From the Toronto Globe and Mail, Hamilton [Ontario] Spectator, Toronto Sun:

A 22-year-old man described as having intellectual disabilities was held captive, beaten, burned and sexually abused for three weeks in an apartment in Hamilton, Ontario, police say. He was near death when authorities responding to a 911 call discovered him hidden in a closet.

Four people face charges in the case. The only apparent motive, according to Hamilton police Superintendent Bill Stewart, was sadism.

Police described the young man, whose identity is being withheld, as “trusting and vulnerable.” They said he had been living on his own, and said his disappearance went unreported. The man’s mother, whose name also was not released, said he has epilepsy.

Girl was cuffed, led away by police; Parents consider legal action

From ABC News:

Eight-year-old Evelyn Towry was arrested and charged with battery after a scuffle with teachers in her northern Idaho elementary school. Prosecutors dismissed the case Tuesday, and her family says they are considering legal action against the school.

Spring Towry (above, with Evelyn) said her daughter was physically restrained to the point of causing bruises and is now tormented by memories of the incident.

Towry said Evelyn, who has Asperger’s syndrome and weighs 54 pounds, had been refused entry into a school party because she refused to take off a hoodie with cow ears and a tail. She said Evelyn had been put in a separate classroom; when she tried to leave, the adults physically restrained her and she reacted in a violent way.

(Photo from ABC video)

The alleged shooting death of a 13-year-old Colorado boy by his father has spotlighted the difficulties faced by parents of children with autism, the Denver Post reports. Allen Grabe has been charged with shooting and killing his son as the boy slept.

Autism is a maddening disorder of scrambled brain development that can lead some parents to snap, experts say. Autistic children suffer abuse and are killed at higher rates than normal children. Studies have shown that about 20 percent of autistic children are abused, compared with about 1 percent of other children.

Advocates say Colorado is notorious as a state with few services for people with disabilities. A shortage of doctors and therapists has led to a lengthy waiting list that often leaves children too old to benefit from services when they eventually get to the head of the line.

Similar stories of parental violence in the face of autism have been reported elsewhere in the U.S. over the past several years, including a father in the Bronx who stabbed and killed his son, a former high-ranking official in the Bush administration who shot and killed his son, parents in Oregon who set fire to their home and locked their son inside to burn to death, and a doctor in Illinois who suffocated her daughter.

“Jacob’s death,” said one Colorado mother, “awoke parents to the fact that ‘I also need to take care of myself.’ “

From the New York Times:

Neighbors of a group home in Eastchester, NY, are protesting a plan that would bring in young men with developmental disabilities when the current residents move to a residence better suited to elderly care.

The four men and three women who currently live in the home faced objections when they moved in fourteen years ago, but have been successfully integrated into the community. Those residents are now aging and require more assistance, so the Westchester Jewish Community Services wants to replace them with six men in their 20s and 30s. Plans call for the men to be supervised by a staff of about 18.

Neighbors say they worry that the younger men could wander and put children at risk for being molested, accosted, or bothered.

The agency has been through this kind of tumult with almost every one of its 12 group homes in Westchester, which accommodate a total of 85 men and women. And according to Dale Wang, the agency’s director of community relations, in 30 years the agency has not had a single serious case of harm to a neighbor.

“People are afraid of what they don’t know,” she said.

… Steven R. Yellen, the agency’s assistant executive director, said mentally retarded people, like everyone else, have a right to live where they choose.

See also earlier post: Disability history collection a reminder of shared trauma

Includes footage of a news report from 1982, in which correspondent Geraldo Rivera documents an arson attack on a planned group home for adults with intellectual disabilities in nearby Long Island. Neighbors had expressed worries about the safety of their children. An excerpt:

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From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

The rape of a woman with profound disabilities has highlighted troubling questions about the oversight exercised by Washington state over programs that provide home care to vulnerable adults. The rape was discovered when the woman miscarried; a DNA match pointed to a nursing assistant.

“I feel so betrayed,” said the woman’s mother. “I trusted them with my daughter. They made me guilty, too, because I could not protect her.”

“The obvious question is, if they don’t get pregnant, how do we know?” said Dick Sobsey, a Canadian expert on violence and disabilities. “Many of these cases are just never uncovered.”

From the Dallas Morning News:

More than a year after Texas officials said they had resolved federal civil rights violations inside the Lubbock State School, a state inspection rated the school 20 out of 100, meaning that it failed to meet one or more major conditions of its certification.

An investigation this summer found critical deficiencies that jeopardized the health and safety of the institution’s residents, who have intellectual disabilities. Among the findings: staff could not prevent the residents from assaulting and sexually abusing one another, and were not always reporting injuries.

When the U.S. Justice Department first investigated the Lubbock State School in 2005, it found atrocious living conditions, civil-rights violations, and 17 deaths over an 18-month period.

A spokeswoman for the state agency that oversees the institution said the scores can be misleading. Dennis Borel, executive director of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities, said the findings demonstrate that “the culture of abuse and neglect is unfortunately continuing at Lubbock.”

From Reuters, UPI:

A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that women with disabilities are more likely than other women to experience violence at the hands of their spouse or partner.

Dr. Brian Armour reported that 37.3 percent of women with a disability reported violent abuse, compared with 20.6 percent of women without a disability. More than 30 percent said they had been hit, slapped, pushed, kicked or physically hurt by an intimate partner, double the rate of other women.

The report, which compiled data from a large annual telephone survey of Americans, was presented at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting in San Diego.

Press release from the American Public Health Association here.