Sunday, July 20, 2014

We received a call from Anthony's community support provider on Friday saying Anthony had gotten violent, and asking us to come get him rather than them bringing him home as they normally would.  We are of course never particularly surprised to get such calls, and I went to pick him up without giving much thought to it.  I had not heard the details and casually told the waiting male staff that Anthony probably needed to have a bowel movement; I would take him home and have him sit on the toilet.

The full story was rather more serious than that. It turns out that he tried to rip a tag off another boy's shirt--yes, we are still dealing with that, along with the urinating problems--and a female staffer tried to stop him.  Anthony got upset and slammed his head into hers, sending her to the hospital with a concussion.  We were asked to keep Anthony home Saturday and Monday while the staff re-evaluates how (or whether) they want to proceed with him.

Anthony is in some ways more difficult to deal with than many other autistic individuals.  Because he is pretty easy-going much of the time, he can lull his handlers into a false sense of security around him.  We are always quite specific about the dangers associated with him: he doesn't get violent often, but when he does, he will do anything he can to hurt his handler if he thinks he can get away with it.  The special needs school that he separately goes to, for instance, has a male staffer that they immediately call when Anthony gets upset.  But we understand that if a staffer sees Anthony for an extended period without a violent episode, he or she might default to thinking Anthony does not require as much diligence as do others.  And then something like this can happen.

Since violence with Anthony ultimately is a matter of when rather than if, we would prefer that he have an episode soon after entering a new environment to let people see that we weren't kidding about him.  Sadly, we don't have control over that. Perhaps we need to consistently reiterate what Anthony is capable of doing until they see it for themselves.