B4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, OCTOBER 21 , 2019
their profile pictures black in
mourning. They remembered
him as an ambitious, hard-work-
ing man who wanted to make his
family proud.
Ilias Bah said his older brother
was loved by everyone, eager to
“fight to become a great man” to
improve his family’s life.
“My older brother was a very
wise, intelligent young man who
had the joy of living his life,” Ilias
Bah said. “He loved his family
very much despite the long dis-
tance.... He was always there for
us, and we will build ourselves to
make him proud.”
[email protected]police so authorities can “catch
the person and to take them to
justice.”
King said that the apartment
complex where the slaying oc-
curred is a large, busy area and
that investigators hope anyone
who saw anything, “even if they
think it’s insignificant,” will con-
tact police.
“No detail is too small,” King
said. “We’re looking for answers
for his family and friends here
and overseas.”
On social media accounts from
across the world, Mamadou Bailo
Bah’s friends and families have
posted tributes to him or turnedthe case.
“We need help to know exactly
what happened,” Dialla said. “We
don’t know why him.”
Mamadou Aliou Diallo, a friend
of Mamadou Bailo Bah’s, is work-
ing to return his body to Guinea.
“He was a very ambitious
young man with lots of hopes and
dreams,” he said. “At this point we
cannot bring his life back. The
only thing we can try to do is bring
his body back to his family so that
their hearts and minds are at
peace.”
Amadou Sara Bah said he
hopes anyone with information
about his son’s killing will contactcountry and work,” Abdoulaye
Bah said. “His father’s business is
based in Morocco. He wanted to
be the one who was going to take
that one day. He wanted to follow
his father’s footsteps.”
The killing has rattled the
area’s Guinean community, which
has banded together to raise
funds for his family.
Doumbouya Dialla, president
of the Association of Guineans in
the DMV, is working with a simi-
lar association in Baltimore to
collect at least $10,000 for the
victim’s family and to urge the
public to come forward with in-
formation that could help solveMamadou Bailo Bah and Ab-
doulaye Bah are not related, but
the two met decades ago when
they were in preschool. They
spent so much time with each
other that their parents eventual-
ly became friends, Abdoulaye Bah
said.
When Abdoulaye Bah moved to
the United States in 2010, the
friends stayed in touch despite
the distance. Then in 2018, the
two reunited in Maryland after
Abdoulaye Bah helped his friend
apply for the student visa that
brought him to the United States.
“He came here with me to learn
English and then go back to hisshock. Why? Why him?”
Abdoulaye Bah, who lives in
Baltimore, said his friend had
lived at the Metzerott Road apart-
ment for only a few weeks on a
temporary basis as he awaited
approval for a new place.
Mamadou Bailo Bah’s dream
was to come to the United States
and learn English, Abdoulaye Bah
said. The friends had plans to
work together in the future, with
Mamadou Bailo Bah looking to
study business and earn an asso-
ciate degree from Montgomery
College, Abdoulaye Bah said.
SEARCH FROM B1
construction on the data center
while Tran rounded up financing
through the federal EB-5 invest-
ment visa program, Tran claims in
his court filing.
After the economic develop-
ment authority filed its lawsuit in
March, records show, Tran’s com-
pany was terminated from the
visa program, which allows for-
eign investors a path to U.S. citi-
zenship in exchange for the jobs
created by their money.
[email protected]lying about the site’s suitability
for new construction, allegedly
telling him that the dirt was “so
clean you could eat off it,” when it
still contained chemical waste.
Finally, Tran argues that he
obtained the $10 million loan for
the project legitimately and has
been making monthly payments
on it of $42,160, which a Warren
County attorney confirmed to The
Washington Post.
The authority’s board ap-
proved the loan as a way to startIn one alleged scheme, Tran
says, McDonald forged his signa-
ture to make it look as if he had
agreed to finance a police acad-
emy to be run by McEathron.
Tran also claims that McDon-
ald falsely informed him that
$1.5 million he collected from the
authority in reimbursed con-
struction costs for the data center
project came out of a state grant.
He says he later learned the grant
didn’t exist.
And Tran accuses McDonald ofrent and former board members
of the authority were charged
with misdemeanor counts of mis-
feasance and nonfeasance for al-
legedly allowing the embezzle-
ment and misconduct to occur.
Tran says in his court filing that
McDonald used his plans to build
a three-building data center com-
plex — on a 30-acre portion of the
former Superfund site that once
hosted the Avtex Fibers rayon
manufacturing plant — to ad-
vance her own interests.McEathron killed himself in May
in the face of allegations that he
and McDonald stole $3.5 million
in authority funds and used it to
buy four properties.
McEathron had not been
charged with a crime. But several
others besides McDonald have
been charged with felonies, in-
cluding her husband, Samuel
North. Last month, all five mem-
bers of the Warren County Board
of Supervisors, County Adminis-
trator Douglas Stanley and cur-return messages seeking com-
ment, and neither did her attor-
ney.
Douglas Parsons, the current
director of the Economic Devel-
opment Authority, referred ques-
tions to the agency’s attorneys,
who did not return messages.
The embezzlement scandal has
rocked the small Front Royal com-
munity, particularly after former
county sheriff Daniel T.
LAWSUIT FROM B1
seeming like they want to make
it happen.”
Gambrell, herself a recovering
opiate user, said the program is
“meeting a need that was miss-
ing” by deploying counselors
who in many cases have shared
the experience of addiction. The
small number of patients who
have entered treatment, she said,
could stem from the fact that
many of those seen in the emer-
gency room aren’t prepared to
stop using, even when offered
buprenorphine.
“There have been multiple
ones that just aren’t ready for
treatment,” she said.
Some treatment providers, for
their part, said they have been
puzzled that more patients have
not flowed to them from the
initiative.
At the end of August, The Post
surveyed each of the seven treat-
ment providers listed in the
directory provided to hospital
counselors. Combined, they esti-
mated that they had seen fewer
than a dozen patients.
David Sternberg, clinical ser-
vices manager at the nonprofit
Helping Individual Prostitutes
Survive — one of the District’s
oldest and most prominent pro-
viders of services to drug users —
said his group’s medication-as-
sisted treatment clinic has not
seen a single patient referred
from participating hospitals.
“It’s pretty well known among
community providers that the
program is a joke,” Sternberg
said.
Mosaic and the hospital asso-
ciation have not tracked how
many patients at the participat-
ing hospitals have screened posi-
tive for opioid use and potential
treatment with buprenorphine,
making it difficult to gauge the
initiative’s success.
Nearly 4,000 patients were
identified as having some kind
of substance use disorder over
the first four months of the
program. But opioid users were
not tracked separately, Hirt
said.
Department of Behavioral
Health Chief of Staff Phyllis
Jones said the program will seek
to report opioid patient numbers
“to better measure how emer-
gency room screenings are help-
ing to reach those most affected
by the District’s opioid epidem-
ic.”
One measure of the number of
opioid users streaming into
emergency rooms comes from
the Fire and Emergency Medical
Services data, which show that
593 people identified as opioid
users were taken by ambulance
to Howard, Washington Hospital
and United Medical Center dur-
ing May, June, July and August.
The pool of potential patients
who could benefit from the pro-
gram will soon expand.
In the coming months, the
program will expand to George
Washington University Hospital,
MedStar Georgetown University
Hospital and Sibley Memorial
Hospital, according to officials
from the D.C. Department of
Behavioral Health.
Davis, like Jackson, said he
resigned from his job as a coun-
selor out of frustration at how
the program was being run. But
he hopes improvements will re-
sult in more people getting help.
“This is early, you know?”
Davis said. “They can turn it
around.”
[email protected]Post’s series was published, the
Bowser administration launched
multiple anti-opioid initiatives,
including a dramatic expansion
in the city’s distribution of the
overdose antidote naloxone.
The emergency department
outreach program began at Unit-
ed Medical Center, MedStar
Washington Hospital Center and
Howard University Hospital, all
of which have seen high numbers
of overdose victims.
Yet key components of the
initiative were not in place when
it launched, according to some of
the drug counselors who were
hired to help emergency room
patients.
Richard Davis, an addiction
counselor who was employed at
Howard from April through July,
said the emergency department
was not staffed around the clock
with outreach workers, as he had
been told it would be during his
training. During gaps in the
overnight shift, drug users who
showed up would not be able to
receive counseling services, he
said.
Michelle Jackson, a counselor
who worked at United Medical
Center through August, said she
had trouble arranging follow-up
appointments with community
providers so that patients could
continue treatment outside the
hospital.
“There’s no follow-through,”
Jackson said. “That fast track
that we were believing that we
were launching — that these
providers in the community were
already on standby waiting for
these referrals — we’ve learned
that... most of them are not
really quite ready.”
Jessie Gambrell, a counselor
in the program who has worked
at Howard University Hospital
since mid-August, offered a dif-
ferent perspective. She said the
program appears to be well run
and that doctors and nurses in
the emergency room had wel-
comed the initiative, “reallyreliable pipeline from the hospi-
tal to ongoing treatment is as
crucial, experts said.
Without that connection, pa-tients addicted to opioids run an
immediate risk of relapse once
they leave the hospital.
“It would be like starting a
patient on insulin and sending
them out the door hoping theycan find a provider to refill it
when they run out,” said Ali Raja,
who oversees the buprenorphine
program at Massachusetts Gen-
eral Hospital in Boston.
Earlier this year, after TheHospital. Researchers there
found that opioid users who
began treatment during visits to
the emergency room with bu-prenorphine — an opioid medi-
cation that sates users’ cravings
without creating extreme intoxi-
cation or other downsides of
street drugs — often have more
success in recovery.The results inspired hospitals
across the country to launch
outreach programs based in
their emergency departments.
While the initial doses of bu-
prenorphine are important, athat counselors had linked more
patients to long-term treatment
than they actually had.
Mosaic Group president Marla
Oros said documentation errors
by drug counselors at the hospi-
tals had led to reporting errors.
“It is not uncommon in the
first several months of reporting
for Mosaic to have to circle back
to our hospital partners and look
deeper into the data to deter-
mine if the documentation and
the reports from the electronic
health records are all working as
planned,” Oros wrote in an email.
Hospital association spokes-
woman Jennifer Hirt said “a
corrective action plan is being
implemented in order to get
accurate data.” D.C. Department
of Behavioral Health officials
also said they are working with
the hospital association to im-
prove data collection.
Department director Barbara
Bazron said that when she was a
Maryland public health official,
Mosaic Group had successfully
launched similar programs in
that state. She said she was
confident the District’s program
would deliver better results, giv-
en more time.
“This is early in the life span of
this particular program,” she
said. “I can tell you from the
Maryland results these efforts
have been extremely, extremely
successful.... I look forward to
seeing the same thing happen
here within the District of Co-
lumbia.”
She added, “As you’re breaking
new ground, you’ve got to get the
bugs out.”
City officials have awarded an
additional $770,000 grant to the
hospital association to monitor
and follow up with opioid users
after they leave the emergency
room.
Like its counterparts else-
where in the country, the city’s
emergency room outreach and
treatment initiative grew out of a
2015 study at Yale-New Haveninitially launched at three hospi-
tals, was a cornerstone of Bows-
er’s plan for an invigorated re-
sponse to drug deaths that had
festered for years without an
aggressive remedy from the Dis-
trict government. The plan was
announced in the wake of a
two-part series published by The
Post in December that examined
the city’s faltering response to
the local opioid epidemic.
But the initiative is off to a
slow start.
Since it began operating in
late April, the city’s program —
run through a contract with the
D.C. Hospital Association worth
nearly $2.9 million over two
years — connected only a small
number of patients with treat-
ment, according to records and
interviews with District officials,
treatment providers and out-
reach workers.
During the program’s first
four months, fewer than 30 pa-
tients began treatment in the
emergency room with the addic-
tion medicine buprenorphine,
and just 19 of them continued
treatment outside the hospital,
according to city data. Over the
same period, nearly 600 opioid
users were taken by ambulance
to hospitals participating in the
program, according to D.C. Fire
and EMS data.
Officials with the hospital as-
sociation and the Mosaic Group,
a consulting firm hired to design
and help manage the program,
defended the initiative, saying it
would take time to yield more
robust results.
Gayle Hurt, the association’s
assistant vice president for pa-
tient safety and quality opera-
tions, noted the program has also
referred hundreds of patients for
various kinds of substance abuse
treatment outside the hospitals,
although most of those referrals
did not lead to follow-up ap-
pointments.
“It’s a new initiative,” Hurt
said. “It’s sort of to be expected
that not everything is going to be
perfect.”
But community treatment
providers, as well as some coun-
selors who performed outreach
to drug users through the pro-
gram, said the rollout has been
rocky.
“It’s been slow and hasn’t
delivered much at this point in
terms of having connected pa-
tients with care, that I’ve seen,”
said Andrew Robie, a physician
who oversees medication-assist-
ed treatment at Unity Health
Care, one of the District’s largest
providers of addiction treatment
for opioid users. “I think they’re
working through the issues and
making an effort to improve it
and soliciting feedback. But it
seems a little bit like some of the
plans could have been in place
before the program was
launched.”
Unity clinics did not see a
single patient referred from the
program through late August,
four months after its launch,
Robie said. Since then, three or
four patients have been referred,
he said.
The program has also had
trouble tracking patient out-
comes. In response to questions
from The Post, the hospital asso-
ciation acknowledged that it had
reported incorrect figures on the
program’s early performance to
the city, erroneously claiming
PROGRAM FROM B1
D.C. program to help connect opioid users with treatment has had little success
In suit, developer claims he was unwitting participant in Front Royal scandal
Fatal shooting of man in Adelphi seems ‘completely random,’ police say
MARVIN JOSEPH/THE WASHINGTON POST
Howard University Hospital was one of three hospitals initially chosen to participate in a new program in the District designed to connect
opioid users with addiction treatment when they come into emergency rooms because of an overdose.BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) launched multiple anti-opioids
initiatives, including a dramatic expansion in the city’s distribution
of the overdose antidote naloxone earlier this year.“It’s been slow and hasn’t delivered
much at this point in terms of having
connected patients with care.”
Andrew Robie, head of medication-assisted treatment at Unity Health Care