How the System Failed Jamie
Ruth Teichroeb of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer tells a troubling story of sexual assault and official neglect in "Voiceless and Abused."
To her attacker, Jamie must have seemed like the perfect victim: blind, nonverbal, infantlike in her mental ability and utterly dependent on her caregivers.
But her body revealed what she could not say -- that someone had raped and impregnated Jamie in her own home. When she miscarried in March, a DNA match pointed to a nursing assistant at Integrated Living Services in Kent.
It wasn't the first time that a nursing assistant at that agency was suspected of sexually abusing Jamie, records obtained by the Seattle P-I show. Two years earlier, a different man was named as a "person of interest" in a police investigation that was dropped for lack of evidence. State officials determined that the agency had followed regulations and required no additional safeguards.
That proved disastrous for Jamie. And it highlighted troubling gaps in Washington's system of protecting vulnerable adults, from questions about whether male caregivers should work alone with vulnerable female clients to the adequacy of state oversight of home care agencies and their employees.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/387252_rape11.html