Episode Transcript- Willowbrook State School & The Urban Legend of Cropsey

[Amanda] Hey podcast listeners, today's episode explores the history of one new york state funded school that was created to provide care to some one New York's resident's facing physical and intellectual disabilities. This is a tragic story about how the abuse, neglect, and known human experimentation would end up being exposed on national television and lead to the foundation of legislation practices providing protections to the rights of persons with disabilities that are still in place today. I'm Amanda and welcome to New York's Dark Side

[Intro Music]

[Amanda] I'm so excited that you are listening, thank you so much! This is our very first episode, and I'm excited to bring it to you! For today, I'm bringing you to Staten Island NY where I will tell you the story of Willowbrook state school and the urban legend of Cropsey. I'm also going to be releasing the second episode of this podcast today which ties to this one and covers the tale of the pied piper of Staten Island Andre Rand. Two quick orders of business, I do have to give a shout out to my husband Jared for supporting my crazy and introducing me to this story. I also have to shout out my girls Steph and Nicole for doing a quick preview listen and encouraging need to go for this. So after telling Jared I had this idea he put on the Cropsey documentary and I instantly knew that I had to cover this story. Maybe you've seen the cropsey documentary and are wondering how they tie together. Trust me, I will definitely get you there. I feel like it's the perfect opening for New York's Dark Side because it encompasses so many elements of what I want this podcast to cover. Lastly, for this episode I used a ton of resources for my research; there will be a link in the show notes to my website which is www.nydarksidepodcast.com where you'll be able to find all the resource details and some other information if you want to do some further digging on your own. 

[Amanda] To start I want to talk a little bit about Staten Island because a lot of this I didn't know until I was researching, and I found it so interesting and I think it's relevant to this story. So even though I have lived in New York State all of my life I've only been to the city once so I actually don't know very much about New York City. New York City is split into five boroughs Staten Island is the least populated of the five it's 3.9 miles long and 7.3 miles wide, shaped like a triangle and it's the third largest borough. There are three bridges that connect Staten Island to New Jersey and only one, the verrazano narrows bridge that opened in 1964 connecting it to New York. According to the Staten Island historian website it's often considered the stepchild to the other boroughs and is referred to by some as a dumping ground. This is discussed a bit in the documentary that we're going to talk about later in this episode. There's a couple of reasons why this there's this sentiment about the island. Staten Island was home to the Fresh Kills landfill which opened in 1948 and operated through 2001, where all of the garbage from the city would go. While in full operation the landfill was getting up to 19,000 tons of garbage a day and things got bad… it stunk, it was horrible. And they finally decided that they needed to back off. For this alone I can see why Staten Islanders feel like they're kind of the dumping ground. New York City was dumping all of their garbage there for years but they didn't even have a bridge that connected them to New York State until almost 20 years later. Fresh Kills landfill has been in the process of becoming a 2,200-acre park for the last two decades. The last barge of residential garbage was received there in March of 2001. After the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th 2001 there was a temporary stay on the closure of Fresh Kills to allow for material from the site to be brought to the West mound of Fresh Kills. The materials were carefully screened to ensure that all remains in effects were removed from the debris and taken to New York city's medical examiner's office for identification and safekeeping. There's a 48-acre site adjacent to the westbound where the materials from the World Trade Center now rest and I'm just going to pause and point out that this little part about the debris from the World Trade Center has nothing to do with the story, but I found it interesting and wanted to include it because I didn't know any of that. And as a New Yorker and as an American I remember that day so vividly in my mind, I remember where I was the day that we found out about the attacks. I remember watching all the new news footage after like later in the day after I had gotten home from school, and I never really thought with everything else going on at that time and everything that we were thinking and fearing and feeling… I never really thought about what happened to the material from that site after all of that and now I know just from doing this to research. So, I wanted to include that because I… I felt like it was important. Staten Island also became home to Willowbrook, a “dumping ground” so to speak for the children of New York families that had mental and physical disabilities. Near Willowbrook was also the Farm Colony which was built as a housing community meant for the socially outcast and impoverished people. It was a poor house, and it was meant for a way for them to be self-sustaining by growing their own food and doing other things. Seaview Hospital is also in this area it's now abandoned but it was the largest tuberculosis treatment center in the nation. So, they were sending the poor there, they were sending the tuberculosis there, the things they didn't want… all of their garbage to Staten Island. It was a dumping ground and there's so much more that I can go into including how Staten Island is also a dumping ground for mob kills, but I seriously could and probably will make an episode on some of these other things completely separate from this. For today I'm going to stop myself before I go down another rabbit hole and we're going to talk about Willowbrook state school.

In 1938 New York State authorized the building of a school for “mental defectives” and 375 acre site in the Willowbrook district of Staten Island NY was selected and the school was built. But before the school opened the United States entered World War Two in the 1940s and New York State turned over the site to the US Army for uses of hospital and prisoner of war camp after the construction was completed in 1942. Halloran General Hospital soon became the largest army hospital in the United States. It was known for orthopedic and reconstructive surgery and a humanistic standard of care. They were doing the damn thing. Halloran had a great reputation and provided quality care. At its peak it treated over 2,500 soldiers daily and at the wars end Halloran became a veteran's hospital. In 1951, Halloran closed, and the army returned the property to New York State first intended purpose as the Willowbrook state school, though there was a brief period of time where the purpose of the property was up in the air. New York 

Governor Thomas Dewey ultimately decided that Willowbrook should be used for the care of the thousands of children in the state with mental and physical disabilities, or in his words “the mentally and physically defective and feeble minded who can never become members of society” who need to be cared for with a “high degree of tenderness and affection”. Spoiler alert that is not at all the story of what happened to the residents at Willowbrook. Maybe that's what the intention was at the inception of the facility, but the reality was to be far cry from a safe and caring residence for those with physical and intellectual disabilities. The fact that there was a sentiment that the children sent to Willowbrook could never be a part of society really sticks with me. And I know it was a sign of the times or whatever and then I'm looking at this, you know, 52 years later and I know I wasn't a part of it, but I feel like it's important to shine a light on this statement given all that I've come to learn about Willowbrook and the actual care or lack thereof that the residents received. And I am going to say this now and I'll say it again later, I'm in no way putting the blame on the healthcare providers that worked at Willowbrook as Geraldo Rivera would go on to say later, they were as much victims as the residents to the system. I'm a nurse I know there are a multitude… a multitude of factors that can be involved in what happens to people at any of the any facility at any given time. You can have a great organization and have a couple of bad employees; you can have great employees and have a bad system. In this case the system that was put into place for these residents was bad and that started from the top at the very beginning. I'm also going to say that I'm not in any way placing blame on anyone who placed their children in these institutions. From what I've learned about Willowbrook and how these residents came to be there, I know there were a lot of reasons why parents chose to send their children to places like Willowbrook. They were being referred to there by doctors, by social workers you know they there were not a lot of resources being, you know, advertised to families to keep them in the home. They were being referred to send them away. However, I do think the viewpoint from the people who chose to open this institution and therefore would have an important impact on the vital parts of running the institution, you know, the people in New York State who are responsible for the funding, the policies, the procedures, the regulations, the structure, the staffing, etcetera… that had a viewpoint that these residents… these citiz ens...these citizens of the state were defective and that they needed to be hidden away because they weren't a part of society? I think that plays a huge role in what happened to these residents and I'm going to get off my soapbox and talk a little bit more about Willowbrook.

[Amanda] So Willowbrook officially opened in October of 1947. Its campus had multiple buildings, they were designed to hold up to 4000 residents and at the start there were twenty mentally disabled patients from upstate New York who came to reside within the walls. By 1955, it had reached full capacity. The truth of Willowbrook would come to light that the residents were often left in a constant state of neglect. Completely tragic for those who could be considered among the most vulnerable. This was largely due to lack of funding from the state which left the buildings and wards understaffed with high ratios of residents per caretaker. This meant that many residents were left little or no supervision, care, or resources. Many were naked due to the lack of clothing or lack of staff available to redress patients if they stripped themselves. Residents could be found soiled in their own urine and/or feces, which would also be left smeared on the walls and clothing. It was also not uncommon for residents to be physically or sexually assaulted by other residents or even employees of the facility. This would go on for far, far longer than it should before the public became aware of what what's going on behind the walls of Willowbrook.

[Amanda] But if abuse and neglect were not enough, there were other concerns for the residents of Willowbrook. There were also questionable medical practices due to confirmed human experimentation. Dr. Saul Krugman, a pediatrician and professor at New York University and Dr. Robert W. McCollum, a virologist and epidemiologist at the Yale School of Medicine performed studies at Willowbrook on the residents from 1956 to 1971. Hepatitis was an issue for the school and the school had reached out for assistance in dealing with it. Dr. Saul Krugman would end up being the principal investigator for the hepatitis experiments with the goal of distinguishing between different strains of hepatitis and working on a vaccination. The doctors intentionally… I'm gonna say that again intentionally… gave residents hepatitis by putting the fecal matter of other residents infected with hepatitis in the food and drink served to uninfected children with the goal of deliberately giving them hepatitis. They were putting the feces in the kids mashed potatoes and chocolate milk and feeding it to them. This… this just really, really bothers me that this was allowed to happen. I'm shocked… I am just shocked… the argument for this method was that creating a vaccine outweighed the harm to the children and that the children would get hepatitis anyway, just because it was in the environment, so let's just intentionally speed up that process and give them hepatitis faster. So instead of fixing the problem, because they knew hepatitis was a problem, and they knew it was because of just the unsanitary conditions. Instead of fixing that problem they took advantage of it and gave more children a disease on purpose. A ward at Willowbrook was selected for this experiment and parents of the children in this ward did sign informed consent for this, however the critics of the study felt that the parents were not sufficiently informed that the children would be intentionally infected with hepatitis. Again, by feeding them the feces of tell other children and that sometimes the only space available was in the hepatitis ward and parents were unduly influenced to consent because there were long waits and crowding issues in other wards of the school. They weren't being offered other resources to try to help keep the kids at home so parents who didn't have the resources to care for their children would agree to allow them to be experimented on, again, probably without true understanding of what was actually happening. And in one of the articles that I read on this, a mother was interviewed whose child was placed in the experimental ward and she agreed to it and I'm purposely going to leave her name out of this podcast. In her interview, she said she agreed to the experimentation to get what she thought would be help for her daughter. She was struggling taking care of her at home and she would later report that when she questioned why the experiments were being done on the children rather than on primates, it was because human experimentation was less expensive, and I know… I know this is just her statement. But again, I think it's important to share because these were such different times compared to now and there were not the same kind of laws and guidelines and regulations around human experiments as there are now and part of that is due to this case, because this is wrong… this is wrong… And the experiments were publicized in the medical community regularly and they were often criticized by the medical community for their unethical nature. But the doctors did find that a form of hepatitis could be blocked using gamma globulin and this turned some of the critics into supporters of the doctors. New York State senator Seymour R Thaylor who had spoken out about the ethical issues of the experiments in the 1960s would later say in 1971 that he felt like the research had been properly performed.

[Amanda] In 1965, Senator Robert Kennedy would shine the publicly on Willowbrook and other state institutions after he made unannounced tours of multiple facilities and began to speak out about the systematic breakdowns of mental hygiene care. He was inspired by the lobotomy of his sister Rosemary, which had been done in the 1940s. Kennedy would go on to say to the media after visiting Willowbrook that the institution “bordered on a snake pit” and that the individuals in the overcrowded facility were “living in dirt and filth their clothing and rags and rooms left comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in the zoo”. Red flag… red flag… red flag… This bothers me, because nothing was really done to change this for several more years. New York State had put in a five year improvement plan but it didn't stick and things reverted back to the way they were.

[Amanda] From 1966 to 1968, a man named Andre Rand using the last name Bruchette would work at Willowbrook as a custodian, orderly, and physical therapy aide. Remember Rand because we're going to come back to him.

[Amanda] Later in 1969, Willowbrook reached his peak of 6,200 residents far surpassing the original 4000 that it was built to hold. Seven years after Robert Kennedy spoke publicly about the need to do better with these institutions, the world would be shocked and outraged by an expose bringing them inside the walls of Willowbrook and Letchworth Village, another mental institution. Dr. Michael Wilkins, a physician who worked at Willowbrook had been advocating to parents of residents within his wards to demand better care and conditions for the residents within. He was let go from his position and reached out to Geraldo Rivera and a print journalist Jane Kurtin and February of 1972 Rivera with help from Kurtin would release an expose on Willowbrook titled ‘Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace’. The expose is on YouTube if you're interested in watching the full video and I highly recommend you do, it's just crazy and I've linked it in my blog. I'm going to highlight some of it in this episode. Rivera paid a visit to Willowbrook entering building six on the campus without authorization or notification to the institution that he was coming with the videographer. They were presented with horrifying scenes of residents wandering around naked and unattended, some just lying or sitting in their own urine or feces. He described the smell of the wards stating that they “smelled of filth, they smelled of disease and they smelled of death”. I… again I'm a nurse, the smell of the hospital is sometimes not great. You know what I'm talking about, like the smell of you know, the cleaning supplies that they use there and sometimes we do get the smell of you know other things like you know feces and you know wounds, GI bleeds… that type of thing but I can't imagine what this would have smelled like just based on the description that they give. And I can't imagine knowing that you know one of my loved ones lived in this institution. And the reason why, you know, part of the reason I don't think I really touched on it earlier that more of the parents weren't, you know, advocating for better conditions and things like that was because they weren't allowed into the facility to see like where their loved ones were staying. They couldn't see all of this stuff that was going on inside the walls when they came to visit. They visited outside on the grounds, they weren't allowed to go in to see like the rooms that their, you know, their loved ones were staying, and they couldn't see like the common areas, and they couldn't see that. So when they would come for visits, you know, their loved one would be dressed and clean and not what actually was happening 99% of the time. So that's really what had Dr. Wilkins really pushing for the changes in the wards and pushing for the parents to advocate for better things because he knew what was going on inside and that's what really led him to you know advocate and ended up to him getting fired and reaching out to Rivera. Because he was a badass. He wanted things to change. Dr. Wilkins was interviewed for the expose and he spoke about the incidences of hepatitis and the residents getting parasites and struggling with pneumonia. Now notably, for me anyway, they did not mention the hepatitis experiments that were being done on one of the wards and I do I know they were published in medical journals from what I've seen it sounds like they didn't ever really get publicized in the mainstream news media. So two days after his unauthorized visit Rivera was invited back for an authorized visit and this time he found that the children were dressed they were well attended there was staff around and everything's looking so much better. So, to see if this was a sustained change, he went back again for another unauthorized visit through a back door a couple days later and found the same conditions as the first visit. Poorly attended residents, naked and wandering, left to sit in their own waste for hours and hours.

[Amanda] So, some of the things that they presented in this expose was that 60% of the residents were not toilet trained and 54% of the residents were unable to feed themselves. So due to lack of staff they were often hurrying to feed the residents and instead of taking a proper time to feed them a meal, you know, of like 20 to 30 minutes, they were taking about two to three minutes per resident to like shove food in their mouths and would just hurry them along and this caused that the residents to aspirate and led to the increased rates of pneumonia that they were seeing. And some of the residents, you know, ended up dying from this. All of the residents were treated in the same manner regardless of their differing mental and or physical ability and residents were often misdiagnosed with what was truly wrong with them. They weren't given a chance to really see what the residents could do, and they didn't work with them to see how they could do better. Dr. Wilkins said that New York State provided the bare minimum for the residents, there was no education structure set up, so residents were often left with nothing to do for hours and hours and hours. They would just wander around, stare at walls, lay on the floor for hours. That was their life. They didn't know what the children were capable of because they didn't attempt to do anything with them. Although Willowbrook was named a school and was funded through the state, there was not an education structure within the organization. Sometimes groups of children who are cooperative would have up to two hours of education time a day, but there wasn't structure to it, not even in the basics of self-care and hygiene, let alone academics. And this is further highlighted in the expose when a resident of Willowbrook was interviewed Bernard Caraballo, who lived at Willowbrook for 18 years at the time of the interview. Bernard was born in 1950 he was placed in Willowbrook by his mother at the advice of doctors at about the age of three after he was diagnosed as being developmentally disabled. He was one of the children that was misdiagnosed. He actually had cerebral palsy. In the interview with Geraldo, Bernard said he only received schooling and physical therapy for five of the years that he lived at Willowbrook even though he wanted to continue, he aged out. He was overaged and it just stopped. They just stopped giving him education and that's so tragic, you know? Here is a kid who wanted to learn… Bernard is a success story though, so he was taken out of Willowbrook with the help of Dr. Wilkins when he was 21. He would go on to become an advocate and he founded the self-advocacy association of New York State in 1986. Not all of the residents had this kind of success story and this is tragic… Tragic! And I'm so glad that we appear to have learned from this, but it's just so sad that the futures of all of these children… remember there were up to words of 6,200 children that were impacted by this, would just be fundamentally changed and shifted because of what they experienced here. Imagine what they could have become if we had the proper tools and resources to give them a better chance.

[Amanda] So part of the issue with the funding was that New York State went through a period of entrenchment which led to a hiring freeze and because of this Willowbrook lost 600 employees through attrition. The budget from the department of mental hygiene dropped from $630 million to $600 million and then was cut even further by Governor Rockefeller to R580 million which caused 200 more employees to be lost. Making the staffing situation much worse for the residents and changing the ratios which had a goal of being 4 to 1 to 30 to 40 to 50 to 1. Ao I just want to say, again, I'm not placing blame on the staff of Willowbrook they were set up for failure by the system that didn't give them the resources and funding to truly do right and provide safe quality care to the residents. One person cannot take care of 30 to 40 to 50 residents, they just can't, it's not possible. Even if they were you know completely alert, oriented, very functional, capable people… one person can't take care of that many people.

[Amanda] So, another facility that Rivera went to was Letchworth Village in Rockland County and he visited with congressman Mario Biaggi for an official visit. They were invited there, Rivera knowing what he knew after visiting Willowbrook arrived a couple hours prior to the visit time because he wanted an actual accurate view behind the walls. And when he got there the staff were still trying to prepare for the visit they were cleaning, they were bringing in racks of clothes to try to get the residents dressed, and even so when the time came for the official visit they weren't ready and the staff explained to Rivera and Representative Biaggi that they didn't have enough clothes. They didn't have enough clothes for the residents and on top of that they didn't have the staff for the patients to keep them dressed so that's why many of the children for this visit were walking around naked. They had four to five staff members for 100 plus residents. They were set up to fail. Representative Biaggi complemented the beauty of the buildings but stated that Letchworth was the worst institution that he had ever visited in his life. He visited hospitals, he visited prisons, but Letchworth was the worst institution he had ever visited in his life. Regulations for funding required 80 square feet per person but they were so understaffed that they were functioning in 35 square feet per person. Letchworth had empty buildings, they had empty wards, but because they couldn't afford the staff to put patients there, they were all crowded into other areas. There were like cribs with multiple children in the cribs. This is very, very sad… just sad and it didn't have to be this way, it didn't have to be this way, but the people that were in charge of making sure it wasn't like this didn't care. They didn't care, they kept cutting the funding. Another sad fact about Letchworth in the expose was that there were 300 able bodied residents who could go out and gain employment outside the facility, but they weren't allowed to and instead they were being used to help fill the staffing gap at the facility and they were paid $2 a day. Which was less than they would have been able to make if they had been able to go out and find employment, but again, they weren't allowed to because they needed them to help staff the facility that's crazy… it's crazy it shouldn't have happened. 

[Amanda] So one thing that I think Geraldo Rivera did really well with his expose was he also showed what we could have done better for these residents and how it should have been. Geraldo Rivera went and he visited Children's Hospital in Los Angeles to show how completely different their mental hygiene program was compared to New York's. California's program focused on the community resources after a European expert on mental development issues visited and he called them out for the conditions in which their residents were living and at that time it was very similar to New York State. And that European expert said, “my God you don't care for your mentally retarded as well as we care for our cattle”. Instead of having institutions they have centers with different services offering resources such as shelters and daycare and other things that people need to be able to keep their children in their home. Very, very different from New York. Instead of, you know, telling them we need to send them to these institutions like Willowbrook they help them they help keep them at home and they helped provide them with what they needed to care for them, which is what we should have done. They also provided education and schooling and highlighted it as being as much of a right for, you know, these children as it is for “normal” children and for older children and older adults they focused on employment opportunities with different workshops which allowed them to be able to go find employment and earn wages and engaged in society. They didn't hide them away they found them opportunities to be a part of society. They focused on prevention through testing and genetic counseling and education to the parents to try to help all of them. Just so much more holistic then New York State.

[Amanda] On March 17th, 1972, 51 years before the day I hope to launch this episode Dr. William Bronston, he was another doctor at Willowbrook that was let go for advocating to parents and trying to improve conditions. So, he was let go and he helped lead a group of parents when they filed a class action lawsuit against Willowbrook. The lawsuit alleged that the constitutional rights of the residents were violated due to confinement of residents sometimes to beds or chairs, or in solitude; due to the overcrowding conditions; due to failure to provide education, habilitation, and evaluations of residents because they weren’t doing any of those things to see how the residents were progressing; they were not providing adequate services for speech, occupational, or physical therapy for the residents; they were not providing adequate clothing, meals, and facilities, including toilet facilities, like the toilet facilties were terrible, they didn’t even have like toothbrushes; failure to provide protection from theft, assault, or injury; lack of compensation for work performed; inadequate medical facilities; the understaffing and lack of competent professional staff; lack of privacy again they’re walking around naked; and failure to release residents eligible for release, they weren’t even releasing residents who were able to go back to the community. This is all very crazy. The plaintiffs in the lawsuits allege that the conditions violated the constitutional right to treatment under the due process clause of the 14th amendment and that their denial of a public education to the residents violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment as well. In April of 1973 US District Court Judge Orrin G. Judd rejected the plaintiffs arguments that the due process clause guaranteed a right to treatment and that the denial of public education violated the equal protection clause, he didn't agree… however he did find that the conditions in Willowbrook violated the constitutional rights of persons living in state custodial institutions to be protected from harm. So according to Judge Judd, the plaintiffs constitutional right to protection from harm meant that the residents of Willowbrook were entitled to “at least the same living conditions as prisoners”. They weren't even getting the same type of treatment as prisoners in jail for crimes. Judge Judd granted much of the requested injunctive relief including prohibiting the use of seclusion and restraints, he increased medical and therapeutic and recreational staffing; required maintenance and requiring regular progress reports on the residents to their parents, and with this injunctive order in place the case proceeded to trial on October 1st of 1974 with the parties continuing negotiations for months afterwards. The case was settled on April 30th, 1975 when judge Judd signed the Willowbrook consent decree. This consent decree outlines specific procedures and instructions for treatment of residents covering issues such as resident living- the environment, programming, and evaluation; hiring of personnel; education, recreation, food and nutrition, dental, and medical treatments; therapy services, the proper use of restraints, conditions for residents to provide labor in the facility and conditions for research and experimental treatment. Significantly the consent judgment also declared the primary goal of the institution and the New York State department of mental hygiene to ready each resident for life in the community at large. Far, far cry from where we started this whole story, where you know, we needed to hide them away because they were never part, never meant to be a part of society. Now we're going to prepare them for life in the community, we want to get them back out to the community and called for the placement of Willowbrook residents in less restrictive settings. So their goal was to try to get them out to group homes, back to home, you know, in other places outside of these institutions. The consent decree set a goal of reducing the number of residents living at Willowbrook to no more than 250 by 1981, which didn't really happen, let's be real here, the state does not do anything quickly.

[Amanda] So while this is a very tragic story for the residents of Willowbrook and other state institutions that functioned in this manner, it did lead to some good things that, you know, came from this. We learned from our mistakes, and I want to highlight some of those things as well. The political reaction from the expose and the lawsuit led to the enactment of legislation to protect the rights of our citizens here, so one of those was the protection and advocacy system in the Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act of 1975 and the goal of the protection and advocacy system is for ongoing protection and advocacy for the personal and civil rights of individuals with developmental disabilities. This also created the Education for all Handicapped Children Act; this act required all public schools accepting federal funds to provide equal access to education for children with physical and mental disabilities. Public schools were then required to evaluate children with disabilities and create an educational plan with parent input that would ensure that they were getting as close an education experience as possible as non-disabled students. This is important. Additionally the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act was signed in 1980 and intended to protect the rights of people in state or local correctional facilities, nursing homes, mental facilities and group homes and institutions for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Ao all of this should not have had to happen in order for these types of things to be put into place, but at least some good came out of what happened. The developmental disabilities assistance and Bill of Rights act and the civil rights of institutionalized persons act were the first federal civil rights laws protecting people with disabilities leading to the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities act through the ADA and this story was just so crazy… I really didn't go too far into researching what happened to the children and the adults after they were taken out of Willowbrook, but I did come across one thing that I wanted to share because this bothered me because it didn't just stop with Willowbrook. Okay, it didn't just stop with Willowbrook the sentiment was still there. So, a worker, Barbara Blum, was the lead of the metropolitan placement unit and this was the agency that was charged with finding residents for the mentally disabled as Willowbrook was closing down. So she was out trying to find placement in like hotels and group homes and hostels and other places so she would go out into the community and she was reportedly reviled in some places where she was finding placement she would be assaulted on the streets people would pelt her with eggs and one time she ended up with a broken nose. Like this makes me so angry these are people too these are residents too they are civilians they are parts of the community, and this poor woman is just trying to find them a safe place to live and instead of welcoming her instead of welcoming the residents into their community they're pelting her with eggs and breaking her nose. Do better… do better people… this poor woman is just trying to do her job and just trying to place people in the community. We’re all together.

[Amanda] in 1983 New York State announced plans to close Willowbrook completely by this time it had been renamed the Staten Island developmental center the last residents would leave the grounds on September 17th 1987. Today the campus of Willowbrook still belongs to the state of New York and while parts of the campus remain abandoned home to some of the Staten island's homeless other parts of it have become part of the campus of the College of Staten Island and this is where the next part of the tale is going to begin. This is what sparked my interest into researching Willowbrook and why I wanted to give that background on the site before covering Andre Rand. So as I mentioned in the beginning I was talking with my husband about my idea of wanting to cover dark history as a portion of my podcast and he popped on a documentary called proxy and as soon as I saw it I knew this was what I wanted to do for my first couple of episodes the documentary was called Cropsey. It was released in 2009 by Staten Island filmakers Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio they grew up with the urban legend of an escaped mental patient who lived in the tunnels beneath Willowbrook and he would come out at night and snatched little children and drag them back to the grounds. Sometimes he had a hook for a hand sometimes he carried a bloody axe. The film covers the true crime story of Andre Rand and I mentioned this earlier, he was a man who worked for a period of time at Willowbrook and he drifted around Staten Island. In 1987, a 12-year-old girl with Down syndrome went missing at the time Andre Rand lived on the grounds of Willowbrook and had a camp not far from where the girls missing body would be found a few weeks later. We'll be covering the story of Andre Rand in the second episode of this podcast we've hit 45 minutes almost and I'm, you know, I'm very excited. I found a lot of things, so don't fret the second episode is being released today as well and it's available now so you can listen to it right now. You can just keep listening to me. Anyway thanks for listening, I hope you come back for more please don't forget to check out my blog the link is posted in the episode notes for more and you can also connect with me on Facebook through the New York’s Dark Side Facebook page Twitter and Instagram @NYDarkSidePod and you can also send me an e-mail at newyorkdarksidepodcast@gmail.com. Thanks again for listening and don't forget to stay curious.