Majority of L.A.’s Skid Row patient dumping settlement lands in Pasadena

LA patient dumping settlement misses Skid Row

LOS ANGELES — The city attorney stood on the roof of a homeless shelter high above the human misery of Skid Row in April and announced a $1.6 million settlement from a hospital accused of dumping about 150 mentally ill patients on the streets.

Rocky Delgadillo trumpeted the penalty, castigated those who took advantage of society’s most vulnerable and praised the Union Rescue Mission’s chief executive as an inspiration for the investigation that led to the settlement.

What seemed like a big payday for the shelter and other nonprofits that have fought homelessness, mental illness and drug abuse on Skid Row for years, however, turned out to be no such bonanza. Instead, the lion’s share went to an organization in Pasadena — a suburb a dozen miles away — to provide grief counseling to school children.

Three months later, the shelters say they can’t figure out why Delgadillo, who finished his term of office last month and is considering a run for state attorney general, let $900,000 go outside the community they serve.

The Mission and three other Skid Row providers received $50,000 apiece, and another group got $100,000. Another $400,000 in fines went to the city and county.

While Delgadillo was still in office, his staff refused to discuss how Hathaway-Sycamores Child and Family Services came to reap the award. His office rejected a California Public Records Act request by The Associated Press on the grounds that negotiations in the case were secret.

When contacted by The AP on Friday, Delgadillo said donating to Hathaway-Sycamores was a preventative approach to what ails Los Angeles’ youth, and will prevent them from “ending up in a cemetery, jail or on Skid Row.”

Delgadillo said Skid Row providers face “an uphill battle” in rehabilitating homeless people, so funding the children’s mental health organization was “much better than a passive, Band-aid, back-end approach.”

College Hospital, which paid the settlement, didn’t know of Hathaway-Sycamores before the settlement, and the medical provider was “not the ultimate decisionmaker in regards to the selection of charities or amounts,” the hospital’s lawyer Glenn Solomon said.

The new city attorney’s chief deputy, Bill Carter, who said he would review The AP’s request, wouldn’t comment on past confidential decisions, but said the settlement didn’t appear to have reached the right hands.

“We want these funds to be received by the communities that are directly affected or impacted by the violations,” Carter said. “In these particular cases, that would be the entities and people doing this work on Skid Row, downtown.”

The settlement stemmed from allegations that as many as 150 psychiatric College Hospital patients — most of them homeless — were driven miles and dropped off near Skid Row shelters. Some were able to walk while others crawled with IVs or colostomy bags intact. Many needed medication and care that shelters weren’t equipped to provide.

Skid Row is a 50-square-block downtown neighborhood with the nation’s densest concentration of homeless. Rough estimates say nearly 5,000 people live there, mainly in shelters and on sidewalks. The area’s residents are plagued by the drug use and violence typical of the worst urban poverty.

Along with a handful of other shelters, the Union Rescue Mission was essential to discovering the practice of dumping patients — some still in hospital gowns — on Skid Row.

Delgadillo singled out chief executive Andy Bales in April for motivating his office to crack down on the practice, calling him “an incredible source of inspiration that have given myself, the people in my office and others the courage to proceed with these investigations and bring them to fruition.”

In the case that sparked the investigation, the shelter asked the hospital to pick up a 32-year-old bipolar schizophrenic, Steven Davis, who showed up on the mission’s doorstep because it could not monitor his care. A van came and then dropped Davis off at another nearby shelter.

Davis wandered away before ending up at a clinic that contacted his family and got him treatment.

Shelter leaders say that if they had received more of the settlement they could put it towards providing limited medical monitoring for those who need it, like Davis.

“No one’s saying anything, and I still don’t know what would merit (Hathaway-Sycamores) getting almost a million dollars when they had absolutely nothing to do with, and weren’t at the heart of what was going on down here,” said Brenda Wilson, founder of the New Image Emergency Shelter for the Homeless.

The $50,000 her organization received wouldn’t even cover the extra personnel it took over a two-year period to patrol the shelter’s perimeter and report the dumped patients to the city attorney’s office, Wilson said.

Leaders of the other homeless service providers named in the settlement, The Midnight Mission and Lamp Community, expressed frustration over the lack of transparency.

By its own account, Hathaway-Sycamores does not deal with the homeless, mentally ill population of downtown. “We do great things here for children who have suffered dramatic loss,” said Rob Myers, executive vice president of development at Hathaway-Sycamores. “I will absolutely defend what I think are the terrific services we provide.”

Myers said the organization was asked to provide the city attorney’s office with a proposal in December 2008 in advance of the April settlement.

In a statement issued after the interview, Hathaway-Sycamores said the monies will provide counseling for South Los Angeles children who are referred to the organization by school officials. It’s expected that 3,500 children and families will receive counseling over two years.

The statement said such care “will help to decrease future mental health issues which can lead to homelessness.”

None of the four downtown shelters received similar communications from Delgadillo’s office. They learned their share of the settlement the day of Delgadillo’s press conference and were stonewalled when they asked why Hathaway-Sycamores was chosen.

The settlement — and all other settlements — will be reviewed by City Attorney Carmen Trutanich, who took office July 1, Carter said.