From CNN, New York Times:

Two teenagers hid overnight in a house in southeast Ohio and spent more than six hours torturing a disabled woman after her mother left in the morning, authorities said.

Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones said the teenage boy and girl tied up the 18-year-old woman, clubbed her, kicked her, shaved her head and soaked her with water before making her walk barefoot outside in the snow.

They also ignored pleas from Ashley Clark, who had undergone brain surgery, not to hit her in the head, investigators said.

“This is one of the worst crimes I’ve ever seen,” Jones said Monday. “They are sick animals, apparently just doing this for kicks and no other reason.”

From the New York Times:

In what is believed to be the first such case in the country, a California transplant surgeon is facing three felony counts relating to charges that he tried to hasten the death of a disabled and brain damaged man in order to harvest his organs sooner.

By most accounts, Ruben Navarro, 25, was very near death, and doctors hoped that he might sustain other lives by donating his kidneys and liver. Dr. Hootan Roozrokh is accused of prescribing excessive drugs to hasten his death.

Dr. Roozrokh has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer said the charges were the result of overzealous prosecutors. But the case has already sent a shudder through (more…)

A pioneer views disability as the final frontier in civil rights

From the Boston Globe:

Keith B. Jones, a composer, producer and performer of hip-hop, is considering a long-shot campaign for the U.S. Senate as a way to bring more attention to disability rights. He sees the cause of people with disabilities as the next frontier of civil rights, “the last great struggle.”

“We are perpetually creating an underclass,” insists Jones, who has cerebral palsy. “We are perpetually under-educating a group of people. We’re not seen as a workforce commodity. We’re seen as a burden.”

From the Contra Costa Times:

Blake Taylor’s new memoir — one of the first penned by a youth with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder — offers a fascinating and ultimately hopeful glimpse into the childhood challenges shared by 4 million other young Americans.

“I want to change the view that ADHD doesn’t exist or that it’s solely a disability,” says Blake. “It’s a gift.”

The book, called “ADHD & Me: What I Learned From Lighting Fires at the Dinner Table,” arose out of Taylor’s college admissions essay. He is a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley.

Accompanying the story are tips for teens on managing ADHD, as well as a reading list.

Earlier post here.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Safe Haven, a residence in Santa Monica, takes in those who have been on the streets more than a year and have a disability, and helps put them in permanent housing. The program is part of a growing nationwide effort to reduce the number of people who are chronically homeless.

Officially, this means anyone who has lived on the streets for at least a year and has a disability. In practice, it often means people who have slept under bridges or on park benches for as long as 20 years, have several disabilities, and are the most difficult for social agencies to reach, usually because they suffer from mental illness.

For society, this group has turned out to be costly: Recent studies indicate that the chronically homeless consume $35,000 to $150,000 a year per person in medical and psychological services, as well as in the time of police, courts, and jails. Housing them, even with substantial support services, costs a fraction of that – from $13,000 to $25,000 annually, according to experts.

Journalist Asra Nomani, writing in the Los Angeles Times and interviewed on National Public Radio, watched her brother struggle with mental illness and says she can’t be part of the coverage — or harassment — of Britney Spears.

Mental illness doesn’t always elicit compassion. It’s hard to see, so it’s hard to understand … All of us should reflect on the fact that we wouldn’t be so cruel to somebody diagnosed with another disease. Would we make a sideshow of someone with a brain tumor?

From the Appleton [Wisconsin] Post-Crescent:

In a nation reliant on child care, parents of children with disabilities find that services appropriate to their children’s needs are almost nonexistent. Parents are left with a frightening dilemma: tolerate unacceptable day care or quit working and weather financial hardship.

“It is a huge problem around the country,” said Linda Smith, executive director of the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies. “And we are putting children at risk.”

But the problem goes largely unmonitored and exists mostly outside the public consciousness, mostly because nobody collects data specific to child care for disabled kids, said Jeff Spitzer-Resnick, an attorney with Disability Rights Wisconsin.