In October 2017, I got a call from a woman who said she has been giving food to people she thought were homeless for over a year. She reached out to the local newspaper because she had recently discovered something surprising: They weren’t homeless. They were residents of an assisted living facility called Jones & Jones, and the vast majority of them were receiving state funds to live there. But every day residents would walk to the nearby busy intersection and panhandle for money because they weren’t given their monthly allowance, they didn’t get enough food, and they had to get away from the bed bugs that left scars all over their faces.
On multiple occasions, the residents, who were mentally and physically handicapped, were hit by cars near that intersection. At least three died. Though local police officers and one city councilwoman were aware of the problems, nothing was done to address it. Assisted living facilities in Virginia are overseen by the state, and Jones & Jones had racked up hundreds of violations in just the four years for which complaint data was available: Roaches in the food, too few items of clothing per resident, patients getting the wrong medication, or no medication at all. Yet despite these major, repeat violations, the facility remained open.
Soon after the first story, The Forgotten, was published, the state began cracking down on the administrator, eventually revoking her license because she had allegedly stolen residents’ money to pay for casino trips and vacations, among other things. But as I spent more time with residents, it became increasingly clear: They had nowhere else to go. Most who were there had been kicked out of other facilities due to behavioral problems related to their mental illness. The administrator told me that 95 percent of the residents were mentally ill. Jones & Jones wasn’t simply a poorly-run assisted living facility, it was a warehouse for the mentally ill.
I followed one resident who had been kicked out of Jones & Jones. He spent a month in a tent. Then he spent a month in jail, because the judge could see that his health would only deteriorate further if he remained homeless. And my investigation broadened to other facilities, including one where a mentally ill resident was deemed unfit to live there. The facility had strict rules for its residents, and contacted the Department of Social Services to seek help in finding a new home for this individual. But after a thorough search, no new home was found because other facilities didn’t want to take him. So the state authorized the original facility to send the resident to a motel. As of June 2018, there was no record of his location.
The story of Jones & Jones was no longer that of a single facility. It was about a chronic, systemic problem in Virginia, stemming from the simple fact that the state has no network of stable housing for its mentally ill. In the summer of 2018, after the first two stories about Jones & Jones and its residents ran, the facility still hadn’t been shut down, though it had no administrator and no license. And in that time, two residents died: One because the facility employees failed to call emergency services despite clear signs that they should have, and the other because Jones & Jones had admitted him even though it could not offer him the appropriate care. His name was Kevin Hammock, and he was suicidal. He took his own life over the summer.