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Group
Home Transfer Harmed His Child
Edward W. Lempinen
Monday, March 31, 1997
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The sales pitch, as Rudy Grana recalls it, was very effective.
Social workers from Sonoma Developmental Center came to him a few years back and explained the situation: They were under tremendous pressure to transfer residents from the center to community homes. Rudy, they said, would you be willing to move your daughter Carla?
Carla was almost 37, severely retarded, unable to communicate, prone to seizures. She had lived at Sonoma since 1966, when she was 8. But, Rudy Grana told them, if the home could provide the specialized care that Carla needed, then yes, he would consider it.
Before long, the staffers got back to him with good news. There was a new home opening in Redwood City -- just two blocks from his own house -- and it would offer the highest grade of care available in the community.
Grana was interested. Managers at the group home promised medical care, trained staff and other top-quality services.
``They did a hell of a job of selling me,'' Grana says. ``I was given this sales pitch, but at the same time there was this underlying pressure: You'd better do it now while you have a chance, because your choices in the future might not be so good.''
Grana was sold.
Carla moved down in August 1994. But before she'd been two weeks at the home, Grana learned that it was staffed not by experts, but by untrained, minimum-wage employees. Carla's condition deteriorated swiftly.
Most worrisome was a dramatic rise in her seizures: from four or five a month at Sonoma to 30 or more a month in her new home -- sometimes four or five in one day.
``If we don't do something soon,'' Grana recalls telling the staff, ``my daughter's going to die. The doctors you're bringing in don't seem to know what to do with her. She's going to die.''
Finally, in May 1995, group home and state administrators agreed to move Carla back to Sonoma. But, he says now, only in recent months has Carla regained her health.
A few months later, the group
home was sold to a new owner. In June 1996, that owner closed the home and
moved the residents to another home it operated.