PUEBLO — After four years and a string of controversies, one of the key criticisms from lawmakers of Colorado human services director Reggie Bicha was his handling of a search for physical abuse in a cluster of Pueblo group homes for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Some of the homes have had a series of incident reports that were self-reported and self-investigated that included sexual abuse, physical abuse, theft and neglect that ranged from a resident being left in her feces to a field trip that left one behind and home alone. There was also a mistake over what “Do not resuscitate” meant when a patient was unresponsive.
Bicha said he lost trust in what his staff in Pueblo was telling him. He sent a team of nurses to the city to search for evidence in March without permission from any of the 62 residents’ guardians — family members, individuals or charities with the legal rights to speak for individual residents.
Investigators performed intimate examinations, or “body audits,” of residents to determine whether wrongdoing had taken place.
As a result, the Department of Human Services may have to answer questions in court about civil rights issues. That could compound the problems for the beleaguered political appointee of Gov. John Hickenlooper. More than 80 lawmakers signed a no-confidence letter directed at human services leadership last month.
“There’s no doubt that it was very, very inappropriate and was an overreach of authority,” said Jim Malila, whose 43-year-old son lives in one of the Pueblo homes. “I don’t see any way that they didn’t violate those people’s rights. And if they did that, then I don’t see how Reggie Bicha can keep his job.”
The state Department of Public Health and Environment is investigating a civil rights complaint by guardians against DHS.
The health department report could be available in a matter of days, a spokesman said. Although it is still confidential, four people who were informed about the preliminary findings said the report cited “deficiencies” in how the department handled residents’ civil rights.
If deficiencies are found, the health department will ask DHS to submit a plan to correct its actions, but the American Civil Liberties Union, other organizations or the guardians could file suit on residents’ behalf.
“I feel certain the Pueblo situation is going to lead to some kind of litigation,” said Denise Maes, policy director for the ACLU of Colorado. “I think everyone is waiting to see what this report says.”
Bicha put 11 people on paid leave in the wake of the abuse investigation he says he instigated.
Bicha’s critics, including the Pueblo Regional Center director who resigned after the abuse investigation began, claim he is aiming eventually to close or consolidate the regional centers in Pueblo, Grand Junction and Wheat Ridge.
They point to dwindling numbers of residents there during Bicha’s tenure. They say the abuse investigation was a means of harming their reputation.
“If you can denigrate, degradate, call into question, it makes it a lot harder for people to defend it,” said Valita Speedie, who resigned as head of the Pueblo Regional Center in April.
Working on the case
Bicha said he could not discuss the investigation. Neither would the Colorado attorney general’s office, because its lawyers are working on the case.
“What I can tell you is those medical professionals asked each and every one of those clients if it was OK,” he said.
Bicha calls opponents’ concerns unwarranted suspicion and misplaced blame. Several outside agencies are looking into issues at the Pueblo Regional Center, including the Pueblo Adult Protective Services and Disability Law Colorado, an independent nonprofit that represents the legal rights of people with disabilities that specializes in civil rights and discrimination issues.
The Pueblo County Sheriff’s Department is investigating 10 cases related to the center, Bicha said.
Bicha said intentions were in the best interest of the residents.
“It really was done under an abundance of caution to make sure those residents were safe,” Bicha said.
He added: “In hindsight, I wish we had stopped and picked up the phone to call the guardians.”
Events were set in motion when Bicha learned in March of a potential abuse case that happened last fall. He would not elaborate on the case, but he said he had reason to doubt he got a straight story from the center’s staff.
He said he talked to the Pueblo Sheriff’s Department and Adult Protective Services in Pueblo County and “connected the dots” about the three agencies’ shared concerns.
“At that point, I didn’t know who we could rely on to give us good, accurate information,” Bicha said.
“A strip search”?
“Let’s call it what it was,” Speedie said of the body audits. “It was a strip search.”
She said when a team of nurses showed up at the center, they wanted to bring all the residents to one home and search them in a restroom.
DHS disputes that. Ultimately residents were checked in their bedrooms.
Speedie is convinced the abuse allegations are part of Bicha’s goal to close or consolidate the three regional centers.
The three homes have 356 beds total, and over the past five years, the vacancy rate has grown from 6 percent to 25 percent, according to DHS documents.
Speedie said she told Bicha he was moving too fast on closing or downsizing the centers, because a lot of residents have nowhere to go. Their home for years has been in a group home in Pueblo.
She said the plan would uproot fragile people who have a history of not being able to make it in private nursing homes.
“I made a decision to speak up, and politically it was the wrong thing to do. And I knew at the time I’d done the wrong thing,” Speedie said. “I knew there would be consequences for not going along with the marching orders.”
Bicha doesn’t deny having conversations with Speedie about the future of the regional centers, but he denied having any vendetta against her or any intention to close the centers, since legally that’s a decision for legislators, he said.
Group of guardians
Lynne Parker Crooks, whose 46-year-old son lives in the Wheat Ridge regional center, was among a group of guardians who formed Save Our Regional Centers after a meeting with Bicha in 2013. She and others in attendance said Bicha told them about plans to downsize and possibly close some of the centers.
Bicha said his conversations about the future of the centers is being mischaracterized. Colorado has been trending toward fewer residents since the 1960s, when there were more than 2,000 people in the regional centers, he said, adding that privatization and less desire from guardians to use the state homes has driven the decline.
Some states have eliminated group homes entirely after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Olmstead vs. L.C. ruling in 1999 that said government should move to end “isolation and segregation of individuals with disabilities as a serious and pervasive form of discrimination.”
That same year, DHS issued a report on “downsizing initiatives” for the group homes. The number of people in Colorado’s group homes has been nearly cut in half since then.
“This started long before Bicha came to Colorado,” Bicha said.
Moreover, Bicha said he doesn’t personally support closing them.
He said a home for people with disabilities who have no place to go will always exist, and no one has been moved to a private facility without the consent of guardians.
A report to legislators in December said that as of September, 85 of the three centers’ 266 residents at the time were ready to be transitioned to private care. Guardians of 67 of them declined the offer.
In 2014 the Colorado legislature created a 15-member task force to study whether it could feasibly close the centers and still care for the people who need the level of care the group homes provide.
Not unusual
Speedie said the 86 incidents reported at the Pueblo Regional Center during the past three years are not unusual, based on the 8½ years she was there.
The “homes of last resort” typically are for those whose behavior is so severe that private nursing homes won’t take them.
The 86 incident reports since 2012 are less than half the 180 that were filed the previous three years, including some that involved accusations against staff members, according to the state health department.
“We can’t get rid of people who are hard to deal with,” Speedie said. “We have to figure out how to deal with them. It’s not easy.”
Bicha would not discuss his specific reasons for suspecting abuse, but the publicly available incident reports show a handful of problems.
On May 23, 2014, a female resident said a male staff member touched her inappropriately at a Pueblo home. An internal investigation by the Pueblo Regional Center said the allegation was substantiated and the employee was fired.
In another Pueblo home on Feb. 7, 2014, a resident in his 70s died after he was found unresponsive. A senior staff member misinterpreted a directive on the person’s chart as “Do not resuscitate.” The directive, however, meant “full resuscitation.” Staff told investigators they were confused.
Another resident in his 70s had a digital home theater and other valuable electronics stolen from his room the day after Christmas in 2012. The DHS incident report indicated the case was unsolved, but “the facility implemented a new system to keep track of residents’ property,” the report states.
There are other accounts of staff manhandling or neglecting individual care, including one resident inadvertently left behind at the home when the rest left in a van for a field trip.
Stephanie Garcia, executive director of the ARC of Pueblo, which has guardianship of seven of the 62 residents who were searched, said the investigation and uncertainty have weighed on the residents.
Some residents are worried they did something wrong, and some are concerned they might live in an unsafe place, she said.
“The residents are internalizing all of this,” Garcia said.
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174, jbunch@denverpost.com or twitter.com/joeybunch
