For decades, New York’s most vulnerable children were sent away to Willowbrook State School – but many never came out.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What is the tragic history behind Willowbrook State School?
The telephone rings, and a male voice is on the other end. Professional. Practiced. His voice is so measured, in fact, that it takes you a moment to realize the truth. This is a bad, bad phone call. The calm voice on the other end is actually giving you the worst news you've ever received in your life. Your little girl, the voice explains. is dead.
She passed away at her school and there was nothing the staff could do to save her. But what the voice doesn't tell you is that your daughter is not the first to die or disappear or be tortured within the walls of this school. In fact, this isn't even the first phone call like this he's made. And it certainly won't be the last. It's 1938 and New York has a problem.
Across the state, special needs children are being neglected, mistreated even. Maybe it's the stigma. Maybe it's that families are reeling from the Great Depression and don't have the means to take care of disabled children. But the fact is, not enough people are stepping up to care for these kids.
Chapter 2: How did New York attempt to address the care of disabled children?
In an attempt to correct this horrifying trend, the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene is tasked with building an institution capable of housing all of them. A suitable tract of land over 300 acres in size is found in the borough of Staten Island. But the local residents immediately revolt. They're convinced that a mental institution will flood their neighborhood with insane criminals.
Department of Mental Hygiene Commissioner Fred McCurdy is spearheading the initiative. The last thing he wants is for the project to get mired in local politics and lose momentum. And so, he tells a little white lie. To get construction underway, McCurdy assures the residents of Staten Island that this new mental institution will be a school, not an asylum.
It'll only house children, and they won't be a danger to anyone. Their community will not be negatively impacted, and rather, Staten Island's residents will be lauded for accepting these vulnerable children with open arms. This line ends up working, and construction begins.
Over the next few years, an imposing six-story red brick building rises up from the ground, looming high as the centerpiece of the eerie, sprawling compound. Finally, in the late 1940s, after the completed compound does a brief stint as a World War II military hospital, the so-called Willowbrook State School opens its doors to students.
But despite what it says on their sign, it's not a school at all. Very little education happens within its walls. Plus, Willowbrook isn't even exclusively for children, as McCurdy promised it would be. As it turned out, adult patients are quietly admitted to Willowbrook as well.
McCurdy's uneasy about misleading the public, but the fact is, 20 adults with intellectual handicaps need somewhere to go, and so he accepts them into Willowbrook, telling himself that the adult patients can help the school by performing maintenance.
After all, Willowbrook is short on staff, caring for the mentally disabled is demanding work, and McCurdy simply can't find qualified people willing to fill the needed roles. Word leaks out that Willowbrook is being loose with its age requirements, and within one year, the school's adult population has ballooned from 20 to 100.
The child population is set to quintuple in size as well, as word about Willowbrook is spreading and families across the state are banging down their doors to get their kids enrolled. The school, which is already barely functioning from understaffing, is experiencing absolutely staggering growth and McCurdy quickly realizes that he's in over his head.
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Chapter 3: Who were the key figures involved in the Willowbrook scandal?
he decides to hand Willowbrook off to someone more qualified. Someone who's able to give Willowbrook's patients the full-time attention they deserve. The job falls to Dr. Harold Berman, a respected physician who claims that he wants to help destigmatize mental illness and treat each patient as an individual. Berman says all the right things.
However, transforming Willowbrook is easier said than done. And as it turns out, conditions do not improve when Berman takes over as director. In fact, this is when the children start to go missing. When director Berman first walks into Willowbrook, he finds patients crammed into wards and only a handful of aides scrambling to look after all of them.
Right as they get one patient settled, another will undress and run down the ward, or start hurting themselves, or start hurting someone else. Berman attempts to secure more funding to help with the understaffing issue, but the money is slow to materialize. Change will not come to Willowbrook overnight, if ever. a quiet apathy starts to take hold of Director Berman.
His dream of turning Willowbrook into a safe, effective care facility is already fading. He simply isn't being given the resources he needs. There isn't enough staff to look after all these kids, and it's only a matter of time before something terrible happens. And that day arrives in August of 1949. That month, an eight-year-old boy vanishes from the compound.
Staff members scour every inch of Willowbrook's 300 acres, but the young patient is nowhere to be found. He's gone. And a few months later, in December, two more Willowbrook patients go missing. In less than a year, Director Berman has already placed more heartbreaking phone calls to patients' family members than he ever anticipated.
He wishes there was something he could do to improve the conditions at Willowbrook State School, but with every passing day, the school becomes more impossible to manage. Hundreds of new students are flowing in each week, causing the staffing disparity to grow ever worse.
Whether he's to blame or not, the fact is that Director Berman has checked out, and his Willowbrook State School has quietly become an extremely dangerous place to be a patient. And a new physician is about to arrive and make things even worse. There is one thing that keeps Dr. Saul Krugman awake at night. Hepatitis.
Thankfully, Krugman doesn't have the disease himself, but he spent his entire career studying it. Hepatitis is an inflammation of the liver often caused by a virus. It spreads in unsanitary conditions, such as the battlefields in World War II, where tens of thousands of soldiers contracted the often fatal disease.
From his time as a flight surgeon in the war, Dr. Krugman knows that a cure is desperately needed, and so he begins to work on one. When Director Berman hears about Krugman's hepatitis research, he reaches out. Berman explains how hepatitis is running rampant at Willowbrook due to its unavoidable overcrowding and uncleanliness.
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Chapter 4: What unethical practices were conducted at Willowbrook?
Director Berman suggests that Willowbrook could provide a mutually beneficial situation. Krugman needs test subjects for human trials, and Willowbrook needs a cure. Intrigued, Krugman goes to the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board with the proposal and secures funding to begin his research at Willowbrook.
But the research Dr. Krugman intends to perform is, to put it lightly, ethically questionable. He intends to actually infect the healthy patients with the disease, and he aims to do this by feeding them fecal matter. Director Berman surprisingly has no problem with this. If anything, he's excited about the optics of a prestigious medical professional performing research at their institution.
But Dr. Krugman needs more than Director Berman's permission. He needs the children's families to agree to it, too. Director Berman helps by pushing consent forms on the parents, many of whom say yes because of the supposed quality attention and care that Krugman is offering. Parents fear that if they say no, their children will suffer untreated in a different ward.
Soon, Dr. Krugman has all the human test subjects he could hope for, and Willowbrook is now his own personal laboratory. Dr. Krugman takes healthy patients from the wards and quarantines them. Then he mixes a concoction that is one part chocolate milk, one part infected feces from other patients. Following this, he monitors their infection.
However, Krugman doesn't allow the children who beat hepatitis to return to their wards. Instead, he keeps them quarantined and reinfects them to see if they've retained any immunity. The children are completely unsuspecting. They all have various mental limitations. They see the world in different ways, understanding things to different degrees. They miss their families, their homes.
They appreciate the extra attention Dr. Krugman gives them, but then their signs begin to hurt. They start to vomit, then cramp and soil themselves uncontrollably. They don't understand why they're in such pain. They don't understand why any of this is happening. It's a living nightmare for the parents as well.
They aren't allowed to visit or even comfort their sick kids because of Krugman's strict quarantine orders. Once their consent forms have been signed, there's no going back. There's nothing they can do, nothing anyone can do. But in 1955, one parent decides to challenge that. His name is Arthur Devol, and he's worried about his young daughter, Catherine.
He committed her to Willowbrook a few months prior, and he's now having trouble getting updates on her. He calls Willowbrook almost daily for any word about her. He gets different doctors every time. They give Arthur conflicting information. Catherine's fine. Catherine's sick. She's in quarantine. He can come see her next week. She's still in quarantine. He can't come see her.
It's a complete mess and impossible for him to figure out what the hell is going on. A tight knot of worry and frustration starts to form in Arthur's stomach. A feeling that he's being lied to. That he's made a bad deal. That he's been conned into harming his own mentally disabled daughter. Arthur just can't shake the sense that he's somehow made a terrible mistake.
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Chapter 5: How did parents react to the conditions at Willowbrook?
while some are more obviously impaired and seem like they should be receiving special care. The more rambunctious patients are in straitjackets, struggling against them. Some bang their heads against the wall. Arthur cringes at the sight of a man scraping his skin against a concrete wall, blood and flesh peeling away with each blow. The aides do nothing to help him.
In fact, they don't even notice. They're too busy dealing with patients who are fighting or having seizures on the floor. But despite all of this, what affects Arthur most is the smell. No matter which ward he pokes his head into, he's always hit with a wall of foul stench that he has no words to describe. But the stench's source is clear enough to see.
Patients across Willowbrook are being left in their own urine and feces. And what's worse, these patients are sick. Their urine is brown, the feces chalky white. He has never seen anything like it. He gags. He wants to get out of this building so badly, but he pushes on. He must find his daughter. His eyes race across every face, trying to find Catherine. Until finally, there she is.
At first, Arthur can barely recognize her. She's lying on the floor, most of her hair missing. She's shaking, covered in her own urine and feces. He picks her up and discovers two things. First, she's lighter than he expected. She's lost a shocking amount of weight. Second, he discovers that Catherine's body is covered in welts.
Catherine is non-verbal, but Arthur doesn't need to hear her speak to know what's been happening. The staff, they've been beating her. Fury and guilt sweep through him. Fury at the monsters who would treat children this way, and guilt for actually believing that his daughter was being cared for. It's all Arthur can do to keep from marching up to Director Berman's office and doing the same to him.
But he reminds himself that right now, what matters most is that he gets Catherine away from here. And so Arthur carries Catherine out of Willowbrook and brings her home. Enraged over what he witnessed, Arthur raises a fuss, and the governor orders an investigation. But it's clear from the start that the investigation is a sham.
State doctors claim that they can't find anything out of the ordinary at Willowbrook. Once they've had a chance to tidy up, Director Berman and other officials from the Department of Mental Hygiene invite reporters to come to Willowbrook to see for themselves, stating, Our school is as fine as any.
Arthur knows this is a lie, and he expects the other parents of Willowbrook students to rally around him. But that support never comes, at least not publicly. A number of parents confide their suspicions to Arthur in private, but they never speak out. Arthur realizes, to his horror, that many Willowbrook parents are terrified of being blacklisted from the school, even if it's hell on earth.
Without Willowbrook, there's simply nowhere else to send their special needs children. There are no other options on the table. And so, the investigation runs its course, but nothing really changes at Willowbrook. Director Berman keeps his job, Dr. Krugman continues his research, and Willowbrook's young patients continue to be exploited. 1964
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Chapter 6: What was the outcome of the investigation into Willowbrook?
Even from activities as benign as mealtime or overworked attendance, take three minutes with each patient, shoveling a mushy mixture of corn, bread, green vegetables, and milk into their mouths. Since the patients don't get solid food, their teeth fall out. Sometimes patients vomit the mush up or even start choking. Attendants don't always notice.
And one year, nine patients die from choking alone. The women's wards are packed so tightly with beds that patients and staff have to climb over one to get to another. The only way patients can pass the time is to lie there, staring up at the flaking and crumbling walls, day after day after day. In the children's wards, things are even worse.
Kids are either being kept in cribs like caged animals, or they get strapped into wheelchairs. When the children's ward showers malfunction one night, two of them are burned to death in the scalding hot water. Nothing, however, is as bad as the men's ward where the threat of physical violence is ever present.
There, it's all the attendants can do to keep the patients from hurting and even killing one another. And things only get worse in 1970 when a hiring freeze causes the number of employees to drop by 25%. By this point, it's clear that the school's conditions aren't improving under Director Hammond.
And this is when a Willowbrook employee named Dr. Michael Wilkins decides to actually do something about this. After several years on the job, Dr. Wilkins has become disillusioned with his work at Willowbrook State School. The patients are being subjected to inhumane conditions every day, and no one else seems to care, least of all Director Hammond.
Half of Wilkins' job is navigating a treacherous network of fellow employees, many of whom are involved in illicit activities. There's an active black market at Willowbrook, where certain attendants deal in drugs intended for the patients. They even resell items stolen from the patients. When different dealers run afoul of one another, it isn't unheard of for violent fights to break out.
There are even reports of attendants raping and killing patients. So many victims are dying at Willowbrook, in fact, that Wilkins can't even guess what the annual total might be. It's certainly dozens, if not hundreds. One janitor in particular creeps Dr. Wilkins out. He's got a large, flat nose, big, dark eyes, deep creases in his cheeks, and a thousand-yard stare.
Sometimes he lingers a little too long near some of the children, and Wilkins has to shoo him away. It seems like the only one who shares Wilkins' concerns about Willowbrook is a social worker named Elizabeth Lee. Together, they appeal directly to Director Hammond to find ways to improve conditions.
When their concerns are ignored, they begin telling parents of the patients about the terrible conditions at Willowbrook and urging them to seek reform. When Director Hammond catches wind of this, he fires Wilkins and Lee immediately. But even still, they refuse to be silenced. Right away, Wilkins and Lee decide to go to the press. They believe the public must know what's happening at Willowbrook.
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