When they were assigned rooms on opposite sides of the hall at a North Florida state psychiatric hospital, that decision would eventually lead to Sean’s death. It also would spawn five lawsuits, three adult protection investigations, two inspector general reports, two licensing probes and an administrative inquiry. The state already has paid nearly $800,000 to one whistleblower, and is facing another in court in April.
But if there were lessons to be learned from Sean’s abuse and death, administrators at the state Department of Children and Families seemed determined not to learn them. In the wake of Sean’s Jan. 12, 2021, death at Northeast Florida State Hospital, the state has faced repeated accusations from his family, attorneys, its own employees and even the local sheriff’s office of covering up its mistakes. One hospital employee testified that her signature was falsified in records identifying staff responsible for the supervision of both Sean and Loyd. The hospital’s medical director also confirmed the falsification, acknowledging in sworn testimony that looking at copies of the phony records made her “nauseous.” Surveillance video of the attack was either not preserved or was deliberately destroyed.
The then-director of DCF’s Adult Protective Services Department concluded in a September 2021 investigation that the hospital’s top two administrators had neglected Sean in the months before his death by failing to transfer him to a medical unit in the same hospital, and were responsible for what he endured. “You cannot have events like this occurring in a [locked] facility and…nobody be held responsible,” Roy Carr, DCF’s then-director of Adult Protective Services, testified in a June 7, 2022, court hearing to decide whether a whistleblower deserved to be reinstated.
But for months DCF’s leaders buried the report that heaped blame on the two high-ranking administrators for Sean’s abuse. They finally concluded that while Sean had been neglected and mistreated at the hospital, no agency employee was accountable. The administrators who at one point were identified as responsible for Sean’s lacerated face, broken ribs, and the “stomping” of his abdomen and groin area — and, finally, his death — have never been disciplined. Instead, a doctor who blew the whistle on the dysfunctional hospital was fired. The Tallahassee judge who ordered DCF to reinstate the doctor excoriated the agency for trying to pin the abuse on four low-level workers who weren’t responsible — while protecting their bosses.
