Seattle Times: McNeil Island CEO, watchdog removed after critical internal report
William Dobbs
A new Seattle Times piece about Washington State’s sex offense civil commitment program is pasted in below and attached as a PDF file. -Bill Dobbs
Seattle Times | July 31, 2025
McNeil Island CEO, watchdog removed after critical internal report
Rooms for residents of the Special Commitment Center on McNeil Island off the coast of Steilacoom, Pierce County. (Kevin Clark / The Seattle Times, 2023)
By Rebecca Moss Seattle Times staff reporter
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Washington’s largest state agency has moved to weaken oversight of the Special Commitment Center, even as an internal report describes potential medical neglect and McNeil Island residents now have fewer ways to report it.
Civilly committed residents, who are secluded from the rest of Washington and entirely dependent on the state for care, told the facility’s ombudsperson that they lived for years with hernia pain, were blocked from having necessary surgeries and went months with kidney stones or heart issues, often being provided care only when issues became life-threatening.
These details are listed in an internal report, obtained by The Seattle Times, following a yearlong investigation by the ombudsperson for the Special Commitment Center, where people are detained on the basis of their history of sex crimes, psychiatric disorder and potential to reoffend.
But after the ombuds, Kayla Elladae, shared the findings in April with the leadership of the Department of Social and Health Services, they disputed the findings and Elladae was blocked from accessing information on the island, then was laid off. Two other staff in advocacy roles, who work closely with the ombuds, were also reassigned off the island, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Times.
The same day Elladae was laid off, DSHS rewrote its rules for external oversight, eliminating the independence of the ombudsperson’s position.
“It’s a fox in the henhouse situation,” said Braden Pence, a Seattle civil rights attorney who formerly worked in public defense on civil commitment cases. Residents, he said, “are subject to the state of Washington’s control and every whim.”
After The Times and state lawmakers asked DSHS about the rule-making and the ombudsperson’s removal, the agency on Monday informed staff of significant leadership changes, including removing Special Commitment Center CEO Keith Devos, who will now be acting executive officer of Maple Lane, a psychiatric facility near Centralia. The new acting CEO will be Daniel Davis, who was CEO of the Olympic Heritage Behavioral Health facility.
Keith Devos, then the CEO of the Special Commitment Center, during an interview in Steilacoom, Pierce County. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times, 2024)
Daniel Davis, the new acting CEO of the Special Commitment Center and former CEO of Olympic Heritage. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times, 2023)
The agency said it is “taking this opportunity to diversify the leadership experience.”
If DSHS continues to limit scrutiny, Pence said, it could potentially violate residents’ civil rights and cause the state to backslide into conditions that led to a sprawling federal lawsuit in the 1990s. The lawsuit, brought by several civilly committed residents, placed the state under years of court supervision and cost millions of dollars to comply with civil rights requirements. As part of that case, DSHS was court-ordered to hire an ombudsperson and provide adequate mental health treatment, among other reforms, including creating a resident advocate position.
Attorneys, residents and agency staff who spoke with The Times say DSHS appears to be regressing on earlier compliance. In the past six months, the Special Commitment Center has offered just two hours or less of sex offense treatment per week — well below state standards.
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State Rep. Dan Griffey, R-Allyn, said in an interview that DSHS’ recent steps are part of significant problems evident at the Special Commitment Center. The ombuds must be “completely independent of the agency, as all (ombuds) should be,” Griffey said. “We have tried to do internal ombuds and they have been abysmal.”
DSHS declined to make Devos or other senior officials available for an interview, aside from the agency’s medical director. A spokesperson said over email that the staffing decisions were not related to the medical report and were necessary amid budget cuts and part of the agency’s overarching vision to “reimagine DSHS,” which includes restructuring the agency and more than 230 layoffs.
“We want to stress that the ombuds oversight services are not going away,” DSHS spokesperson Cynthia Shipley said in an emailed statement.
DSHS plans to consolidate remaining ombuds roles to monitor all facilities under the Behavioral Health and Habilitation Administration, which includes the commitment center, Western and Eastern state hospitals, and other facilities.
In response to questions about the rule-making, Shipley says DSHS intends to again update its rules to reflect “our commitment to independent and neutral ombuds services.”
The agency also said in an email to staff that a resident advocate will return, but the role will now report directly to the CEO of the Special Commitment Center, rather than being independent from the facility.
Rep. Mari Leavitt, D-University Place, said agency cost-cutting is misplaced when it targets crucial roles. It was an ombuds who highlighted for lawmakers serious problems with solitary confinement at the Department of Corrections, she said.
DSHS serves some of the state’s most vulnerable people, she said, and without an independent ombudsperson on the island, “we can’t get a true feel for what is happening within those institutions.”
This summer, residents have had limited ways to report what happens inside the confines of the secure facility even as new problems arise. The underwater cable to the island broke last month and the facility lost power and experienced rolling blackouts, which shut down phone lines, security cameras and cooling systems on sweltering days.
“Substandard at best”
For the two years Donald Herrick has been detained at the Special Commitment Center, he has never had a physical exam and has spent months with a half-centimeter-long metal screw sticking out from his front tooth. DSHS has not provided a permanent dental remedy.
“The quality of care … is substandard at best,” Herrick said in an interview from McNeil Island.
Herrick, who was sentenced in 1997 to nine years in prison for rape, is awaiting trial to determine whether he meets the legal criteria to be civilly committed under Washington law.
When a painful cyst formed on Herrick’s back, he said his requests for medical attention were ignored. Not until the cyst swelled to the size of a lime and ruptured was he provided emergency care, he said.
Herrick is one of more than a hundred residents of the McNeil Island facility who told Elladae during her investigation that they received inadequate medical or dental care, lived with molding mattresses, were treated poorly by medical staff, or were issued inaccurate or delayed prescriptions without seeing a doctor.
Although many requests for medical attention were responded to in a timely manner, the report found some residents went years without dental care, and others waited months for diabetic shoes, 10 months for glasses and five months to access their own medical records.
Elladae declined to comment.
DSHS responded to Elladae’s findings in the final report — obtained by The Times in a public records request — writing that the ombuds made “assumptions” about care and failed to emphasize what the state was doing well, like many residents being seen by a medical professional within six days.
“The residents’ care was attended to,” Dr. Brian Waiblinger, chief medical officer for DSHS’ Behavioral Health and Habilitation Administration, said in an interview with The Times. “When a resident’s concern was brought up, the concern was addressed in the clinic or sent out for treatment.”
Waiblinger said he reviewed the cases cited in the ombuds report and said most issues came down to residents’ faulty memories or expectations for care.
“How the individuals perceive that treatment is something we probably need to work on,” he said, “and that is not something that is unique to DSHS.”
Many of the Special Commitment Center’s 127 residents in total confinement have significant mental health issues, chronic medical needs and physical or cognitive disabilities. Once detained or committed to the island on the basis of rehabilitation for potentially sexually violent behavior, they rely on the state for their “care, custody, and control.” It’s the ombudsperson and resident advocates who are charged with “protecting the guaranteed rights” of residents.
A decade ago, Disability Rights Washington urged DSHS to conduct an outside audit of medical care at the Special Commitment Center, noting many of the same issues highlighted in the recent ombuds report. The state has also faced several lawsuits from residents alleging inadequate medical care.
But the ombuds report was the first time since then that an independent investigation focused solely on medical issues.
Source: Esri MARK NOWLIN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
The medical director for the island — and sole physician — was paid just under $300,000 in 2023 but spent less than 90 minutes each month caring for patients that year, the report found. That’s 1% of the time that a primary care provider typically spends with patients, the report said, citing national statistics from the American Association for Physician Leadership and a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The medical director, Dr. Deborah Havens, resigned in April and now works at Washington’s Department of Labor and Industries.
Havens did not respond to requests for comment.
DSHS said Havens’ resignation wasn’t related to the report and a new medical director is now in place.
But in the absence of time with a doctor, residents told the ombuds they grew sick and missed necessary medication, including a resident who wasn’t given doses of a medication for HIV, which can cause the virus to replicate and become transmittable to others.
“Replace or circumvent or silence”
Ombuds are meant to ensure those in power and government agencies are providing appropriate, safe care for the people who rely on them, like at nursing homes and programs for people with developmental disabilities. And they often face pushback.
President Donald Trump in March gutted key ombuds offices in the Department of Homeland Security overseeing immigration as well as its office for civil rights. Last year, California fired a state ombudsperson after she exposed conditions inside its juvenile detention center.
Washington established an ombudsperson at the Special Commitment Center more than two decades ago to conduct “independent, neutral reviews” of the program. But DSHS has at times appeared adverse to the scrutiny of these roles, including firing a court-appointed ombuds in the late 1990s and blocking them from investigating incidents.
“When (the Special Commitment Center) is criticized, it attempts to replace or circumvent or silence those critics,” an attorney for plaintiffs in a federal injunction wrote in 2002.
That pattern appears to be repeating now, attorneys and state employees say.
Elladae, the most recent ombudsperson, was given notice that she would be laid off two days after the state auditor declined to investigate a complaint Elladae filed with the state auditor’s whistleblower program. In it, Elladae alleged DSHS had attempted to block her access to records she needed to conduct independent investigations.
A July 2024 directive from former DSHS Secretary Jilma Meneses had required the Special Commitment Center to “cooperate with all records requests from the Ombuds … deemed necessary to accomplish their external oversight of SCC program activities.”
But weeks after Elladae delivered the medical report, then-acting Secretary Cheryl Strange issued a new directive saying the ombuds could only access information via public records request, overriding the former secretary’s directive.
Elladae wrote in a letter to supervisors following her dismissal: “I was consistently obstructed. These actions undermined the independence required of my role and ultimately compromised my ability to fulfill it.”
DSHS declined to reinstate her.
Lisa Robbe with the office of developmental disability ombuds, which monitors but is entirely independent from DSHS, said that independence is essential.
“We don’t answer to DSHS,” she said. Instead, “We push back all the time.”
“It is hard to be a whistleblower from the inside,” Robbe said, because ultimately, “who is signing your paycheck?”
Rebecca Moss: rm...@seattletimes.com. Rebecca Moss is an investigative reporter at The Seattle Times.