How a 16-Year-Old Boy Was Locked Away Without a Mental Evaluation

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In 2012, a 16-year-old boy named Tyler Haire was locked up in a Mississippi jail cell after committing a violent crime against his father’s girlfriend. Tyler ended up spending years behind bars while waiting for a psychiatric examination, despite having a history of issues dating back to early childhood. Sarah Smith‘s ProPublica story, “What Are We Going to Do About Tyler?” was a recent No. 1 pick here on Longreads. It offers a sobering look at America’s failures when it comes to treating mental illness.

I spoke with Smith recently about her reporting process, and the remarkable way she discovered the story: dialing up all 82 sheriffs in Mississippi in order to find a case like Tyler’s.


Hospitals denied my child life-saving surgery because he was autistic

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Five years ago, when my son Lief was 9, he fell ill with a virus. The virus attacked his heart and flooded it with fluid. The pressure from the growing pool inside his heart tore the muscle fibers. In a matter of weeks, he was transformed from a healthy kid to a critically ill hospital patient with only one hope for survival: a heart transplant.

Needing a lifesaving transplant is truly awful for any child and family. For children with a disability, the challenges are even more immense. Lief has autism and is a non-speaking person who types to communicate. He struggles with sensory disturbance, profound motor planning difficulties and perseverance behaviors.

Because of our son's disability, the doctors at our local children's hospital told us that no facility would perform the transplant, and we should prepare for him to die. Then two other hospitals, one in Seattle and one in L.A., refused to consider him. That left Lief with only one last West Coast option. As Lief's condition swiftly deteriorated, a young physician at our local hospital pleaded his case to Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University. The hospital was persuaded, and opened its doors to us. 


The Sexual Assault Epidemic No One Talks About

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Pauline wants to tell her story — about that night in the basement, about the boys and about the abuse she wanted to stop.

But she's nervous. "Take a deep breath," she says out loud to herself. She takes a deep and audible breath. And then she tells the story of what happened on the night that turned her life upside down.

"The two boys took advantage of me," she begins. "I didn't like it at all."

Pauline is a woman with an intellectual disability. At a time when more women are speaking up about sexual assault — and naming the men who assault or harass them — Pauline, too, wants her story told.

Her story, NPR found in a yearlong investigation, is a common one for people with intellectual disabilities.

NPR obtained unpublished Justice Department data on sex crimes. The results show that people with intellectual disabilities — women and men — are the victims of sexual assaults at rates more than seven times those for people without disabilities.

It's one of the highest rates of sexual assault of any group in America, and it's hardly talked about at all.

Pauline was part of that silent population. But she says she decided to speak publicly about what happened to her because she wants to "help other women."

NPR's investigation found that people with intellectual disabilities are at heightened risk during all parts of their day. They are more likely than others to be assaulted by someone they know. The assaults, often repeat assaults, happen in places where they are supposed to be protected and safe, often by a person they have been taught to trust and rely upon.


Cities May Be Facing a New Housing Crisis

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As rents and demand for renting increase, millions of Americans are being evicted -- sometimes with only a few days' notice.

During the housing crisis and Great Recession a decade ago, millions of Americans were evicted from their homes for being unable to pay their mortgages. Now, many housing experts say America is on the verge of a new eviction crisis, and this time, it's affecting renters.

“We have had basically a lot of demand for rental, and tight credit markets have pushed up that demand by people who would normally own homes,” says Dan Immergluck, an urban studies professor at Georgia State University.

The 2008 fiscal collapse reshaped the housing market, prompting greater scrutiny of banks' lending practices and keeping more people from purchasing a home. That's placed more pressure on renters, especially low-income renters, according to the 2017 State of the Nation’s Housing report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

Apartment List, an online rental property search firm that also collects data on the rental market, recently published a report detailing what many housing experts say are troubling warning signs in the rental sector.

According to the report, nearly one in five renters were unable to pay the full amount of their rent for at least one month of a three-month period in 2017. Some 3.7 million Americans experienced an eviction at some point in 2017, and most of those renters earned less than $30,000 per year. (The number of evictions includes formal, court-ordered instances as well as "soft evictions," in which tenants leave under the threat of a formal eviction but before the actual notice had been given.)

The phenomenon isn't just hitting hot markets like New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. It's a problem in many cities across the country, even those that haven't been impacted by gentrification.

Cities with a short supply of affordable housing and large populations of poor and low-income residents topped the Apartment List eviction rankings. The top three cities in the study were Memphis, Phoenix and Atlanta, where the rate of residents who had been evicted ranged from 5.7 percent to 6.1 percent. All three cities have poverty rates above 20 percent. In Memphis, one in four residents lives at or below the federal poverty line.


Dying with respect: Sacramento professor starts homeless hospice

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A retired Sacramento professor is creating a hospice center for the terminally ill experiencing homelessness.

"Everybody should have that opportunity to die with respect, dignity and love," she said. "These are people with heart disease, cancer, AIDS -- whatever serious terminal illness -- that otherwise would be on the street, and die on the street."

Fitzwater is a retired professor with UC Davis School of Medicine, a professor emeritus at Sacramento State and the founder of the nonprofit Health Communication Research Institute.

The Sacramento facility is named after her 34-year-old grandson who died in 2014 while homeless in Nebraska.

“When he was clean and sober, we would talk a lot about what his purpose was in life. He wanted to help those he saw on the street who were sick, dying and had no one to care for them,” she explained. "So this is in his memory. It's a tribute to his compassion and his love for others. This is something I feel very much guided by him.”

Joshua’s House will be among just a handful in the country offering this type of end-of-life care -- and is the first in the West Coast.

“It really struck me when I was at UC Davis working in the cancer center and learning some of the people we were treating were homeless,” she explained. "They can be treated at a local hospital, but we don't have enough MediCal beds, we don't have 24-hour shelters, we don't have places where hospice care could be provided."

Fitzwater said doctors have agreed to discharge terminally ill patients, and then provide hospice care at Joshua’s House to their patients.