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Part 2: Criminal neglect, overlooked cruelty
Rotten food, violence and suspicious deaths - and state regulators failed to see it.
Owens did not respond to several phone calls and a written request for comment.
Five months later, a Veterans Affairs social worker, Christopher Leahy, sent the state a five-page complaint detailing mistreatment of one of his clients, another disabled veteran.
Leahy, a registered nurse, touched on some of the abuses that would result in criminal prosecution, including forced labor, financial improprieties and neglect.
Accompanying that complaint, a VA psychiatrist sent the state her own memo telling of a "highly disturbing" discussion about that veteran with Tina Fake.
"I began to question her mental and emotional stability," wrote the psychiatrist, C.E. Zupanick, saying Fake "expressed intense contempt and dislike of this patient."
This time, Owens went to the home himself.
After interviewing Tina Fake and residents, he found each allegation unsubstantiated. Nobody complained of ill treatment, his report said. Residents called the newspaper-stuffing voluntary.
He never spoke to the veteran Leahy had written about; he was unavailable, the report said, concluding: "There appears to have been unmet expectations on both sides."
A detective's discovery
The Fakes might still be running the Reaching Out home if VA officials had not called police in February 2005 about Sees, the badly beaten Vietnam veteran.
When Sees said he had hurt himself, doctors didn't believe him.
"I don't want to get anybody in trouble," Sees said when Detective Dipalo spoke to him.
By tracking down victims the state had never interviewed, Dipalo quickly learned the truth that had eluded regulators for years.
A month after he began his investigation, Dipalo served a search warrant on another home owned by the Fakes - one small enough that it was exempt from welfare department regulation. He walked in and found 43-year-old Paul A. McGovern slumped in a recliner, clad only in urine-soaked diapers and a T-shirt. McGovern seemed to be having seizures.
He discovered Janet Weaber, 64, in a wheelchair in the basement. She had been partially paralyzed by a stroke.
Weaber, who had been living in the basement for years, had been barred from seeing relatives. Her phone, which she was paying for, had been removed.
McGovern and Weaber were alone in the house.
Dipalo would find that the beneficiaries on Weaber's pension had been changed to Clifford Fake and the Fakes' two children.
"I was thinking, how could this have gone on this long?" Dipalo said.
In April 2005, after Dipalo told them that he was launching a criminal investigation, welfare officials moved to close Reaching Out.
