Mass Impact

By Elizabeth Scheinberg

How does an institution become an instrument of death? It's a hard question to ask and an even harder one to answer. It's a phenomenon not just applied to Au Clair/Advoserv/Bellweater, nor to Delaware or Florida. The World Health Organization, WHO, provides that

Every year, there are an estimated 41 000 homicide deaths in children under 15 years of age. This number underestimates the true extent of the problem, as a significant proportion of deaths due to child maltreatment are incorrectly attributed to falls, burns, drowning and other causes

There is no one discernable agency that collects data on the deaths of children and adults receiving in-patient mental health and developmental care. Private facilities often reject Freedom of Information Act requests for this data. Collectively, our society has since its onset devalued human life when that life was that of someone physically, neurologically, or behaviorally impaired. We keep records of touchdowns and Super Bowls, but not of how children and adults die when secreted in private profit or non-profit facilities.

These failures make it very difficult to ascertain when the perfect storm is brewing. Lawsuits that end in settlements further skew the statistics. Money is the law's way of saying "I'm sorry." However, that apology doesn't come with a statistic. It obliterates it. Most settlements don't require a party to admit fault. Settlements actually make it more difficult to chase the ghosts.

Chasing ghosts. I've been chasing ghosts for more than a year, collecting the footprints left by Au Clair/Advoserv/Carlton Palms/Bellweather in newspapers across the country. I've read more than 4000 want ads, tracked Advoserv to a fleeting effort to influence disability care in Iowa, delved into harness racing and how lightening really does strike twice, learned much more about the Spanish armada than I will ever need to know, delved into real estate holdings, investigated nearly 40 business entities to discern their function and met many fascinating individuals whose contributions and leads are priceless. Most striking, however, are the tortured stories of children abused and/or killed in the care of their institutions. They are the most devastating. They are the reason we are all here, we ache to tell their stories. We hear them in the silence. We hear them in the Echo.

Although there are many sidebars yet to be written, many flings and forays to explore in the journey of Au Clair/Advoserv/Carlton Palms/Bellweather; it is evident that now is the time to pivot and delve into the phenomenon that allowed Mazik to institutionalize children and adults during a time of national de-institutionalism. It is only through documenting the past that we can hope to never repeat it. It's time to acknowledge those who paid the highest price for society's ready response to house away those complex special need individuals whose lives were assigned less value by society majority simply because they were not born "typical" - but instead came into this unwelcoming world with innate needs that required specialized care to reach their full potential.

The question at hand is how did Ken Mazik build an empire?

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