The Work APS Does Saves Lives
An interview with Judy Karasik

Paul and Judy Karasik, the authors of The Ride Together: A Brother and Sister’s Memoir of Autism in the Family, originally sought out AAR because they wanted to reach APS workers:

Because their work is so often accomplished under conditions of confidentiality, the bravery, tenacity, and accomplishments of APS too often go unnoticed. It would be wonderful for my family if the book could be known to the larger APS community -- as a way to express our profound gratitude.

Intrigued, we said we would love to review the book, and have (see “The Ride Together: A Brother and Sister’s Memoir of Autism in the Family,” elsewhere in this issue). But because of its very spare structure and because Judy “feared that too much emphasis on the story of [David’s abuse at a residential facility in West Virginia] would draw readers’ attention away from the point of our story, which is to let readers meet and know our brother David,” the book actually says relatively little about the Karasiks’ experience with APS. AAR therefore went back to the siblings and asked for more details. Judy Karasik responded.

AAR: You said you were very grateful to APS workers and wanted to say “thanks.” Can you be more explicit about what APS did for your family? How was it so helpful to you?

Judy Karasik: It takes Adult Protective Services to get beyond the denial and uncover the truth. And they are dealing with all kinds of crazy denial. It has to be crazy because no one in their right mind could bring themselves to be abusive in the ways that APS finds people being abusive -- hitting helpless people, humiliating people who have cognitive disabilities. I did not read all the documents, but I understand that some allegations were of sexual abuse. That’s hard for me, as the sister of a resident, even to think about. To get back to the point, and to be specific, in the most violent case, the local newspaper reported that one person suffered “leg cuts, a broken shoulder and bruises on his face, chest, back, arms, and legs. An autopsy showed he died from a head injury.” That is, obviously, the result of the behavior of monsters. I think it is most important to realize that, in order to do this stuff, the abusers have to be telling themselves that the horrible thing they are doing, or are allowing to be done, is “permissible” in some way. APS systematically fights this quiet but completely horrific part of human behavior.

I think there were three kinds of denial in our situation.

Worst, there was the denial of the perpetrators. The [facility owners], in their urgent need to hire staff, had begun to cut corners. One of the documents in the courthouse reported that they had stopped doing background checks on out-of-state hires. Background checks are absolutely required when hiring people who care for vulnerable clients, and we can see why in the case of “Brook Farm” -- some of the people later found guilty had records, and were people drawn to the work at “Brook Farm” because they enjoyed having helpless people at their mercy. These individuals could deny the fact that what they were doing was cruel, abusive, and, in my opinion, evil.

Second was the denial of the [owners] themselves. Times were changing, residents were being brought home from out of state, and programs that featured integration into the community and vocational placements had gained favor, understandably, with citizens, policy people, and legislators alike. The “Zareks” believed that they provided a haven for their residents, and that providing that justified cutting corners. They took on residents with greater needs and multiple needs, they provided less training to staff (the court documents report that training was often just the occasional watching of videotapes), and they took on staff that was less qualified to begin with, and in some crucial instances, altogether the wrong kind of person. They lied to APS, they falsified the records, they lied to the families. It is my personal belief that this, too, represents a form of evil.

Finally, there is our own denial as family members. I prefer not to view this as evil, but maybe I am letting myself get off too easily. The families in these situations do not want to believe that their sons, daughters, brothers, and sisters are in danger. So many of them have absolutely no alternative but keeping the resident at home -- and especially for people David’s age, born in the 1940s or 1950s, who had no mainstreaming as they were growing up, who had no opportunity to develop the skills of independence -- that means that a family member needs to be “on duty” 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even if the family has wealth, this is hard, and if the family is middle-income, or low-income -- and many of the families are, disability is distributed evenly across the income spectrum -- it is hard for families to even imagine how they are going to make the arrangements and frightening to imagine what it will be like for them to cope with the consequences. In the court records, even after a resident died, even after it was clear that residents were being beaten and abused, families said they were satisfied with the care their family member was receiving and they preferred having him or her at Brook Farm than having the resident return home.

The families could not do what APS did. When David was being hurt, when so many others at “Brook Farm” were being hurt, some much worse than David, we believed what we were told: that David had “fallen down.” After the truth came out, I thought, I should have known. But a well-informed family friend reminded me that I didn’t know the questions to ask. She said to me, “For example, the people at ‘Brook Farm’ said that David had fallen down in a fire drill. Was a fire drill scheduled that day?” That is a question that APS would ask.

My point is that it takes Adult Protective Services to get past the denial and uncover the truth.

AAR: You said that when the APS workers came onto the Brook Farm campus, it was the first “of what would be a very long stay.” Can you be more explicit about what happened then?

Judy Karasik: APS came onto the campus, having been alerted when a resident came to the Emergency Room of the local hospital and had injuries “that were inconsistent with the diagnosis of a fall.” They asked to see the available records. I do not know what happened next -- my guess is that the resident’s injuries had not been reported in the files that legally need to be complete and available for regular inspection. So the APS professional demanded to see what else there was. And, amazingly, but I think in line with the kind of crazy denial being practiced by the people we call the Zareks, they were led to the black steel box, it was unlocked, and they were allowed to read the contents.

The black steel box is where the second set of records was kept. A former staff member, who had left “Brook Farm” years earlier, but who stayed in touch with old colleagues, has told me that it is her belief that [one owner] kept the second set of records as a kind of blackmail to the people working at “Brook Farm”. Even though this would incriminate him, as well.

As far as I remember, APS closed down the place within a few days. They contacted the states for out-of-state people, and most of those people were brought back home. My guess is that the black box made it fairly easy to identify many of the people who had done the most harm.

We found out through the state, as I recall, and pretty soon after APS arrived. I was in Italy, where I had moved two months earlier, with my new baby, and I got an e-mail from my brother Michael, who lives in Baltimore. APS did not contact us directly. They went through channels, and I think that following legal procedure is extremely important in situations like this, so I think they did exactly the right thing. I believe that APS also did the hard, long work of supervising the period when there were still residents at “Brook Farm,” and overseeing the transition to new management. This would have to be done with the residents still living there, and trying to keep life as normal as possible for the residents -- all of whom have either been abused or who have lived with abuse and have the perfectly reasonable fear that they might be next. The management of all this, I imagine, is a very delicate job, requiring persistence, patience, and an immense amount of sensitivity.

APS found chilling information in the black box, and through other investigations. Nonetheless, any accusations needed to be proved in a court of law. So I did not find many of the details of the case that were in the court documents in the records of the local newspapers. Too, in a rural area, the “Zareks” were major employers. Many people had worked there, or their family friends had worked there. In fact, many people had looked the other way. I guess that’s a fourth kind of denial, the community’s denial. And the APS people, of course, are also ordinary citizens, who live in or near the community, so they are doing their work in that context, too.

This is all why I feel so strongly about the heroism and professionalism of Adult Protective Services. They do the hard work, they ask the right questions, they look at the most painful kinds of human behavior, they record it carefully, they testify in courtrooms. And because what they uncover must be kept confidential until facts are proved in a court of law, I imagine that they rarely get recognized for the work they do to save lives, which they do as certainly as any firefighter or police officer. And when APS saves lives, the threat of death is not due to accident, but to intentional hurt. I think that must make the work more difficult, emotionally, and I am grateful to each and every APS professional who faces the facts and protects our most vulnerable clients.

AAR: You seem to view APS workers in a really heroic light.

Judy Karasik: I do. Let me give another example. One quiet comment in the testimony upset me more than anything else. The APS professional said that, “the non-verbal residents at [the facility] were especially vulnerable” to the abusers on staff. The staff was beating and abusing residents who could not talk.

Adult Protective Services speaks for those who cannot speak.

Even those who, technically, can speak, often don’t or won’t. A family friend, a lawyer, explained that as she understood abuse, it was common that people who had experienced it would not talk about it until they were absolutely sure they were safe from it. David does not speak about what happened at “Brook Farm,” and I don’t expect him to, ever. This makes the job of APS difficult; nevertheless, they persevere. They find the evidence. They put the pieces together. They report. They bring to light that which is hidden.

Finally, I think what makes me feel so powerfully about the debt that our family owes to APS is not just the fact that APS saved my brother’s life -- who knows what would have happened next? -- and the lives of others at “Brook Farm,” but that David and his fellow residents were being hurt emotionally as well as physically. I have spent my life watching people. Not everyone, but too many, treat David as though he were not entirely human, as though he were expendable in some way, as though his life was “worth less” than yours or mine -- and that’s a quick slide to “worthless.” What happened at “Brook Farm” is the nightmarish but logical extension of treating people like David as less than human. It is the sorrow-filled fear of every person who loves someone with developmental disabilities.

APS stopped those people from hurting my brother. For that, I have no words to express my thanks.