zReportage.com Story Summary: zReportage.com Story of the Week #749: TUESDAY August 11, 2020: INSANE. INVISIBLE. IN DANGER. by ZUMA Press Newspaper The Tampa Bay Times photographer John Pendygraft and reporters Leonora LaPeter Anton, Anthony Cormier and Michael Braga, who together spent more than a year investigating and documenting Florida's state-run mental hospitals, exposing institutions shrouded in secrecy. Using those records, the reporters created the first comprehensive database of injuries and violent episodes at Florida's mental hospitals. Florida's state-funded mental hospitals are supposed to be safe places to care for people who are a danger to themselves or others. But years of neglect and $100 million in budget cuts have turned them into treacherous warehouses where violence is out of control and patients can't get the care they need. Since 2009, violent attacks at the state's six largest hospitals have doubled. Nearly 1,000 patients ordered to the hospitals for close supervision managed to injure themselves or someone else. This story won a Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting. Welcome to: INSANE. INVISIBLE. IN DANGER.
© Story Summary: zReportage.com Story Summary: zReportage.com Story of the Week #749: TUESDAY August 11, 2020: INSANE. INVISIBLE. IN DANGER. by ZUMA Press Newspaper The Tampa Bay Times photographer John Pendygraft and reporters Leonora LaPeter Anton, Anthony Cormier and Michael Braga, who together spent more than a year investigating and documenting Florida's state-run mental hospitals, exposing institutions shrouded in secrecy. Using those records, the reporters created the first comprehensive database of injuries and violent episodes at Florida's mental hospitals. Florida's state-funded mental hospitals are supposed to be safe places to care for people who are a danger to themselves or others. But years of neglect and $100 million in budget cuts have turned them into treacherous warehouses where violence is out of control and patients can't get the care they need. Since 2009, violent attacks at the state's six largest hospitals have doubled. Nearly 1,000 patients ordered to the hospitals for close supervision managed to injure themselves or someone else. This story won a Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting. Welcome to: INSANE. INVISIBLE. IN DANGER.

ROBERT VALDEZ (70) during a jail interview in Pasco county. Robert wrestles with late-onset mental illness, as his actions propel him into Florida's criminal justice system.
© John Pendygraft/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Wire

CHERYL VALDEZ shows reporters the next door neighbor's shed that her husband Robert Valdez burned in Trinity. Robert wrestles with late-onset mental illness, as his actions propel him into Florida's criminal justice system.
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Cheryl Valdez keeps a photo of the fire damage to the house next door taken the morning after her husband's arrest. Robert Valdez was given 55 months in prison for arson. Experts say incarcerating the mentally ill just makes them worse. And yet, Florida Department of Corrections Secretary Julie Jones estimated that 30 to 40 percent of the state's 100,000-plus inmates have a mental illness.
© John Pendygraft/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Wire

Robert Valdez's Public Defender WILLIAM PURA, explains what happened after a court hearing to the defendants wife CHERYL VALDEZ. Her husband Robert Valdez wrestles with late-onset mental illness, as his actions propel him into Florida's criminal justice system.
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Judge PAT SIRACUSA listens to testimony during Robert Valdez's sentencing in the Paso County Courthouse. The process of convicting Robert, 71 and mentally ill, had become excruciating, like a marathon with no end in sight. It had been a year since his arrest. A new judge, Siracusa, now presides over the case.
© John Pendygraft/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Wire

ROBERT VALDEZ who struggles with late-onset mental illness, prays during a court hearing in Pasco County as his public defender, WILLIAM PURA, makes his case. Robert was given 55 months in prison for arson.
© John Pendygraft/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Wire

ROBERT VALDEZ, 70, asks for a hug from his wife CHERYL VALDEZ after leaving the Pasco County jail a free man. His incarceration strained their relationship. Every year in Florida, about 200 defendants get out of mental hospitals only to wind up back there again within 12 months.
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Screen grab from Cheryl Valdez's cell phone video of a rocking chair she identifies as the chair her husband Robert Valdez took from his neighbor's home shortly before his arrest. After stealing the chair he then set the home on fire and was given a 55 month prison sentence for arson.
© Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Wire

CHERYL VALDEZ looks around the sold and packed up home she shared with Robert Valdez in Trinity. Cheryl decided to move to Tampa. 'Robert and I will never be together again,' she said.
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TONYA COOK poses recently with a police evidence photo taken the day she was attacked during her shift at Maximum security North Florida Evaluation and Treatment Center, where she worked as an orderly in 2012. 'Everybody knows when you go to work in that environment you are never 100 percent safe,' Cook says. 'There's no security in these buildings at all, there aren't a lot of people who want to work there anymore because of the way these places are run.'
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Closed circuit TV screen grab showing hospital orderly TONYA COOK being attacked by a resident of Florida Evaluation and Treatment Center. Cook was attacked during her shift at the maximum security Treatment Center in 2012.
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TONYA COOK was violently attached by a patient while working at North Florida Evaluation and Treatment Center and had her face sewn up with 30 stitches. 'Everybody knows when you go to work in that environment you are never 100 percent safe,' Cook says. 'There's no security in these buildings at all, there aren't a lot of people who want to work there anymore because of the way these places are run.'
© John Pendygraft/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Wire

Aerial view of Florida State Hospital forensic unit. When someone dies in a Florida mental hospital, staff members are required to conduct a 'mortality review' to find out what happened. If they suspect wrongdoing, the investigation is forwarded to DCF (Department of Children and Families) inspectors. These investigative files only become publicly available if DCF officials decide the death is a result of staff abuse or neglect. DCF rarely reaches that conclusion.
© Luis Santana/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Wire

LAURA MALLIA smokes her only cigarette after waking up on the street outside of the Salvation Army in Sarasota. Mallia is chronically homeless and has been arrested 65 times. She has been court ordered for nonviolent offenses three times to one of Florida's mental hospitals so that she could be deemed competent enough to face her charges. Each time, she went back to life on the streets.
© John Pendygraft/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Wire

JOHN N. BRYANT, Assistant Secretary for Substance Abuse and Mental Health at the Florida Department of Children and Families.. When reporters pointed out that The state Department of Children and Families (DCF) own numbers show a 45 percent increase in violent and other dangerous incidents since 2008, John Bryant shook his head, puzzled. 'You know we track those numbers daily, weekly, monthly,' he said. 'Im a little incredulous about it because it's something we pay attention to pretty closely.'
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LAURA MALLIA smokes her only cigarette after waking up on the street outside of the Salvation Army in Sarasota. 'Laura has had mental problems since she was a young teenager,' Mallia’s sister, Catherine Orobello, wrote in a 2013 letter to the court. 'She has been in and out of mental hospitals and has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. She is a menace to society and a danger to herself.'
© John Pendygraft/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Wire

RACHELLE MCNAIR holds the funeral program for her son, Tuarus McNair, who died at Treasure Coast Forensic Treatment Center. Her surviving sons KENDRICK MILLS, 25, (left) and KENNETH MILLS, 26 hug her. McNair feels her son's death was never explained to her. 'My child was put in a place were he was not safe. They were supposed to protect him and they did not protect him at all,' McNair says. 'The only thing I really wanted from the beginning was to know how my baby's day went. How did it go so wrong that he ended up in a casket?'
© John Pendygraft/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Wire

TAURUS MCNAIR, a 27-year-old schizophrenic, died slumped over on the floor of his room, a few hours after he was punched multiple times at Treasure Coast Forensic Treatment Center. After Tuarus McNair was beaten, a hospital worker was supposed to check on him every 30 minutes. Instead, personnel records show, the worker left Tuarus alone in his cell for an hour. Tuarus was dead when the orderly finally looked in.
© Courtesy Rachelle McNair/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Wire

RACHELLE MCNAIR weeps in front of Treasure Coast Forensic Treatment Center after being denied her son's medical records. McNair has spent 15 months trying to find out what happened to her son, Tuarus. In 2014, a patient punched him repeatedly in the head during a fight. Staff a gave him a shot of the anti-psychotic thorazine. The next time anyone checked on him, the 27-year-old was dead. An autopsy showed Tuarus's brain was swollen. He also had 10 times the normal amount of Thorazine in his system. The Medical Examiner ruled the death natural, blaming it on a rare heart malfunction that usually strikes drug abusers. As a result, DCF closed the case and sealed its documents, even to Tuarus's mother.
© John Pendygraft/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Wire

The South Florida State Hospital opened in 1957 on the grounds of a World War II military base. It was investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice in the 1970s for allegations of patient abuse and sexual misconduct. In 1998, the Florida Legislature turned management over to a private company. Over the past five years, DCF has logged about 580 'critical event' reports at its six largest mental institutions. Reportable 'events' include serious injuries and deaths, as well as other problems that arise, such as patient escapes.
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ANTHONY BARSOTTI, Jr. and LUANN BARSOTTI hold a picture of their son, Anthony Barsotti III, who died from head trauma while a resident of North Florida Evaluation and Treatment Center after an employee pushed him into a concrete wall. 'Only God knows what really happened that night. My son was brutally murdered, I felt, and nothing is going to change that,' Anthony Barsotti, Jr. said.
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C.J. MCKENZIE, 63, drives four and a half hours once a month to spend a few hours with her son Doug McKenzie, 37, who is in Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee. CJ believes that the mental hospitals don't want the public to hear from the patients they serve. 'They don't want people like Doug telling you what really happens inside those places,' she said.
© John Pendygraft/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Wire