9 deaths, no charges raise questions about oversight agency

MINEOLA, N.Y. -- Little more than names and incident numbers appear on a Long Island medical examiner's list of nine developmentally disabled people who died in state care since 2013, but this much is known for sure: All the deaths came under a cloud of abuse or neglect allegations, and none resulted in criminal charges.

The one-page list titled "Abuse and Neglect with Death Involved" surfaced as part of a Freedom of Information request by an advocate who called it the latest example of how New York's oversight agency for the disabled in state care, the Justice Center, is not doing enough to pursue suspicious cases.

Questioned about the handling of the deaths, all in Long Island's Suffolk County, state and local officials responded with conflicting accounts.

The Justice Center said it told county prosecutors about the cases, in accordance with state law, but prosecutors said that's not true. The medical examiner's office said it referred two cases to police for further investigation. After police denied for days they got them, they acknowledged this week they did.

"It screams for a federal civil-rights and criminal investigation," said Michael Carey, who became an advocate for the disabled after his son was suffocated in 2007 by a state group-home worker who later was convicted of manslaughter.

Carey has become a frequent critic of the Justice Center, established in 2013 to protect the 1 million disabled, addicted and mentally ill in state care.

Its mandate is to probe all allegations of wrongdoing by caretakers, with the power to refer cases to local prosecutors or bring criminal charges itself.

But an Associated Press analysis last year found it rarely uses that power, with just 2.5 percent of the more than 7,000 substantiated cases of abuse or neglect resulting in criminal charges.

Records released earlier this year showed the Justice Center declined to investigate most of the nearly 1,400 deaths of developmentally disabled people in state care in the past two years.

Seeking to find out how often the Justice Center refers deaths in state care to local officials for criminal investigation, Carey filed a sweeping public-records request of every county prosecutor and medical examiner in New York.

Suffolk County was the only one of 62 counties to offer up -- by name -- the suspicious deaths it received from the Justice Center over the past three years. Three other counties gave just numbers, a total of 15 such deaths. The list from Suffolk's medical examiner's office contained no details, and the Justice Center refused to elaborate about individual cases.

One of those families plans to use those documents to sue the group home where a developmentally disabled woman lived before dying last year.

Carolyn Jirak, 62, spent nearly her entire life in state-funded care, classified as nonverbal with the intellectual capacity of a young child.

Her sister Catherine Jirak Monetti contends Jirak's death followed weeks of mistreatment, including an unexplained broken kneecap that was untreated for days, an ankle wound that became infected with cellulitis and prescribed antibiotics that weren't given for three days. Jirak eventually was taken to a hospital with pneumonia and fever and died 10 days later of respiratory failure.