Frosh files suit against Delaware group home where Md. teen died

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Maryland has sued a Delaware group home — where a Maryland girl died in 2016 under mysterious circumstances — alleging the home failed to provide services for disabled children that it was obligated to provide.

The False Claims Act complaint against AdvoServ details staff shortages, a failure to provide supervised care for students, a failure to provide teachers for students and a failure to administer medication for students in the program.

“Although presenting themselves as a modern, progressive facility able to provide behavioral, medical and educational services to this special-needs population, the reality was more Dickensian,” the complaint said.

Overall the state paid more than $13 million to place students at AdvoServ between June 1, 2015, and Oct. 2016, when the contract was canceled following the death of Maryland teenager Janaia Barnhart.

The Maryland Department of Human Resources has contracted into facilities youth up to the age of 21 who were either already in foster care or under a voluntary agreement with parents. The children, who have developmental disabilities that require constant and specialized care, are placed into homes out of state when space is not available at facilities in the state.

The state is seeking to recover damages of more than $75,000 and penalties of $10,000 for each violation. 

The case was originally brought by a whistleblower under the False Claims Act of 2015, which means the whistleblower could be eligible to receive part of any award the state receives. Typically information about the whistleblower is revealed after the case is resolved.

The complaint was filed in Baltimore City Circuit Court.

“We allege that AdvoServ failed to deliver services it was hired to provide to the children in its care and that its failures endangered the health and safety of those children,” Brian E. Frosh, Maryland’s attorney general, said in a statement.

It is unclear who Maryland could recover damages from. Bellwether Behavioral Health, which is the new name for AdvoServ, was placed into receivership by a New Jersey judge last week. Requests for comment were referred by Bellwether to the New Jersey Department of Developmental Disabilities, which did not respond.

Frosh’s complaint did not include Barnhart’s death because the state did not have the right to sue on her behalf. Her family has filed its own lawsuit.

Julia Arfaa, an attorney representing Barnhart’s family, could not discuss the case until she reviewed the file, but said the result of the lawsuit was “favorable.”

Barnhart, 15, had been diagnosed with cognitive disabilities and an aggressive behavioral disorder and was set to be transferred to a Maryland facility.

After a dispute with staff at the Bear, Delaware, AdvoServ facility, Barnhart was in a small room with five staffers. Twenty-one minutes later, the staff called 911 to report that she was in cardiac arrest.

The teenager was taken first to a hospital Christiana, Delaware, and later to Nemours Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, where she died two days later.

While it did not touch on Barnhart’s case, the attorney general’s complaint detailed other cases where AdvoServ allegedly did not fulfill its contractual obligations, including requirements that it not use restraints on students.

The complaint said AdvoServ understated events in which it used restraints and that while the facility was understaffed, the staff that were there were also undertrained.

“When reporting incidents in which a child was physically restrained, Defendants minimized or concealed their staff’s role in certain incidents, and always claimed that staff had attempted to redirect or diffuse the behavior before resorting to restraints,” the complaint said. “In reality, staff rarely attempted other behavioral management techniques, consistently defaulting to physical restraints to deal with any potential problems.”

The facility failed to make sure children in its care received their medications, the complaint alleged. It said in a review of the records of 10 children, the state found 717 instances of a child not receiving medication he or she had been prescribed.

The complaint also said that while AdvoServ management knew about the problems, it never took the steps necessary to correct them, even after an incident where a Maryland student ran away from the facility “to engage in a sexual relationship with a staff member.”

Typical punishments for staff included memos or write-ups in personnel files, actions the complaint called “minimal” and which “did not result in any improvement.”