A new investigative project by reporters Ashley Balcerzak and Jean Rimbach at NorthJersey.com delved into the state’s privately run group home system that provides care for some 8,000 adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. What they documented in their “Hidden at Home” series was alarming.

The system is largely left to police itself, the investigation found, and the lack of accountability can have devastating results for its residents with conditions like cerebral palsy, Down syndrome and autism. In some cases, residents were left to die alone in avoidable ways, the report said, and others weren’t provided basic care like being given food, water or medical attention. Abuse and medical errors also led to disturbing injuries or death, and group home staff were found to be overburdened and underpaid.

To produce the series, Balcerzak and Rimbach spent a year filing hundreds of public records requests and interviewing hundreds more family members, providers, group home staff and residents with developmental disabilities. They said many of their efforts were blocked by the state Department of Human Services, which oversees the $1.5 billion system, and many of the stories remain untold either out of fear of retribution or because the group home residents are unable to speak for themselves.

“The more families we talked to, the more documents we read, we kept coming up with the same things happening, the same lapses in basic care,” said Rimbach, an investigative reporter for The Record and NorthJersey.com. “People not being cleaned, people not getting proper medication. People not having their incontinence underpants changed, not getting the food they needed, getting too much of the wrong food. Not being taken to doctors.”

“We also found families were keeping a catalogue of injuries … from burns, bruises, stitches, all kinds of things that were happening to their loved ones, many of them unexplained and those that were investigated, many of them unsubstantiated,” she said.

Balcerzak, a reporter for The Record and NorthJersey.com, said the state conducts a “mortality review” of each individual death in the homes.

“The ombudsman Paul Aronsohn calls those ‘cursory,'” she said. “What we do know is about 170 people under group home care die each year and 120 are unexpected, so that means they’re not in hospice or palliative care. And then from that, only about 10% of deaths are investigated.”