Investigative Classics is a weekly feature on noteworthy past examples of in-depth reporting.
Exposes of the treatment of the elderly, disabled and mentally impaired are the low-hanging fruit of investigative journalism. Faceless bureaucrats, perpetually underfunded facilities and people who cannot advocate for themselves are a recipe for corruption. The abject state of the victims is fodder for poignant prose.
Such coverage might be Sisyphean – the problem never goes away – but it is also necessary: How much worse would conditions be absent these stories?
Among the most powerful examples of such work is the Washington Post’s 1999 series on the District of Columbia’s system for the mentally impaired, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2000.
Its depiction of “a system marked by municipal ineptitude and private profiteering: a system that has fostered abuse and even death,” echoes the findings of so many other series before and since.
What stands out is the writing of its chief reporter, Katherine Boo, who went on to become a staff writer at the New Yorker and the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2012, for her book “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity.”
Here’s how she opens the series:
Elroy lives here. Tiny, half-blind, mentally retarded, 39-year-old Elroy. To find him, go past the counselor flirting on the phone. Past the broken chairs, the roach-dappled kitchen and the housemates whose neglect in this group home has been chronicled for a decade in the files of city agencies. Head upstairs to Elroy's single bed.
These days, reconciled to living, Elroy has fashioned ways to cope. He keeps private amulets against a misery he doesn't fully grasp. There's the leatherette Bible he can't read; the Norman Rockwell calendar of family scenes he hasn't known. "You're in good hands," reads the Allstate Insurance poster tacked above his mattress -- the mattress where the sexual predator would catch him sleeping. Catch him easily: The door between their rooms had fallen from its hinges. Catch him relentlessly -- so relentlessly that Elroy tried to commit suicide by running blindly into a busy Southeast Washington street.
And there's his strategy of groping his way down to the bare-bulbed basement again and again to wash the sheets from his violated bed, as if Tide could cleanse defilement. "God is a friend of mine," he says. But absent divine intervention, "you just gotta do what they say." Just got to add soap powder, and more soap powder, turn the dial to hot. "Gotta not let the worries pluck your nerves." …
Elroy has endured the District's caretaking inadequacies since he was a toddler. The Post is withholding his last name for privacy reasons, because he has been sexually victimized. He lives in a group home run by entrepreneur Rollie Washington and his wife, Dorothy. Real estate records note that there are 11 bathrooms in the million-dollar Upper Marlboro "Manor Farm" where the Washingtons make their home. A city report recently noted that the home they provide for Elroy had no toilet paper. It did have vermin and broken furniture and, city records show, a long record of ill-serving its inhabitants. The Washingtons' company wasn't licensed to do business in the District from 1993 until late 1998, records show. Still, the city government paid their company millions of dollars over those six years for the services they provided Elroy and others.
The world of "simple" people is in truth a complicated place: Words elude, stories shift, times and places blur. But a tour of that world fixes one fact pretty firmly: Even people with IQs of 50 know this isn't the way life is meant to be.
