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Invisible Lives|D.C.'s Troubled System for the Retarded:

Forest Haven Is Gone, But the Agony Remains

By Katherine Boo
Washington Post Staff Writer

March 14, 1999;
Page A01 Part 1

Elroy lives here. Tiny, half-blind, mentally retarded, 39-year-old Elroy. To find him, go past the counselor flirting on the phone. Past the broken chairs, the roach-dappled kitchen and the housemates whose neglect in this group home has been chronicled for a decade in the files of city agencies. Head upstairs to Elroy's single bed.

"You're in good hands," reads the Allstate Insurance poster tacked above his mattress -- the mattress where the sexual predator would catch him sleeping. Catch him easily: The door between their rooms had fallen from its hinges. Catch him relentlessly -- so relentlessly that Elroy tried to commit suicide by running blindly into a busy Southeast Washington street.

These days, reconciled to living, Elroy has fashioned ways to cope. He keeps private amulets against a misery he doesn't fully grasp. There's the leatherette Bible he can't read; the Norman Rockwell calendar of family scenes he hasn't known.

And there's his strategy of groping his way down to the bare-bulbed basement again and again to wash the sheets from his violated bed, as if Tide could cleanse defilement. "God is a friend of mine," he says. But absent divine intervention, "you just gotta do what they say." Just got to add soap powder, and more soap powder, turn the dial to hot. "Gotta not let the worries pluck your nerves."

A decade ago, the District government, compelled by a federal lawsuit, carried out a celebrated rescue of some of its most vulnerable citizens. It closed Forest Haven, the notorious asylum for the retarded in Laurel, where Elroy had grown to adulthood. In its place, the city fashioned one of America's costliest reform efforts for the retarded: dispersing Forest Haven's 1,100 residents, and the other people subsequently committed to city care, into small, privately operated group homes scattered throughout the District. This new, community-based system would provide sensitive, individualized care in homelike settings -- care monitored by a large network of city and federal protectors.

But today this reform is failing.

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Invisible Deaths|The Fatal Neglect of D.C.'s Retarded: System Loses Lives and Trust
By: Katherine Boo
Washington Post Staff Writer

December 5, 1999 Page A1

The corpse measured 66 inches from blue toes to jutting ears. In a beige house on Tenley Circle, a dentist-entrepreneur lugged this cargo down the stairs into the basement and laid it to rest by the washer.

The body in plaid pajamas was that of a 57-year-old retarded ward of the District of Columbia. On the streets outside the city-funded group home where he had lived and died, kids sometimes called him Retard-O. Inside, he sweetened the hours by printing the name his mother gave him before she gave him up. Frederick Emory Brandenburg. He blanketed old telephone directories with that name, covered the TV Guides the home's staffers tossed aside. He glutted the flyleaves of his large-print Living Bible. The immensity of the effort made his hands shake, but the habit seemed as requisite as breath. In this way Brandenburg, whose thick-tongued words were mysteries to many, impressed the fact of his existence on his world.

In January 1997, that existence was obliterated by his caretakers.

In one of 14 group homes for which the city pays dentist Arthur Stubbs and his partner, Sheila Gaither, $6 million a year, Brandenburg was tranquilized in a staff mix-up, grew acutely ill and, surrounded by caretakers, slowly died without treatment. His body was washed, moved by Stubbs into the basement, and cremated without autopsy. The White Pages emblazoned with his name were dispatched to a trash can out back. His caretakers altered the time and circumstances of his death in records they submitted to the city, house documents show.

Government officials who were supposed to ensure his safety kept evidence of wrongdoing from the police. And this summer, after The Washington Post asked questions, Brandenburg's city case manager shredded records on his death. Today, in the name of the privacy and dignity of the retarded, top city officials say they can't publicly acknowledge that a man named Fred Brandenburg was ever in their care.

This erasure of a life was not an exceptional event in what was supposed to be America's most compassionate and costly effort to deinstitutionalize the mentally retarded.

***********
In Today's Viral World, Who Keeps a Civil Tongue?
By Ann Gerhart
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Washington Post A1

Late last month, Charisse Carney-Nunes fired up the computer at her home in Northeast Washington to check her e-mail. Her brain already was on morning drive time: breakfast for the kids, her day's work at a government agency. She glanced down at her screen, then froze.

"Ms. Carney-Nunes," began the e-mail from Michelle Malkin, a best-selling and often inflammatory conservative writer with a heavily trafficked Web site. "I understand that you uploaded the video of schoolchildren reciting a Barack Obama song/rap at Bernice Young elementary school in June. I have a few quick questions. Did you help write the song/rap and teach it to the children? Are you an educator/guest lecturer at the school? Did you teach about your book, 'I am Barack Obama' at the school? Your bio says you are a schoolmate of Obama. How well-acquainted are you with the president?" 

Carney-Nunes looked at the time stamp -- 6:47 a.m. -- and closed the file without replying. She knew Malkin had driven criticism of President Obama's back-to-school speech, streamed nationwide, as an attempt to indoctrinate students. Now Malkin was asking about a YouTube video of New Jersey public school children singing and enthusiastically chanting about Obama from a Black History Month presentation.

By nightfall, Carney-Nunes's name was playing on Fox News and voice mails on her home phone and cellphone were clogged with the furious voices of strangers. The e-mails kept pouring in, by the hundreds, crammed with words spam filters try to catch: She was a "nappy-headed" traitor; she would lose her job and go to jail; she was Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker who glorified Hitler.

It has been nearly a year since Barack Obama, running as a uniter and not a divider, was elected president by the largest margin in 20 years. The loop on cable news of thousands of beaming faces in Chicago's Grant Park has given way to a summer and fall of thousands of other faces contorting in defiance and fear. A congressman yelled "You lie!" at the president on national TV. 

A liberal bit off the finger of a conservative during a confrontation over public health insurance.
On Friday, just hours after Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Republicans and Democrats were at their battle stations again.

The nation's political discourse seems sour, angry, even dangerous; "uglier than it's ever been" is a phrase often volunteered -- as if President George W. Bush had never been depicted as Hitler, declared a dunce and heckled by Code Pink during his second inaugural address.

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Rural dentists report surge in "meth mouth"
Tuesday, 7/26/2005
By TODD C. FRANKEL
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, A1


SIKESTON, MO. -- When children drop in for a dental checkup or cleaning, Dr. Gail Redman usually ends the appointment with her familiar reminder to brush and floss regularly. But she recently added something new: "Whatever you do, don't do meth."

The unusual advice, rarely heard in a dentist's office, is the result of Redman's seeing more and more cases of a disturbing dental decay considered a telltale sign of methamphetamine abuse.
The condition, commonly known as "meth mouth, " leaves users' teeth black-stained, rotted and often unsalvageable. It can advance so rapidly that patients even in their late teens and early 20s have required full-mouth extractions.

"We see it a lot, " said Redman, director of the facility in Missouri's Bootheel. "It's because meth is so bad in this area."

Almost unheard of in urban areas, meth mouth is a growing problem for dentists working in the nation's rural stretches, where meth has hit the hardest. Already rural social services and law enforcement are dealing with the drug's fallout, from families torn apart by addiction to the toxic home labs where meth is made.

Now, rural dentists say meth is changing their jobs too.

*********

For Teenagers, Hello Means ‘How About a Hug?’

By SARAH KERSHAW

Published: May 27, 2009
New York Times

**scene lede**
There is so much hugging at Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, N.J., that students have broken down the hugs by type:

There is the basic friend hug, probably the most popular, and the bear hug, of course. But now there is also the bear claw, when a boy embraces a girl awkwardly with his elbows poking out.
There is the hug that starts with a high-five, then moves into a fist bump, followed by a slap on the back and an embrace.

There’s the shake and lean; the hug from behind; and, the newest addition, the triple — any combination of three girls and boys hugging at once.

“We’re not afraid, we just get in and hug,” said Danny Schneider, a junior at the school, where hallway hugging began shortly after 7 a.m. on a recent morning as students arrived. “The guy friends, we don’t care. You just get right in there and jump in.”

*Big picture graph*
There are romantic hugs, too, but that is not what these teenagers are talking about.
Girls embracing girls, girls embracing boys, boys embracing each other — the hug has become the favorite social greeting when teenagers meet or part these days. Teachers joke about “one hour” and “six hour” hugs, saying that students hug one another all day as if they were separated for the entire summer.

*Expanded big picture graph/reach*
A measure of how rapidly the ritual is spreading is that some students complain of peer pressure to hug to fit in. And schools from Hillsdale, N.J., to Bend, Ore., wary in a litigious era about sexual harassment or improper touching — or citing hallway clogging and late arrivals to class — have banned hugging or imposed a three-second rule.
.....
**expert voice**
But Amy L. Best, a sociologist at George Mason University, said the teenage embrace is more a reflection of the overall evolution of the American greeting, which has become less formal since the 1970s. “Without question, the boundaries of touch have changed in American culture,” she said. “We display bodies more readily, there are fewer rules governing body touch and a lot more permissible access to other people’s bodies.”

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Page One
August 6, 2009

No More Perks: Coffee Shops Pull the Plug on Laptop Users

They Sit for Hours and Don't Spend Much; Getting the Bum's Rush in the Big Apple

By ERICA ALINI
A sign at Naidre's, a small neighborhood coffee shop in Brooklyn, N.Y., begins warmly: "Dear customers, we are absolutely thrilled that you like us so much that you want to spend the day..."

But, it continues, "...people gotta eat, and to eat they gotta sit." At Naidre's in Park Slope and its second location in nearby Carroll Gardens, Wi-Fi is free. But since the spring of 2008, no laptops have been allowed between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. weekdays and 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. weekends, unless the customer is eating and typing at the same time.

*Big picture nut graph*
Amid the economic downturn, there are fewer places in New York to plug in computers. As idle workers fill coffee-shop tables -- nursing a single cup, if that, and surfing the Web for hours -- and as shop owners struggle to stay in business, a decade-old love affair between coffee shops and laptop-wielding customers is fading. In some places, customers just get cold looks, but in a growing number of small coffee shops, firm restrictions on laptop use have been imposed and electric outlets have been locked. The laptop backlash may predate the recession, but the recession clearly has accelerated it.

"You don't want to discourage it, it's a wonderful tradition," says Naidre's owner Janice Pullicino, 53 years old. A former partner in a computer-graphics business, Ms. Pullicino insists she loves technology and hates to limit its use. But when she realized that people with laptops were taking up seats and driving away the more lucrative lunch crowd, she put up the sign. Last fall, she covered up some of the outlets, describing that as a "cost-cutting measure" to save electricity.

*acknowledge limitations, but still selling*
So far, this appears to be largely a New York phenomenon, though San Francisco's Coffee Bar does now put out signs when the shop is crowded asking laptop users to share tables and make space for other customers.

*note some rolling against trend*
Some coffee shops say they still welcome laptop users, if only because they make the stores look busy. For some, the growing number of laptop-carrying customers with time on their hands is reason to expand. "I had to add more outlets and higher speed" in early June, says Sebastian Simsch, 40, the co-owner of Seattle Coffee Works. Starbucks Corp. coffee houses, which in some cases charge for Wi-Fi, and bookstore chain Borders Group Inc., which always charges for Wi-Fi, don't have any plans to change their treatment of laptop customers. Neither does bookstore giant Barnes & Noble Inc., where the Wi-Fi is complimentary.

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'People are wondering, who's next?'
Pemiscot County wants answers after teen suicide 'epidemic'
Sunday, 12/10/2006
By Todd C. Frankel
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

**scene lede**

CARUTHERSVILLE, MO. -- The string of teenage suicides leads here, to a cemetery called Little Prairie. It is early afternoon. Keith Floyd, 19, climbs out of his blue Ford truck and walks to the grave of his friend JJ. The dirt is as fresh as the pain.

Jason "JJ" Tate, 18, a popular basketball and football player, committed suicide a few weeks ago. That alone shocked people here. But he is the fourth teenage boy in just five months to take his own life in rural Pemiscot County. Another teenage boy attempted suicide in that time.

"It's an eerie feeling, " Floyd says, standing in the cemetery. "People are wondering, who's next?"

**impact of trend**

Floyd knew all of the teenage victims, and none of this makes sense to him. The county coroner has lain awake at night thinking about it but remains "buffaloed and baffled." The schools have sought help from state agencies and area churches but are worried about crossing some unseen line, triggering more tragedy.

**search for answers**

To many people, the deaths of so many teenage boys appear connected - there must be a reason, after all - giving root to rumors of a suicide pact or drugs. All of the boys were born in 1988 and knew one another. Two had recently graduated from high school. One served as the pallbearer at another's funeral. The three last deaths were by hanging in a closet at home. Two of the boys left notes, but no answers.

"It's scary because we don't know what the common tie is, why this is going on, " Caruthersville High counselor Deidre Hornburg says.

Hornburg says it feels like "an epidemic." It is a word usually reserved for disease, but experts believe suicide can be contagious, with one death triggering another, especially among teenagers, leading to suicide clusters.

That doesn't happen here.


Pemiscot County is a flat place in the state's Bootheel region, 200 miles south of St. Louis. The Mississippi River hugs the county on one side. Sprawling cotton fields separate the small towns. Jobs are scarce, unless you find work at one of the few remaining factories. Teenagers spend weekend nights driving the town loop. Even that lost some of its allure after a tornado destroyed a large swath of Caruthersville in April.

**scope of trend/proof that it exists**
But until this year, suicide was rare. Pemiscot County, population 19,400, averages two such deaths a year. No one younger than 25 committed suicide here from 2001 through 2005, according to state statistics. And county coroner Jim Brimhall, who has been in the funeral business 39 years, cannot recall the last suicide by a young person, before this year.

The year has been extraordinary. Brimhall has worked seven suicides in his county: the four teen deaths, plus the deaths of a 22-year-old man and two older adults. (Also, a 23-year-old man from Pemiscot hanged himself in a nearby county. He died in October, one month after his neighbor became the third teen to commit suicide. Police believe this was a coincidence.)