Arrests begin over Texas State School "fight club"

From the Dallas Morning News:

AUSTIN – Authorities on Thursday began arresting the six state workers accused of forcing mentally disabled Corpus Christi State School residents into "fight club"-style brawls, as advocates came to the Capitol to protest the state's handling of the scandal.

By evening, Corpus Christi police had arrested one person and had confirmations that three more were turning themselves in. They were seeking the others, and said they had good leads.

Advocates for the disabled assembled in a tense Capitol hearing room to call on lawmakers debating a state school safety bill to impose a moratorium on all new admissions to the institutions until Texas goes six months without finding abuse or neglect in them.

"We've got to be appalled at every state school where there continues to be abuse and neglect," said Beth Mitchell of Advocacy Inc., the state's federally funded abuse-watchdog group. "We need to not put anybody else in harm's way."

The criminal charges stem from allegations this week that Corpus Christi state school employees forced disabled residents into orchestrated, late-night fights over the course of more than a year. They were caught after they captured at least 20 of the episodes on a cellphone camera, one turned over to police.

Five of the suspects – Timothy Dixon, 30; Jesse Salazar, 25; Guadalupe Delarosa, 21; Vince Johnson, 21; and Dangelo Riley, 22 – are charged with injury to a disabled person, a third-degree felony. Their bail has been set at $30,000. A sixth suspect, 21-year-old Stephanie Garza, is charged with a state jail felony for allegedly failing to intervene in the fight clubs. Her bail is set at $15,000.

Arrest warrants obtained by The Dallas Morning News allege five of the employees encouraged, filmed or narrated the fights – which were documented in dozens of still images and 20 videos taken over six months in 2008. Riley is allegedly seen kicking a resident during a fight, while Dixon, who appears from the warrants to be the phone's owner, is accused of doing much of the filming and narration. Four of the videos show residents sustaining injuries.

Johnson is already in custody, and officials with the Department of Aging and Disability Services said Thursday they are firing all of the employees except for Delarosa and Riley, who left their jobs last year.

Since the fight club was made public, the agency has made surprise overnight visits to every dorm in every state school. At Gov. Rick Perry's order, they also began installing video cameras, hiring security guards and adding overnight supervisors at all facilities. New admissions to the Corpus Christi facility have been halted.

"If you can imagine individual residents being woken up at night, being forced to fight with one another, while people who work for ... the state watch, encourage, incite, laugh and participate," Rep. Patrick Rose, D-Dripping Springs, said to agency officials at Thursday's hearing. "I encourage you to do everything you can right now, and I'm disappointed that we haven't done more. "

Lawmakers, some of whom have been shown the videotaped fights, are moving quickly to enact emergency state school safety legislation, which passed the Senate on Monday, and got a hearing before the House Human Services Committee on Thursday. They're under the gun from the U.S. Department of Justice, which outlined widespread abuse, neglect and civil rights violations in Texas' state school system in a report late last year.

But advocates for people with disabilities said the safety bill, which creates an ombudsman to oversee abuse and neglect investigations, and requires employees to submit to random drug tests and fingerprinting, doesn't go far enough – particularly in light of the fight-club revelations. They say security guards and surveillance cameras are a Band-Aid on a state school system that is in crisis, and that is so strapped for cash it must hire inexperienced, unprofessional employees.

"An environment that breeds such atrocities is unfixable," said Jeff Garrison-Tate, a former Advocacy Inc. investigator who now runs the non-profit Community Now. "This so-called fight club bears witness to a new low in Texas. You can't even make this stuff up."

DADS Commissioner Addie Horn, who gave lengthy and at one point tearful testimony at Thursday's hearing, acknowledged that many direct-care workers
"still make less than what you can make at Wal-Mart or McDonalds."

A News search of the state's employee database indicates all of those charged in the Corpus Christi fight club were entry-level workers who made an annual salary of $22,000 or less, and had been employed by the facility for fewer than two years.

Still, she said she of the "fight-club" employees: "I'd like to hunt 'em down and kill them."

"I want everybody to understand that you can't do this to people who are disadvantaged. You can't do it to each other as human beings," she said. "I don't have that magic wand, but I will try with every fiber in my body to keep trying to work towards that."

The forced fights, while highly organized in Corpus Christi, don't appear to be isolated to that facility. The News reported on Wednesday that staff at both the Mexia and San Angelo state schools have provoked physical altercations between residents in the last six months – and that at least five state-school employees had been fired, demoted or suspended since 2006 for such activity.