Inside a ‘Hell on Earth’ in Oklahoma

Two summers ago, Detective Frank Bruno was at the police station in Enid, Okla., when a woman walked in with a story to tell.

In Enid, a city of 50,000 people dotted by Depression-era grain terminals, Mr. Bruno typically worked on robberies and financial crimes. But in this case, the woman, Apera Tobiason, was a treatment specialist at the Robert M. Greer Center, an institution for people with developmental disabilities that sat on a sprawling campus on the main road into town.

She was upset. She told Mr. Bruno that she had started working at Greer the previous summer, writing treatment plans for residents who had the mental capacity of young children. At first, she had been excited. Her brother has a disability, so the work felt personal. But she quickly realized that Greer was no place she would want her brother to be.

In early 2023, she had encountered three residents who had black eyes or head injuries and grew suspicious when they were all explained away as accidental. The problem, she said, was that many of her fellow staff members were barely trained and regarded residents as nuisances requiring discipline.

But her reports to her superiors, which she was soon filing weekly, if not daily, seemed to go nowhere. She told the police that little of what she saw was reported to the state, as required by law, and often only after injuries had healed.

After she raised her concerns, Ms. Tobiason said, a woman she worked with called her a snitch, and deliberately bumped her shoulder in a hallway. She said she was made to feel by her co-workers that her empathy for the residents was the problem.

“They absolutely hated that I was nice to them,” she said.

She had sought a meeting with Mr. Bruno after receiving an alarming phone call from another police officer two days earlier. He told her that fliers with her photo had been found all over town, advertising her for sex work. “Item for sale,” they said. “Want your Popsicle blown?” They included tear-off slips with her phone number. She went looking, and found them on utility poles, in bathrooms, at public parks and at a vocational training site used by Greer.

Her supervisor declined to intervene, saying it wasn’t clearly a company issue. Ms. Tobiason could be heard crying during the conversation, which she secretly recorded. “You have to get your emotion under control,” her supervisor said.

“I have people with my photo, and my number, calling me late at night,” she protested.

He later chided her for “not taking any kind of responsibility for your part in this.”

Mr. Bruno, 30, who had joined the police force after serving as an Army medic, had been looking for a case where he could have an impact, do some good. He thought he might have found one.

“These are probably some of the most vulnerable people in this state, and they’re up there by themselves,” he said in an interview later. “Somebody needs to actually care about these people and do something right by them.”

Reports of abuse and neglect have long been endemic in the care of those with developmental disabilities. For decades, Liberty Healthcare, a private company with contracts in more than a dozen states, has pitched itself as an alternative for disabled adult services that typically are provided directly by states or charities. But in Oklahoma, it has left behind a trail of litigation and outrage, highlighting the potential problems with outsourcing care of a largely powerless population to a profit-making company operating with limited oversight.

While Greer has received widespread attention in Oklahoma, The New York Times interviewed two key insiders for the first time: Ms. Tobiason, as well as an elusive former resident who provided a rare firsthand account of what happened and emerged as a critical potential witness who could open the door to criminal prosecutions.

This article is also based on dozens of accounts from families, regulators, the police and Liberty employees, as well as police reports, court affidavits and personnel records. Photographs and medical records documented years of injuries, as did decades of Greer’s own internal abuse reports, along with recordings of interviews with victims and suspects.

What they showed was how difficult it is to hold the perpetrators of such abuse accountable. Criminal charges were brought against eight Greer employees based on the investigation that Mr. Bruno would undertake. But the cases were dropped before they went to trial. Even after a new contractor took over this year, some managers who failed to heed abuse reports kept their jobs or were promoted.

Together, these accounts told a story of a nightmare that went on behind locked doors for years, its victims often unable to recognize the depravity of what was happening to them, let alone sound an alarm.

“It’s just a tragedy that should never happen,” Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, a Republican, said in an interview. “Whatever control that company got in place, it didn’t work.”

During a half-century-long push to deinstitutionalize care for people with mental illness and developmental disabilities, state hospitals that had acted as little more than warehouses were largely emptied out. After federal litigation in the 1980s pushed Oklahoma toward more community-based care, the state contracted work to Liberty, a company that provides a variety of services to support challenging populations.

Liberty’s operations have been the subject of controversy before. A 2007 Times report revealed failures at a Liberty-run sex offender treatment center in Florida, which one mental health counselor called “a cesspool of despair and depression and drug abuse.” In California, State Senator Brian Jones, the Republican minority leader, complained in 2023 that Liberty “sneaks into unsuspecting communities” to “secretly release dangerous” predators.

Company officials declined to answer most questions about Greer, citing continuing litigation. But in court filings, Liberty denied many allegations of abuse and inadequate oversight, contending that it “performed within accepted industry standards.” It fired several Greer employees accused of misconduct and agreed to some corrective actions, including instituting morning meetings to review what happened the previous evening.

As Mr. Bruno began investigating, he learned that state regulators had already cataloged a spate of serious problems, including accusations of beatings by staff members. One resident was blinded in both eyes. Another suffered leg injuries that a doctor likened to those seen in a car crash. Mr. Bruno noticed that injuries were typically reported as accidental. It “got worse and worse and worse with the more that I found out,” he said.

In the months that followed, families of more than 20 residents, including one who died at Greer last year, hired lawyers who gathered evidence backing up abuse claims leveled by Ms. Tobiason and other whistle-blowers.

The lawyers had dozens of photos showing residents with black eyes or covered with large patches of deep purple bruising. Some residents claimed that they had been sexually assaulted, according to state records.

Many accounts focused on a cadre of men on the night shift, several in their early 20s, whom residents accused of routinely engaging in abusive behavior. The residents described enduring “choke-and-revive” games that appeared to be no more than an effort by the night crew to pass time.

But the residents often had trouble understanding what was happening. One told a specialist brought in by Mr. Bruno that a caregiver “tried to choke me with a towel” and in a videotaped interview described getting his head dipped in a toilet.

“Is that a no-no?” he had asked.

As Mr. Bruno widened his inquiry, it appeared that plenty of people had tried to raise alarms. A former Greer nurse filed a lawsuit against Liberty in which she said the facility had become a “hell on earth for many of its residents.”

The Oklahoma Disability Law Center, a federally funded nonprofit, filed formal complaints in May 2023 with two state agencies. RoseAnn Duplan, a policy specialist with the center, said in an interview that her group saw “almost identical bruising in multiple different people.” Joy Turner, the group’s investigations director, added that injuries were routinely “coming from the same unit, with the same staff. I mean, how do you not recognize that?”

The state took little immediate action. The next year, a state-funded report by a consulting firm cited “a series of seriously abusive situations perpetrated by residential staff,” and also found that ongoing management problems were largely allowed to continue.

One of the first things Mr. Bruno did was help track down closed-circuit camera footage where the fliers had been hung. Four of Ms. Tobiason’s co-workers, all women, could be seen taking part.

She went to court and was granted protection orders against the women. But with fliers already seeded across the community, police officers worried about her safety; she took a leave from work and left town, giving her ex-husband partial custody of her children.

Mr. Bruno began digging into abuse episodes detailed by Ms. Tobiason. One common thread was Jonathan Martinez, a care provider hired in 2021 at the age of 19. He was named in abuse or misconduct allegations involving at least seven residents.

He had already come to the Enid police’s attention in a referral in May 2023 from state regulators, after they substantiated allegations that Mr. Martinez had punched a female resident in the face who wasn’t sitting down in a van. An internal Greer report said she had poked herself in the eye.

Another case was that of Jaymee Muns, 28, a nonverbal autistic woman with a history of physical outbursts, according to her mother, Shawna Moore. At Greer, she appeared in 112 injury reports from May 2022 to May 2023, documents show, culminating in two detached retinas that went largely unexplained. She lost sight in both eyes.

Ms. Moore said her daughter had been a prolific creator of pastel drawings, bursting with color and shape. But her injuries changed all that.

“She’s no longer an artist because she doesn’t have eyes,” Ms. Moore said, adding that her daughter is now heavily medicated. “Her life is gone now. She sits in a chair and that’s what she does.”

That same year Mr. Bruno asked Liberty’s internal investigator, responsible for examining reports of abuse and other problems, why her caseload increased 50 percent from a year earlier. He was concerned by her dismissive response. She told him that she normally started investigations believing “the client is lying about what happened,” he said later, describing the conversation.

Another Greer employee, who asked that his name not be published because of threats he had received after cooperating with the police, tried to explain the challenges of working at Greer to Mr. Bruno. Residents typically have mental illnesses as well as developmental disabilities and often end up there when their families are unable to control them.

“Some of them get real violent,” the worker told Mr. Bruno in a videotaped interview. “And you’ve got to take them down. You try to do it to the best of your ability without you getting hurt and without them getting hurt.”

The man said a culture of violence had set in.

“A lot of people — what shocked me — were bragging about that,” he said. “That’s just their mentality, you got to beat them up.” He told the detective that some Liberty employees came to work “itching for a fight.”

By early August 2023, Mr. Martinez was the subject of several investigations. (Mr. Martinez and his lawyer declined to discuss the claims.) The state Office of Client Advocacy, which monitors Greer, put in place a safety plan barring Mr. Martinez from working with residents while the inquiries were underway. But Liberty put him back to work weeks later, saying that the company’s own internal inquiry had cleared him, according to police reports.

Mr. Bruno also noted in his case files that reports of abuse became more frequent after Ed Webster, 53, was promoted to night shift supervisor on the facility’s west wing. A Liberty employee and a resident both told Mr. Bruno that Mr. Webster had sometimes acted as a lookout when abuse was taking place, once warning others when a nurse was approaching. (In a text, Mr. Webster said that “none of that is true,” adding that he was “trying to forget and move on.”)

In September 2023, Mr. Martinez was fired.

By then, Mr. Bruno was talking to the office of the district attorney, Tommy Humphries, about bringing criminal charges. Mr. Humphries was skeptical, and in interviews, both he and Mr. Bruno highlighted a common impediment in such cases.

“Oftentimes your victims cannot tell you what happened,” Mr. Bruno said, adding that one resident in his 20s who might have been a witness “has the mentality of a 2- or 3-year-old.”

But a victim would soon emerge who was not like the others.

‘I Used to Be an Outlaw’

Mr. Lott was not supposed to be at Greer. He was not developmentally disabled, but he had been in and out of prison, fighting drug addiction for years. When he once again faced probable prison time after leading police officers on a chase, he decided to “play dumb,” he later told Mr. Bruno, leading the state to declare him mentally incompetent. He ended up at Greer.

For a few weeks, it did seem like a better option than prison. But then, he said, he started hearing strange noises outside his room in the west wing.

There was paper covering the window on his door, blocking his view. But he could hear disturbing sounds: The squeaking of sneakers, almost like a basketball game was being played. What sounded like the thudding of fists against flesh. Moaning and pleading.

He started turning up the television in his room. “I couldn’t listen to it no more,” he later said. “It was that bad. It was just, like, breaking my heart.”

Eventually, Mr. Lott scraped a small hole in the window covering and was stunned by what he saw going on in the common area. A group of young male employees, night shift regulars, were holding down a resident and beating him. The same thing happened again a few days later, and on many other nights.

“I’d be like, man, they’re going to kill this person,” he said in an interview. He would also see staff members routinely bribing one resident with fast food to beat others. “It was like chicken fighting,” he said, adding, “They would take bets.”

Like Ms. Tobiason, he tried alerting Greer supervisors, but made little headway. Then he urged a sympathetic caregiver to pull up the shirt of a resident who had been beaten. The caregiver, alarmed by bruising he saw, informed a supervisor who knew about Mr. Bruno’s investigation and told the detective.

On Oct. 18, 2023, Mr. Bruno approached Mr. Lott at an off-site recycling center that employed Greer residents.

“I’m not big on snitching,” Mr. Lott said as they began talking in a small conference room. “You know, I used to be an outlaw.”

But he was ready to talk. Mr. Lott recounted to Mr. Bruno what he had heard and seen: Beatings. Waterboarding. Victims pleading for mercy. He said he was especially worried about a Black resident with a friendly disposition whom he called his “buddy.” This was a curious development. Mr. Lott had once been a member of the Aryan Brotherhood while in prison and still has a swastika on his left hand, but said he had renounced racism. “You know, I’m a Christian,” he told Mr. Bruno.

His new friend was a particular target of the west wing night crew. One night, Mr. Lott said, he saw his friend being held down in a chair, with towels wrapped around his neck.

“They’d take Sonic cups and pour it on his face,” he said, “make him pass out and beat him awake.” (A similar account appears in a lawsuit brought on behalf of another former Greer resident, Matthew Owens, alleging that he was “strangled” with bedsheets or wet towels until unconscious, then struck “repeatedly until he woke up.”)

Mr. Lott said “it was a horrible sound” when his friend was jarred back awake during the beatings.

“I’m thinking, man, I need to tell somebody this, but I don’t want to be a snitch,” he said. “But I actually talked to my mama about it and she was like, ‘Richard, if that’s going on, ain’t nobody going to say nothing to you about snitching.’”

By mid-November 2023, Mr. Bruno had convinced the district attorney, and arrests began, with Mr. Martinez among the first, charged with felony abuse by a caretaker and conspiracy. A week later, Mr. Webster and two other employees were charged.

Days later, Mr. Bruno and a state investigator sat down with Hugh Sage, Liberty’s top Oklahoma executive, in a conversation later recounted in an interview and a police report. Mr. Sage told them that he had not seen any injuries to residents. Mr. Bruno, exasperated, pulled out several of what he called “black and blue” photos showing injuries.

“I was like, you really want to tell me I made this up?” Mr. Bruno recalled. In a report, he wrote that “over the course of the interview, it became more and more obvious” that the administrator “had little to no idea what was actually going on.”

Mr. Sage stepped down a couple of weeks later and did not respond to requests for comment. After arrests began, Liberty officials promised to “fully cooperate,” releasing a statement saying they were “deeply disturbed by the reports of abuse and consider such behavior to be wholly inappropriate.”

For Mr. Bruno and family members who had pushed to get answers, it seemed as if a reckoning was at hand.

But their optimism was short-lived. In January 2024, five employees who had been suspended for abuse allegations, but were not among those criminally charged, resurfaced at Greer. Under the direction of supervisors from Liberty’s corporate office in Pennsylvania, the employees were told to shred a dozen large trash cans worth of documents, according to court records.

Lawyers for many residents with pending lawsuits got a temporary restraining order halting the shredding, but three days had passed. The company characterized it as routine document destruction and in a statement “categorically denied” any effort “to destroy evidence.” But a few days later, during a civil court hearing, Liberty’s human resources manager in Oklahoma at the time, Stacie Caywood, testified that someone had been sent to a local store to buy five paper shredders to carry out the work.

“You sent somebody to get five shredders during the middle of multiple criminal and civil investigations?” Ross Leonoudakis, a lawyer for one of the plaintiffs, asked during the hearing.

“Yes, sir,” Ms. Caywood replied.

The same week the shredding occurred, the State Department of Health issued a report accusing Greer of failing to investigate allegations of physical or sexual abuse involving six residents.

Mr. Bruno hoped that his own case would finally curtail such episodes.

But then problems emerged. By the summer of 2024, Mr. Lott, the only resident eyewitness without a mental disability, had been released from Greer and left town. When he couldn’t be found, Mr. Humphries, the district attorney, moved to drop all criminal charges.

Mr. Lott resurfaced in September in a jail near the Arkansas border, detained on an old burglary warrant, and Mr. Bruno rushed over to talk to him. This time, Mr. Lott added a new element to his account. He said that he, too, had been a victim, but had previously been too embarrassed to discuss it.

He told Mr. Bruno that the night crew at one point had covered his face with a towel, turned the shower on and streamed water over his face.

“You’d feel like you’re drowning, but you really wasn’t,” he told The Times. “I never even knew the word until I explained it to the detectives, and they said, that’s called ‘waterboarding.’” He also claimed that he had been sexually abused by Greer employees on several occasions.

Mr. Bruno believed Mr. Lott was telling the truth, and pressed to refile charges.

But Mr. Humphries was still not convinced.

“Obviously there are some inappropriate things that have gone on,” he said later in an interview. But he said he felt that Mr. Lott had changed his story, and he was no longer certain that his testimony would stand up in court.

In May, Mr. Martinez was arrested again — this time on drug trafficking and gun charges. According to court filings, he was found with 44 grams of cocaine, mostly in a safe, and an AR-15 rifle. He pleaded not guilty, and both he and his lawyer declined to comment on the new case, which is pending.

A Change in Management

The controversy over Greer generated months of headlines in local news outlets like The Frontier and The Oklahoman, which reported last year that the Department of Human Services was seeking to continue the state’s contract with Liberty.

The department said in recent statements that it had considered keeping Liberty amid “intensive safety remediation efforts,” and pointed to several actions the state took after the scandal became public, including putting monitors inside Greer and installing cameras. Liberty, in court filings, defended its management, saying that none of its actions were “unlawful, reckless, willful” or “malicious,” and in a brief statement to The Times said its local staff had included “experienced clinical and operations managers.”

The plan to retain Liberty drew immediate pushback.

“I told them they are not renewing that contract,” said Senator Paul Rosino, a Republican who chairs the Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee. “Why in the world would we renew a contract,” he added, “for people who tortured and abused people?”

The state ultimately terminated the contract, a move that Governor Stitt said was made “as soon as we felt like we legally could,” adding that the situation was “just an absolute tragedy.”

Liberty continues to operate elsewhere, however. In its home base, Pennsylvania, it has contracted with the state since 2015 to oversee investigations of abuse of people with developmental disabilities. The state said it recently reviewed completed cases “to ensure proper handling.”

Greer was taken over in February by Respectful Partners, an Oklahoma company that operates group homes. Concerns linger. Some people currently working at Greer expressed unease to The Times that the new company had retained or promoted several former Liberty officials, including Ms. Tobiason’s old supervisor.

Ms. Tobiason, who has filed her own lawsuit against Liberty, said she found it hard to believe that there were so few repercussions.

“I feel like the D.A. not prosecuting just makes people more scared to stand up and speak out,” she said.

Mr. Lott has also joined litigation against Liberty, but wonders why he talked to the police. “I kind of feel like I wasted my time,” he said.

Mr. Bruno is still on the job; he recently assisted after a fatal shooting at a local hospital. The outcome of the Greer case left him “frustrated and disappointed,” but he said he didn’t regret pursuing it.

“Somebody has to tell people what happened up there,” he said.