MINEOLA, N.Y. — There may be a reason a prosecutor’s office says it never received nine reports of suspicious deaths of developmentally disabled people in state care over the past three years: A state oversight agency acknowledged on May 20 that it sent them to an assistant prosecutor’s personal email, an account that apparently had been abandoned.
The handling of the nine cases has prompted the agency, the Justice Center, to update its email list and institute a policy of only sending such reports directly to each county’s top prosecutor, plus a designee, followed with a phone call to confirm.
The Associated Press reported this week that none of the nine death cases, all in Long Island’s Suffolk County between 2013 and 2016, led to criminal charges.
Suffolk’s district attorney’s office said the Justice Center, the state’s central clearinghouse for collecting such cases, never told the office of the cases, as required by law. The Justice Center disputed that and provided the AP with notification documents showing they were sent to the address it was given by the office three years ago: a private, non-governmental email with the domain optonline.net.
Suffolk district attorney’s office spokesman Robert Clifford said that private email was identified by the office as “a dormant, private email address of an assistant district attorney.”
“Its use is decidedly not in compliance with the customary transmission of official business or information,” Clifford said.
There was no response when the AP tried the address several times this week.
Clifford refused to identify the prosecutor or say how long the account was believed to have been abandoned. He said he didn’t know how the Justice Center got that address.
Additionally, Clifford said that nobody from the Justice Center called to follow up on its notifications and that a search of the DA’s office records produced no sign of any “regular mail” follow-up. The Justice Center didn’t respond to queries asking if it made attempts to follow up.
