New Jersey Halts Admissions for Troubled Group Home Company

In August 2012, the Saccoh family thought they’d finally found a good home for the youngest of the family’s eight adult siblings, near their home in Trenton.

Abdulaye, then twenty, is autistic and intellectually disabled. A quick-to-laugh computer whiz and Special Olympics track star, he’d spent two years at the North Jersey Developmental Center after he started having behavioral issues at the age of 18.

The family was eager to move him out of an institutional setting when Bellwether Behavioral Health approached them and offered Abdulaye a new placement.

“We were like, ‘Finally!’ ” his sister Fatou remembers thinking. 

“They told us that they had a program that will fit his needs and he's going be placed in a group home,” says his mom, Emma Adoula.

Bellwether gave Abdulaye a spot in one of their Branchburg homes.

“It’s a beautiful house,” Fatou observed when she visited Abdulaye in his new setting. “It’s clean, he’ll be comfortable here.”

Bellwether Behavioral Health is a private equity-owned developmental disability services company based in Delaware. It's also gone by the name Advoserv. For decades it’s offered group homes and day programs to people whose care needs qualify them for Home and Community-Based Services Medicaid waivers, funding dispensed by state disability agencies.

Concerns over Bellwether’s treatment of clients has lead state agencies in New York, Maryland, Delaware, and Florida to cut ties with Bellwether facilities. But New Jersey’s Division of Developmental Disabilities continued to defend the company, which has a reputation of taking clients other group homes turn away. Bellwether has 62 licenses across the state and serves over 450 New Jerseyans.

The longer Abdulaye stayed in the Branchburg home, the more his family became concerned. He didn’t seem to be receiving any kind of therapy or vocational development, and he appeared anxious when they visited.

“He was looking like somebody who was not eating,” Emma says. “His body was just a big skeleton standing there.”

House staff brushed off her concerns, but over a year she says the once broad-shouldered 6’5” Abdulaye lost nearly 100 pounds. Fatou kept photographs on her phone to document the growing number of scratches and other wounds the family found on his body. At one point, he had a broken clavicle.

Such injuries are weekly occurrences at Bellwether group homes across the state, according to records from New Jersey police departments obtained by WNYC.

Branchburg police report their officers are at Bellwether facilities three to four times a day, as back-up for under-staffing in the homes. One Bellwether day center in Branchburg had 156 emergency squad visits in the last two years alone. Seven of them were for incidents where a staff member had allegedly assaulted a client.

For years, the Saccoh family sent their concerns about Abdulaye’s treatment to Bellwether management and state officials, who dismissed Abdulaye’s injuries as the result of roughhousing with other home residents.

The Saccohs found themselves in the same position as many families dissatisfied with the care of their developmentally disabled love ones — ill-equipped to house Abdulaye in their own home, but unable to find him an alternative to Bellwether in the absence of verifiable proof of abuse.

In December of 2016, that proof arrived. Fatou received a phone call from the director of Abdulaye’s group home. Abdulaye was at the Robert Wood Johnson Somerset Medical Center in Somerset with a swollen eye, cuts to his chest and swollen arms. A house staff member reported seeing another staff member strike Abdulaye in the face. A hospital social worker had called the Branchburg police to report her concerns of abuse.

Bellwether agreed to move Abdulaye to another of their homes, in Bridgewater. But when the mistreatment continued, lawyers with the federally-mandated oversight group Disability Rights New Jersey helped Emma convince the state to move Abdulaye into an emergency placement group home. Nine months later, he’s still in that temporary placement.

Fatou says she's relieved he's no longer in Bellwether’s care.

“I think we would have gotten a call that my brother was killed,” she said. “That is my honest feeling with them.”  

Two other New Jersey families with adults in Bellwether Behavioral Health homes did get that call last year. Carlos Beltre died in a Fairlawn home from injuries his family alleges stemmed from neglect. In West Milford, Susan Osborne died of choking after staff failed to follow her doctor’s orders for food preparation and neglected to monitor her eating, according to the family's lawsuit against Bellwether.

Bellwether Behavioral Health won’t comment on individual cases, but in a statement, they said: “When incidents inevitably occur, we strive to address them responsibly.”

Both families are suing Bellwether and its owner, the New York City-based private equity group Wellspring Capital Management. Wellspring purchased Bellwether in 2015 from another private equity group, which had bought the company from its original founder in 2009.

In recent years, private equity funds have begun eyeing developmental disability services as a growth industry, due to growing autism diagnosis rates. National spending on autism is expected to rise 70 percent between 2015 and 2025.

Past Bellwether employees allege that once Wellspring purchased Bellwether, the firm began to cut costs by cutting administrators and home staff and hiring less-educated workers. The lawsuit on behalf of the Beltre family alleges that Wellspring is using Medicaid money intended to support client services to “improperly and unjustly enrich the Corporate Defendants.” It also accuses them of using Medicaid money to fight off lawsuits.

Wellspring Capital Management directed requests for comment to their general counsel, who hung up the phone when a reporter identified herself. The company has recently removed all mention of Bellwether Behavioral Health from their website.

This past year, New Jersey’s Division of Developmental Disabilities conducted a series of surprise investigations at Bellwether homes. Inspectors found that when employees didn’t show up for work, the company would keep the home short-staffed. They found falsified documents, missing pill bottles, clients with medical dietary needs not receiving the right diet, rooms that smelled of urine and rotting wood, and homes that were using restraints for extended periods of time and not reporting injuries to the state.

WNYC has found that over the past year, New Jersey officials verified instances of abuse or neglect at Bellwether homes at over thirteen times the average rate of other large New Jersey group home companies.

This July, after inquiries by WNYC, the state’s Division of Developmental Disabilities announced a moratorium on admissions to Bellwether group homes.

But that still leaves nearly 450 New Jerseyans still in Bellwether Behavioral Health’s care. The state says it's installing an independent monitor and exploring other options for serving developmentally disabled citizens.