Two months after inewsource reported a spike in police calls, a lapse in mental healthcare and a suicide death at a COVID-19 isolation hotel, San Diego County shifted the operation of its sheltering program to a staffing agency for $30 million.
But problems at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Mission Valley appear to be no better today.
Why this matters
San Diego County is spending millions of dollars to house people affected by COVID-19 in hotels. Some have tested positive or have symptoms, while others have health issues that put them at risk. Many are homeless and have no other place to safely isolate.
Hotel guests and employees told inewsource the program is mismanaged, staff aren’t properly trained and security guards harass those who are under a public health order to isolate. It’s all causing some to leave the hotel before they’re supposed to.
Records show the high volume of police calls to the Crowne Plaza also has continued, as have reports of suicide threats and overdoses.
“They’re shooting from the hip,” said Turquoise Teagle, a site coordinator at the hotel who works for the county’s contractor, Equus Workforce Solutions.
“I think the county should come in, revamp the program and get Equus out of there, honestly.”
TLDR: Read our five most important takeaways from this investigation here.
Teagle, 35, said she was placed on paid administrative leave after repeatedly complaining to her supervisors about the poor care at the hotel. Among the problems she said she’s reported:
- Guests don’t receive their medication on time and children have gone days without appropriate food.
- Employees aren’t told how and when to coordinate with Telecare Corp., which the county pays to provide mental and behavioral health services.
- Staff aren’t prepared to work with most of those who are isolating — people who are homeless and might be struggling with mental illness or substance-use disorders.
Another employee described similar conditions but fears being fired so inewsource agreed not to name them.
Neither Equus employee inewsource interviewed said they had seen county officials visit the hotel. County officials get their information from daily video meetings, where an Equus supervisor reads updates to faces on a computer screen.
A former Crowne Plaza guest, William Morris, who stayed there in November with his wife after she tested positive for COVID-19, said a dispute about his service dog escalated to a security guard attempting to hit him with a chair.
“I wouldn’t put my worst enemy in a place like that,” Morris said, adding that security was his biggest issue. “They don’t have empathy for people, compassion for people and they’re a bunch of animals running wild.”
When the pandemic began last March, the county took over the Crowne Plaza and other hotels to temporarily house people who needed somewhere to stay. The goal was twofold: To isolate people who test positive or come in contact with the virus, and to protect people who are at-risk for developing severe illness.
The county has refused to identify all the facilities in use, citing privacy concerns for the people in isolation, but said about 950 rooms have been secured.
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County spokesperson Michael Workman said in emails to inewsource that officials are in daily communication with contractors, conduct site visits at least once a month and are notified of any serious incidents. He added that Equus has received “several positive comments from guests at Crowne Plaza” in satisfaction surveys.
As for the frequent police presence at the hotel, Workman said on-site security is supposed to “monitor any situations which may require law enforcement involvement.”
“Some of the individuals we have provided isolation for also have a high degree of behavioral health needs,” he said. “In addition, the impact of isolation and the challenges with addressing the pandemic often contribute to an increase in behavioral health symptoms.”
Despite that, Teagle said Equus never provided any mental health training and she had no idea what to expect when she started her job.
“I feel like speaking out on it will just bring more attention to it and maybe the county will be a little bit more hands on with everything that’s going on,” Teagle said.
‘How do you not realize that?’
Early in the pandemic, county staff operating the Crowne Plaza became overwhelmed.
An employee overseeing operations sent an email March 26 to colleagues saying she was “pushing and begging and pleading for additional staff” to help with the workload, “and to provide adequate support to the folks in the hotels.”
Within a week, county officials changed an existing $13 million contract it had with Telecare, which had been providing mental health services to San Diegans in the legal system, to also help people in isolation.
But it didn’t make a difference for 28-year-old Jose Angel Gomez-Camacho. He died by suicide at the Crowne Plaza three weeks later.
Gomez-Camacho was living on the streets, diagnosed with schizophrenia and addicted to crystal meth when county officials placed him at the hotel, according to his brother, Jorge Gomez.
Gomez, 31, said he and his younger brother, Jose, grew up poor in San Diego County. They had a rough childhood, he said, and they followed different paths.
“My brother took more of a liking to the streets. I tried to live my life as best as I could,” Gomez said.
His brother struggled with addiction for years, and family members think that’s what led to his mental illness. The last time family saw him was on his birthday in early April. He tested positive for the virus soon after and was sent to the Crowne Plaza.
County employees are supposed to check on each guest once a day. But after Jose tested negative for the virus, “it was presumed he left the hotel,” county medical examiner records show.
Five days passed before hotel staff found him on April 23.
“How do you not realize that there’s somebody dead in your hotel? How do you not realize that?” Gomez said.
He believes San Diego County should bear some responsibility for what happened to his brother.
If he had been given the care he needed, Gomez said, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”
Workman, the county spokesperson, said he could not comment on the specifics of the case because of privacy concerns but explained “there was an incident where a guest was able to gain reentry to a room after check-out.” Staff didn’t know the guest was there because they thought the room was empty, he said.
The medical examiner’s records on Jose’s death weren’t public while the county investigated what happened, but they were recently released to inewsource. The county would not answer questions about its investigation.
“It wasn’t easy for me to process this,” Gomez said. “There’s times where I blame myself and I have to stop doing it because it’s getting nowhere.”
A $30 million contract
Two months after Jose’s death, San Diego County asked Equus to run its COVID-19 sheltering program. Officials realized the staffing agency can “perform the services more economically and efficiently than the county,” according to the contract signed on July 1.
Equus is responsible for providing guests with three meals a day, laundry services, on-site security and medications, relying on several subcontractors to get the job done. Equus employees also arrange transportation to and from the hotel, screen people to assess their needs for healthcare and government benefits, and work on discharge plans, either into permanent housing or another shelter.
The county paid Equus $10.2 million in 2020. If services are needed through the end of this year, it will cost an additional $20 million.
While Equus oversees the daily operations, Telecare is still responsible for providing mental and behavioral health services at the county-run hotels. Since August, Telecare has received more than $350,000 for its work at the hotels through funding the county received under the federal CARES Act.
Suicide prevention help
If you are having thoughts of suicide, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at (800) 273-8255 or the San Diego Access and Crisis Line at (888) 724-7240.
Other resources are available here.
Public records show Telecare has a history of not fulfilling its duties. In the past six years, the company had to issue corrective action plans for at least four contracts it held in California.
That includes an incident in 2015, in which Telecare decided not to bill Los Angeles County for $153,000 in services it was supposed to have provided. The company said “leadership vacancies” had caused “errors and omissions in documentation.”
And in 2017, multiple patients suffered serious injuries at a rehabilitation center in Long Beach while under Telecare’s supervision. The company said it would address the issues by randomly observing staff.
Telecare would not comment for this story.
When guests arrive at the Crowne Plaza, they receive a pamphlet instructing them to call Telecare if they’re feeling “anxious, sad or lonely,” along with a list of phone numbers for emotional support and crisis response lines.
Together, Equus and Telecare can address any situation that may arise, said Nicole Ganier, vice president of operations for the western region of Equus.
“We recognize the complex nature of the population we serve as part of this program and have implemented policies and trained staff to assist them as effectively as possible,” Ganier said in an email.
Addressing emergencies
Teagle, the hotel site coordinator, said she loves her job, but Equus is overlooking opportunities to improve. The program is disorganized, staff aren’t adequately trained and guests who need help aren’t getting it, she said.
She started working with Equus when the company was mass hiring in early December because of a COVID-19 outbreak at the San Diego Convention Center, where the city has an emergency homeless shelter. While she had experience working with people who are homeless, Teagle said she was unprepared for what she was thrown into at the Crowne Plaza.
As of Feb. 12, about 300 people were isolating at the hotel.
Some are first responders and medical professionals who need to be isolated from their families because they’ve tested positive for the virus or have symptoms, but many are people without homes. Teagle said there are too many to adequately meet all of their needs.
The training Teagle said she received from Equus was minimal. She said the main message was: “Don’t be a jerk.”
There is no designated training coordinator, she said. Instead, workers are told to shadow each other, leading to inconsistent habits and procedures. Equus also doesn’t explain to new staff exactly what Telecare’s role is, other than that it provides resources for people in need.
Teagle said she was the first point of contact for many of the residents yet nobody taught her how to look for signs of mental illness, drug addiction or other issues that could come up. While staff are able to help with a range of problems, she said sometimes they just have to tell residents: “If you’re feeling really bad, you’ve got to call 911.”
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San Diego police records show that after Equus and Telecare took over hotel operations for the county, calls from the Crowne Plaza continued to flood in.
Police have responded to more than 230 calls to the hotel since the pandemic began — three times more than the average number of calls seen in the prior two years. About a quarter of the calls were related to mental health, including suicide attempts and threats.
Summaries of the calls detailed 16 incidents where guests expressed suicidal thoughts. Some of the descriptions mentioned that residents were unhappy with staff or refused to leave the hotel after being discharged.
A San Diego police spokesperson confirmed two deaths have occurred at the hotel in the past two months, but details about those incidents are not yet available. A lieutenant who oversees patrols in the area declined to comment for this story.
‘I wasn’t breaking any rules’
Guests at the hotel are under a public health order, signed by county Public Health Officer Dr. Wilma Wooten, which requires them to isolate for at least 10 days. They aren’t supposed to leave the hotel before then except for medical care.
But Teagle said that’s not enforced. Security allows people to come and go, she said, and it’s not uncommon for an entire day to pass before Equus realizes someone left early. She’s also noticed the guards get in confrontations and “constantly have issues” with guests.
Two San Diegans who have stayed at the county’s public health hotels told inewsource they have faced harassment from the security guards.
Morris, 60, lives with his wife, Martha, and his service dog, Mini-Me, in their gold Mitsubishi Outlander. He said they were offered a room in the Crowne Plaza after his wife tested positive for COVID-19 in November.
Within an hour, a security guard accosted him about leashing Mini-Me, who helps with his balance and mobility, he said.
Morris explained his dog doesn’t wear a leash because he could trip over it, and the front desk already had the paperwork. The guard “rudely walked away,” he said.
A document listing rules for guests at the hotel shows a leash isn’t required if it impedes the service animal’s ability to assist its owner.
Over nine days, Morris said the guards continued to berate him about the leash every time he went outside with Mini-Me.
“I don’t know where they’re getting these guys from. I don’t know, are they pulling them off the street?” Morris said. “Because these guys are coming in … and doing a very good job of acting like thugs.”
Equus signed a subcontract with AllState Security Services to run security at the Crowne Plaza. The San Diego-based agency’s website says it provides private guards at construction sites, hospitals, schools, financial institutions and warehouses throughout California.
Ganier, the Equus representative, said all the companies they work with are vetted through background checks and pre-approved by the county. She wouldn’t provide a full list of subcontractors or any details about their publicly funded work at the hotel, telling inewsource to ask the county for more information. The county did not provide a list of subcontractors either.
AllState didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Morris said he reached his breaking point when a guard tried to hit him with a chair and two other guards intervened. Meanwhile, his wife was suffering from severe COVID-19 symptoms inside their room. Instead of focusing on her recovery, he said he was “busy fighting the wolves off.”
He filed a complaint with Equus and left the hotel with more than a week remaining in his wife’s stay. Equus and the county wouldn’t comment on Morris’ claims or any other allegations about the security guards.
He said he wished he could have stayed longer but feared one of the guards would try to hurt him.
“They were just on me every day, and every single day was a new situation with a new security guard, with a new issue of him proving himself that he was more of a man than I was, and I had to follow the rules,” he said.
“The problem was, they had no idea I wasn’t breaking any rules.”
‘These people need help’
As a site coordinator during the morning shift, Teagle said her responsibilities were to deliver breakfast and lunch, as well as tend to any other needs of those in isolation. That could mean coordinating a medical appointment or grocery pickups.
While caring for the residents, she said she started to notice a lack of empathy among Equus employees.
One day, she said a man who was formerly incarcerated called the front desk asking for an Android phone charger, saying the terms of his release required he keep his phone charged.
According to Teagle, her supervisor told her it didn’t matter — the man could go to jail. She said she wound up finding a charger for him.
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The problems she described went beyond empathy. Medications weren’t distributed when they should have been, she said, causing some people to leave the hotel early. Medicine would sit in the hotel for days before workers delivered them to the guests, who were instructed not to leave their rooms because it could expose others to COVID-19.
Plus, nurses notified staff that toddlers at the hotel were losing weight because they weren’t getting adequate nutrition, Teagle said. Equus planned to continue feeding toddlers milk or menu items such as quesadillas and lettuce wraps until she reached out to the food vendor to provide meals more appropriate for children — chicken and wild rice with sweet potatoes and applesauce, which are easier for toddlers to consume.
It was just a matter of communication, she said.
Teagle said she hasn’t been to the Crowne Plaza since she was placed on leave earlier this month. She felt compelled to speak out because “these people need help.”
“That could be my family,” she said.
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| Gender Identity | Gender Identity | Gender Identity | |||
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Lorie Hearn is the chief executive officer, editor and founder of inewsource. She founded inewsource in the summer of 2009, following a successful reporting and editing career in newspapers. She retired from The San Diego Union-Tribune, where she had been a reporter, Metro Editor and finally the senior editor for Metro and Watchdog Journalism. In addition to department oversight, Hearn personally managed a four-person watchdog team, composed of two data specialists and two investigative reporters. Hearn was a Nieman Foundation fellow at Harvard University in 1994-95. She focused on juvenile justice and drug control policy, a natural course to follow her years as a courts and legal affairs reporter at the San Diego Union and then the Union-Tribune.
Hearn became Metro Editor in 1999 and oversaw regional and city news coverage, which included the city of San Diego’s financial debacle and near bankruptcy. Reporters and editors on Metro during her tenure were part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning stories that exposed Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham and led to his imprisonment.
Hearn began her journalism career as a reporter for the Bucks County Courier Times, a small daily outside of Philadelphia, shortly after graduating from the University of Delaware. During the decades following, she moved through countless beats at five newspapers on both coasts.
High-profile coverage included the historic state Supreme Court election in 1986, when three sitting justices were ousted from the bench, and the 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris. That gas chamber execution was the first time the death penalty was carried out in California in 25 years.
In her nine years as Metro Editor at the Union-Tribune, Hearn made watchdog reporting a priority. Her reporters produced award-winning investigations covering large and small local governments. The depth and breadth of their public service work was most evident in coverage of the wildfires of 2003 and then 2007, when more than half a million people were evacuated from their homes.
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Laura Wingard is the managing editor at inewsource. She has been an editor in San Diego since 2002, working at The San Diego Union-Tribune, KPBS and now inewsource. At the Union-Tribune, she served in a variety of roles including as enterprise editor, government editor, public safety and legal affairs editor, and metro editor. She directed the newspaper’s award-winning coverage of the October 2007 wildfires and the 2010 disappearance of Poway teenager Chelsea King. She also oversaw reporting on San Diego’s pension crisis.
For two years, Wingard was news and digital editor at KPBS, overseeing a team of four multimedia reporters and two web producers. She also was the KPBS liaison with inewsource and collaborated with inewsource chief executive officer and editor Lorie Hearn on investigative work by both news organizations.
Wingard also worked at the Las Vegas Review-Journal as the city editor and as an award-winning reporter covering the environment and politics. She also was the assistant managing editor for metro at The Press-Enterprise in Riverside. She earned her bachelor’s degree at California State University, Fullerton, with a double major in communications/journalism and political science.
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Here are the services whose cookies you can find on inewsource.org:
- Sharing buttons for Facebook and Twitter. These use the standard scripts provided by each company.
- Google Analytics, which we use to measure site traffic. Google Analytics gathers certain non-personally identifying information over time, such as your IP address, browser type, internet service provider, referring and exit pages, time stamp, and similar data. We also use Facebook Pixel to measure, optimize and build audiences for advertising campaigns served on Facebook. In particular it enables us to see how our users move between devices when accessing our website and Facebook, to ensure that our Facebook advertising is seen by our users most likely to be interested in such advertising by analyzing which content a user has viewed and interacted with on our website.
- Stripe, which allows us to accept donations through our website.
- Salesforce to manage newsletter subscriber, donor, and other identifiable user data.
- Mailchimp, to manage newsletter distributions. We collect your email address if you choose to subscribe to one of our email newsletters or email news alerts. Other optional information that you enter when subscribing – such as your first and last names or city are simply so that we can deliver more personalized email newsletters. We DO NOT sell, rent or market your information to any other parties. We retain your information only as long as necessary to provide your service. When we send emails, it collects some data about which users open the emails and which links are clicked. We use this information to optimize our email newsletters and, as aggregate information, to explain what percentage of our users open and interact with our newsletters.
Personal Data
We only collect personally identifiable information such as your name and email address when you sign up for a newsletter, donate to our organization, or otherwise submit it to us voluntarily. We do not share your personal data with any third parties other than some common service providers, whose products use your information to help us improve our site, deliver newsletters, or allow us to offer donation opportunities.
inewsource limits access to all user data for the purposes of newsletter, fundraising, and customer service only. User data is not sold to or otherwise shared with anyone not working with or for the inewsource.
You may unsubscribe or opt-out of our email and mail communications at any time by hitting the “unsubscribe” button in any email you receive from inewsource, or by emailing us at contact@inewsource.org or calling us at 619-594-5100.
Donor Information
The identities of all donors will be listed on our website. inewsource does not share, trade, sell, or otherwise release donors’ personal information to any third parties.
Refunds
If you encounter errors when donating on the website, please contact us at members@inewsource.org. For example, if you submit a donation for an incorrect amount or make a duplicate transaction please email us immediately so we can reverse the charges.
Cancellation of Recurring Donations
You can cancel your monthly recurring donations free of charge by notifying us at members@inewsource.org.
Links to Other Websites
Our site may contain links to documents, resources or other websites that we think may be of interest to you. We have no control over these other sites or their content. You should be aware when you leave our site for another, and remember that other sites are governed by their own user agreements and privacy policies, which should be available to you to read.
Disclaimers and Limitation of Liability
Although we take reasonable steps to prevent the introduction of viruses, worms, “Trojan Horses” or other destructive materials to our site, we do not guarantee or warrant that our site or materials that may be downloaded from our site are free from such destructive features. We are not liable for any damages or harm attributable to such features. We are not liable for any claim, loss or injust based on errors, omissions, interruptions or other inaccuracies on our site, nor for any claim, loss or injust that results from your use of this site or your breach of any provision of this User Agreement.
Contact Us
If there are any questions regarding this privacy policy, please contact us at contact@inewsource.org or call us at 619-594-5100.
Type of Content
News: Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Article Post Types
postType of Content
News: Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.