Daughters death leaves unanswered questions

Facility quiet on details

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

It isnt the kind of phone call that a mother is ever prepared for.

They called me on the phone at 7:45 that night to tell me my daughter had just died, Melissa Whittaker said.

LaKeesha, or Keesha as she was known to her family, a 16-year-old former Greenwood High School student, died Nov. 12 while a resident at Spectrum Care Academy in Columbia.

Reports at the time said Keesha was running away from the staff at the facility.

Adair County Coroner Rick Wilson said Keesha crossed a guardrail into oncoming traffic on Campbellsville Road, where she was hit twice, by a van and then by a car.

SpectrumColumbia is a psychiatric residential treatment facility for adolescent girls.

Keeshas family is concerned that no one at Spectrum will talk to them about the events that led up to her death, and they have a number of questions about the way the facility handled things.

Numerous messages left by the Daily News requesting comment from Spectrum officials were not returned.

An open-records request by the Daily News showed several previous state investigations into complaints about Spectrums operations around the state, including some that found operations failed to have proper staffing levels.

The day after she was killed, someone from Spectrum brought the clothes Keesha had left there, and a rose she had made of clay for her mother, Whittaker said.

She also said there were several calls from the center asking if they could pay for the funeral.

Since the funeral, though, she said she has not received answers to her questions of the staff at Spectrum.

They told me they were under a gag order, which is only issued by a judge and there hasnt been a judge in this … yet, Whittaker said.

The director at Spectrums Columbia campus, Brandy Hancock, refused to comment.

At the visitation in the funeral home, Keeshas grandmother, Beverly Cline, met Ben Arnold, owner of the four Spectrum campuses.

Cline said she strenuously voiced her concerns about Spectrums care of her granddaughter, but got no answer she was satisfied with.

Repeated calls to Arnolds office at Spectrum and his other company in Columbia have not been returned and his assistants said he was not available.

The girls presence was missed especially this time of year.

She was usually the life of the party, Cline said. Christmas wasnt as joyful without her. I miss her a lot, and I hope to get to the bottom of what happened.

The family has said there are several things they dont understand about that day and the week leading up to Keeshas death.

There is more to it than what theyve told us, Cline said. There is just no way she would have run out in front of a vehicle. She was too much for living. Keesha had too many things she wanted to do.

Then there was a question about why she was still there.

Her discharge date came a week before she was killed, Whittaker said. And then they said, after she had packed her clothes and gathered up all her stuff, that they thought it would be best if she stayed.

She said the staff could not give her a specific reason why Keesha wasnt coming home and she was even more confused because the last three weeks, the teen had been the Student of the Week at Spectrum because of her behavior.

So Whittaker said she decided to drive up and take Keesha out of the program.

Brandy (Hancock) told me if I signed her out that I would lose her medical card, Whittaker said.

The state says that is not an issue.

When a person chooses to leave a facility, it has nothing to do with their eligibility status for Medicaid or any Medicaid program, said Gwenda Bond, a public information specialist for the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, which is responsible for administration of Medicaid in this state. It will not in any way jeopardize their eligibility status. The federal government and Medicaid endorse free choice of providers and if a recipient is not satisfied with the treatment they are receiving, they may choose to leave.

The attorney who is handling an unrelated legal matter for Spectrum, Samuel Haywood, said he was not familiar with the situation and would not comment.

Then there was the familys question about where Keeshas things are.

When they brought me my daughters things all they brought were clothes, Whittaker said. She was an artist and poet she would write 10 poems a day. There wasnt one picture in there, not one piece of paper.

Whittaker said Spectrum officials told her that state investigators have her journals and other possessions.

We cant comment on any open investigation, Bond said when asked if this was accurate.

Her grandmother said Keesha was not unhappy at the facility, and had been there since the spring.

She went there in March or April, Whittaker said. Its hard for me to remember. I was taking chemo then and its hard for me to remember things.

Whittaker said she has cervical cancer and has been through chemotherapy and radiation, but some health problems continue.

She was always so scared I was going to die before she got home, Whittaker said of her daughter. All she ever wanted to do was come home and take care of her momma.

Whittaker said Keesha was at Spectrum because she had some issues as far as wanting attention.

I have five other kids. She was doing things to get attention. Whittaker said.

Her mother said Keesha was learning how to control and redirect her desire for attention.

She was diagnosed ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) at an early age, Whittaker said. At 13 or 14 she had all the signs of bi-polar, which was eventually how she was diagnosed.

She was not just popular in her family, Keesha was popular in the sports program she was in.

She had participated in softball, said Brent Belcher, at the Bowling Green Parks and Recreation Department. I knew her for about two years. She was always smiling, the first to congratulate someone and cheer them on.

He described her as always happy and enthusiastic.

She was pretty blessed athletically, Belcher added.

Her pastor at Grace Baptist Church, Marvin Carson, described her as a loving and sweet child, who usually got along well with the kids her age.

But there was a reason for her to be at Spectrum.

She was in there because she had problems, Carson said. Occasionally she would have a problem with authority.

Her mother said she would tell tales to get attention, and not all of them were true.

And in the past she had told her mother she was going to run away, but never got further than the edge of the yard.

She said she has made a promise to herself to do what she can to make sure this doesnt happen to anyone else.

I know if it happened to my daughter it could happen to anyone elses, Whittaker said.

An open-records request for state investigations into the Spectrum campuses found one complaint against the Columbia campus in 2003, which the state said was unsubstantiated, and another in 2001 where the state found the allegations were valid.

The facility failed to have the required staffing to provide supervision of the residents, according to the report from that investigation by the Kentucky Cabinet for Health Services Office of Inspector General.

That investigation stemmed from allegations that a male resident was missing from his room for two hours and was found in the closet of a female resident.

Of the four campuses, the file of complaints and investigations for the Columbia campus was the smallest file.

State officials said such facilities are to be inspected annually, with a range of eight to 15 months as the guideline.

Bond said she has been told that such inspections were carried out at that location, but said that she has not seen those records.

There were at least seven investigations at the Glasgow campus in that same period.

Allegations of insufficient staffing at both the girls and boys areas were substantiated by investigations in 2003.

That same year the investigators notified them that both houses did not meet the minimum licensure requirements.

They cited the lack of qualifications of the director as one of the reasons for that conclusion.

At Spectrums Elizabethtown campuses, there were five investigations since 2001, including one of a runaway in 2003. There were no findings against the company in that investigation, but one in 2001 substantiated claims of understaffing.

Three others in 2004, including one for understaffing, were reported as unsubstantiated in the inspector generals investigation.

There are two campuses in London, one for girls and one for boys. In August 2003 at the boys campus, the state noted that the staff failed to have a systematic method for checking for expired medications. The facility was also faulted for having fiberglass insulation hanging broken from the ceiling above the tables where the residents eat.

Also noted in that investigation was that there was not a proper sprinkler system installed and that several pieces of furniture were broken.

In January 2004, that same campus was faulted for not doing background checks on their staff, insufficient training for some of the staff and no record of staff tests for tuberculosis or illegal drugs.

By April, the state was back at the London campus investigating the claim that a staff member hit a resident repeatedly in the face during a struggle. It was discovered that the facility had not done the background checks that it had told the state it would.

The state investigators did a background check and found that the staffer had a conviction in 1999 for aggravated assault, fourth-degree spousal abuse, as well as convictions for contempt of court, violating an emergency protective order and terroristic threatening.

Later in April that same facility was found to be allowing insufficiently trained staff administering medications.

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