Family fights for abused handicapped woman

< Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next >

'She missed us to death'
After Perfelia entered Belvidere, Aunt Lena, alone in her own house, fell into a deep depression.

Perfelia began falling down, said the group home staff. Her face was bashed, the skin scraped off her nose, and she degenerated into bouts of weeping.

She also hated the place. When her family came to visit, she cried and begged to be taken home. “It was very hard,” says her cousin, Monica Hubert, a nurse’s aide and one of Sal’s two grown daughters. “It was hard for her and it was hard for us. She missed us to death.”

Story continues below ↓

advertisement | your ad here

They didn’t understand the explanations offered by Belvidere employees. Perfelia had walked just fine before she got here, her family said. And she’d never bruised or scraped her face.

Monica, Sal, his other daughter Michelle Luizza, and another cousin, Renee Rossi-Rosen, didn’t know what to think.

In all, she “fell” five times. Always, it was her face and nothing else that was injured, her family said. Three times, she was taken to the emergency room of nearby Warren Hospital. Her last visit there was prompted by caretakers at her day school, who said Perfelia should be seen by a doctor. Her eyes were so black-and-blue, the school took Polaroids of her.

“She looked like she had been in a fight with Mike Tyson,” Rossi-Rosen said.

Rossi-Rosen is an attorney. She is also tough and stubborn. She has filled four accordion files with correspondence to state health officials demanding to know what happened to her cousin.

She could file a civil suit and ask for a lot of money, but she and her cousins will have none of that.

“I want justice,” she says. “Nobody is going to pay me off. That’s blood money.”

Full extent of abuse revealed
Perfelia’s cousin sent her first letter to James W. Smith, then-director of the Division of Developmental Disabilities, on Aug. 6, 2003. It ran three pages and it was not subtle. She demanded an investigation of Belvidere. “This must not be ignored nor will I allow it to be ignored,” she wrote. She highlighted the sentence in bold type.

It took more than a month for Smith to answer. In a letter dated Sept. 9, he promised “a thorough investigation will be conducted.”

But in the coming months, Rossi-Rosen became a foot soldier in a war of words with functionaries in New Jersey’s health system. And she learned that Perfelia had been more abused than the family suspected.

Sometimes the state sent documents detailing events the family knew nothing about.

Rossi-Rosen received seven documents called Confidential Initial Incident Reports. They were dated from May 16, 2003, to Aug. 8, 2003, one week after she entered the emergency room for the last time:

May 16. “Perfelia Russo told (a staff member) that she fell and bumped her head.” Even though she had a lump on her skull, staff sent her to school, where it grew to 3 inches. She was taken to Warren Hospital’s emergency room, where a physician’s assistant sent her home, cautioning staff to watch for signs of concussion.

June 20. Perfelia told employees at her day school that she had been slapped across the face and choked. A staff member at Belvidere was suspected, and “removed from the schedule pending an investigation,” the report said. The name of the employee was blacked out. Perfelia’s family does not know the outcome of that investigation.

July 23. Perfelia yelled at a home employee: “Don’t hit me, don’t hit me. You better not hit me.” Under a box titled “additional comments,” officials wrote, “Perfelia suffers from Alzheimer’s and has been making frequent accusations against staff.”

Perfelia does not have Alzheimer’s, her cousin says. “She has Down syndrome,” Rossi-Rosen said. “That’s it. They couldn’t even get that right.”

July 26. Perfelia was discovered “with golf-ball size bump on her head.” Again, group home staffers sent her to school. Two days later, the report says, a nurse at the school told Belvidere staffers that Perfelia should be seen by a doctor because of her blackened eyes.

The report does not say how Perfelia was injured or why no one at Belvidere appeared to notice her battered face. The school took six Polaroids of Perfelia, noting the date and time. Four were taken on July 28. Two were taken the next morning.

They show a confused-looking woman with massive bruising, as if someone had punched her in each eye. There was a wide gash on her forehead. The school later gave the photographs to Perfelia’s family.

July 29. Four hours after the school took Polaroids of her face, another incident report was filed. Underneath a box marked “Injury Level,” the report said “none.” Perfelia told two health workers at Belvidere that someone hit her. Then she demonstrated how it was done.

She “took her fist and hit herself in the eye and stated 'like this.' When we asked her where this happened, she stated, 'Downstairs. He say don’t look, don’t look,'" the report says. Perfelia could not identify her attacker beyond calling him “the boy.”

Months later, in correspondence sent by the state during its investigation, health officials confused Perfelia with another injured patient.

John Pernal, the state’s Human Services administrator for Warren County, wrote Rossi-Rosen about an October 2003 phone message he’d left saying Perfelia suffered five broken ribs at Belvidere in an incident that had never been reported.

“My mistake was that I had confused Perfelia with another (patient) in my haste and I apologize for any anxiety this may have created,” Pernal’s letter said.

“How do you like that?” Rossi-Rosen asks. “How can you overlook five broken ribs? I feel sorry for whoever that other person is, and their family.”

CONTINUED : Neglect and abuse

< Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next >

Discuss Story On Newsvine
Rate Story:
View popularLowHigh
Email
Instant Message
Print