Mentally Disabled

On Feb. 4, someone identifying himself as an employee of the ARC of Baltimore showed up at a Pikesville group home to pick up Lemuel Wallace, a legally blind and mentally disabled 37-year-old. Hours later, Wallace was found in a bathroom stall at Gwynns Falls Park, fatally shot multiple times in the head. Yesterday, city homicide detectives visited Wallace's neighborhood in Pikesville, going door-to-door and visiting a local convenience store in an attempt to stimulate tips in a case that has generated few answers.

The movie was over, but Robert Ethan Saylor refused to leave the theater. Soon after the developmentally disabled Frederick man was handcuffed by three off-duty sheriff's deputies, he was dead. The unexplained death last month of Saylor, 26, who had Down syndrome, has thrust the Frederick County sheriff's office into the national spotlight, opening a debate over police treatment of people with mental disabilities. "With proper training, these officers would have realized there was a better way to work with Robert," said Kate Fialkowski, executive director of the Arc of Maryland, an advocacy group for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

A mental-health advocacy group filed a federal lawsuit yesterday against Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Maryland seeking broader health benefits for mentally disabled people.On Our Own Inc. of Baltimore is asking U.S. District Court here to rule that the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 requires insurers to provide the same level of coverage for mental health conditions that they provide for other health problems.David F. Chavkin, a lawyer representing the organization, said the lawsuit is among the first in the country to challenge a long-standing practice by insurance companies of providing less coverage for mental health services than for other types of medical care.

An Odenton man who tricked a mentally disabled Glen Burnie postal worker into giving him more than $250,000 over the course of three years pleaded guilty Wednesday to exploiting a vulnerable adult, according to Anne Arundel County prosecutors. Eugene Allen Hinson, Jr., 59, of the 1300 block of Tab St. in Odenton was sentenced by Anne Arundel County Circuit Judge Paul Hackner to serve 18 months of a 10-year prison term, prosecutors said in a news release. Hackner also required Hinson to pay full restitution to Thomas "Tommy" Newberger, 50, who is mentally retarded and has worked various jobs at the U.S. Post Office in Glen Burnie for about 30 years, prosecutors said.

A former employee at the ARC of Howard County is suing that organization, claiming superiors ignored her attempts to expose theft of funds and then fired her.Last year, state officials scrutinized ARC after a program coordinator pleaded guilty to stealing more than $19,000 from four mentally disabled people, and a string of thefts from clients were committed by employees and employees' relatives and friends.ARC is the largest nonprofit source of services for the mentally disabled in Howard County, among them a residential care program.

Mary T. Dugan, who worked diligently to improve the lives of the mentally disabled through her work with the Arc of Maryland, died Monday of lung cancer at her Severna Park home. She was 70. Mary Teresa Murray was born in Huntington, N.Y. and raised in Ozone Park., N.Y. After graduating in 1955 from Dominican Commercial High School in Jamaica, N.Y., she did office work for Union Carbide Corp. in New York City. While working at Union Carbide, she met Thomas G. Dugan, who she married in 1961.

A mentally disabled patient at Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center in Jessup who was repeatedly placed in restraints - once for more than 300 hours straight - is suing state mental health officials and caregivers, alleging that they failed to treat the underlying causes of his disorder and instead resorted to illegally confining him for long periods of time. Robert Brandt, 31, who has been at Perkins since he was accused of setting his roommate's bed on fire - while the roommate was in it - at Spring Grove Hospital Center seven years ago, names 41 defendants, including the state of Maryland, the hospital, staff members as well as the current and former secretaries of the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, in his lawsuit.

A two-story house owned by First Evangelical Lutheran Church in Odenton will be part of a program to bring mentally disabled young people from out-of-state institutions back to their families and community.By November, three 18-year-olds will be living in the house and attending either public or private schools for special education. They will have a live-in supervisor and six other full-time staff members working with them.Turning the house on Beverly Avenue into a local resource is what the congregation had in mind when it bought the building about eight years ago, said the Rev. Robert L. Hinz, pastor.

Mary Ellen Bender can't tell you how many years she's been at her job in a workshop for the mentally disabled, or the amount of her last paycheck.But the 30-year-old shouts when she is asked whether she enjoys sliding refrigerator warranties through a machine that seals them with plastic."

Wielding a high-powered car vacuum with the dexterity of a seasoned pro, 33-year-old Bridget Fitzhenry was adjusting to her first day at the Great American Car Wash with ease.Ms. Fitzhenry could hardly contain her enthusiasm for the work. As soon as a car entered the lot off Ritchie Highway, she'd flag it down, motioning toward her bay."It's great," she said of her new job vacuuming car mats, floors and upholstery.The car wash opened Friday, but Ms. Fitzhenry was among a group of 11 new employees, each of them mentally disabled, being taught the ropes during a five-hour training session Thursday.

A Baltimore jury found brothers James and Kareem Clea not guilty Wednesday in a murder-for hire scheme arranged by a Baltimore pastor, who was convicted last year in the plot to kill a mentally challenged man for $1.4 million in life insurance funds. The pastor had implicated the brothers as accomplices. "It's the only verdict they could get; [prosecutors] didn't prove [their case]," Lawrence Rosenberg, a defense attorney for James Clea, said after the ruling. His client's knees buckled as the first "not guilty" was read into the court record, while Kareem Clea, who has been in custody since his arrest in October, let out a whoop.

It seemed at first to be a genuine friendship between the Odenton man who ran a Glen Burnie hobby shop and a mentally disabled man who unloads trucks at a post office. But Anne Arundel County prosecutors have accused the older man of stealing more than $237,000 from the younger, vulnerable one, including convincing him to repeatedly refinance his tiny house so that the mortgage ballooned from $13,000 to $220,000. Anne Arundel County prosecutors said Thursday that Eugene Allen Hinson Jr., 57, was arrested in Front Royal, Va., where he now lives, after he was charged in a 14-count criminal information with defrauding Thomas Newberger, 48, of Glen Burnie, out of thousands of dollars.

A year and a half after Baltimore police uncovered a murder-for-hire scheme in which they say two men conspired to kill a blind and mentally disabled man for insurance money, detectives believe they have found the man who pulled the trigger. On Thursday, police charged Kareem Clea, the 27-year-old brother of one of the men awaiting trial in the plot to obtain life insurance money. Police say James Clea introduced his brother to Kevin Pushia, who authorities say paid $50,000 for the killing of Lemuel Wallace.

On Feb. 4, someone identifying himself as an employee of the ARC of Baltimore showed up at a Pikesville group home to pick up Lemuel Wallace, a legally blind and mentally disabled 37-year-old. Hours later, Wallace was found in a bathroom stall at Gwynns Falls Park, fatally shot multiple times in the head. Yesterday, city homicide detectives visited Wallace's neighborhood in Pikesville, going door-to-door and visiting a local convenience store in an attempt to stimulate tips in a case that has generated few answers.

Mary T. Dugan, who worked diligently to improve the lives of the mentally disabled through her work with the Arc of Maryland, died Monday of lung cancer at her Severna Park home. She was 70. Mary Teresa Murray was born in Huntington, N.Y. and raised in Ozone Park., N.Y. After graduating in 1955 from Dominican Commercial High School in Jamaica, N.Y., she did office work for Union Carbide Corp. in New York City. While working at Union Carbide, she met Thomas G. Dugan, who she married in 1961.

Josephine Grabowski did not expect, at age 86, to be pulling herself precariously out of her wheelchair to change her son's soiled bedsheets. In fact, she did not expect her son Frankie, now 48, to be alive at all. When her son was born, Grabowski's doctor informed her that "Mongoloid" children like hers did not live past their teens. But as medicine advanced and home care improved, thousands of developmentally disabled baby boomers like Frankie Grabowski are outliving their elderly parents for the first time.

Viona Williams doesn't like to complain. It's just that things can go wrong. She has problems with her colon. Her thyroid acts up. Arthritis grips her arms and legs.But her biggest worry is her boy. At 42, Tyrone has the impish, open smile of a youngster. He has the loping gait of an adolescent, the life experiences of a middle-aged man and, when frustrated, the emotional responses of a young child."I am over 60, and I worry about him being out in the streets," said Mrs. Williams, a retired desk supervisor at the Enoch Pratt Library.

WASHINGTON -- Faced with a historic demand to release mentally disabled patients from state hospitals, Supreme Court justices expressed worry yesterday that those hospitals could be emptied even of patients who need treatment there.A major case from Georgia drew pleas from the disability rights movement for the court to end the longtime segregation of mentally disabled people in hospitals. The case tests whether federal law gives the mentally disabled the right to be integrated with nondisabled people in community centers or homes.

From the start, social workers were concerned for Seth. They were present in the emergency room when he was born and visited his mentally disabled parents' Abingdon apartment in the days after he went home to make sure he was receiving proper care. But after that, alleges the boy's maternal grandfather, Jesse Stacey, a retired Aberdeen police officer, the social workers didn't do enough. He complained to them that his daughter, Giovanna Mosley, and her husband, Richard, who was left with brain damage from a car accident, weren't properly caring for his grandson.

Dr. Donald F. Klein, a retired pediatrician and medical school professor who was an advocate for the mentally disabled, died of a blood disorder Thursday at Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care. The longtime Stevenson resident was 79. Born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Dr. Klein was the son of a physician whose office was next door to home. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1949 from the Johns Hopkins University and graduated from Yale University School of Medicine in 1954. After completing an internship at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, he served two years as a captain with an Air Force medical unit at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama.