By Associated Press - Sunday, May 4, 2014

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (AP) - The drowning of a 35-year-old man who had escaped from a South Texas center for people with developmental disabilities was preventable, according to his family.

Sean Yates, who had been living at the Corpus Christi State Supported Living Center, had a history of escaping from the facility and thus had a staff member with him at all times.

But nine days before he escaped on Jan. 30, officials reduced his level of supervision, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times reported (https://bit.ly/1i99frB ) Sunday.

Documents obtained by the newspaper show some center employees felt it was negligent to have reduced Yates’ level of supervision and felt they had been forced into making that decision, which several said they regretted.

Texas Department of Family and Protective Services investigators determined the center staff erred in reducing his supervision.

The body of Yates, who had a high-functioning form of autism, Asperger’s and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, was found Feb. 22 in the ship channel in Corpus Christi. His death was ruled accidental by drowning.

His mother, Aleene Yates, said the living center staff did not tell her family that he had been taken off the restrictive supervision. His sister, Ashley Yates, said the family would have objected to the change.

The goal of the facility is to help each resident live as independently as possible, said Cecilia Cavuto, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Aging and Disability Services, which oversees Texas’ 13 state-supported living centers.

According to documents obtained by the newspaper through an open records request, a treatment team on Jan. 10 agreed Yates’ “only barrier to successful community placement is his history of unauthorized departures.”

The team devised a plan to allow Yates to prove himself ready for community placement by reducing his level of supervision to routine Monday through Friday but keeping him on one-to-one supervision on weekends.

“That should have never, never happened,” Aleene Yates said of her son’s reduced supervision.

The Department of Family and Protective Services investigation concluded the decision to reduce his supervision was negligent because staff didn’t properly supervise him, putting him at risk of injury.

In deciding to reduce Yates’ supervision, some staff members cited a previous meeting where administrators told staff the Corpus Christi living center had one of the state’s highest ratios of residents on one-to-one supervision and “that it was not sustainable to keep so many residents on 1:1,” one staffer said in documents.

Cavuto said there is not a mandate to reduce the number of residents on one-to-one supervision.

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Information from: Corpus Christi Caller-Times, https://www.caller.com

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