The Disturbing Story of the Asylum Called 'Forest Haven'

Forest Haven. The name sounds like a place of safety. What it actually was, was a government compound hidden in the Maryland woods where Washington, D.C. sent the people it did not want to deal with. The deaf. The epileptic. Orphans reclassified as "retarded" with a stroke of a pen. Over 66 years, hundreds of them died inside, and one investigating attorney would call it the deadliest known example of institutional abuse in recent American history. The District Training School for the Mentally Retarded opened in 1925 on 200 acres of forested land in Laurel, Maryland. Twenty-two buildings with gentle names like Dogwood, Elm, and Poplar were spread across the campus, along with a working farm, a theater, a gymnasium, and a baseball field. The idea was vocational training. Teach residents skills. Prepare them for jobs on the outside. That vision collapsed within decades. By the 1960s, funding had been slashed so severely that all education and recreation programs were eliminated. The population swelled past 1,300 with only two social workers for the entire facility. Forest Haven was spending roughly $18 per day per patient when the national average was over $30. Doctors declared medically incompetent by the state of Maryland were allowed to keep practicing. Hundreds of people who were not intellectually disabled at all were committed simply because they were deaf, dyslexic, epileptic, or did not speak English. When a nearby orphanage closed in 1974, twenty children were sent to Forest Haven and reclassified from "orphan" to "retarded" with a stroke of a pen. The director himself told the Washington Post that at least 400 of his residents did not belong there and that the facility was contributing to their handicap. Nobody acted on it. Residents were beaten with belts and baseball bats, locked in bare rooms wearing nothing but diapers, and hosed down instead of bathed. Dozens died from aspiration pneumonia after being fed while lying down because staff were expected to feed 8 to 10 people in the time it would take to properly feed one. In 1976, the parents of Joy Evans, a 17-year-old who died from aspiration pneumonia after being committed at age 8, filed a class action lawsuit that the United States government itself joined as co-plaintiff. A federal judge ordered the facility closed, but Forest Haven continued operating for another 13 years. The Evans case became the longest-standing class action of its kind in American history. It was not dismissed until January 2017, forty years after it was filed. After Forest Haven finally closed in 1991, former residents were moved into group homes across D.C. The abuse followed them. A Washington Post investigation by Katherine Boo found that 116 people with disabilities died in those group homes between 1993 and 1999. The series won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Not every story ended in tragedy. Ricardo Thornton entered Forest Haven as a child and left in his twenties. He has worked at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in D.C. for more than 35 years. He married a fellow former resident named Donna after fighting for the right of people with intellectual disabilities to marry. His story was featured on 60 Minutes and made into a CBS movie. He testified before the United States Senate. Subscribe for new episodes exploring the abandoned asylums, psychiatric hospitals, and forgotten institutions that shaped American history. What institution should we cover next? Drop it in the comments.