A week after his first birthday, Bobby Hartwell’s parents dropped him off at the Colorado State Home and Training School for Mental Defectives northwest of Denver.
He never saw them again.
For the next 30 years, Hartwell, who has cerebral palsy and mental retardation, lived at the school and at a nursing home. In 1980, Wade Blank, a preacher and activist for the disabled, got Hartwell out, helped him get public assistance and a home, and taught him to live on his own.
Now, at 57, Hartwell may lose it all, starting with his apartment – because he can’t prove he’s a U.S. citizen.
Hartwell’s dilemma is the result of new rules – a 2006 Colorado law, federal requirements in the 2006 Deficit Reduction Act, and 2004 homeland security legislation – aimed at thwarting terrorists and barring public benefits for undocumented residents.
But the disabled, the mentally ill and the homeless are getting tangled in those rules, their advocates say.
Last month, Hartwell got a letter telling him he must produce a state-issued ID or driver’s license to continue getting help paying for his apartment.
He has already lost his federal food stamps, said Nola Nash of the Atlantis/ADAPT center. The center, founded by Blank, helps disabled people live independently.
Nash helps Hartwell and about 40 others who are frantic over the rules. There may be hundreds more, she said.
At one time, the state operated three homes for the disabled. At its peak in the early 1960s, nearly 2,000 people lived in Ridge Home, the state facility near Denver.
Without housing assistance, Hartwell can’t pay his rent. He has no family to take him in. His only alternative, Nash said, may be a nursing home.
“I’m not going back. Not going back. Not. Not going back,” Hartwell said. As he spoke, his voice rose to something between a shout and a sob.
To satisfy the requirements for his housing assistance, Hartwell needs a state photo ID. To get that, he needs a birth certificate. To get his birth certificate, he must show a driver’s license or state ID.
For people who lack either, the state accepts military IDs, paycheck stubs, mortgage documents or a Social Security card, said Ron Hyman, state registrar of vital statistics.
Hartwell has none of those.
The state is just following the rules made by Congress, Hyman said.
“We do have an appeals process,” he said. “We try to make allowances.”
Nash paid $50 for a computer search on Hartwell’s Social Security number to get him a card – and learned someone in California has been using his identity.
Nash and Hartwell also went to the state Division of Motor Vehicles, where they were told that in place of a birth certificate, a high school yearbook photo or a gun permit would work. But not Hartwell’s RTD pass for the disabled. Staff told her to appeal but could not tell her how to do it.
“It’s absolutely criminal,” said Maureen Farrell, executive director of the Colorado Center on Law and Policy, an advocacy group challenging the ID requirements.
“There are individual workers who are making up the rules, and nobody knows what they are,” Farrell said.
The Denver Department of Human Services has a chart describing which benefits require which documents. The chart is six pages long.
The Colorado legislature is considering a bill that would expand the list of documents that could be accepted for a state ID.
Hartwell was one of many wards of the state let out of institutions in the 1970s and ’80s, with little documentation, as investigations uncovered abuses. A 1985 U.S. Justice Department report on the Ridge Home found one resident with a femur protruding through the skin and one with a left arm swollen, loose and floppy at the shoulder.
“Staff were unable to explain how a resident suffered second-degree burns,” the report said.
“We can be mad at the people who put their kids in there – but most of them, I think, thought they were doing the best thing at the time,” Nash said.
Two weeks ago, Nash and Hartwell learned the names of his parents from the only remaining scrap of information from Hartwell’s stay at Ridge: an index-card-size form.
On it are the names of his parents, their Littleton address and an assigned three-digit number.
Hartwell has never asked about his parents, Nash said, but he does ask whether he has brothers or sisters. If so, he would like to meet them. So far, none has been located.
Hartwell’s apartment is modest. There is a table and one chair, a television he loves but insists is broken, a stove he won’t allow anyone to turn on.
People who came out of Ridge brought odd phobias, Nash said. “One guy’s afraid of pork chops. Bobby doesn’t want things to burn up.”
In the living room, a picture of Jesus is taped on the wall, and a photo of three little girls. Hartwell doesn’t know the girls’ names; they are the children of one of the attendants who help him get up and dressed each day.
He always wants someone nearby when he uses the bathtub. At the nursing home, he said, “They left me in the bathtub. I was afraid. They locked the door and left me.”
Hartwell spends his days at the Atlantis Center, where he likes showing off a newspaper photo of him, taken at a 1985 protest seeking wheelchair-accessible transportation. In it a young man in glasses, his wheelchair parked in front of a bus, raises his arm defiantly.
The caption calls Hartwell only “a man in a wheelchair.”
To Nash that’s typical – as if Hartwell weren’t a real person. That is why she’s determined to get his ID.
“He lost his identity once and then got it back,” she said. “Now the state is trying to take it away again.”
Staff writer Karen Augé can be reached at 303-954-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com.
