Part 2: Criminal neglect, overlooked cruelty

Looking back on it now, Jeffrey Sees believes he was lucky to have been beaten so badly. It was his ticket into a hospital - and out of hell.

"I don't think I would have lasted much longer," he says. "I think they would have killed me."

Sees, a Vietnam veteran with mental-health problems, had spent two tortured months at the privately run, state-regulated Reaching Out Personal Care Home in Palmyra, Pa.

Savagely kicked and manhandled at the home, overdosed with psychotropic drugs, Sees, then 56, arrived at a local veterans hospital in February 2005 with fractured ribs, a broken arm, and bruises over 60 percent of his body.

It wasn't just the physical abuse that made life at Reaching Out miserable for the 20 or so residents, a criminal investigation later found. The couple who ran the facility, Tina and Clifford Fake, kept Sees and other residents isolated from their families. They forced them to do unpaid menial labor. They fed them spoiled food retrieved from Dumpsters, stole their money, and beat them when they complained.

Two residents died after failing to get emergency medical attention.

But all of that, even the deaths, failed to generate action by the state Department of Public Welfare, whose job is to protect residents of personal-care homes.

Not that officials hadn't been warned. Four times in 2003 and 2004, state records show, state regulators looked into detailed complaints about the Reaching Out home and rejected them as unfounded when, in fact, they were largely accurate.

The case is a stark example of what an Inquirer investigation has found to be a years-long record of failure in Pennsylvania's program of monitoring residential facilities known as personal-care homes.

State regulators missed the beatings, the neglect, the psychological abuse.

Even the wreckage of Sees' broken body didn't register: A state bureaucrat accepted Tina Fake's assurances that Sees had somehow harmed himself. He marked the case "no action," state records show.

In an interview, Karen Kroh, who took over as the state's top regulator of personal-care homes after the case came to light, said the department would do things much differently today.

At the time, she said, many investigations were haphazard: "A short visit to the home, in and out, interview people at the home, and we were done.

"Now we would interview all the staff and all the residents, separate from the home if need be. . . . I just told one of my staff I don't care if they have to fly to Hawaii to interview a doctor, if that is what's required."

Luckily for other victims - including a wheelchair-bound woman locked in a basement - the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reported Sees' injuries to Michael A. Dipalo, a Lebanon County detective.

After Dipalo and his federal counterparts gathered a mountain of evidence, the Fakes pleaded guilty to state and federal crimes involving the beating of Sees, the deaths of three elderly people, and myriad other felonies.

"You just couldn't make these things up if you were writing a script for a horror movie," Lebanon County District Attorney David J. Arnold Jr. said at a recent hearing.

Founded in deception

The Fakes' operation was founded in deception.