Another Death at Marysville Academy

[Deborah]

I was aware of the death of Wauketta Wallace in '89 at Marysville, a religious program, but not this one.

Sides settle Maryville suicide case
Dave Orrick
Daily Herald Staff Writers
Posted Friday, May 20, 2005

Lawyers involved in the civil lawsuit over a ward of the state who killed herself at Maryville Academy have reached an agreement to settle the case, but told a judge Friday they want to keep the details secret.

"We'd like to make sure that nothing with respect to the settlement actually gets filed," said a lawyer who appeared before Judge Michael Hogan Friday at the Daley Center in Chicago. The lawyer refused to identify herself after the hearing.

The case is a wrongful death suit on behalf of Maryville ward Victoria Petersilka, who hanged herself on Feb. 9, 2002. Petersilka's relative, Jennifer Hess, sued Maryville, the Des Plaines home for troubled youth, in 2003.

Complete secrecy is unusual for wrongful death cases in Cook County, because Rule 12.15 of the court says the plaintiff "shall file" a petition for approval of the settlement, and that the judge must decide how much lawyers in the case are paid.

When Little City, the Palatine facility for the developmentally disabled, settled a wrongful death case in July 2004, for example, the judge's order included the amount and how it was to be disbursed.

The judge Friday did not indicate if he would agree to secrecy, but he noted that none of the parties involved in the case seemed to object.

If the documents remains secret, it will remain unknown whether a Maryville lawyer will be involved in the settlement.

That lawyer, Robert C. Yelton III, was added as a defendant to the lawsuit in February 2004. Lawyers for Petersilka alleged that Yelton "aided and abetted" Maryville in its creation and cover-up of two different, conflicting reports about Petersilka's suicide.

Yelton and his attorney did not return calls.

The false report ignited a firestorm of controversy after it was discovered, and it spurred two investigations by DCFS' Office of the Inspector General. More controversy came after a University of Illinois at Chicago professor criticized the office reports as a whitewash.

State-paid monitors were brought in, and Maryville's leader, the Rev. John Smyth, promised changes. But in September 2003, as FBI subpoenas were issued to investigate possible federal health care fraud, DCFS Director Bryan Samuels declared the Des Plaines campus "not safe" and announced the state was essentially severing ties with the facility. A national agency later pulled its accreditation.

According to the suit, the original Maryville report said Petersilka had threatened to kill herself before doing so. The altered report said she had simply threatened to run away.

The difference was crucial because, had Maryville authorities known of her suicidal intentions, certain precautions, such as regular checks on Petersilka, should have been taken, the suit claims.

In later investigations, Maryville maintained that the alteration was not an attempt to cover up the fact that it was aware of Petersilka's suicidal intentions, but that the original report had been false, and that the Maryville program manager John Siers had lied about the suicide on the first report only to justify a restrictive physical hold that was placed on Petersilka that day.

The UIC professor, Ronald Davidson, accused the Office of the Inspector General in an Oct. 27, 2002, letter to then-DCFS Director Jess McDonald of glossing over Maryville's actions.

His letter notes that DCFS regulations clearly say agencies must report any instance of falsified documents rather than just turn over what they believe to be the true report - regardless of what a lawyer advised. The letter implies this was known to Maryville. In fact, the CFS-119 form that Maryville submitted to DCFS on the incident has a check box for falsified documents.

"Getting bad legal advice does not absolve an agency from having to abide by the same commonsense ethical behaviors that all other DCFS providers in Illinois are expected to follow," Davidson's letter said.

The firm that DCFS consulted at the time, Yelton & Kehl, does not list child welfare law as one of its specialties on its Web site. In court filings, it vigorously denied doing anything wrong.

However, a judge approved taking a deposition of Yelton and Maryville's Fr. David Ryan, ostensibly to discover just what advice Yelton gave Ryan about the falsified report.

DCFS and Maryville would not comment Friday on the secrecy provisions of the settlement.

[Cayo Hueso]

Complete secrecy is unusual for wrongful death cases in Cook County, because Rule 12.15 of the court says the plaintiff "shall file" a petition for approval of the settlement, and that the judge must decide how much lawyers in the case are paid

OMG, these people are so fucked up.  

In later investigations, Maryville maintained that the alteration was not an attempt to cover up the fact that it was aware of Petersilka's suicidal intentions, but that the original report had been false, and that the Maryville program manager John Siers had lied about the suicide on the first report only to justify a restrictive physical hold that was placed on Petersilka that day.

Oh!!  Well THAT explains everything!! :roll:  :roll: THAT makes it OK....they just lied cause they needed an excuse to "restrain" her. :roll:  How do these people sleep at night?

Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.
--Rep. Robert L. Henry, TX December 22, 1914 (quoting Lincoln)

[Anonymous]

Do you have any idea whatsoever what you are talking about?  Because a troubled youth chose to hang herself.. Maryville Academy and all the people who get paid next to nothing to do a job nobody, not even the parents or relatives want to do.. are to blame??  Guess what.. the way the rules were written.. they couldn't even stop someone from killing themselves or others even if they wanted to.

Give me a break.  It is, I mean was.. a place for kids who nobody else wanted or could
"handle" to go to get care and education.  On any given day there are 2-3 staff for 8-12 kids.. tell me, is this enough staff to give the 1 to 1 attention they all really deserve??  If somebody has their mind set on killing themselves.. nothing short of locking them up in a hospital is going to stop them.

To blame the people that were actually trying to make a difference in kids lives for such a thing is, as you say, fucked up.

So instead, let's close down Maryville and send all the kids who already have been shipped around to about 10 different foster homes, right back to where they came from.. yeah, that makes sense.

Blame the law makers, the beauracracy of it all.. don't blame the only people who really cared about these kids.

[Anonymous]

Do you have any idea whatsoever what you are talking about?  Because a troubled youth chose to hang herself..

Wait a minute... so, what you're saying is that because a troubled teen did that, it doesn't really matter, you know, kids like that do these things all the time?  :roll: Man, you are sick.

Maryville Academy and all the people who get paid next to nothing to do a job nobody, not even the parents or relatives want to do.. are to blame??  

Yes, they are to blame. This child was entrusted to their care. It is their responsibility to look after these children, to help them, suport them, and stop them from hurting themselves. That's what treatment centers are supposed to do.

Guess what.. the way the rules were written.. they couldn't even stop someone from killing themselves or others even if they wanted to.

Even if they wanted to.... a freudian slip, there?

Give me a break.  It is, I mean was.. a place for kids who nobody else wanted or could
"handle" to go to get care and education.

So, because these are kids that "nobody waznted to handle", their lives are not as worthy as those of other human beings?  You said it yourself-- she was there to be cared for. Maryville was supposed to do that. They didn't. They are to blame.

On any given day there are 2-3 staff for 8-12 kids.. tell me, is this enough staff to give the 1 to 1 attention they all really deserve??  If somebody has their mind set on killing themselves.. nothing short of locking them up in a hospital is going to stop them.

So, according to your logic, there's no point in trying to help someone who's suicidal, because they're all just going to do it anyway.  :roll:

So instead, let's close down Maryville and send all the kids who already have been shipped around to about 10 different foster homes, right back to where they came from.. yeah, that makes sense.

It makes perfect sense. Maryville has proven itself to be neglectful and unsafe for children. Why would anyone want to keep children in a place like that?

A girl died in their care. It's their responsibility to make sure things like that don't happen. They cared more about covering their own asses by lying, than about looking after the children in their care. It's their fault, and they're to blame.

[Anonymous]

On 2005-06-14 22:15:00, Anonymous wrote:

"Do you have any idea whatsoever what you are talking about?  Because a troubled youth chose to hang herself.. Maryville Academy and all the people who get paid next to nothing to do a job nobody, not even the parents or relatives want to do.. are to blame??  Guess what.. the way the rules were written.. they couldn't even stop someone from killing themselves or others even if they wanted to.



Give me a break.  It is, I mean was.. a place for kids who nobody else wanted or could

"handle" to go to get care and education.  On any given day there are 2-3 staff for 8-12 kids.. tell me, is this enough staff to give the 1 to 1 attention they all really deserve??  If somebody has their mind set on killing themselves.. nothing short of locking them up in a hospital is going to stop them.



To blame the people that were actually trying to make a difference in kids lives for such a thing is, as you say, fucked up.



So instead, let's close down Maryville and send all the kids who already have been shipped around to about 10 different foster homes, right back to where they came from.. yeah, that makes sense.



Blame the law makers, the beauracracy of it all.. don't blame the only people who really cared about these kids."

Oh, Bullshit.

I'd believe they couldn't have kept her from suiciding if she'd done it by biting off her tongue.

Hanging herself is preventable.

In all likelihood, if they had prevented her from having anything with which to hang herself, and anything to tie it to, they would have been able to get her through *that* suicidal period and possibly help her.  That is, they would have been able to help her if they'd been offering proper treatment.  Whether they were or not, I have no data and no opinion.

A falsified report to justify an illegal restraint, *or* a falsified report to hide her previous expression of suicidal intentions---either way, that doesn't look good.

They didn't prevent it, the lawsuit is a fair cop.

If they hadn't falsified the report, if they had reported the falsified report as soon as they had discovered it, if they had been able to log exactly what all the staff were doing, and that they couldn't call other staff in, and that the manager had repeatedly asked for supplementary staff---if they had followed all the procedures, so that there wasn't anything they could have done differently---then they would have been fine.

This girl should have been in a warm, clean room with a mattress on the floor and no blankets, sheets, or shoe-laces, and nothing elevated to tie anything to.

When you're asked to work at or run an unsafe institution and look the other way, you don't look the other way and rationalize that you're at least doing *some* good---you run it safely, even if you go over budget, and just let them fire you. Or you resign in protest, filing your grievances publicly, and going on to the next job.

The way unsafe facilities stay open and *don't* get fixed is that eventually somebody takes the money and shuts up and runs it unsafely---rationalizing that they're "at least doing some good"

What they're really doing is by their presence and complicit silence, preventing the system from being *forced* to change.

The harder it is to find someone willing to run an unsafe facility, the more legislatures pony up the funding and the staffing levels to safe levels.

It's just like national politics and the military---you don't get any brownie points from the service community for getting soldiers killed in job lots following incompetent orders.  The right thing to do is to resign your commission in protest.  When officers start resigning their commissions in protest rather than pass on bad orders, the history is that the President and SecDef usually figure out they're giving terrible orders and improve them.

Just like when it gets real hard to find someone who will stay on the job running a bad facility instead of simply going as much over budget as necessary to run it safely and *making* the state fire them, or resigning in protest when the state reprimands them, the state tends to pony up the resources.

With private facilities contracting to do services for the state, when you refuse to under-bid the job---when *everyone* refuses to under-bid the job---the state has to pay enough for it to be done right.  The more obviously shady operators it has to go to to get a bid as low as it wants, the more the legislators get uneasy about the politics of the thing and the more money they pony up to do it right.

I've been a bureaucrat.  I know.

When you "go along to get along" you get Vietnam.

Your argument is made of the weak excuses people make to themselves in the middle of the night to let themselves get to sleep in spite of what they've done, or looked the other way over.  It doesn't hold water.

Get over yourself.

Timoclea

[Anonymous]

Bad people can almost never do really horrible things on an institutional scale without the permission and cooperation of semi-respectable people.

Bad people try to get semi-respectable people on board by getting them to rationalize that "at least they can do *some* good" by "working within the system."

I'm including the recklessly negligent milquetoast legislators in "bad people."  They do horrible things and then rationalize them with, "We didn't know."  Plausible deniability.

They point to the semi-respectable people, who rationalized, as the villains whenever it finally blows up in all their faces.  They say, "He looked like such an upstanding guy.  How could I possibly have known he'd do *this*?!"

When the semi-respectable people refuse to get suckered into the rationalization of, "At least I can do *some* good;"  when the semi-respectable people know where to draw the line---then the people who set the funding lose their moral "cover"--because they have to go to *blatantly* shady operators to get their dirty work done.

And when that happens, they pony up just enough funding that they can get *someone* semi-respectable on board.

The semi-respectable people *control* the degree of funding, or the degree of negligence, by either lending their respectability to the endeavor or withholding it by withholding their participation.

How easy would it be for pedophile Catholic priests to get access to their prey as *defrocked* former Catholic priests?  Not easy at all.  The respectability of the Catholic church *causes* pedophilia by giving the pedophiles moral cover.

In the very same way that semi-respectable people agreeing to run or work for an underfunded institution give *it* moral cover.

They say they're not to blame for the bad things happening because *they* aren't withholding the funding and *they* don't control the funding.

They're lying to themselves.  They are, and they do.

It's their willingness to participate and look the other way that allows the system to function negligently rather than improving.

I've got no sympathy for them.  

They're *not* "trying to help."  They want a certain kind of job and they're rationalizing to themselves and lying to themselves and *telling* themselves they're trying to help.

Only by withholding their consent and imprimatur of respectability from the endeavor *until and unless* sufficient funds and staffing levels were provided would they *actually* help.

They're a critical component of the problem.

Remove them from the machine and it grinds to a halt, until the funding *has* to increase to keep the legislators from getting voted out.

Which usually *does* get some legislators voted out and results in a better government---because their lending of their respectability and their silent consent allows the *voters* to lie to themselves, too.

It's a dysfunctional conspiracy of silence, and the "professionals" running and staffing the negligent facilities are the ones who could *most* easily stop it just by walking away.

"If I walk away, they'll just hire someone worse"---that's right.  And they'll lose a certain amount of their plausible deniability when tney do, which is the only thing that can put real pressure on the system to change.

Timoclea

[Deborah]

Troubled kids going back to main Maryville campus
DES PLAINES | First since state cut off besieged facility in '04

June 28, 2007
BY CHRIS FUSCO Staff Reporter/[email protected]
Today, for the first time in three years, the state is sending troubled youths back to Maryville Academy's main campus.
"We're trying to move forward," Maryville Associate Executive Director Cheryl Heyden said of the arrival of 18 special-needs boys, most of them teens. "To have more life on the campus will be great."

Maryville, a not-for-profit affiliated with the Archdiocese of Chicago, hasn't housed wards on that campus since June 15, 2004 -- a shutdown sparked by widespread violence, sexual activity and youths running away.

Also, Maryville last year agreed to pay the state nearly $4 million to reconcile overbillings that happened under the watch of its former executive director, the Rev. John P. Smyth. Smyth had built Maryville into a well-known organization, and the state's decision to scale back its relationship with Maryville prompted an outcry from politicians and celebrities close to him.

Maryville is now under the direction of a new chief, Sister Catherine Ryan. The youths moving to its Des Plaines campus today are coming from another Maryville facility so they can have better access to vocational training and other services.

"We feel [the move] will better serve the children and youths," said Kendall Marlowe, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.

[Anonymous]

YET ANOTHER GREAT STORY.

[Anonymous]

Death by suicide in any residential facility is criminal negligence IMO and the staff who allowed this to happen on their watch should be charged as such.

 :flame:  :flame:  :flame: