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5.17.2001
By
PETER B. LORD
Journal Environment Writer
PROVIDENCE -- If you didn't know them, you might
have thought that Joanna Ravello and her 7-year-old son, Jalen, had just
hit the jackpot.
On a sunny morning last July, a Superior Court judge awarded Jalen Ravello-Hayre
a record-high legal settlement that will support him for the rest of his
life . The judge also gave Joanna Ravello her own cash settlement
-- about enough to buy a new car.
Five years earlier -- the summer he turned 2 -- Jalen was poisoned by
lead paint in the Smith Hill apartment where he lived with his mother.
Doctors say he suffered severe brain damage. He barely speaks. He has
trouble controlling his behavior. He's a very slow learner.
During the brief court session, Ravello kept a firm hand on Jalen as he
twisted and squirmed. He is so hyperactive she didn't know what he might
do if she let go.
And that may help explain the letdown that followed.
When she finally won her lawsuit against her landlord, she felt no elation.
"For once everything in my life was settled," she recalled recently.
"And all of a sudden, I was so depressed. I didn't know why.
"I was low. I was so low."
Even though her son's financial future was secured, lead had damaged his
brain so badly she has trouble picturing what his life will be like years
from now.
"Sometimes I'll think he'll be fine," she said. "But then I see him get
into it with a kid, and I wonder, when is it going to change?"
RAVELLO, the daughter of immigrants from Trinidad, was raised in
Providence and completed the college-prep program at Hope High School.
After graduating, she worked at a local pharmacy for a year, then enrolled
at the University of Rhode Island, majoring in Human Development.
She met a young man during her freshman year. The relationship didn't
endure, but she became pregnant and took time off to have a baby, Jalen.
He was 8 pounds 7 ounces at birth in 1993, and was, by all accounts a
healthy boy.
Jalen grew into an energetic toddler who would make a roomful of people
laugh , says Ravello. "He had an infectious laugh, always.
He was a good kid, fun to be around."
Just before Jalen turned 2, Ravello was back at college. She and Jalen
moved into a triple-decker at 133 Oakland Ave., in Providence. It had
two bedrooms and hardwood floors. It was close to her mother's apartment
and the bus lines. And the rent was only $400. It seemed like a great
find.
"I moved into that apartment in June. Soon, [Jalen] was acting funny,"
Ravello recalls. "He was moody. He wouldn't eat, except for sweets. And
he became uncontrollable. He'd run out into the streets."
In August, Ravello got a call from the laboratory that analyzed blood
collected during Jalen's annual physical exam.
"It was like she was trying to be calm, but she made it clear something
was so important I better get my butt to the hospital."
Jalen's blood-lead level was 82 micrograms per deciliter -- or
82 ug/dl -- more than four times what is considered to be significantly
poisoned.
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LEAD
(led) n. 1. Symbol Pb
A dense metallic element used in solder, radiation shields,
paints, and antiknock compounds.
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Ravello rushed her son to Hasbro Children's Hospital. An intravenous needle
was stuck into his hand, and doctors injected more chemicals into his
thighs every five hours , to draw out the lead. During his
first night, his blood-lead level soared to 180 -- nine times the level
considered significantly poisoned -- as medication drew the lead out of
his bones and tissue.
The injections continued -- every five hours, around the clock -- for
five days.
"It was a nightmare," Ravello recalls. "He didn't understand. And it was
like every terrible thing you could imagine happened to him."
Ravello called her landlord, Jefferson Wright, to tell him that her son
had been poisoned in the apartment. When she returned there from the hospital,
she said Wright had let himself in and was busily scraping peeling paint
from the windows. But, state inspectors found lead concentrations throughout
the apartment.
"It was a mess," she says.
Life would never be the same for Jalen or his mother.
Because health counselors didn't want him to go back to the contaminated
apartment , Jalen stayed with his grandmother for the next
four months while his mother searched for another place to live.
She found that many landlords won't rent to families with young children
because they don't want to deal with lead problems.
Ravello also contacted a lawyer, Robert J. McConnell.
Meanwhile, she stopped paying rent because the landlord wouldn't clean
up the lead. She says he turned off the hot water, and then issued her
an eviction notice.
In District Court, Ravello checked off her defense on a legal form: the
landlord "failed to maintain the premises in a fit and habitable condition
-- lead poisoning, no heat."
She says the judge seemed concerned, but , even so, he ordered
her to move.
BOB McCONNELL lives on the East Side and works in a fourth-floor,
wood-paneled office suite that offers a dramatic view of the Providence
River and beyond that, the edge of the city's poor neighborhoods where
lead paint has caused so much heartache.
He wears flannel shirts and jeans on days he doesn't have to go to court.
He often mentions that he had one Irish grandfather and one Italian grandfather
and neither reached high school. And when he talks about the law, he leaves
aside the Latin verbiage and speaks plainly about right and wrong, with
a few baseball metaphors thrown in.
"I have to say I'm humbled by many of our clients," McConnell says during
a recent interview. "I don't know what it's like to grow up in South Providence
and worry every day about drugs and crime. How the hell they get by every
day, I don't know. And then in addition to everything else, these parents
have kids who get lead poisoned."
McConnell is also humbled by the difficulties in representing the families
of poisoned children. Lead lawsuits aren't settled quickly, and there
are lots of ways they can go wrong, he says .
Most children are poisoned as toddlers but cannot be thoroughly evaluated
for brain damage until they are 5, McConnell says. That means there is
a time delay of three or four years before a lead-poisoning lawsuit can
be successfully concluded.
Of 113 cases he has initiated since 1992, McConnell's office has settled
only 12.
All too often, he says, he deals with landlords with no insurance, or
with liability policies that exclude lead coverage.
The issue of lead-insurance exclusions is complex and contentious. In
the gubernatorial race three years ago, Myrth York chastized Governor
Almond for supporting a proposal that would have allowed insurance companies
to exclude lead coverage. Even though one of his aides responded that
York was trying to politicize a complicated issue, Almond backed off the
proposed regulations.
The Department of Business Regulation declared a moratorium in November
1993 that forbids insurance companies doing business in Rhode Island to
exclude coverage for damages caused by lead poisoning, according to a
letter in 1999 from Anthony V. Arico Jr., then acting director.
Arico acknowledged that before the moratorium, the DBR gave about three
dozen companies permission to exclude such coverage. He said since the
moratorium was declared, the DBR has licensed an additional 100 property
and casualty companies, and he expected that none would have exclusions.
Two years ago, Asst. Atty. Gen. Terence J. Tierney formally asked the
DBR to provide him with the records of any insurer that had been licensed
since the start of the moratorium and still had an exclusion for lead.
The DBR responded that it had no records that would show which insurers
have lead exclusions, according to letters obtained by The Providence
Journal through a Freedom of Information request.
McConnell says his staff runs into so many lead exclusions so often that
they refer to the "fictitious moratorium."
Poor families whose children are poisoned are often reluctant to sue,
McConnell said. Many probably don't know they can . Others
move away before he's had a chance to reach settlement.
"In the Southeast Asian community (where lead poisonings are high), I
don't think litigation is part of their concept," he said.
When there is liability insurance, corporate lawyers fight hard to get
suits dismissed, McConnell says.
Most troubling, the insurance company lawyers also attack the credibility
of family members. Blaming the victim, they often suggest that the poisoned
child was not bright to begin with or argue that the lead poisoning resulted
from poor parental supervision.
"We look at these as negligence cases much like a car accident," McConnell
says. "But the insurance companies defend these tooth and nail. A few
years ago, there was a $100,000 policy, and I had a kid who had really
high lead levels. I wanted the [full amount of the] policy. The other
lawyer said, 'How's the kid's jump shot?' He said the only way the kid
would earn that kind of money is in the NBA. That's the kind of attitude
we run into sometimes.
"Often they want the parents' IQs examined. We fight like hell to stop
that. If there was a car accident and we claimed a brain injury, we're
not going to have to get an IQ test."
McConnell says he is picking up more and more cases, but his 100 or so
pending cases are nothing when you consider the thousands of children
who have been poisoned in the last few years.
"There are a lot of kids out there with lifelong injuries who won't get
compensation," McConnell said.
EVERY EDUCATIONAL and medical evaluation of Jalen from the time
he was lead poisoned found delays in his speech and behavior.
A few months after he was poisoned, school speech and psychology experts
described Jalen as an "adorable" boy suffering from significant delays
in development that left him impulsive and easily distracted.
He was referred to special-education programs in Providence schools. The
annual reports that followed showed progress every year, but in baby steps.
At 3, Jalen had "a very high activity level and limited ability to focus."
School psychologists said his verbal skills were limited to "jibberish
and repetition of single words."
By 4, Jalen had learned to count to 10 and recognize his name in print.
But he still spoke in one- or two-word sentences. A psychologist at Rhode
Island Hospital also concluded that Jalen's "cognitive delays are quite
suggestive of mental retardation."
At 5, school psychologists said Jalen could count to 60 and spell his
name, but he was still speaking in one- or two-word sentences.
At 6, school evaluators said Jalen could write his name and speak in three-
to six-word sentences.
A court guardian last year described Jalen as "a pleasant young man who
is very easily distracted. He is not able to hold a conversation. Jalen
clearly has problems with communication and cognitive functioning."
The guardian said a doctor who examined Jalen reported that "his prognosis
for the future and for independent functioning is poor."
At the same time, McConnell said Joanna Ravello's strong academic background
overcame the defense lawyer's efforts to portray Jalen's problems as inherited.
And she easily paried the lawyer's suggestions that she was somehow at
fault.
Ravello will never forget some of the questions.
"Do you consider yourself a caring mom?
"Would a caring mom let this happen?"
She thinks she now knows exactly where the poisoning happened -- a window
overlooking the driveway. Ravello wouldn't let Jalen go out by himself,
so he'd sit by the window, watching older kids ride their bikes. The window
was surrounded with peeling paint.
Their landlord, Jefferson Wright, says he didn't know there was lead in
the apartment. After he was cited by the Health Department, he said he
didn't have the $8,000 it would have taken to make the apartment lead
safe. Wright said he spent months working on the apartment himself. But
in the meantime, he couldn't rent it, and the loss of income caused him
to file for bankruptcy. He lost four houses. Wright's financial problems
scared Ravello because they raised the possiblity the he would have no
assets to sue for. But then McConnell found that Wright had insurance
coverage.
When the case was settled before Judge Michael A. Silverstein, McConnell
collected one-third, but he says he's settled so few cases that he's not
making much money from them. The total amount of the settlement remains
undisclosed at the parties' request.
"If I never have to do another case, I'll be happy," he said. "We think
we're trying to do good, and we're sticking up for people who don't have
someone standing up for them.
"I feel good bringing in [a landlord] who is a dinosaur. I'm not intimidated.
When you see these guys poisoning these kids, something's got to be done.
These guys are out of control. We're on the side of angels here."
JALEN HAS gotten big. And he still has his infectious smile.
"But, in many ways, he's still 3 or 4," says Ravello. "He'll put his face
right up to yours. He'll touch you, or run his fingers through your hair.
"People insult him, and he doesn't know it.
"Not long ago, some kids down the street were throwing apples at him,
trying to knock him off his bike. Jalen laughed. He didn't understand.
He has no defenses. He's so open."
Recently at a General Assembly hearing on extending insurance coverage
for victims of lead poisoning, an insurance lobbyist, who opposed the
bill, said a few families may "hit the jackpot" with big settlements,
but most won't be helped.
Ravello may have won a big award, but to her it's no jackpot.
It's enough to support Jalen's basic needs, but she has no confidence
in what the future holds for him.
"He won't be a doctor," she says.
For five years, Joanna Ravello had been Rhode Island's poster mom for
lead poisoning. Ravello, who has a master's degree from the University
of Rhode Island, had attended countless meetings with teachers and doctors
concerning her son, and had worked for lead-poisoning victims and advocacy
groups.
Ravello, who is now a counselor for minority students at URI, wanted to
tell her story to The Providence Journal so that others might learn from
what she has gone through.
She knows that her struggles with lead are far from over, but now, she
dreams of moving on.
She'd like to stay in her neighborhood , to buy a bungalow
with a nice yard. That would be just fine for her and Jalen.
As long as it's safe.
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