She Was Smacked at the Group Home. He Cowered in Fear. Bruises Everywhere.
The people who worked at the brick building that housed 24 developmentally disabled residents called it the “Bronx Zoo.”
One worker regularly hit a resident while he ate, making him cower in fear at mealtimes. Another worker would repeatedly “smack, punch and push” a female resident, sometimes when she tried to watch staff members cook. A female worker sat in the lap of a male resident who used a wheelchair, placing his hands on her breasts and moving provocatively while other employees laughed and cheered, according to records and depositions.
Darlene Ruffin, an employee turned whistle-blower, told state investigators that she saw bruising every day. “I couldn’t keep up,” she said.
The abuse first came to light five years ago, leading to a public outcry and an investigation by the state, which runs the facility, called the Union Avenue I.R.A., in the Bronx. But in a new review of the case, The New York Times found that when officials tried to fire 13 employees for abuse or neglect at the home, they failed each time.
The workers were shielded by the state arbitration process, whose shortcomings — a focus of earlier Times reporting — often return abusive employees to the job.
The Bronx case is emblematic of a larger problem across New York. Hundreds of pages of disciplinary records from 2015 to 2017, obtained by The Times under the state open-records law, show that more than one-third of the employees statewide found to have committed abuse-related offenses at group homes and other facilities were put back on the job, often after arbitration with the worker’s union.
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