Caregiver charged after alleged stabbing by mentally ill man
Snellville police have charged a caregiver at a personal care home with reckless conduct after one of the men in her charge allegedly stabbed another resident.
Typical of MOST of the caregivers I have the displeasure of talking to, this one was not giving very seriously ill people their medications on time and correctly.
Most of the care home attendants are morons. I have talked to and met plenty of them.
At best they talk a fair game but there are MANY who deny the existence of mental illness, who have no capacity in their tiny brains to understand how serious these illnesses are and they are employed by vultures who pack some of society's most vulnerable people into shitholes that pass for "houses" and take pretty much every last penny they have AND their food stamp cards.
I have also met and worked with a variety of patients from these homes on this street. I have even visited some of those homes a couple years ago when I worked for that shitty Assertive Community Treatment company that would never pay me correctly.
It is an out of control problem that is largely allowed to continue because:
1: the people affected are poor and mentally ill. Who gives a flying fuyck about THEM?
2: It's VASTLY cheaper for Georgia to ignore their own laws about this than to actually enforce them because that would COST MONEY. Georgia has been emptying it's psychiatric hospitals in favor of "community placements' for people with severe mental illness, and they have plainly just dumped them into the streets and let the nearly 2500 unregulated "Personal care homes" snatch them up and exploit them.
These "PCH's" require - usually - at least $600 as month rent which will get them indoors with 4-7 other people - or more, all paying at least $600. The average SSDI check is about $650 - $725 which leave people with MAYBE a hundred dollars for the month IF the PCH gives it to them. I hear endless stories of people not getting a penny back for this, that, and the other reason.
And if your PCH discovers that - for whatever reason - you make $800, $900, $1200 a check, oddly, that seems to become your rent. No, I am not goddamned kidding.
So this shit continues unabated.
Police have had to respond to more than 80 calls to care homes on Sonya Lane so far this year. Some were simply because residents hadn’t taken their medicine, McDonald said. “It’s definitely putting a strain on our calls for service and obviously how we respond to those calls,” he said.
The city of Snellville has placed a moratorium on issuing any new business licenses for personal care homes, McDonald said.
That's just on
one short street in one dinky town outside Atlanta.
There's plenty more and its not like its unheard of
“I wasn’t a tenant anymore,” Hill testified recently. “I’d become a hostage.”
Hill, 59, said he was trapped in a windowless basement room in a DeKalb County home for almost six months ending in March 2010, sharing the room with a mentally disabled stranger. For breakfast, they got Ramen noodles in Country Crock margarine containers; for dinner, two bologna sandwiches. They used 5-gallon paint buckets for toilets.
Their landlord, Chandra Renee Faust, 43, now faces criminal charges. County and state officials say the allegations shine light on a disturbing and growing phenomenon in which freelancing caregivers and renters prey on vulnerable people to get access to their disability checks.
And shit like this has to happen before ANYBODY gets in any trouble.
You can come to Georgia, buy some ramshackle house, put 8 mentally ill people in it, NOT get licenced, charge them out the ass to stay there, turn the heat off in the winter, remove the burners from the stove, padlock the fridge and yell at clients who complain of hunger, as well as DEMAND they find someplace to go between 8 am and 4 pm. Get OUT.
This is why we tax people.
This is why we have regulation.
Because people get ripped off, abused, neglected and injured.
I know they are just mentally ill commoners on the bottom rung of the 99%, but it's still as wrong as wrong can be, even though there is profit to be had.