"...deemed ready for community placement..."; by whom? The fourth-yr psychology major that pts. see in lieu of a psychiatrist? Or perhaps the nurse practioner who is in charge of prescribing psychoactive drugs? The much-vaunted '24 hour supervision' is provided by an untrained minimum-wage employee.One employee per house of 12-15 pts. Money-taxpayer money-flows through Altapointe with little oversight. Supervisors,assistant supervisors,deputy assistant supervisors run their little piece of Altapointe as their own private fiefdoms,with rampant favoritism.The feds and the Ala. Medicaid Agency should clean house at Altapointe;perhaps this horrible event will prompt closer scrutiny.

It's amazing how disgruntled, former employees come out of the woodwork to criticize an organization they left behind OR that they were asked to leave. Federal government mandates that mental health patients must be placed in the least restrictive environment. We will always have people that are so sick they need to be in a locked environment. Those that are deemed ready for community placement by the courts must have somewhere to go. Behaviors rarely can be predicted; that's why these individuals need care and oversight. Maybe Margaret and Bobby9 would rather they were on the streets?

Old Charlie Manson pretty much got it right it... “You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy.”

I am a former employee of Altapointe,and can attest that 'Margarets' cooments are spot on.The '24 hour supervision' consists of a minimally-literate unskilled drop-out who has no experience in the mental-health field.'Consumers' with prior violent histories are allowed total freedom to leave the premise in search of crack,meth,ect.Mix prescribed high-dosage psychoactive pharmaceuticals with street dope and you have a highly volatile situation in a person who may already have poor impulse control and unstable temperament.With Searcy closure,there will be even more of these group homes in neighborhoods.

THIS is exactly why we need MORE of these groups out in the neighborhoods! Let's put a couple more in Country Club Estates, too! Altapointe spokeswoman Carol Mann is either a pathological liar OR she's got her head stuck so far up her anal cavity that she is totally out of reality! (Maybe she should be living at the group home, too?)

I worked as a nurse when it was Mobile Mental Health. The situation in those homes are horrible. The people who work in them are, for the most part, untrained and have a tendency to sleep during their shifts. The good workers and there are a few, are not aware that they may be alone with men who have long police records and some have even been found "not guilty by reason of insanity" of murder, rape, arson etc. Half the time the phones in the group homes didn't work so the staff couldn't call for help if they needed it. The group homes are supposed to be a way for mental patients to become accustomed to living in society. The patients are supposed to meet certain criteria but most of them do not and never will be fit to safely live in society and too many of them are not even mental patients. They are criminals who have learned to use the mental health system. I quit after only a couple of months. I had been a psych nurse for more than 25 years but had never worked in conditions as dangerous as those that are required of the staff there.