My Son Was Barricaded In His Bedroom.

Location: Ohio

Sorry if this isn’t cohesive, I’m still beyond angry.

My wife and I took guardianship of a family friend with developmental disabilities. His surviving parent is elderly and has medical conditions that makes it impossible for them to make decisions regarding his health and wellbeing. For the sake of this post I will be referring to him as my son. Thanks for understanding.

My son is non verbal and requires constant visual supervision and frequent redirection as he is a troublemaker. He lives in an apartment with his roommate, and is provided “care” through an agency. We have had issues in the past that we could, to en extent, understand. His staff is new and still learning. His staff had their hands full with his roommate, etc. Needless to say we have already begun looking for another agency to provide care even before this happened.

Today, some friends of ours were in town and decided to visit unannounced. They got to his apartment, knocked on the door and nobody came to answer it. They tried the door, it was left unlocked and the apartment was empty — no staff, no roommate and presumably no son. Then they noticed the couch in the living room was pushed up against my son’s bedroom door. As you can probably deduce, they moved the couch and my son was in his room. Alone, in the dark, soiled clothes, the whole nine.

Our friend got him out, packed a day bag, and left with him. He is now safe and physically unharmed. This incident was reported to the County Board of Developmental Disabilites before they were even out of the parking lot. The case worker at the BoDD is opening an investigation, and the staff that was on shift was removed from the house (once they got back with my son’s roommate). Our son will not be going back there until we get this all sorted out. We advised his roommate’s family as well.

The staff will probably get fired, but my question is can we press charges? Is there anything we can do to make sure this person is never in a position to provide care again?

I will be calling the Board of DD in the morning when they are open, and our friend will be filing a police report. Should we file one as well?

Our friends did not take any pictures or take any measures to preserve evidence as their priority was getting him out of the situation.

Any advice would be helpful. I feel like there’s nothing I can do except post about it on Reddit, and that makes me even more irate.