If you’re a patient at the Woodward Resource Center, a residential care facility for individuals with intellectual disabilities, it’s not worth nearly enough—and the center’s history indicates your life could not only be devalued, but also at serious risk.
For the second time in just eight short months, the Woodward center has been fined for causing the death of a patient:
- In May, a 49-year-old man who was supposed to be checked by staff every 15 to 30 minutes was left unchecked all night. The employee designated to monitor the man spent the time instead chatting on his cell phone. When the patient’s body was discovered in the morning, staff stood around talking and delaying rather than delivering the CPR needed to save his life. The Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals and Licensing levied a $10,000 fine for the death—increased to $30,000 because it was a repeat violation.
- In September 2024, a 22-year-old Woodward patient died due to consuming toxic levels of the anti-schizophrenic drug clozapine. Two residential treatment workers lost their jobs over the incident, according to the facility, resulting in a $10,000 fine for Woodward.
So there’s your answer: Die at Woodward through staff negligence and your life is worth exactly $10,000, according to Iowa authorities.
“These people got what they deserved, which were warrants for their arrests.”
In addition to the above deaths, the facility has been fined four times in the past nine months for failure to follow regulations:
- Woodward was fined $500 in December, when a staffer brutally shoved a patient, causing them to fall from a recliner to the floor. Two other staffers saw the assault, but failed to report it.
- Woodward was fined $4,250 in February for failure to provide prescribed diets to patients.
- Woodward was fined another $2,750 in May after a patient swallowed a plastic spoon because they weren’t supervised, and had to undergo an emergency endoscopy.
- The same month, an additional fine of $3,500 was levied for inappropriate care of a patient.
Last August, police became involved at Woodward when a female staffer physically attacked a patient for 15 minutes after she “grabbed him out of the chair, with enough force to rip his shirt, threw him to the floor and began an assault on him,” according to Woodward Police Chief Jim Graham. “It was terrible.”
Police saw a video of the event and issued charges against four employees—three who stood by and did nothing to stop the assault, and the alleged attacker, Mercedes Denise Wilson, who is currently on the run from a national arrest warrant.
“It was completely out of the blue,” Graham said. “It’s not like [the patient] was trying to assault her and she was defending herself.… It was a completely unwarranted ass-kicking, that’s exactly what it was.
“These people got what they deserved, which were warrants for their arrests.”
The vicious attack was halted only when a fourth employee stepped in. But if that hadn’t happened, who knows? Woodward may have been responsible for yet another patient death.
All of which begs the question: How can Woodward even call itself an “intermediate care facility for individuals with an intellectual disability”?
Exactly where, for example, is the “care”?
More evidence of its absence can be found in a 2002 investigation of Woodward by the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice (DOJ): “From April 2000 through March 2001, an average of 56 Woodward residents each spent about 18 hours in mechanical and manual restraints each month,” the DOJ report states. “Some individuals ... were repeatedly restrained for more than 300 hours a month.… The use of restraints at Woodward places individuals at risk of harm.… Woodward’s residents regularly are physically injured in restraints.”
In 2001, a 45-year-old man died at Woodward. “The primary cause of death, according to the State Medical Examiner’s autopsy report, was ‘compressional/positional asphyxia occurr[ing] during physical restraint by other individuals,’” the DOJ report states.
But despite the disturbing fact that the death was listed as a homicide, no criminal charges were filed.
“Psychiatric ‘care’ is not supposed to kill patients, and no one expects patients to die in psychiatric hospitals,” said the mental health watchdog Citizens Commission on Human Rights. “Restraint ‘procedures’ are the most visible evidence of the barbaric practices that psychiatrists choose to call therapy or treatment.”
After the DOJ investigation, Woodward stated it planned to take remedial action to address each of the report’s criticisms.
But in little more than half a year, two patients just died on their watch.
For multiple deaths and years of abuse, Woodward’s penalty was less than the price of a new car: $40,000.
