Chapter 10 — THE COMPLAINT LOG
Every licensed residential facility in the Commonwealth has to keep a complaint log.
A child, a member of staff, a teacher, a doctor, a relative — anybody — can make a complaint about a facility. It goes in the log. It gets a number, a date, a category, an investigation, and a disposition.
There are four dispositions.
**Substantiated.** **Unsubstantiated.** **Unable to determine.** **Unfounded.**
Those are not synonyms and the difference is the whole of this story.
*Unsubstantiated* means we investigated and could not confirm it.
*Unfounded* means the allegation is determined not to have occurred — and it is the only disposition that closes a complaint without triggering a follow-up inspection.
Larkfield Care Group's four homes had logged, over six years, one hundred and nine complaints.
Sixty-one of them were closed as **unfounded**.
The state average for that disposition, Odalys told me, across all licensed providers in the Commonwealth, is about nine percent.
Larkfield's was fifty-six.
"Mrs Ashcombe, do you know who signs the disposition on a complaint at Larkfield?"
"No."
"It's the compliance officer. Every provider has to name one to the department. He can't be the person who owns the facility, for obvious reasons."
"Who is it?"
And Odalys Pinto said a name I had not heard in about eleven years.
"Gareth Moody."
Gareth Moody was Daniel's roommate at Penn State. He is a licensed social worker. He lives in Harrisburg. He came to our wedding.
He has been the named compliance officer of Larkfield Care Group since 2019 and he has, in that time, been physically present at one of the four houses on eleven occasions.
Eleven times in six years.
He signed sixty-one complaints as unfounded and he had been in the buildings eleven times.
"How does he sign them?"
"Electronically. From a desk in Harrisburg." She let that sit. "Mrs Ashcombe, I'm going to ask you something and you should feel free to hang up and call an attorney first."
"Go ahead."
"Do you have access to your husband's home office?"