In decades of unchallenged deceit, disabled patients at Fairview Developmental Center were subjected to various instances of sexual assault, abuse by stun guns and even a homicide.
“With each additional piece of information, the alarm bells in my head rang louder,” speaker Ryan Gabrielson said during the Walter Cronkite School’s Must See Monday event.
Gabrielson’s investigative reporting for California Watch on the Fairview case won him the newly developed Katherine Schneider Journalism Award for Excellence in Reporting on Disability. This award is added to Gabrielson’s collection that includes a Pulitzer, two George Polk Awards and an Online Journalism Award.
The developer of the award, Katherine Schneider, is blind. She hopes that by creating this prize, journalists will have an incentive to pay attention to the disabled people in their community.
“Sometimes if you throw money at something, the situation improves,” Schneider said in a discussion with a journalism class at the Cronkite School earlier in the day.
Gabrielson told the crowd that he was honored to be the first recipient and told the story of how the Fairview investigative piece developed over eight months. Of the information gathering period, Gabrielson said he recalls “banging my head against a wall until it finally began to cave.”
Journalism sophomore Nathaniel Soy was impressed by Gabrielson’s dedication. “It was interesting to see someone who actually spent a considerable amount of time on one story,” he said.
It all started with a tip that landed on Gabrielson’s desk in April 2011. The tip indicated years of financial fraud and came with evidence. Gabrielson started making calls and realized that the story was much bigger than finances.
From 2008 to 2010, Gabrielson found 250 incidents of substantiated patient abuse. Even though the number of patients dropped, the number of patient abuse climbed each year.
Elementary education junior Brooke Hicks was shocked at the severity of the cases Gabrielson spoke about.
“(The patients) are being taken advantage of,” she said.
As Gabrielson kept researching, he began to get information on individual patient cases, including one about an autistic man who died from a broken neck he suffered inside the facility.
He searched the name, “Van Ingraham,” and found a blog written by the patient’s brother. The first post opened, “It’s 2:15 a.m., and I’m weary. Not from the day now passed, but from the past two years and eight months of fighting the state of California, after my brother was a victim of homicide that the state covered up.”
As Gabrielson’s research led him to mistake after mistake in the center, he knew he had to take action. After publishing his piece “Broken Shield” on the California Watch website, Gabrielson and his team at the Center for Investigative Reporting began a course of legal action against Fairview.
The California State Legislature already passed two bills to protect patients in homes, but the legal battle that began in January of 2012 continues today. The CIR won in its superior court case, but the Department of Public Health appealed the decision in an attempt to keep some of their record-keeping practices confidential. Gabrielson and CIR are not giving up that easily.
“We’re taking our chances and going to the State Supreme Court,” Gabrielson said.
As the evening wound down, Gabrielson was asked about future topics he might investigate. Gabrielson said he would rather see the criminal justice system work as it is supposed to.
“I don’t want to investigate any more of this” he said. “I just want to see it work.”
Contact the reporter at emma.totten@asu.edu
