2 Lima Officials Implicated in Patient Assault Charges

By Edward P. Whelan

and Richard C. Widman

Staff Writers

LIMA, O. Two high-ranking officials at Lima State Hospital are expected to be implicated in charges of rape and sexual activities with patients, The Plain Dealer learned yesterday.

Reports of sexual activity between hospital employes and patients -some forced on the patients under duress have been previously disclosed in this newspaper's continuing investigation of conditions at Lima.

Present and former employes of the hospital have told The Plain Dealer of numerous incidents of sexual activity including the following

A Columbus girl was visited tre-

quently on her ward by a hospital administrator and was taken by him on various occasions into storerooms. Later, upon her release. she was visited by him at her home.

• A Toledo woman wrote a letter to a Lima official's wife after she was released from the hospital, accusing the husband of raping her. The letter was initially handed to a Lima security officer, who allegedly dismissed it with a smile and shrug.

A former go-go dancer from Dayton allegedly had sexual relations with the official involved with the Toledo

same woman.

• An 18-year-old girl was returned to Longview State Hospital in Cincinnati. a mental hospital, after she reportedly told state investigators she had been raped by an employe wearing a mask. She said she

was taken from her cell late at night into an empty storeroom at the Lima hospital.

WHILE these reporters have been investigating the cases, several of the attendants have turned the same information over the State Highway Patrol investigators assigned to the investigation under the direction of Nicholas Curci, an assistant state attorney general.

These reporters and the highway patrol investigators have also been checking reports from male patients of a hospital ward that a trusty-patient had forced them into homosexual acts with him and other patients, with the approval of hospital attendants.

The trusty-patient involved allegedly has been selling" patients to other inmates for homosexual activity, backing up his operations with threats of physical mis-

treatment with support from hospital employes.

Another case being investigated reportedly involves lesbian acts between a female attendant and patients in her ward.

CURCI, although he would not discuss the reports, said each is being thoroughly checked.

He said he also has received reports of patient mistreatment from Robert H. Mihlbaugh, the Lima lawyer who originally investigated hospital conditions for Atty. Gen. William J. Brown.

Curci, who has headed a state investigation of Plain Dealer disclosures about abuse of patients and other possible crimes at Lima, said he would deliver a preliminary report to Brown tomorrow.

Curci said the inquiry is expanding and would last another two or three weeks.