Date: 2002-10-23
Death at Mason County program not the first for company that runs it By Jonathan Osborne
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, October 23, 2002
Moments before a 17-year-old died in their care last week, employees at a Mason County wilderness program held the youth in a restraint outlawed a year ago because of its lethal potential, officials at the camp said Tuesday.
Charles Chase Moody is at least the fifth youth to die in Texas since 1988 after being restrained in a facility or program run by the Brown Schools. Officials for the Nashville-based company acknowledged the deaths and the fact that Moody had been placed facedown in a prone position.
"Our staff was not trying to take this man into a prone position, but they ended up falling to the ground in the course of things," said Diane Huggins, a Brown Schools spokeswoman. The company offers youth behavioral treatment services at 21 facilities nationwide, seven of which are in Texas, including the San Marcos Treatment Center and the Oaks Treatment Center in Austin.
"When they went to the ground, they did fall forward," Huggins said of the three staff members who restrained Moody. "This young man was a pretty big fellow: He's 6'1" and weighed 180 pounds. From our own looking into things and knowing how our staff responded, we know that they did the best job that they could to respond appropriately."
Moody, who investigators say was having difficulty breathing when sheriff's deputies arrived at the camp, died before paramedics arrived.
Authorities have not released an autopsy or commented on the cause of death, pending a toxicology report.
However, Moody's father said investigators told him that his son died from asphyxiation.
"He vomited and nobody even knew it," said Charles Moody, a Dallas defense lawyer who once represented the Brown Schools in a case involving a restraint-related death. "I cannot imagine how somebody could vomit and be unconscious and nobody knew it until the sheriff arrived. That doesn't happen. There are many, many unanswered questions."
Moody, who is divorced, said he did not know that his son, who was taking medication for anger issues and had been in a treatment facility before for drug and anger problems, had been sent to the On Track wilderness program in Mason.
The Mason County sheriff's office, the Texas Rangers and the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services, which oversees such programs, are still investigating. Huggins said the staff members involved in the incident, whom she would not identify, have been placed on administrative leave with pay.
The state's rules on use of restraints on youth, dated August 2001, do not allow staff members to place a patient facedown and apply pressure to his back, the so-called prone restraint. Other forbidden restraints include any that keep the staff member from seeing the youth's face, restrict the person's ability to communicate or impair the ability to breathe.
Officials at the Department of Protective and Regulatory Services said they don't know how many people have died in the facilities they oversee, in part because their electronic database goes back to only 1998.
The Brown Schools is the oldest and largest youth behavioral program in the state, Huggins said, and each year treats thousands of troubled children and adults in its Texas facilities.
The other four Texas deaths associated with restraints at Brown Schools programs occurred not in the wilderness program but at facilities where "young people with more serious behavioral and psychological issues are treated," Huggins said.
The first death occurred in 1988 at South Austin's Healthcare Rehabilitation Center, which has since been renamed. An 18-year-old, Brandon Hadden of East Texas, died after being restrained in a straitjacket and held facedown on a bed, according to Michael Slack of Austin, who represented Hadden's mother.
"He started to vomit in their presence . . . and choked to death with two staff members continuing to hold him down," Slack said.
Charles Moody, who was the defense lawyer for the Brown Schools in that case, settled it during trial in 1997 for an undisclosed amount.
"I don't know exactly what I can tell you based on attorney-client privilege," Moody said. "But there wouldn't have been a settlement unless there was some question of liability."
In 1990, 17-year-old Diane Harris died in the Brown Schools' Seguin Community Treatment Center after five staff members placed her into a "basket hold," in which a person's arms are crossed in front of the chest. The center has since closed.
A grand jury did not issue any indictments, but it blasted the center in a report for "the inadequate training of the staff administering the hold."
"We have taken the unusual step of developing an official record . . . into the bizarre way (Harris died) so that this tragedy will not have to be repeated," the report said. "Even though the hold was not authorized under the center's own policies, apparently it was routinely used with the knowledge and consent of the center's management."
Slack's firm, Slack & Davis LLP, also represented the family of 16-year-old Roshelle Clayborne, who died in 1997 at the Brown Schools' Laurel Ridge facility in San Antonio. According to a state report, Clayborne died of an irregular heartbeat after a violent struggle with hospital staff, during which they put her in a restraint.
During the altercation, Clayborne said she couldn't breathe, according to the report, which was obtained through the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, an international watchdog group that focuses in part on institutional health care.
The treatment center was placed on probation for a year in 1997. The lawsuit was settled out of court in 1999 for an undisclosed amount.
A year later, 9-year-old Randy Steele died of suffocation at the same facility after a violent outburst. Two hospital workers held the boy down, during which he vomited and began having trouble breathing, state officials said at the time. He later died.
What happened to Chase Moody is less clear.
According to Brown Schools officials, the Richardson teenager and two other boys became aggressive toward staff members about 8:30 p.m. Oct. 14. Moody was the only one placed in the restraint hold.
Huggins said every employee receives training in proper crisis prevention techniques, and in this case the fall to the ground was unavoidable.
"When situations like this happen, it is very devastating," Huggins said. "The young people we serve come to us with emotional, behavioral and psychological problems. We do everything that we can to keep them safe, and these are some unfortunate cases."
But critics such as Jerry Boswell, president of the Austin chapter of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, say these cases are occurring too frequently.
"The more you look at a situation like this, the more incensed you get," Boswell said. "How many children have to die . . . before you lose a license in this state?"
And Slack, whose firm reviews "hundreds" of cases involving care facilities each year, said more such cases are inevitable unless lawmakers address the issue.
"We're talking about very fundamental errors in judgment that were committed," Slack said.
But caring for troubled youth with such problems is an evolving process, Huggins said.
"It behooves all of us in our industry to continue to look at safer ways to handle patients," she said. "Obviously we need to continue to re-examine the way that we're handling situations and try to find safer ways to deal with them."
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