Lima Ex-Aide Admits He Signed Untrue Report of Beating

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attendants and put in the cell for two weeks' solitary Confinement. The charge man was upset not because anyone picked on the boy but because the trusty kicked him in the head. He realized what could happen. There might be an investigation.

LATER in the afternoon we filled out reports and we all signed it. I signed it too. Why? What else could you do. This is a common thing up there. One person can't fight the entire organization by himself. If you do, they let you go if you cause too many ripples. So we all signed it, saying the boy was fleeing from the guards and he cut himself in the head.

"In the afternoon, the day supervisor, Noah Rogers, came in the ward and had a discussion with Dick Counts, the charge man, and said we were going to have to smooth this whole thing over because it looked pretty bad. He ok'd the report with the knowledge of what happened.'

DePalma also told of a hospital patient who was kept in a solitary confinement cell for nearly three years.

"GUARDS WOULD NOT even visit." said DePalma. "His food was given by trustys. He was animal-like and would crawl on all fours, or be cowering in a corner completely naked. His wrists were shackled together with leather shackles attached from a loop around his waist. The only items in the cell with him were a blanket and metal pot for his excrement. He was taken out once a week to be showered.

He was not bathed at any other time.”

DePalma said that any patient placed in solitary confinement is stripped, placed in leather handcuffs and made to sleep on a cement floor without a mattress.

DePalma said that another patient was severely beaten by an inmate with an iron rod in August 1967. He said nothing came of the incident. DePalma said the victim spent two weeks in a private hospital in a coma and almost died.

DePalma blamed the incident on a supervisor who had refused to discipline the unruly patient. According to DePalma, the patient was acting irrationally, "running patient was acting irrationally, "running around from one end of the ward to the oth-

er.

""

“WE CALLED the supervisor and told him to take the man to another ward. He said he did try to talk to the patient but the patient did not respond, so the supervisor left. He told us "Oh, he'll be all right. Let him go."

"We called the supervisor twice again to take the man off the ward. He did

nothing. Meantime a fellow attendant, a very sickly man who is in his 60s, left the ward without informing me.

*About 4 a.m. I noticed the boisterous patient going into the fire hose room, where he broke off an iron hook, a hanger for the clothes. Shortly thereafter, noticing that the old attendant was not around, I saw this man come down the hall laughing. He was really laughing. He was holding the iron rod in his hand. I forced him into a solitary cell with little trouble. But he just kept laughing. Then everybody came upstairs.

*

They found a man with his head split open. Other patients said the incident was due to a homosexual triangle.

“HAD THEY TAKEN the man off properly upon our request, this would never have happened.

"When I filed my report I detailed exactly what had occurred. The hospital authorities tried to get me to change my report because of the trouble it might cause. However, I refused. Although apparently the Ohio State Patrol was called to investigate the incident, no one ever talked to me,

ant who walked off, a violation of rules, or nothing ever happened to the other attendthe supervisor.”

DePalma said patients feared going to the dentist in the hospital infirmary because "he refused to use pain killers and was unsanitary.'

""

"I remember seeing the dentist clean off an instrument with his handkerchief and

shove the instrument in his hands back in the patient's mouth."

DePalma said he resigned because he was ostracized and was given "crummy" details. He said he was assigned to the male geriatrics ward for refusing to alter his report of the beating with the iron rod.

"THIS WAS THE FILTHIEST and most depressing of all the wards in the hospital,"

DePalma said. "In the summertime, the old men would carry food from the cafeteria in their pockets and fall asleep either in the beds or chairs. Ants would crawl all over them and nobody would do anything.”

DePalma said most guards in the hospital worked two jobs and were tired when coming to the hospital.

"There doesn't seem to be any racial problem in the hospital," he said. "They treat all of the inmates alike -like dogs.

"They like to make pets of the blacks, the ones that are funny; the guards give them a break. You know, like giving a cooperative dog a special break.

"The guards are not even generous with the hospital supplies. They only give three or four sheets of toilet paper a day to a patient and at the weekly shave, four patients must share one razor blade.'

DePalma worked at the hospital from April 1966 to August 1967 while a senior at Xavier University. He commuted to the Cincinnati campus twice a week.

DePalma also spent one year in law school at Ohio Northern University in nearby Ada.

DePalma, who intends to re-enter law school next year, says he resigned from the hospital because "the brutality was too much.