Lorrie Coleman and Jamie Burrous were fired last week for seeing – but not reporting – abuse at Ponderosa House, a Lawrence group home for developmentally disabled adults.

On Wednesday, they accused their former employer, Community Living Opportunities, of lying.

“I think they fired us to save their butts from the state,” said Burrous, who had worked at the home for almost three months.

Burrous, Coleman and eight others, including their immediate supervisor, were fired last week after CLO higher-ups concluded that the supervisor had abused residents and that the others had failed to report the problem.

But Burrous, 20, said she reported an instance of abuse on April 25, two days before CLO officials say they first realized the house manager was hostile toward residents.

“They knew,” Burrous said. “They just didn’t do anything about it.”

Coleman, 38, said she, too, reported the house manager on April 25.

“Actually, I complained about her a couple days earlier, and I was told to put it in writing,” she said. “So I did. I turned in a seven-page letter on April 25.”

‘What’s this?’

The next evening, Coleman said, she was called into the house manager’s office and confronted.

Lorrie Coleman, center in blue, and her former co-worker, Jamie Burrous, back right, say that they were unfairly fired from their jobs at Community Living Opportunities. Now jobless, Coleman is concerned that she won't be able to provide for her kids. Coleman's kids are, pictured on Wednesday from left, Davaughn Pellis, 12, Kionna Coleman, 10, Zackiyah Sanders, 7, and Nina Atkins, 7.

“She pointed to the computer screen and said, ‘What’s this?’ She was mad,” Coleman said, explaining that someone in CLO’s front office had shared the complaint with the house manager in an e-mail.

“She wanted to know what it was about, and I told her she was mean all the time to the clients and to the staff,” Coleman said. “She wanted to get in this big argument about it, but I wouldn’t. I just left.”

Coleman said when she lodged the complaint, she had assumed her identity would be protected.

“I was scared to death,” she said.

Investigation begins

CLO officials said they started an investigation into the house manager’s actions on April 27 after a supervisor overheard employees recalling an incident of abuse.

The house manager was immediately suspended and later fired.

Also on April 27, CLO reported the then-suspected abuse to the Kansas Department on Aging, the state agency charged with inspecting group homes for the developmentally disabled. The department conducted a separate investigation.

Jamie Price, a spokeswoman for CLO, confirmed that an employee had, in fact, turned in a letter during the interviews on April 27.

“It was dated April 25, but it wasn’t received until April 27,” she said.

Price declined to say whether Coleman had turned in the letter. “I can’t comment on current or former employees,” she said.

Employee disputes timing

Price insisted that CLO launched its investigation at the first inkling of abuse.

“That’s what our investigation found and that’s what the Department on Aging’s investigation found,” she said, noting that all of the employees were interviewed by both agencies and that no one had said anything about reporting abuse before April 27.

Coleman disputes this.

Price said CLO reported the house manager’s actions to the Lawrence Police Department.

“We figure they were the best qualified to determine if this was a criminal matter,” she said.

Price said she has been questioned by police.

Coleman said she met with police Wednesday.

“Most of what they talked to me about was the (house manager) manhandling the clients, which I did not see – if I had I would have confronted here right then,” Coleman said.

Coleman said her complaint centered on the house manager yelling at residents and staff.

“I liked working there – I’d only been there like three weeks,” she said. “But (the house manager) was yelling at me all the time, and I kept thinking I must be doing something wrong. Finally, I said something to one of the staff and they said, ‘Oh, she yells at everybody,’ and that’s when I said ‘This is wrong, I’m not going to put up with it.'”

Burrous said she’s been asked to meet with police Friday.

Abuse findings

The abuse has been confirmed by CLO and Department on Aging investigations. Among the findings:

¢ The supervisor, a woman, taunted, manhandled and verbally abused the home’s eight residents, all of whom are considered severely disabled.

¢ To punish bad behavior, the house manager would, on occasion, throw a resident’s meal in the trash.

¢ During the day, a resident who’s blind and unable to speak, was often made to stand “for long periods of time” in an effort to keep her from falling asleep and to cause her to sleep at night.

Oftentimes, people who are blind lose track of time and may sleep during the day and be awake at night.

¢ When the blind resident wet herself, the house manager made her stand outside alone in urine-soaked clothing, for three to four hours on at least one occasion.

The house manager knew the resident feared being left alone outside.

Coleman and Burrous said the blind woman was not incontinent and only wet herself when she was upset.

¢ Several employees said they feared losing their jobs if they reported the supervisor’s abuse.

Workers suspended, fired

The Department on Aging completed its investigation May 24. That morning, all 10 employees at Ponderosa House, 205 E. 26th St., were suspended. By the next afternoon, they had been fired.

CLO president Mike Strouse last week said the workers were fired for not reporting the abuse as soon as it was seen or detected.

Whether CLO will be fined for the house manager’s actions remains to be seen.

“We may have something to announce Thursday or Friday,” said Department on Aging spokeswoman Karen Sipes.

CLO operates 38 homes in Lawrence. All but two have three or four residents.

Ponderosa House is one of two CLO homes in Lawrence with eight residents.

Earlier this year, the Disability Rights Center of Kansas sued CLO on behalf of four residents it claimed had been mistreated at Elmwood House, 1424 Elmwood St., in 2004.

Other cases

Also, two CLO employees were charged with various forms of criminal abuse last year.

The employees, Eric Scott Wyatt and Dustin Dean Taylor, were charged in separate felony cases after allegedly abusing a resident at Ponderosa House.

According to documents filed in Douglas County District Court, Wyatt and Dean were accused of several incidents of abuse involving a client described as having Parkinson’s disease symptoms including tremors and difficulty moving.

The alleged abuse included:

¢ beating the client “about his head and face” with the heel of his own shoe after the client accidentally fell.

¢ shoving a credit card in the client’s mouth because Wyatt “was angry with (the client) for putting things in his mouth,”

¢ grabbing the client by the lower jaw by jamming a hand into his or her mouth to keep them standing.

In March, Wyatt’s attorney, Michael Clarke, asked the court to dismiss the charges because the patterns of patient abuse in CLO-owned group homes were not limited to Wyatt or Taylor.

Clarke argued that other lawsuits, including the civil suit filed by the Disability Rights Center of Kansas, showed that other CLO employees also allegedly abused clients at other CLO homes without facing criminal charges.

An investigator with the Kansas Attorney General’s Office said in a court filing that he had not interviewed or reviewed documents other than those pertaining specifically to Wyatt or Taylor and had no evidence of other abuse occurring within CLO-owned group homes.

Price said the incidents do not constitute a trend.

“I’d say these are three separate unfortunate events,” she said.