http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/crime/244795

Thanks for all the links, not easy reading, needless to say.

In my opinion, it is largely the “traditional” authoritarian bias (power for its own sake) that still permeates our culture, in extremely subtle ways as well as overt, that is responsible for both the abuses that occur in institutional settings (including on the policy level), and for those that occur at the individual and family levels in domestic settings.

The imbalance of power that exists between individuals and groups is itself the flash-point of all injustice, and viral authoritarianism thrives on that imbalance. We rely upon such authoritarianism by default, because we, as a whole, are unwilling to commit to the risk and much harder work that more egalitarian approaches demand. Oh, we love to wear our “enlightened” garbs and trinkets on the outside, but we are still tribal predators on the inside…

[/soapbox]

(Although in some defense of alternatives, I know folks who act as foster parents and do a good job of it, even with special-needs children.)

Equally disturbing, I think, is this rather unusual report pertaining to adults in mostly institutional settings:

Abuse and Neglect of Adults with Developmental Disabilities (California)
http://www.pai-ca.org/pubs/701901.htm

For those who don’t feel up to reading the whole report, the most compelling data can be found in Chapter 1.

In comparing these different sets of statistics, we might bear in mind that victims taken out of the first (domestic) settings routinely wind up in the second (institutional) settings … which, it would appear, are vastly more hazardous on the whole than the averages of domestic life.

In other words, as horrific as the “disease” is in this case, such general “cures” as present-day society is prepared to administer somehow always turn out to be worse.

(now I’m getting this strange “deja vu” feeling for some reason…)

Child abuse statistics
http://www.yesican.org/stats.html

We have had some horrendous child abuse/death stories here and they leave me shaking because by the time it reaches the paper too often it is too late to do anything except punish the perpetrator, not rescue or spare the child. There is no child anywhere for any reason who should have this happen to him or her.

The mother had custody of the child because the father already had been jailed or charged with abusing another autistic child of theirs. He was no longer with the family by this time. Despite CPS “looking for the family”, there was never a missing persons claim. Despite being uninvolved with his dead son, he is filing a lawsuit against CPS.
As a person located in Tucson, I feel this case has more to do with drugs, law enforcement, CPS and out of control parenting than with autism. It’s identical to a couple other cases that occurred at the same time with nonautistic victims.
I fully believe that Brandon Williams would have been killed regardless of his neurology.