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'Grossly unfair'

"I think this was grossly unfair, humiliating and embarrassing," Berg said. "This really, really, really hurt me worse than anything that has happened in my life. ... I am the victim, and I was bitten. I tried to stop it. I was the victim."

Sargis, her son's legal guardian, said she was told nothing about the assault until she received a two-sentence letter from the hospital about three weeks later.

"This letter is to inform you that an allegation of abuse made on 4/28/08 was investigated and was substantiated," the letter said. "If you have any questions about this, please do not hesitate to call the [patient] advocate."

When she tried to find out what happened, Sargis said, she was provided with little information. When she pressed for more, she said, the hospital's clinical director threatened to discharge Luciano and send him home.

Shown the video for the first time last week, Sargis said top hospital administrators, including Cherry Director Jack St. Clair, misled her.

"It was nothing like what they told us," Sargis said. "St. Clair said he wasn't hit, it was just a little tap. They said Ricky never hit the ground. It looked like they were fighting."

Luciano's medical file indicates that Cherry's staff struggled to control his behavior during his two-month stay at the hospital. He was frequently restrained and heavily medicated.

The file also indicates he suffered several injuries while there, though little explanation is sometimes provided and it appears his mother was often not informed.

Two days after the altercation with Berg, instructions for Luciano's care handwritten by a doctor whose initials are illegible instructed nurses: "Ice pack to R side of face 20 minutes. ... Do not call family."

No interviews

Requests to interview St. Clair or other Cherry administrators this week were declined by the department.

"The doctor remains on the staff and continues to practice," spokesman Tom Lawrence wrote in e-mail Friday. "No other information will be provided as anything else violates state personnel policy."

N&O stories earlier this year described the 2006 beating of a Cherry Hospital patient by three staff members and the death of another Cherry patient smothered by more than a dozen staff members restraining her.

The incidents were among 82 questionable deaths in state mental hospitals and 192 cases where the state determined its employees had abused or neglected patients.

The top medical official at Cherry, Dr. Robert C. Owens, was reassigned to a job at a state prison last year after it was revealed publicly that he had pleaded guilty to a felony in 1989 after performing oral sex on a sleeping 9-year-old girl.

As part of a pledge to improve transparency in the state hospital system, DHHS Secretary Dempsey Benton said in January all patient deaths or incidents involving injuries to patients or staff would be noted on the department's Web site. No entry was made about Luciano, however.

"There was no real injury," Lawrence said Friday. "I think it takes more than a red mark to qualify."

Luciano was transferred from Cherry in June to a state home for the developmentally disabled.

"The doctors there said he had been overmedicated at Cherry," Sargis said. "They took him off most of the drugs, and he is doing much better."

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