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AUSTIN – A state lawmaker said March 20 that at least two workers at the troubled Corpus Christi State School are on administrative leave after allegations of new fights among the facility's mentally disabled residents.
State Rep. Abel Herrero, D-Robstown, said there are "allegations of new, separate, additional fights that occurred within the last 48 hours" and that state officials are investigating. He said he does not know whether the residents were injured, or whether they were forced to fight by employees.
This month, six staffers were charged with injury to a disabled person over fights allegedly organized for the staff's entertainment. Videos of the fights were found on a cellphone.
Herrero said Department of Aging and Disability Services Commissioner Addie Horne told him Thursday night that Advocacy Inc., a group that advocates for the residents of state schools, toured the Corpus Christi campus and reported new evidence of alleged fights.
A telephone message left with Advocacy Inc.'s Austin office on March 20 was not immediately returned. A DADS spokeswoman declined to comment on the report of new cases.
Also on March 20, videos of the fights were shown at a Corpus Christi bail hearing for a former employee accused of staging the bouts. State officials, local police and the FBI are all investigating the allegations of staged fights.
The videos from former state school worker Timothy Dixon's cellphone included two residents repeatedly punching each other while staff members cheered. The residents tried to choke each other before one threw the other to the floor. An employee then kicked the resident on the floor.
Dixon's bail was lowered by half to $15,000 by state District Judge Sandra Watts.
Four of the six current and former employees have been arrested. Two others were believed to have moved out of state before the investigation, police said.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From The AP:
