Restraints and abuse: What happened to Denis Maltez?

Kristina Chew, PhD  

I read about an autistic boy who is restrained in a van while on an outing from the residential placement where he lives: He stops breathing. He dies. I think,

and remember Jonathan Carey, who died on February 15th; he lived at a center in upstate New York. But the story I am reading is about a 12-year-old boy, Denis Maltez, who lived in Florida and who died on May 23rd. He was on a trip to a flea market to get a haircut—there is mention of staff holding his arms behind his back and of staff restraining his legs…….this article from the June 25th Miami Herald provides a lot of details and is almost unbearable to read.

Then I read about all the medications Denis was on—Seroquel, Zyprexa and Depakote—-and that David J. Glatt, who owned Rainbow Ranches, the group home where Denis lived, has been charged with inpersonating a doctor (a brain surgeon). It seems that children in the group homes were medicated “so ‘irresponsibly’ they trembled, slept and drooled.” Child-abuse investigators had “looked into a claim that ….. Denis Maltez, was so overmedicated he had to be hospitalized in January”—-but the complaint was closed and no action taken against Rainbow Ranches, which have now been shut down.

State regulators presented a juvenile court judge with an emergency order portraying the home where he lived, 310 Northwest Dr., as a den of neglect where disabled children were over-medicated, sexually abused each other and sometimes went hungry.

Denis was diagnosed with “autism, schizophrenia, mild mental retardation, psychosis and depression.” His mother, Martha Quesada, had removed him from another group home in Cutler Ridge after another child punched him in the face.

I have to wonder—did anyone think to connect some of Denis’ behaviors with the physical abuse he received at the first residental placement, or (at the risk of speculating) with the abuse he may have been subjected to at Rainbow Ranches? How can we know really happened to Denis?—-to get some inkling, read Ralph Saverese’s Reasonable People, in which his narrates how he and his wife learned about the abuse (physical and sexual) that their adopted son DJ went through while in foster care.

Thinking of Denis and his family here.