Are you ready to rumble?
Posted on 03/10/2009 10:37:46 AM PDT by AH_LiveRight
AUSTIN – Profoundly disabled residents at the Corpus Christi State School have been forced into "fight club"-style battles by the employees hired to care for them, police alleged Tuesday.
Corpus Christi Police Capt. Tim Wilson said vivid video footage captured on cellphone cameras shows staffers goading young male state school residents into physical altercations, then shoving them at each other to ensure that fights ensued.
The brawls are captured on repeated videos filmed during 2007 and 2008 – with one that appears to have been taken last month. Wilson said they show “staged events” where mentally and physically disabled residents push, kick and punch each other, then have their arms raised in victory when they “win.”
Eleven current or former state school employees were identified in the videos, state officials said. "Workers were staging fight clubs with the residents for their own entertainment. It's child abuse -- some of the worst I've seen in over 30 years," Wilson said. “I’ve heard of isolated incidents before, but what’s most appalling is that it’s obvious this is organized.”
The news comes while lawmakers are debating how to reform the embattled state schools for the disabled, which came under fire by the U.S. Department of Justice late last year for systemic abuse and widespread civil rights violations.
On Monday, the Texas Senate unanimously approved a bill to protect state school residents from mistreatment – a measure deemed an emergency by Gov. Rick Perry. The Corpus Christi allegations are “disgraceful, unacceptable,” said Rep. Patrick Rose, D-Dripping Springs, who, in addition to filing the House state school safety bill, has authored legislation to close some of the state schools in favor of community living.
(Excerpt) Read more at dallasnews.com ...
The TYC (Texas Youth Commission) and HHS both have had rampant and widespread abuse. Patients (citizens) sold into sexual slavery, beaten, assaulted, robbed, raped, sodomized and more. All with taxpayer money, and no civil recourse. Government employees seizing mentally ill and handicapped children, and using them for "fun" and profit. Protected by Federal statute. And Texas is the rule, not the exception.
I agree 100 percent - I cannot understand this world any longer. Thank you for your comment regarding service (My service was with the Air Force in the mid 70’s, early 80’s - my son is presently in the Army).
I think that the Texas Rangers also investigated some juvenile prisons that had officers raping/seducing the boys there (around 3 or 4 years ago).
Don’t forget about how partisans within different government “regulatory” agencies abused their access to private information when it came time to dig up dirt on Joe The Plumber for the media.
There is absolutely no good case that can be made to give more power to our government. They have not shown enough responsibility or recourse.
Are you ready to rumble?
When they are in “community living”, the DNC can send out knock and drag vans to the “community” to take them to the polls to vote for Democrats. If they were in a State hospital, it’d be harder to get passes for all of them and more oversight to see that they aren’t being “instructed” who to vote for.
And yet the media focused much attention on the “horrors” of Gitmo. There is much worse going on in our own prisons and even hospitals (as is the case here).
Hubby served from 83-86 army. Give your son our best wishes and thank him as well.
I have always been a sucker for a man in uniform........cause I know they have my back :)
The first rule of fight club....
If we’d had a decade of vouchers, reality TV couldn’t exist.
And the solution is...
Add another layer of bureaucracy.
I will pass along your thanks to my son. In my family we believe it is our duty to serve. This goes back to before the Revolutionary War.
Do you have numbers to go with those accusations? They sound very much like the accusations that appeared in the papers before closing the state mental hospitals. After they were closed the actual numbers were published and they were different than the word “widespread” would suggest.
Texas sounds like it’s trying a better remedy than outright closing the institutions. The problem lay with some of the people being hired.
That’s exactly what happens in PA. The van for a group home will roll up to the polls. People have reported seeing the patients with cards instructing them who to vote for.
CROCKETT, TX — The Texas Civil Rights Project condemned the Texas Youth Commission’s decision to hire Brent Rumbo to run TYC’s troubled Crockett State School facility. In August, Rumbo was forced to resign as the principal of Navasota High School. According to local news reports from the Bryan/College Station area, Rumbo discriminated against minority students, threatened children with an axe, and was stopped by police with a prostitute leaving a drug house.
http://www.texascivilrightsproject.org/?p=168
” Albert Moskowitz, the Chief of the Criminal Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, sent a letter dated September 27, 2005, to the Superintendent of the Texas Youth Commission’s West Texas State School youth detention facility declining the prosecution of two of the Texas agency’s employees — Ray Brookins and John Hernandez — for engaging in sexual molestation of 10 underage males incarcerated at the facility. The charges of molestation were originally brought by Texas Ranger Brian J. Burzynski. Earlier, in a July 28, 2005 letter, the Assistant US Attorney for West Texas, Bill Baumann, who works for US Attorney Johnny Sutton, a close friend of Gonzales, sent a letter to Burzynski declining federal prosecution in the pedophile case. In a decision that indicates that the Gonzales Justice Department defines child molestation in very narrow and high threshold terms, Baumann wrote that the young men at the West Texas facility that claimed they were raped by Brookins and Hernandez did not sustain “bodily injury” or “bodily pain.” Baumann also defined aggravated sexual assault as resulting from a “perpetrator knowingly causing his victim to engage in a sexual act (which can include contact between the mouth and penis) by force against the victim or by threatening or placing the victim in fear that the victim (or any other person) will be subjected to death, serious bodily injury or kidnapping). Baumann stated, “I do not believe that sufficient evidence exists to support a charge that either Brookins or Hernandez used force to cause victims to engage in a sexual act.”
http://digg.com/politics/The_Child_Prostitution_Ring_that_Reached_Bush_Whitehouse
“There are some men in this world,” Harper Lee wrote in To Kill a Mockingbird, “who were born to do our unpleasant jobs for us.” And there are some who were not. Among this latter group is Randy Reynolds, who for the past dozen years has held the unpleasant job of district attorney for the hardscrabble 143rd Judicial District, which covers the rural West Texas counties of Ward, Reeves, and Loving. During Reynolds’s tenure, peace officers in the 143rd have brought hundreds of cases of drug trafficking, theft, assault, robbery, and sundry other felonies to the district attorney’s office for prosecution, and Reynolds, exercising his discretion as the people’s representative, has declined to prosecute the vast majority of them.”
http://www.texasmonthly.com/2008-10-01/feature3.php
The common thread seems to be a Democrat Sherriff, Prosecutor, and Judges.
Ping!
If you want on, or off this S. Texas/Mexico ping list, please FReepMail me.
Hey, what’s wrong about that? Only thing better would be to give each one a claw-hammer and tell em the one that survives will be set free, then shot that SOB.
It’s people like you that give FReepers a bad name.
BTW...that picture in this thread made me laugh so hard I spit tea all over my keyboard.
; ^ )
I am a hard-hearted, non-politically-correct kind of guy. I have no time for the moans and whimpers of animal rights activists, humorless womyn’s studies majors, race-baiting poverty pimps, or any other special pleaders.
But this is one of the most inhuman things I’ve ever heard of.
Those are certainly sad stories that cover more than one state, different agencies and various kinds of corruption. I hope Texas doesn’t throw the baby out with the bath water in it’s attempt to clean things up.
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