69-year-old woman with autism left in hot van unattended for over 2 hours

DOUGLAS COUNTY, Ga. — A state investigation is now underway after a 69-year-old woman with autism was left in a hot van unattended for more than 2 hours.

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It happened in the parking lot at Arbor Place Mall last August. Someone passing by called the police for help.

Channel 2 investigative reporter Ashli Lincoln spoke with advocates who say a new law can help prevent these kinds of mistakes.

“How long she’s been out here,” Douglas County Ofc. Dukes can be heard saying on the bodycam video.

“It was a group of us, then we got distracted with the other group getting them out of the van,” one person can be heard explaining on the the bodycam video.

That distraction resulted in 69-year-old Brenda Ballard being left in a hot van for what police say was two and a half hours.

“She’s sweating through all her clothes,” Dukes said.

It was 87 degrees on Aug. 8th when two employees with the Chanan Foundation forgot about Ballard, while they took a group of disabled individuals to the movies and lunch at Arbor Place Mall.

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Rena Harris with the Georgia Advocacy Office for Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities—says it gets several calls like this incident.

“Direct support professionals are some of the most overworked and underpaid members of the workforce. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that this affects safety for the people that they’re that they’re caring for,” Harris said.

This year Gov. Brian Kemp approved a $6 an hour pay increase for workers supporting people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

“This rate increase is not going to completely solve the problem, but it’s a good start,” Harris said.

Harris says while the organization followed state-mandated staff-to-patient ratios, they failed to follow the organization protocol by doing a simple head count.

The CEO of the Chanan Foundation, Lon Bell, told police his employees, “broke policy, they’re going to be terminated.”

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Bell declined Channel 2 Action News request for an interview but did provide a statement that said in part:

“For privacy reasons, we do not discuss personnel actions or the individuals to whom we provide care. However, we have been made aware of the situation, and we enacted additional safety protocols to protect those whom we serve.”

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