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Too young to die
February 20, 2007
A 13-year-old boy, autistic and
mentally retarded, is dead, raising critical questions about his
care
 It
strains the imagination to think of two parents who ask for
relatively so little from a state government that's supposed to
monitor the care of children placed in institutionalized homes and
schools and instead get as horribly shortchanged as Michael and Lisa
Carey.
They already were battling state
authorities in a quest for an investigation of what they contend was
abusive treatment of their son, Jonathan, at a school for autistic
children in Dutchess County in late 2004. Now the Careys are
demanding to know what led to their son's death after they moved him
to O.D. Heck Developmental Center in Niskayuna.
The evidence that's available so
far is heart wrenching enough to suggest an absence of humanity
itself. Jonathan died after being improperly restrained on a
shopping trip last week, police said. He was just 13.
The two O.D. Heck staff members who
were transporting him have been charged with manslaughter. Police
allege they drove around on personal shopping errands for 90 minutes
after Jonathan stopped breathing. No attempts were made to revive
him, according to the Colonie police, until he arrived back at O.D.
Heck on Thursday night.
The anguished words of his parents,
blaming the death of their son on a "broken and failing system,"
sound quite reasonable, even restrained, under the circumstances.
No detail can be spared as the
state Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities,
which oversees O.D. Heck, goes about finding the full, and no doubt
ghastly, truth about the needless death of a boy who suffered too
much on the best of days. Jonathan's death must be investigated with
two purposes above all in mind -- satisfying his grieving parents,
and sparing any other family from a similar ordeal.
That also means breaking through
what has been a wall of silence for the Careys. Their efforts to
find out what Jonathan endured at the Anderson School in Dutchess
County have been stymied by a state law requiring such records to be
sealed. It's in the ostensible interests of privacy that such laws
are on the books. But no child's privacy, especially not an abused
child, needs to be protected from his parents. And no one else's
privacy should be protected to the point where it blocks parents
from knowing how their children are treated in state-supervised
facilities.
The state Legislature must move
promptly on a bill sponsored by Sen. Stephen Saland, R-Poughkeepsie,
giving parents access to special-needs children's records. More
broadly, it must hold the hearings promised by Senate Majority
Leader Joseph Bruno, R-Brunswick, examining the operations of state
facilities like O.D. Heck.
Listen, again, to the words of an
angry but determined father. "We really felt compelled, like a
God-given responsibility, to help other children, to get changes and
reform to help prevent something like this from happening."
The system that failed Jonathan
Carey is indebted to Michael Carey and Lisa Carey and all those
parents like them.
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=564775&category=OPINION&BCCode=
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