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2 detail complaints about group home

A relative and a guardian say they removed patients from the Dalberth Family Care Home and told officials about its poor condition. But both say nothing was done.

By COLLEEN JENKINS
Published September 28, 2005

Angela Davis' brother had been at the Dalberth Family Care Home only three weeks last year when she decided to pull him out. On his final night at the home for disabled adults, she found her brother agitated. The house was filthy. The owner and caretaker, Francis Herman Dalberth, was drunk and belligerent, she said.

In June, Joanne Rivera-Therrell became the professional guardian for a woman who she said was physically and sexually assaulted at the Dalberth home. When she was taken to Spring Hill Regional Hospital two months before, the woman also had toxic levels of a drug used to treat seizures in her system.

Davis and Rivera-Therrell contacted the St. Petersburg Times on Tuesday after learning that owner "Guy" Dalberth was arrested last week and accused of abusing one of the disabled residents at his Spring Hill adult family care home.

Both said they previously had told state and local officials of their concerns about the owner and his facility.

Did authorities take action?

On Tuesday, four days after Dalberth's arrest, that still wasn't clear. The Agency for Health Care Administration and the Department for Children and Families both are investigating Dalberth's home.

But AHCA, which licensed the home, couldn't say whether Dalberth's criminal history should have precluded him from operating, how long he had been in business or whether his home previously had been investigated for infractions.

"I'll get you answers today," AHCA spokesman Jonathan Burns said early Tuesday afternoon.

Later, he said answers wouldn't come until today. "We're working on it," he wrote in an e-mail.

Pasco County sheriff's spokesman Doug Tobin said his agency's files showed some 70 reports for the home at 15741 Lancer Road, but he could not yet say whether any of those records had to do with complaints about the facility.

Prior to Thursday night's incident, during which 53-year-old Dalberth allegedly hit a resident who uses a wheelchair, the owner-caretaker had been arrested five times in Florida. The charges include lewd and unnatural sex, battery, leaving the scene of a crash involving property damage and two DUIs.

The lewd charge came in 1987, when a St. Petersburg police officer arrested Dalberth for having sex in North Shore Park, according to records obtained Tuesday.

Both DUI arrests occurred in Hernando County this year, on March 5 and Sept. 3. Hernando sheriff's spokeswoman Donna Black said Dalberth was driving alone both times.

That's little comfort to Davis. She said she alerted AHCA and DCF immediately after removing her brother in August 2004 from Dalberth's home because she was so worried about the residents left behind.

Her complaints ran long: Dirty dishes stacked high in the sink. Shower floors covered with grime. Carpet dirtied by dog feces and urine. Residents getting verbally abused.

"The house stunk," she said Tuesday. "I complained all over the place. . . . It never went anywhere."

Rivera-Therrell, president of Community Services for the Aged Inc. in Hudson, had a similar experience. When she went to Dalberth's home to retrieve her client's things, the woman's clothing had been urinated on and Dalberth refused to turn over her television set, the guardian said in an e-mail.

She said she filed an incident report with law enforcement and spoke with a DCF investigator.

"In my last conversation with the DCF investigator, he asked me point blank if I felt the current residents in the home were at risk," Rivera-Therrell wrote in her e-mail. "I responded that yes, they all were at extreme risk. . . . Yet nothing has happened that I can see."

On the advice of her attorney, Rivera-Therrell said later Tuesday that she could not elaborate.

Dalberth posted bail at 8:15 p.m. Monday. He declined an interview with the Times.

Colleen Jenkins can be reached at 727 869-6236 or cjenkins@sptimes.com

[Last modified September 28, 2005, 12:43:25]