Jami Vaughn still can’t bring herself to watch surveillance video that shows her 10-year-old son being assaulted at The Hawthorn Center, located inside the Walter P. Reuther Psychiatric Hospital in Westland.
Vaughn said her son suffered brain damage and psychological trauma during the assault that workers at the state-run facility allegedly took part in and instigated.
“He could have been killed,” Vaughn said.
Vaughn’s attorney, Arnold Reed, filed a $100 million lawsuit against five workers who either participated in stepping on the boy’s fingers when he reached under a door or instigated an attack by another patient, a 15-year-old girl.
Moments before he played the surveillance video for reporters at a press conference Thursday, Reed said, “You will see them laughing and jeering this on. They wanted a fight. They instigated a fight. So now, they’re going to get one.”
The video begins with several workers kicking and stepping the bottom area of a door where Reed said Vaughn’s son was sticking his fingers. A young girl, age 15, then enters the camera field and she walks past the adults to do the same thing they had been doing.