They were among the most vulnerable of our population; the mentally ill, the emotionally strained, the psychologically challenged. In our mental health institutions they should have found understanding and high degrees of care and concern. But what some found were beatings and bruises, abuse, neglect and even the loss of life.

  In the spring of 1890, Patrick McGough sustained a broken collarbone after being thrown to the ground by an attendant at the State Asylum. The following spring, an Olneyville man named John Gallagher was declared insane due to recent sickness and trouble, admitted to the asylum and released just days later as cured. He told police that the bruises on him were left by the facility’s night watchman.

On the night of July 31, 1900, John Drape was discovered lying bloodied on the floor of the asylum by a supervisor. A gash on his forehead, a broken nose, two cuts on the back of his neck and dark bruises on his chest, which resembled a boot heel, made it clear he had been assaulted. Unconscious, he died later that evening from shock.

Drape was a 53-year-old epileptic who had lived at the asylum 14 years. His face had been beaten to an unrecognizable mass by head attendant, 215-pound Charles McLaughlin. Attendant Elwell Lowell had witnessed the assault which began by McLaughlin beating Drape with a mop soaked in scalding water. He then knocked Drape to the floor and began kicking him in the face, head and back before stamping the heel of his boot violently into his head and chest. Mclaughlin was arrested. Drape was buried.        

Over the next several decades, there were investigations into complaints of abuse against psychiatric patients in RI. In the summer of 1925, 85-year-old Oliver Rochford was seriously injured and hospital attendant Herman Long was charged. As he was being beat on the stomach with a shoe, causing severe bruises and probable internal injury, Rochford’s screams brought forth other attendants who grabbed Long and held him until police arrived. A former cotton mill grinder, Rochford was a husband and father and a native of Canada who had been living in Woonsocket prior to his committal. He died seven months after the attack, of heart disease, senile psychosis, delirium and confusion.     

Fifty-two-year-old Michael Lafferty, who had been employed as an attendant at the hospital for two years, was arrested on June 12, 1929, accused of assaulting three patients. Lafferty had been fired due to charges of patient abuse before, but had been rehired and was now accused of beating patients with a boot strap. Found guilty, he was sentenced to serve ten days in jail and fined $25 plus court costs.

What was needed over the years since the Asylum for the Insane was opened in 1844, through its transformation to the RI State Hospital for Mental Diseases in 1917, and beyond, was someone with a loud voice to step up and call attention to the atrocities being committed. In Nov. of 1947, RI Senator Raoul Archambault paid a visit to the hospital and announced that the Howard institutions were “rampant with inefficiency and riddled with favoritism."

The senator explained that the superintendent had one of highest paying jobs in RI, complete with beautiful living quarters, a private cook, housekeeper and motor vehicle for his use. While he lived in comfort, the psychiatric patients he was in charge of lived in fear and various states of medical neglect. According to Archambault, the hospital was “little more than a displaced persons camp."

The senator had inspected every crevice of the state hospital and delved deep into its history. He discovered that fire safety was ignored and that there had been no fire drills for four years. The fire hoses were discovered inside an old building, having rotted. 

At meal time, he found lunch for hundreds of patients being made in a kitchen which contained no soap, dry towels or mops. The evening meal consisted of a bowl of corn flakes and those who were thirsty could get a drink from a communal bucket of water out in the yard. In the tunnel leading to the dining room, the filth of human waste permeated the air. “There seems to be no limits to the indignities we heap upon the guiltless people in our state institutions," Archambault publicly announced.   

That same year, three hospital attendants were dismissed for alleged patient abuse and failure to report patient injury; 62-year-old Daniel Cox, an 18-year employee and supervisor of the ward for the criminally insane; 44-year-old attendant Paul Whiterock; and 41-year-old attendant George Minkema. The trio testified that they had been called to the room where 28-year-old Paul Santos had been confined for four months, as he was pulling plaster off the wall, and that Santos knocked Minkema to the ground. Minkema testified that in his attempt to escape, he produced a slight scratch near Santos’s eye.  

Attendant Maurice Zelinski testified that he saw Whiterock and Minkema punch and kick Santos in the head, jaw and side of the face while Cox looked the other away. He stated that Santos never lunged at any of them and that the patient’s injured eye was totally closed when the beating was over.

Attendant Manuel Rezendes testified that he took Santos to the washroom to clean the dried blood off his eyelid and that Santos told him, “I was beat up by the two big fellows.” Rezendes made a report to one of the hospital’s doctors.

Rezendes told the court that Minkema instructed him to refrain from sending a supper tray to Santos that evening. In the morning, he said, Minkema instructed him to withhold breakfast from Santos as well. It was common, he stated, for attendants to withhold food from patients they didn’t like for three or four days.

The physician who examined Santos believed that the eye injury was produced by a knee, elbow or fist. While some attendants testified about the alleged beating, others insisted that it never happened.

As the decades passed, it never became easier to prove who was telling the truth and who was lying or, to use Archambault’s words, whether or not the facility was “riddled with favoritism.” But there was rarely any question, for those willing to look at the care of our State’s mentally ill through clear lenses, that it remained “rampant with inefficiency” for a very long time.