The Washington Post - 23.08.2019

FRIDAY, AUGUST 23 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ M2 A

FLORIDA

‘I-95 killer,’ who left

6 dead, is executed

Gary Ray Bowles, a serial
killer who preyed on older gay
men during an eight-month
rampage that left six dead, was
executed by lethal injection
Thursday at Florida State Prison.
The sentence was carried out
at 10:58 p.m., according to the
office of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).
Bowles received the death
penalty for the November 1994
murder of Walter Hinton in
Jacksonville Beach. Hinton was
Bowles’s sixth and final known
victim in a series of killings in an
eight-month span in 1994 that
terrorized the Interstate 95
corridor and won him the
nickname the “I-95 killer.”
It began in Daytona Beach
with the murder of John Hardy

Roberts. In between, there were

victims in Rockville, Md.;

Savannah, Ga.; Atlanta; and

Nassau County, Fla. In each case,

Bowles had a signature: He

stuffed the victims’ throats with

objects — towels, rags, toilet

paper, dirt, leaves and even a sex

toy.

— Associated Press

VERMONT

Diocese names priests

accused of abuse

A report released Thursday by

Vermont’s Roman Catholic

Church found there were

“credible and substantiated”

allegations of the sexual abuse of

minors against 40 priests in the

state since 1950.

All but one of those allegations

occurred before 2000, and none

of the priests is still in ministry,

the report said. Most of the

priests who were named in the

report are now dead.

Bishop Christopher Coyne,

who leads the Roman Catholic

Diocese of Burlington, which

covers the entire state,

commissioned the report last fall

after the Vermont attorney

general’s office launched its own

investigation into allegations of

abuse at the now-shuttered St.

Joseph’s Orphanage in

Burlington and amid mounting

pressure on the church to

respond to abuse claims.

Vermont’s attorney general’s

office is conducting a separate

investigation into abuse

allegations.

Coyne said until the names

were released Thursday, the

scope of abuse within the diocese

“has been our family secret.”

The Vermont diocese has been

grappling with priest sex abuse

cases for decades. The diocese

has spent tens of millions of

dollars to settle cases.

The release by the Vermont

diocese comes as the Catholic

Church across the country and

worldwide comes to terms with a

legacy of the sexual abuse of

minors. Last month, the Diocese

of Manchester, which covers

New Hampshire, posted a list

that included the names of 73

priests.

— Associated Press

CALIFORNIA

Former co-worker

held in shooting

A suspect arrested in the

stabbing death of a man at the

California State University at

Fullerton campus was a co-

worker of the victim, police said

Thursday.

Chuyen Vo, 51, was arrested

Wednesday night at his home in

Huntington Beach, officials

announced at a news conference

near the killing scene in a

campus parking lot.

Lt. Jon Radus declined to

elaborate on the work

relationship of the suspect, and

it was unclear whether it was

current or in the past.

The victim, Steven Shek

Keung Chan, 57, worked as the

director of budget and finance

and student services for

university extended education

but retired in 2017. He returned

to the campus in January to

work as a consultant.

Authorities have said Chan

was found stabbed numerous

times inside his silver Infiniti in

a campus parking lot Monday,

and they believed it was a

targeted attack.

— Associated Press

DIGEST

Politics & the Nation

BY HAILEY FUCHS

Eugene Redmond, a longtime
Yale University psychiatry profes-
sor, lured students to his research
site on a Caribbean island, offer-
ing financial and professional
support before sexually assault-
ing them — behavior that persist-
ed for almost 25 years after Yale
was made aware of the allega-
tions, according to a university
investigation released this week.
The 54-page report said that
missteps by Yale administrators
allowed a chronic abuser to prey
upon students for decades. Red-
mond, affiliated with the Yale
School of Medicine faculty
for 44 years, is accused of sexually
assaulting at least five students
and performing unnecessary, in-
vasive genital or rectal exams dat-
ing to the early 1990s. He com-
mitted acts of sexual misconduct
involving at least eight other un-
dergraduates, recent graduates
and one high school student, ac-
cording to the review conducted
by Deirdre M. Daly, a former U.S.
attorney in Connecticut.
The revelations emerged from
interviews with 110 witnesses, in-
cluding 38 current and former
students. Months before the re-
port was released, the Yale Daily
News published an investigation
of Redmond’s alleged abuse. In a
statement to the student paper,
Redmond denied the allegations,
calling them “slanderous and de-
famatory.”
Redmond, who is banned from
Yale’s campus and denied the priv-
ileges of a retired faculty member,
has not been criminally charged
and declined the university’s re-

quest for an interview during the

investigation. His attorney did not

respond to requests for comment

from The Washington Post.

Redmond becomes the latest

tenured faculty member at a high-

profile university to be ensnared

by the #MeToo movement. At oth-

er Ivy League schools, the move-

ment has similarly led to a reckon-

ing. In July, Harvard suspended

an acclaimed economist facing al-

legations of unwelcome sexual

contact. Dartmouth recently

reached a $14 million settlement

with nine women who said the

college disregarded years of sex-

ual harassment and assault by

former psychology professors.

Yale is promising to

change protocols for internships,

overnight programs and disci-

plinary action. Yale President Pe-

ter Salovey issued an apology.

“Redmond’s actions, reported

by the survivors who came for-

ward, are reprehensible and anti-

thetical to the educational mis-

sion of our university,” he said.

“On behalf of Yale, I am deeply

sorry Redmond’s behavior was

not stopped once and for all when

it was first reported.”

The investigation chronicles

the “textbook grooming behavior”

Redmond is accused of using to

exploit students, garner their

trust and establish control. The

Yale professor allegedly

had a regular routine with interns

he hosted at his research site

on St. Kitts, a quiet island known

for its population of vervet mon-

keys: invite students for an alco-

holic beverage, require a male in-

tern to share a bedroom with him

— claiming other researchers

would be arriving soon or addi-

tional cleaning charges would be

too expensive — and then sexually

assault the student.

In 1994, several undergraduate

students first reported claims of

sexual molestation and harass-

ment by Redmond to the chair of

the Medical School’s Psychiatry

Department, according to the re-

port. In a settlement with a stu-

dent, Redmond promised to close

his summer research program,

but Yale did not implement a mon-

itoring mechanism to ensure he

did so, the report found.

“[It is] clear that if Yale had

implemented a long-standing

monitoring program after the

1994 investigation, Redmond’s

ongoing misconduct might well

have been detected and stopped,”

the report read. “In addition, at

various points after 1994, several

members of the Yale community

had concerns about Redmond’s

subsequent interactions with cer-

tain students, which, if they had

pursued, might have prompted

Yale to further scrutinize Red-

mond’s conduct and potentially

uncover his misconduct.”

In 2018, a Yale student reported

a new allegation of sexual assault

against the professor to the

school’s administration. With dis-

ciplinary action pending and

word that the 1994 allegations had

resurfaced, Redmond retired qui-

etly from the faculty in May 2018.

But it was not until months lat-

er, after another complaint of sex-

ual misconduct against him was

made, that the university began

the independent investigation.

Yale students and faculty mem-

bers have long pushed the admin-

istration for greater oversight of

those found to have committed

sexual assault.

Valentina Connell, a senior who

helped lead protests on campus

after then-Supreme Court nomi-

nee Brett M. Kavanaugh, a Yale

graduate, was accused of sexual

assault, said professors found to

have committed sexual miscon-

duct are often allowed to continue

teaching. For students, who might

fear retaliation from those in pow-

er, filing a complaint can often be

an arduous process, she said.

“Yale has a culture of letting

professors with allegations of sex-

ual misconduct get by without

consequences,” Connell said.

Elizabeth Jonas, a Yale profes-

sor of internal medicine and co-

chair of the university’s Commit-

tee on the Status of Women in

Medicine, said the administration

has repeatedly ignored her

group’s proposals. Only public

outcry and potential damage to

the university’s reputation spur

the administration to act, she said.

[email protected]

Yale report alleges sex assaults by former longtime professor

BRENNAN LINSLEY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Eugene Redmond is pictured at a biomedical research center on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts in

June 2006. The former Yale psychiatry professor is accused of sexually assaulting students there.

BY LENNY BERNSTEIN

With a nationwide prescrip-
tion opioid lawsuit scheduled for
trial in two months, attorneys for
newborns suffering from expo-
sure to opioids in the womb have
made a last-ditch plea for special
legal treatment for the infants
and their guardians.
Attorneys representing a
group that may number more
than 250,000 children have spent
much of the past two years seek-
ing a separate trial against drug
companies but have been re-
buffed twice by the judge who
oversees the sprawling legal case.
The children are still included in
that lawsuit, along with about
2,000 other plaintiffs, against
some two dozen defendants from
the pharmaceutical industry.
The children’s lawyers also
have complained that attorneys
for cities and counties spearhead-
ing the lawsuit have refused to let
them take part in settlement ne-
gotiations that are occurring as
the trial date approaches.
The attorneys, from 20 firms
that represent children across the
country, insist that a settlement
or verdict must yield billions of
dollars specifically earmarked for
years-long monitoring of the
physical and mental health of
children born with “neonatal ab-
stinence syndrome.” That is the
formal name for the cluster of
difficult symptoms endured by
babies who undergo withdrawal
from opioids in the days after
birth.
Without that guarantee, the

attorneys contend, cities and

towns are likely to spend any

money they receive from drug

companies on more pressing and

popular needs, as some states did

with windfalls from the $206 bil-

lion settlement with tobacco

companies two decades ago.

“Our goal is to make sure that

we do not have a tobacco-style

settlement, where all of the mon-

ey goes to the governmental enti-

ties, and there’s not a significant

trust set aside to help these chil-

dren,” said Stuart Smith, one of

the lawyers representing the fam-

ilies.

About 2,000 plaintiffs, most of

them cities and counties, have

sued about two dozen drug com-

panies over culpability for the

prescription opioid epidemic,

which has killed about 200,

people in two decades. The cases

were consolidated in a Cleveland

federal courtroom, where Judge

Dan Aaron Polster is overseeing

them all.

Polster has encouraged the

hundreds of attorneys involved to

work out a mass settlement that

helps pay for treatment, emer-

gency care and other costs of

curbing the epidemic. If that does

not happen, a test-case trial in-

volving just two Ohio counties,

Cuyahoga and Summit, would

begin in October.

Separately, nearly every state

has sued drug companies in their

own courts, reasoning that they

have the advantage there. A ver-

dict in the first of those trials,

between Oklahoma and the

health-care conglomerate John-

son & Johnson, is expected Mon-

day.

In December, Polster rejected a

request for a separate “track,” or

trial, for the neonatal abstinence

syndrome children, a status he

has given to Native American

tribes. He instructed their attor-

neys to instead meet with top

plaintiff lawyers from cities and

counties “to address how [the

children’s] needs might be more

adequately addressed.”

Attorneys for the cities, coun-

ties and other groups issued a

statement at the time supporting

Polster’s decision. “Judge Polster

decided not to create this sepa-

rate track and we believe his

decision was correct,” they said.

“Communities in every part of

this country continue to lose lives

every day, and while each of those

communities is unique and has

its own separate claim, this litiga-

tion is the most effective path

towards accountability.”

In July, the lawyers for the

cities and counties also submitted

consultants’ reports that name

pregnant women and newborns

as a “special population” of peo-

ple affected by opioids that would

be aided by money from any

verdict or settlement — signaling

that they are including those

groups in their overall strategy.

They estimated that those two

groups alone would need

$10.7 billion over 10 years to

remedy the damage caused by

mothers’ opioid use.

Now with time running out,

the attorneys for the children

filed a motion Monday asking for

a delay to review 130 million

pages of documents and other

data that they said they were

prevented from viewing until last

month. Their goal is to certify the

infants as a class later this year

and bring a class-action suit

against drug companies under

the auspices of Polster and the

larger litigation.

An estimated 32,000 babies

were born with the withdrawal

syndrome in 2014, according to

the National Institute on Drug

Abuse. That is a more than five-

fold increase from 2004.

The infants are prone to low

birth weights and suffer trem-

bling, irritability, gastrointestinal

problems and sleep dysfunction,

among other symptoms. They can

have seizures unless they are

carefully weaned off drugs by

health-care providers.

Research on the long-term ef-

fects of that experience is limited,

but some experts are concerned

that the children will suffer cogni-

tive, developmental and behav-

ioral problems from the effects of

exposure to opioids and with-

drawal. The babies’ attorneys

have presented opinions from ex-

perts suggesting that opioids are

harmful to developing fetuses.

[email protected]

Attorneys: Babies born after opioid exposure need legal cover

BY DANIELLE

DOUGLAS-GABRIEL

The U.S. Education Depart-

ment is accepting requests from

cancer patients to have their stu-

dent loan payments postponed

while they undergo treatment.

The request form, released

Thursday, will make it easier for

patients to have payments sus-

pended without interest accruing

on their loans for the duration of

treatment and for six months

after it ends.

This new type of deferment is

more flexible than other options.

It requires the government to

forgo collection of interest on a

wider range of federal loans dur-

ing the postponement period.

There is no time limit, so borrow-

ers whose cancer may return five

years after treatment would be

eligible to seek another defer-

ment. Other options have three-

year limits.

Borrowers must submit a letter

from a doctor certifying they are

or were receiving cancer treat-

ment and the dates of care. Defer-

ments will be approved for up to

one year of treatment, followed

by a six-month post-treatment

postponement of payments. If

treatment lasts longer, the pa-

tient’s doctor may submit a new

letter stating that.

The cancer treatment benefit

applies to federal loans made on

or after Sept. 28, 2018, when the

law was enacted, and to loans that

borrowers were repaying on that

date. The Education Department

estimates that more than 5,

federal student-loan borrowers

will be eligible.

Thursday’s release of the re-

quest form comes nearly a year

after Congress passed legislation

for the cancer-related deferment.

The provision was signed into

law by President Trump in Sep-

tember.

The Education Department

said there were many pieces to

put in place before the agency

could get the program running. It

had to figure out how the law

would apply to various types of

federal loans. It also had to work

with the nine contractors servic-

ing its $1.5 trillion portfolio of

student debt to retool their sys-

tems to add the deferment option.

The agency released a draft of

the request form after four

months, and it was then subject to

a 60-day public comment period.

“A simple form should have

had a 30-day public comment

period, especially one modeled

after existing deferment and dis-

charge forms,” said Mark Kan-

trowitz, the publisher and vice

president of research of the finan-

cial aid website Savingforcollege

.com. “Cancer patients can’t wait

for financial relief. The law was

effective immediately upon pas-

sage.”

Even without a request form,

eligible borrowers were still enti-

tled to the deferment. But many

borrowers complained that loan

servicers refused to take action,

according to consumer advo-

cates. The Education Department

instructed servicing companies

to place eligible borrowers in for-

bearance, a type of payment post-

ponement in which interest ac-

crues, until the agency developed

and implemented the program

requirements.

Now that the form is available,

borrowers may ask their loan

servicers for retroactive defer-

ment.

Despite the delay, Rep. Betty

McCollum (D-Minn.), who spon-

sored the deferment provision,

said she was pleased the request

form is available and was inspired

to champion the measure after

meeting a young veteran strug-

gling to pay her student loans

while out of work and receiving

chemotherapy.

“These students were stressed

and squeezed between paying

medical bills or paying student

loans, while at the same time

receiving cancer treatment,” Mc-

Collum said. “This is a real suc-

cess story for the 70,000 young

adults diagnosed with cancer

each year who can now defer their

student loans, focus on beating

cancer, and then return to their

academic life.”

[email protected]

Program

provides

loan relief

to patients

BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Ashley Kennedy, left, cuddles her daughter Makenzee at Mount

Washington Pediatric Hospital in Baltimore in 2015, in a ward that

specializes in weaning newborns off of heroin and methadone.

Inquiry finds missteps by

university allowed abuse

to continue for decades

New deferment option

suspends student debt

during cancer treatment