Mississippi Today
Forty years after health official scaled fence in Jackson to save malnourished personal care home residents, unchecked horrors remain
Neighbors could hear yelps from inside a 10-by-10-foot shed behind a house on Grand Avenue in west Jackson on an October afternoon in 1982.
The location was a known unlicensed personal care home — facilities meant to care for adults, often with mental illness, who cannot live on their own, but which have never been regulated by any state agency.
Local police said they couldn’t enter without a warrant and called Mendal Kemp, then-chief of licensing for the Mississippi State Care Commission, the precursor to the Mississippi State Department of Health.
Kemp arrived and, finding the property locked, borrowed a ladder from a neighbor and scaled an eight-foot wooden fence.
He made it past two vicious guard dogs, opened the storage room door and found eight severely emaciated individuals sitting on a cot and on the floor around the dark, unlit room. There was no running water or electricity, and the owner had given the residents a bucket to use as a bathroom. One had sores all over his back, another was completely blind.
Kemp, his colleague from the Mississippi Department of Mental Health named Janne Patterson Swearengen and others spent four hours at the scene rescuing the individuals, who were transported to licensed facilities.
But the health officials were no strangers to these conditions. A few years earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court found state mental health hospitals could no longer hold nondangerous patients against their will, and thousands of patients from the nearby Mississippi State Hospital wound up in Jackson.
To answer, unlicensed personal care homes started cropping up, especially along West Capitol Street in large multi-story houses that had otherwise been abandoned, absent safety assurances like fire extinguishers or appropriate staffing.
“We couldn’t license them. So what do you do?” Kemp told Mississippi Today in a recent interview. “They couldn’t comply with any kind of standards. And these people were so helpless. They had been treated like dogs — ‘go lay down, stay in your room, don’t do this’ — and they’d been institutionalized for all this time, so they obeyed.”
Kemp’s office often received anonymous complaints about these facilities. His workers would go door to door and issue letters: get a license or close down.
“We’d go back, it’d be an empty house. She’d just moved down the street,” Kemp said.
The Grand Avenue discovery by Kemp and his colleagues made national news, resulted in the creation of the Coalition of Boarding Homes, and led to the passage of the Vulnerable Persons Act in 1986, which strengthened laws around protecting abused or neglected vulnerable adults.
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Forty years later, an underground network of unlicensed personal care homes in Jackson — and the horrors perpetuated against vulnerable residents living in some of them — persists.
In 2010, a woman living in an unlicensed personal care home in west Jackson died of hypothermia after being kept in a room with no heat and a broken window. In 2017, the health department raided three illegally-operating homes, finding that residents were living with no heat, toilets or bed linens, according to news reports. That home operator still has an active home health care business license. In 2021, three residents died after a man set fire to another unlicensed personal care home in north Jackson.
In January, Disability Rights Mississippi, a nonprofit and the state’s designated legal advocacy agency for people with disabilities, released a report detailing widespread misconduct in the industry of unlicensed personal care homes across Mississippi, where, unlike in other states, these facilities “have the ability to comfortably engage in illegal practices without the threat of licensing agencies penalizing them.”
State law requires that any home caring for more than four individuals not related to the homeowner be licensed by the Mississippi State Department of Health, adhering to a set of often costly safety requirements and inspections. Residents of these homes typically don’t need the level of care offered by a nursing home, but still need assistance to stay fed and bathed, take medicine, or get to and from appointments.
The health department licenses 11 of these homes in Jackson, according to an agency directory — down from 17 in 2017, according to the Clarion Ledger. The health department said in that time, smaller homes have been replaced with larger ones, so the reduction only accounts for a net loss of 15 beds.
Then there are unlicensed homes operating legally with fewer than four residents and those operating illegally with more than four residents – same as forty years ago. Disability Rights found that some owners try to skirt this rule, such as by placing residents in tents on their property, “to claim that only three people are ‘actually inside the house.’”
The Legislature saw a bill this session to get rid of this distinction, requiring homes with any patients to be licensed, but it quickly died.
There’s no way of knowing for sure how many of these homes are operating under the radar, but Disability Rights estimates there could be two to three times as many unlicensed homes as licensed.
Individuals living in these facilities often have nowhere else to go. They sometimes sign over their monthly SSI checks, $900 of federal assistance for people with disabilities and often their only income, to the homeowner in exchange for paltry services and little to no allowance. Disability Rights found a home caring for six individuals pulling $4,800 per month in rent, far above the market value for the property, and it did not have a smoke detector or sprinkler system.
“Operating these homes does cost money, but the inconsistency and lack of oversight for ensuring residents are receiving adequate care and provisions, after handing over most or the entirety of their limited funds, creates a breeding ground for financial exploitation,” the Disability Rights report reads.
Aurora Baugh, who spent most of her career at the Department of Mental Health, retiring several years ago as the Coordinator of the Division of Recovery and Resiliency, said her agency long quit discharging folks from the mental hospitals to unlicensed personal care homes — but low housing stock is one of the sector’s largest challenges. The agencies that transition people from institutions to the community, like the Department of Mental Health, but also the Department of Corrections, have a stake in the conditions of these facilities.
“They’re the ones who make the difference if people go to licensed or unlicensed, but if you only have (11 in Jackson), what are you going to do? Put them in a hotel?” Baugh said.
And to make matters more complicated, some residents may prefer the lax rules offered in the unlicensed homes, such as the ability to come and go as they please or smoke cigarettes, as opposed to strict conditions in place at some licensed facilities or nursing homes.
“They wanted the freedom, you know, after being housed (in hospitals) for so many years,” Swearengen said.
In exchange, the Disability Rights report identified what residents inside some of these homes are enduring: plastic coverings or boarded up windows, deadbolted doors, no electricity, exposed wiring, bathrooms ill-equipped for disabled residents, no washer, dryer or stoves, locked food pantries and improper cooling and heating to the point where one resident’s body temperature decreased to 78 degrees. Disability Rights found residents that had not been bathed, wearing the same clothes for days, and residents receiving only one meal a day.
Typically, the conditions inside these facilities aren’t brought to light until an incident involving law enforcement occurs or someone makes a complaint, like in the case of Grand Avenue in 1982.
But licensing officials aren’t exactly scaling fences today.
Frances Fair, director of health facility licensure and certification at the Mississippi State Department of Health, said the department’s surveyors – “current day superheroes” – hit the streets every week in tough circumstances to examine conditions and investigate complaints inside the homes licensed by the department.
“But we do need to do it legally, within the framework of our authority,” Fair said, which does not include the same treatment for unlicensed homes.
When the health department receives word of a home operating illegally, Fair said it turns the information over to the Office of the Attorney General, whose responsibility she said it is to investigate.
Michelle Williams, chief of staff for Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, said the office has received at least 10 of these complaints from the health department since January of 2024, and that the office does investigate in these instances to determine if abuse, neglect of exploitation is occurring. But Williams also said a home simply operating without a license isn’t a crime, that the attorney general’s office doesn’t pursue licensure, and the health department should seek administrative relief in those cases.
The AG’s office investigates thousands of cases of alleged adult abuse, neglect or exploitation each year — most of which do not rise to the level of criminal prosecution — but Williams said the office does not capture data to show how many of those incidents occurred inside personal care homes, licensed or unlicensed.
In the gap, Disability Rights has taken the steps it can, filing civil court complaints to force illegal homes in Jackson to become licensed or close down: four in 2022 and one in 2024.
“Even when these homes are closed, there are no safeguards in place to prevent operators from reopening a new UPCH (unlicensed personal care home) in a different location, leaving residents vulnerable to continued exploitation and neglect,” reads the Disability Rights report.
Fair said solving the issue of predatory unlicensed personal care home owners will require stakeholders to “follow the money.” In the case of residents signing over their SSI checks to the personal care homes, the business owners become the official “representative payee” in the federal government’s records.
“As long as people can make money off of vulnerable adults and say they’re going to take care of somebody, but then they take their checks and commingle those funds with their own personal funds and there’s not a lot of oversight on that, then that can be a problem,” Fair said.
Fair said several agencies have a role to play, such as the U.S. Social Security Administration, which administers the funds ultimately going to these business owners and should be auditing to ensure residents are treated fairly.
The descriptions of the unlicensed homes found today in Mississippi — “inhumane living conditions”, “neglect by other residents and staff”, “unsafe, unsanitary, and uncaring” — mirror language from Kemp’s old papers.
“They were in deplorable conditions and in great need of attention,” Kemp wrote after the incident on Grand Avenue, according to an Oct. 20, 1982, Mississippi Health Care Commission memo obtained by Mississippi Today.
“Things must be a lot better,” Kemp mused during his interview with Mississippi Today.
“I don’t know that they’re better,” Swearengen, his former colleague, responded.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Ties that bind, not lines that divide, at the heart of “Little Women” are what make Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel such an enduring classic. More than a century and a half since its 1868 publication, the March sisters’ coming-of-age tale continues to resonate in fresh approaches, say cast and crew in a musical version opening this week at New Stage Theatre in Jackson, Mississippi.
“Little Women, The Broadway Musical” adds songs to Alcott’s story of the four distinct March sisters — traditional, lovely Meg, spirited tomboy and writer Jo, quiet and gentle Beth, and artistic, pampered Amy. They are growing into young women under the watchful eye of mother Marmee as their father serves as an Army chaplain in the Civil War. “Little Women, The Broadway Musical” performances run March 25 through April 6 at New Stage Theatre.
In a serendipitous move, the production coincides with Women’s History Month in March, and has a female director at the helm — Malaika Quarterman, in her New Stage Theatre directing debut. Logistics and scheduling preferences landed the musical in March, to catch school matinees with the American classic.
The novel has inspired myriad adaptations in film, TV, stage and opera, plus literary retellings by other authors. This musical version debuted on Broadway in 2005, with music by Jason Howland, lyrics by Mindi Dickstein and book (script) by Allan Knee.
“The music in this show brings out the heart of the characters in a way that a movie or a straight play, or even the book, can’t do,” said Cameron Vipperman, whose play-within-a-play role helps illustrate the writer Jo’s growth in the story. She read the book at age 10, and now embraces how the musical dramatizes, speeds up and reconstructs the timeline for more interest and engagement.
“What a great way to introduce kids that haven’t read the book,” director Quarterman said, hitting the highlights and sending them to the pages for a deeper dive on characters they fell in love with over the two-and-a-half-hour run time.
Joy, familial warmth, love, courage, loss, grief and resilience are all threads in a story that has captivated generations and continues to find new audiences and fresh acclaim (the 2019 film adaptation by Greta Gerwig earned six Academy Award nominations).
In current contentious times, when diversity, equity and inclusion programs are being ripped out or rolled back, the poignant, women-centered narrative maintains a power to reach deep and unite.
“Stories where females support each other, instead of rip each other apart to get to the finish line — which would be the goal of getting the man or something — are very few and far between sometimes,” Quarterman said. “It’s so special because it was written so long ago, with the writer being such a strong dreamer, and dreaming big for women.
“For us to actualize it, where a female artistic producer chooses this show and believes in a brand new female director and then this person gets to empower these great, local, awesome artists — It’s just really been special to see this story and its impact ripple through generations of dreamers.” For Quarterman, a 14-year drama teacher with Jackson Public Schools active in community theater and professional regional theater, “To be able to tell this story here, for New Stage, is pretty epic for me.”
Alcott’s story is often a touchstone for young girls, and this cast of grown women finds much in the source material that they still hold dear, and that resonates in new ways.
“I relate to Jo more than any other fictional character that exists,” Kristina Swearingen said of her character, the central figure Jo March. “At different parts of my life, I have related to her in different parts of hers.”
The Alabama native, more recently of New York, recalled her “energetic, crazy, running-around-having-a-grand-old-time” youth in high school and college, then a career-driven purpose that led her, like Jo, to move to New York.
Swearingen first did this show in college, before the loss of grandparents and a major move. Now, “I know what it’s like to grieve the loss of a loved one, and to live so far away from home, and wanting to go home and be with your family but also wanting to be in a place where your career can take off. .. It hits a lot closer to home.”
As one of four sisters in real life, Frannie Dean of Flora draws on a wealth of memories in playing Beth — including her own family position as next to the youngest of the girls. She and siblings read the story together in their homeschooled childhood, assigning each other roles.
“Omigosh, this is my life,” she said, chuckling. “We would play pretend all day. … ‘Little Women’ is really sweet in that aspect, to really be able to carry my own experience with my family and bring it into the show. … It’s timeless in its nature, its warmth and what it brings to people.”
Jennifer Smith of Clinton, as March family matriarch Marmee, found her way in through a song. First introduced to Marmee’s song “Here Alone” a decade ago when starting voice lessons as an adult, she made it her own. “It became an audition piece for me. It became a dream role for me. It’s been pivotal in opening up doors for me.”
She relishes aging into this role, countering a common fear of women in the entertainment field that they may “age out” of desirable parts. “It’s just a full-circle moment for me, and I’m grateful for it.”
Quarterman fell in love with the 1969 film version she watched with her sister when they were little, adoring the family’s playfulness and stability. Amid teenage angst, she identified with the inevitable growth and change that came with siblings growing up and moving on. Being a mom brings a whole different lens.
“Seeing these little people in your life just growing up, being their own unique versions, all going through their own arc — it’s just fun, and I think that’s why you can stay connected” to the story at any life juncture, she said.
Cast member Slade Haney pointed out the rarity of a story set on a Northeastern homestead during the Civil War.
“You’re getting to see what it was like for the women whose husbands were away at war — how moms struggled, how sisters struggled. You had to make your own means. … I think both men and women can see themselves in these characters, in wanting to be independent like Jo, or like Amy wanting to have something of value that belongs to you and not just just feel like you’re passed over all the time, and Meg, to be valuable to someone else, and in Beth, for everyone to be happy and content and love each other,” Haney said.
New Stage Theatre Artistic Director Francine Reynolds drew attention, too, to the rarity of an American classic for the stage offering an abundance of women’s roles that can showcase Jackson metro’s talent pool. “We just always have so many great women,” she said, and classics — “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Death of a Salesman,” for instance — often offer fewer parts for them, though contemporary dramas are more balanced.
Reynolds sees value in the musical’s timing and storyline. “Of course, we need to celebrate the contributions of women. This was a woman who was trying to be a writer in 1865, ’66, ’67. That’s, to me, a real trailblazing thing.
“It is important to show, this was a real person — Louisa May Alcott, personified as Jo. It’s important to hold these people up as role models for other young girls, to show that you can do this, too. You can dream your dream. You can strive to break boundaries.”
It is a key reminder of advancements that may be threatened. “We’ve made such strides,” Reynolds said, “and had so many great programs to open doors for people, that I feel like those doors are going to start closing, just because of things you are allowed to say and things you aren’t allowed.”
For tickets, $50 (discounts for seniors, students, military), visit www.newstagetheatre.com or the New Stage Theatre box office, or call 601-948-3533.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Tracy Harden stood outside her Chuck’s Dairy Bar in Rolling Fork, teary eyed, remembering not the EF-4 tornado that nearly wiped the town off the map two years before. Instead, she became emotional, “even after all this time,” she said, thinking of the overwhelming help people who’d come from all over selflessly offered.
“We’re back now, she said, smiling. “People have been so kind.”
“I stepped out of that cooler two years ago and saw everything, and I mean, everything was just… gone,” she said, her voice trailing off. “My God, I thought. What are we going to do now? But people came and were so giving. It’s remarkable, and such a blessing.”
“And to have another one come on almost the exact date the first came,” she said, shaking her head. “I got word from these young storm chasers I’d met. He told me they were tracking this one, and it looked like it was coming straight for us in Rolling Fork.”
“I got up and went outside.”
“And there it was!”
“I cannot tell you what went through me seeing that tornado form in the sky.”
The tornado that touched down in Rolling Fork last Sunday did minimal damage and claimed no lives.
Horns honk as people travel along U.S. 61. Harden smiles and waves.
She heads back into her restaurant after chatting with friends to resume grill duties as people, some local, some just passing through town, line up for burgers and ice cream treats.
Rolling Fork is mending, slowly. Although there is evidence of some rebuilding such as new homes under construction, many buildings like the library and post office remain boarded up and closed. A brutal reminder of that fateful evening two years ago.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
George Foreman, surely one of the world’s most intriguing and transformative sports figures of the 20th century, died over the weekend at the age of 76. Please indulge me a few memories.
This was back when professional boxing was in its heyday. Muhammad Ali was heavyweight champion of the world for a second time. The lower weight divisions featured such skilled champions and future champs as Alex Arugello, Roberto “Hands of Stone” Duran, Tommy “Hit Man” Hearns and Sugar Ray Leonard.
Boxing was front page news all over the globe. Indeed, Ali was said to be the most famous person in the world and had stunned the boxing world by stopping the previously undefeated Foreman in an eighth round knockout in Kinshasa, Zaire, in October of 1974. Foreman, once an Olympic gold medalist at age 19, had won his previous 40 professional fights and few had lasted past the second round. Big George, as he was known, packed a fearsome punch.
My dealings with Foreman began in January of 1977, roughly 27 months after his Ali debacle with Foreman in the middle of a boxing comeback. At the time, I was the sports editor of my hometown newspaper in Hattiesburg when the news came that Foreman was going to fight a Puerto Rican professional named Pedro Agosto in Pensacola, just three hours away.
Right away, I applied for press credentials and was rewarded with a ringside seats at the Pensacola Civic Center. I thought I was going to cover a boxing match. It turned out more like an execution.
The mismatch was evident from the pre-fight introductions. Foreman towered over the 5-foot, 11-inch Agosto. Foreman had muscles on top of muscles, Agosto not so much. When they announced Agosto weighed 205 pounds, the New York sports writer next to me wise-cracked, “Yeah, well what is he going to weigh without his head?”
It looked entirely possible we might learn.
Foreman toyed with the smaller man for three rounds, almost like a full-grown German shepherd dealing with a tiny, yapping Shih Tzu. By the fourth round, Big George had tired of the yapping. With punches that landed like claps of thunder, Foreman knocked Agosto down three times. Twice, Agosto struggled to his feet after the referee counted to nine. Nearly half a century later I have no idea why Agosto got up. Nobody present– or the national TV audience – would have blamed him for playing possum. But, no, he got up the second time and stumbled over into the corner of the ring right in front of me. And that’s where he was when Foreman hit him with an evil right uppercut to the jaw that lifted the smaller man a foot off the canvas and sprayed me and everyone in the vicinity with Agosto’s blood, sweat and snot – thankfully, no brains. That’s when the ref ended it.
It remains the only time in my sports writing career I had to buy a T-shirt at the event to wear home.
So, now, let’s move ahead 18 years to July of 1995. Foreman had long since completed his comeback by winning back the heavyweight championship. He had become a preacher. He also had become a pitch man for a an indoor grill that bore his name and would sell more than 100 million units. He was a millionaire many times over. He made far more for hawking that grill than he ever made as a fighter. He had become a beloved figure, known for his warm smile and his soothing voice. And now he was coming to Jackson to sign his biography. His publishing company called my office to ask if I’d like an interview. I said I surely would.
One day at the office, I answered my phone and the familiar voice on the other end said, “This is George Foreman and I heard you wanted to talk to me.”
I told him I wanted to talk to him about his book but first I wanted to tell him he owed me a shirt.
“A shirt?” he said. “How’s that?”
I asked him if remembered a guy named Pedro Agosto. He said he did. “Man, I really hit that poor guy,” he said.
I thought you had killed him, I said, and I then told him about all the blood and snot that ruined my shirt.
“Man, I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I’d never hit a guy like that now. I was an angry, angry man back then.”
We had a nice conversation. He told me about finding his Lord. He told me about his 12 children, including five boys, all of whom he named George.
I asked him why he would give five boys the same name.
“I never met my father until late in his life,” Big George told me. “My father never gave me nothing. So I decided I was going to give all my boys something to remember me by. I gave them all my name.”
Yes, and he named one of his girls Georgette.
We did get around to talking about his book, and you will not be surprised by its title: “By George.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
://mississippitoday.org”>Mississippi Today.
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