From MindSite News by Art Levine. “Universal Health Services Inc., one of the largest operators of behavioral health facilities in the country, was pulled back into the news this month as Illinois prosecutors charged a former mental health counselor with repeatedly sexually assaulting children as young as 7 over an eight-year span ending in 2004.
On Dec. 1, Cook County prosecutors filed five counts of assault against Edmund Rivers, 68, a former counselor at Hartgrove Behavioral Health Hospital in Chicago. The facility is the target of several civil lawsuits, and prosecutors say five more alleged victims came forward after attorney Martin Gould announced the first lawsuit against the hospital late last year.
The mental health facility is not an outlier in Illinois: Gould says he represents more than a thousand patients who say they were abused physically, sexually and/or psychologically at youth residential treatment centers across the state, including but not limited to UHS facilities. “But the worst appears to be Hartgrove, with hundreds of sexual abuse plaintiffs,” he told MindSite News. “It was a playpen for pedophiles.
Gould described Rivers as a “serial perpetrator” and predicted more arrests and criminal charges would follow. “He’s the first domino to fall,” he said.”
