This is a remarkable 4 part series about the failure of support systems for adults with significant disabilities. This is part 1. Links to the other 3 parts are at the bottom of the article. They have used some complicated system of content delivery, so you have to work to get to the bottom of the article.....
On a bitter March morning in 2014, I picked my way across an icy corner in Point Breeze and knocked on Patricia Sankey's storm door. I heard slow, heavy steps and the rattle of keys, and then Sankey opened the inside door.
She was a short, round, older woman dressed in a pink housecoat. Tendrils of cigarette smoke pushed through the storm door's vents; the air inside the home was cloudy with it. She appeared wary.
I asked if she was related to Christina Sankey, 37, who had intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) and had wandered off two weeks before while under the watch of a state-paid caregiver. Her body was found the next day on a sidewalk, five miles away. She had frozen to death overnight.
"I'm her mother," Sankey said.
I told her that I was trying to understand how her daughter went missing in the first place, and that no one seemed to think it was a big deal that Christina's caregiver lost track of her. That the police and coroner had been quick to dismiss the death as a tragic accident with apparently little investigation. That there had been no mention of potential neglect by the caregiver, the way there would be if Christina had been an equally vulnerable child.