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Man who won $9 million in suit over abuse of brother at state psychiatric hospital wants change in CT, hopes to donate money to improve care

Hartford Courant - 7/5/2022

The brother of a man who endured repeated abuse at Whiting Forensic Hospital hopes he can one day donate some of the $9 million won in a lawsuit against the state to programs that fund the type of supportive housing he thinks could have changed the trajectory of his brother’s life.

Albert Shehadi last week became the recipient of the largest-ever lawsuit payout to an individual by the state of Connecticut after the settlement was approved by a judge. Shehadi sued the state, the state department of Mental Health and Addiction Services and some medical staff after uncovering a scandal in which his brother, William Shehadi, was physically hurt and psychologically tortured by staff at Whiting Forensic Hospital.

William Shehadi was years in to a court-ordered 10-year stay at the maximum security facility on the Connecticut Valley Hospital Campus — the state’s only public psychiatric hospital — when staff who were charged with his care were seen on surveillance video abusing Shehadi by hitting him, kicking him, dousing him with liquids and forcing him to wear a diaper on his head.

William Shehadi, who is still in Whiting, was sentenced to the hospital after being found not guilty by reason of insanity in the death of his father.

Albert Shehadi, who is his brother’s conservator, said that he believes the abuse his brother endured, and his seemingly lifelong sentence to what he called “the Never Never Land of Whiting” could have been avoided if the state had more options available for supportive housing for people with mental illness.

The $9 million settlement, approved by a judge last week, will be placed into a trust fund for William Shehadi for the duration of his life. Upon his passing, his brother plans to donate the funds, he said.

Meanwhile, he wants to share his message that the state needs more supportive housing for, and services for, people with severe mental illness.

Albert Shehadi said that in their youth, his brother struggled socially and with mental illnesses, but it wasn’t until he moved out of the house on his own that his mental health deteriorated more severely.

William Shehadi, who grew up in Greenwich with his brother and parents, went to college in Pennsylvania. There, his brother said, his mental illness “went from a background condition to [limiting his] life around the edges, to a condition that overwhelmed his life.”

William Shehadi soon failed out of school and ended up in and out of inpatient services before settling into an apartment, where he was largely alone and independent, his brother said.

“He was released into a private apartment in an otherwise normal apartment building with an extremely limited support system,” Albert Shehadi said.

While William Shehadi was living in the apartment, a nonprofit worker would visit three times a day to make sure he took his medication, his brother said.

But otherwise, his brother said, “Here was this troubled man with a history of psychiatric instability who was left alone for the other 22.5 hours of the day with a TV set and his thoughts.”

“Not surprisingly, it didn’t have a good ending,” he said.

In 1995, Shehadi’s parents came to visit and a chaotic scene unfurled in the stairwell — his brother said he’s still unclear about what happened, but William Shehadi, a large, heavy man, landed on top of his frail 89-year-old father near the bottom of the stairs.

Their father suffered multiple severe injuries, including a punctured lung and a fractured jaw, according to Albert Shehadi. He died a little more than two weeks later at a hospital in Stamford.

Albert Shehadi said he believes that if William Shehadi had more supportive services or other housing options, their father would still be alive. And he believes that his brother’s life would have turned out much differently.

“I’m convinced that my father would have died a natural death if Bill had been put in an appropriately supported place for someone of his level of disability,” he said.

Albert Shehadi has been in a years-long legal battle advocating for justice for his brother.

Shehadi sued the state, the State Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services and its commissioner and 11 Whiting employees and administrators in the suit.

“This was a very difficult case, and the state and the parties can move forward now that it has been resolved,” a spokesperson for the office of Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a statement following the settlement.

The case led to the arrests of 10 Whiting staff members and the dismissal of more than 35 employees, including Whiting Chief of Patient Care Services Renata Kozak, whose employment was terminated for her role in the abuse.

Mark Cusson, a third-shift nurse who was seen on video taunting and abusing Shehadi, was found guilty by a jury in 2019 of multiple counts of intentional cruelty to persons and disorderly conduct in March 2017, according to court records. He is serving a five-year sentence at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield, according to the state Department of Correction.

Albert Shehadi said that even if his brother were to spend the rest of his life inside Whiting, which he hopes he doesn’t, he wants to ensure that no other patient, no other family, has to go through what he and his brother have endured.

He said that he hopes that state officials realize his brother’s life could have been different — that he didn’t have to be kept for 20 years at Whiting, which has so far racked up a bill of $8 million. That cost of care was also part of the lawsuit; the state agreed to waive the bill.

Albert Shehadi said he wants to send the message to the state that: “You could have put an amount of money that was a lot, lot smaller into an appropriate community residence for my brother in 1995 and my dad would have died of old age and my brother would have had a very different trajectory of his life. He may or may not have been mentally ill his whole life, but it definitely would not have been the horror show that he got in Whiting.”

Shehadi said he wants to partner with organizations that create new options for supportive housing and help increase the availability of those types of housing networks all across Connecticut.

Shehadi said his plan is to help financially support creative, nonprofit organizations that want to build alternative housing options for people with severe mental illnesses, such as community housing that provides more intense services than an independent apartment, without sentencing them to life in a maximum security hospital. He also wants to focus on creating more step-down housing options for people who are moving to lower-security level housing after being committed to places like Whiting.

And, he said, he wants to show the state that it can be done; that there are options for severely mentally ill people that are safe and affordable, but aren’t Whiting.

Shehadi said winning the lawsuit is only an important first step on a long road.

“Mentally ill people are still treated as second-class citizens in the state. So while this is a huge step forward for my brother, there is still the larger environment that my brother spent his life in that is going to condemn some future iteration of my brother — who has serious mental illness, who needs services, who needs something that he did not get — to less than humanity,” said Shehadi. “That’s still out there, so I’m still working.”

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