Worker charged in 2004 sex case still not tried
By ALAN JUDD, ANDY MILLER
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
January 14,
2007
She says the money doesn't matter.
Her $25,000 settlement from the state, she says, doesn't make up for what happened to her at Northwest Georgia Regional Hospital on New Year's Day 2004.
She wants justice.
But more than three years after she reported that an employee at the state mental hospital had sexually assaulted her, the man has not yet faced trial. Her case is among the 194 substantiated instances of physical or sexual abuse by Georgia's state mental hospital employees since 2002.
That New Year's afternoon in Building 412 of the hospital, the woman and another patient had a cup of coffee with an employee in a staff break room, normally off-limits to patients. The other patient soon left.
The employee, Reggie A. Spivey, locked the door, the woman says.
Over the next few minutes, she alleges, Spivey forced her to have sex and sodomized her.
The woman, now 35, was being treated for depression and psychotic illness. By the beginning of 2004, she had been in and out of Northwest Georgia Regional several times. "I was up there so much," she says, "it was like home."
Now home is in Haralson County, where two red baseball caps perched on her couch profess her love for the Georgia Bulldogs. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is withholding the woman's identity because she says she was the victim of a sex crime.
Spivey, 27, had been working at the state hospital as a health services technician since July 2003. He previously had been employed as an electrician's helper and as a Wal-Mart worker, unloading trucks, according to state personnel records.
A month before he was hired, Spivey had been arrested on three counts of battery stemming from a domestic dispute, court records in Floyd County show. State personnel officers in Atlanta discovered the arrest in September 2003 while conducting routine background checks on newly hired employees.
Although a letter in Spivey's personnel file described the charges as potentially "job-related," the hospital allowed him to remain at work.
Spivey completed a court-ordered anger management course and, as part of an agreement with prosecutors, a judge dismissed the battery charges on Dec. 12, 2003.
Three weeks later, Spivey was working the day shift on an adult mental health unit at Northwest Georgia Regional.
The patient who accused Spivey of rape says that after the alleged attack, she went to her room in a daze and waited about an hour to report it, until a staff member whom she trusted arrived for work.
The hospital's police department opened an investigation and took the woman to a rape clinic in Rome, where an examination showed indications of a possible sexual assault.
Spivey at first denied the allegations. He was suspended with pay as the hospital investigated. More than a month later, however, he admitted in a statement to police that he had had sexual contact with the patient, but claimed it was consensual.
"She told me after I had poured her some coffee that she wanted to have sex with me, so I told her that we could not do anything like that but she said it will be all right," Spivey wrote in his police statement.
Under state law, even consensual sex with a person confined in a mental institution is illegal. The hospital fired Spivey.
A Floyd County grand jury later indicted him on charges of sodomy and sexual assault on a person in custody. He pleaded not guilty.
Efforts to reach Spivey were unsuccessful. His attorney, James Wyatt, declined to comment.
Despite Spivey's statement to police acknowledging sex with the patient, the case seemed to languish.
A trial was scheduled twice — first in August 2005, then the following December. But the woman and her social worker, Diane Engels, say prosecutors never seemed willing to try the case. The woman says they never met with her or took a statement from her.
Normally, "you're protective of the victim — trying to find out what's going on with the victim," says Engels, a former victims advocate in Cherokee County. "There was none of that. ... They were looking at it like she's not competent to testify because of her illness. They didn't act like they would normally act in that kind of case."
Last August, after several months of inactivity, prosecutors asked a judge to place the case on hold indefinitely. In court papers, prosecutors said they needed the postponement "for further investigation."
Leigh Patterson, the district attorney in Rome, attributes the delay to a backlog at the state crime lab.
In an interview, she said prosecutors did not receive a lab report until almost two years after Spivey's indictment, and that more results are still outstanding. She declined to comment on the nature of the additional tests or on prosecutors' dealings with the alleged victim.
"We're still investigating that one," Patterson said. The case, she said, "has not been shoved aside."
The state agreed in 2005 to pay the woman $25,000 to settle a civil case she had filed. But, she says, "the money isn't the whole thing." She says she wants her alleged assailant held accountable.
"I want to see him in jail," she says. "I want to see him punished."
What makes her angriest, though, is that Spivey worked in the state hospital despite his arrest record.
"He should have never got the job," she says. "That doesn't make sense. If you have a problem, why should you go to work with other people who have problems?"