't have anything coming up that he was molesting her," so he couldn't wipe her bottom, Bass said.
"He is really upset with this situation. . . . He just felt like they made him feel like he had committed a crime."
Keywords:
ABUSE
by CNB