Mother says state failed to protect disabled daughter

By Jonathan Martin
Seattle Times staff reporter

JOHN LOK / THE SEATTLE TIMES Nancy Sclater and her daughter, Suzy, 28, at the private Seattle home where Suzy now resides. She is cared for by carefully screened female attendants. Suzy, who has cerebral palsy and had a stroke at birth, is mostly nonverbal and functions at the developmental age of a toddler.

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In the early 1990s, while working for the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS), she helped raise $300,000 for a new, state-operated group home in Shoreline. She was confident enough in the care provided by state-employed caregivers that she put her adult daughter, Suzy, who is afflicted with cerebral palsy, there.

That trust disintegrated Thanksgiving weekend of 2000.

A caregiver changing Suzy's diaper found bruises across her pelvis. Harborview Medical Center doctors found semen and what appeared to be a handprint on her upper thigh, and concluded she had been raped.

For four years, Sclater has called in favors from well-connected friends to press for a more thorough investigation. The King County Sheriff's Office has conducted its own investigation, but that effort slowed after DNA testing cleared various caregivers and roommates who had access to Suzy in the days before her injuries were discovered.

The attack remains a whodunit, in part, Sclater contends, because DSHS failed to cooperate with the investigation. It took the agency a full year to produce key documents, including internal memos showing that one of Suzy's caregivers had driven off during one night shift, leaving the group home unlocked and potentially open to an attacker.

DSHS' delay in releasing the documents felt like a betrayal, Sclater said. She has sued DSHS in King County Superior Court, alleging negligent oversight, lax hiring standards and failure to cooperate with the police investigation. A trial is scheduled for August.

The suit poses an unusual legal issue: whether a public agency can be held responsible for an unsolved crime.

"I trusted these people, and they've done nothing to ensure the situation will never occur again," Sclater said. "They had the ability to cooperate with law enforcement to find out who did this, and they didn't. They withheld information."

Jeff Freimund, an assistant attorney general representing DSHS, said a lawsuit is premature until criminal charges are filed. "It's unfair to say that DSHS caused an assault," he said. "We don't even know where or when an assault happened."

The late-arriving records, including the one about the unexplained absence of the night caregiver in 2000, were found in the desk drawer of an employee who left soon after the rape, Freimund said.
 
But during a deposition taken for Sclater's lawsuit, a sheriff's detective, Janette Luitgaarden, said she was skeptical of that explanation.

Luitgaarden, assigned to the sex-crimes unit, noted that employees at Suzy's group home knew about "important" memos at the start of her investigation.

"The fact that this had been sitting there the entire time ... and it hadn't been brought to my attention, certainly I found extremely concerning," Luitgaarden testified.

A sheriff's spokesman said Luitgaarden wouldn't discuss the case for this article because the matter still is under investigation.

Risk of assault

Studies show developmentally disabled women are between four and 12 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than nondisabled women. And the number may be higher, because crime-victim researchers have trouble interviewing residents of nursing homes and institutions, said Richard Sobsey, a professor at the University of Alberta.

Though assaults were once a hidden problem, there are now too many studies to ignore, Sobsey said. "We've reached the point where people in this field can't say we don't know this is a problem."

One of the people Sclater turned to after the rape was then-Secretary of State Ralph Munro, a volunteer guardian for the developmentally disabled. Munro said he often hears similar stories, including one about a developmentally disabled woman who has been raped at least three times.

"That happens to lots of parents of handicapped children," Munro said. Their children "get raped, they get hurt, they get assaulted. Parents have just had it. It's so emotionally destructive to parents and their children."

On the other hand, Marybeth Poch, head of DSHS' developmental-disabilities wing for King County, said she has received only one report of a sexual assault in seven years on the job.

Living alternatives

Suzy's group home was part of the State Operated Living Alternative (SOLA) program, created in 1993 when a state institution near Spokane closed. State staff members provide 24-hour care in homes created to serve developmentally disabled clients.

With an $11 million annual budget, the program is intended to provide the intensive care of a state institution in a setting that allows the program's 113 clients to integrate into everyday life.

After trying to care for her daughter at home, Sclater admitted her, at the age of 7, to the Fircrest School state institution. Suzy had an unexplainable stroke at birth and, now 28, functions at the developmental age of a toddler. She can express joy and pain from the confines of her wheelchair, but she is mostly nonverbal.

Sclater already was a member of a statewide disabilities board and took a job as a public-information officer at Fircrest to be near Suzy. When the Legislature created SOLAs, she helped raise money for her daughter's new home.

In the months following the rape, Sclater looked back more closely at incidents that at the time hadn't seemed to her to indicate abuse Now, she wonders about the cause of the nightmares that awakened Suzy during the night, about bruises on her back that mirrored the pattern of her shower gurney, about her hymen being broken.

Sclater's conclusion: "I think they'd been using her for years."

Different theories

DSHS lawyers take a different view of the matter, suggesting that Suzy could have gotten the bruises in a series of falls and inserted the semen into herself. But Deborah Preller, the Harborview doctor who examined Suzy after the rape, said during a deposition that neither theory fits the evidence.

The DSHS lawyers also have objected to Sclater's use of her network of friends. For example, she asked King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm Maleng to give the case priority. And after DSHS didn't quickly return calls after the rape, she asked Munro to help arrange for Suzy to move to another group home.

Suzy now lives in a private home on Queen Anne Hill, cared for by carefully screened female attendants. Still, she sometimes wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, Sclater said.

Sclater said the case shows that the state needs more rigorous screening of prospective caregivers.

According to state documents, the caregiver who appears to have left Suzy unattended during Thanksgiving 2000 was hired even though he didn't meet minimum qualifications. He had been fired from a previous caregiver job at a nonprofit agency because he "made the administrator feel uncomfortable," documents said.

Sclater also is pressing for a rule that would not allow male attendants to bathe and change female patients unsupervised.

Many other states and nonprofit agencies have similar policies to guard against liability, said Sobsey, the Alberta professor. There is no such policy now at DSHS because of inadequate staffing, said Poch, the DSHS administrator.

Most important, Sclater charges, DSHS needs to create a culture of accountability. If she had gotten an apology, or even a sense of urgency, a lawsuit would have been less likely, she said.

According to documents filed in the case, Sclater's attorney thinks the state owes Suzy up to $11 million in lifelong-care expenses and for emotional damages. Sclater said that money would ensure that Suzy would never again have to rely on DSHS-funded care.

"I just don't trust them," she said.

Jonathan Martin: 206-464-2605 or jmartin@seattletimes.com