The Greer Center was supposed to be a refuge for people with developmental disabilities. But accounts from inside the secretive facility paint a starkly different picture, depicting a place where helpless patients faced beatings, waterboarding and constant fear.

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By Danny Hakim and Rachel NostrantPhotographs by Desiree Rios

Reporting from Enid and Oklahoma City, Okla.

Sept. 14, 2025

Two summers ago, Detective Frank Bruno was at the police station in Enid, Okla., when a woman walked in with a story to tell.

In Enid, a city of 50,000 people dotted by Depression-era grain terminals, Mr. Bruno typically worked on robberies and financial crimes. But in this case, the woman, Apera Tobiason, was a treatment specialist at the Robert M. Greer Center, an institution for people with developmental disabilities that sat on a sprawling campus on the main road into town.

She was upset. She told Mr. Bruno that she had started working at Greer the previous summer, writing treatment plans for residents who had the mental capacity of young children. At first, she had been excited. Her brother has a disability, so the work felt personal. But she quickly realized that Greer was no place she would want her brother to be.

In early 2023, she had encountered three residents who had black eyes or head injuries and grew suspicious when they were all explained away as accidental. The problem, she said, was that many of her fellow staff members were barely trained and regarded residents as nuisances requiring discipline.

But her reports to her superiors, which she was soon filing weekly, if not daily, seemed to go nowhere. She told the police that little of what she saw was reported to the state, as required by law, and often only after injuries had healed.

After she raised her concerns, Ms. Tobiason said, a woman she worked with called her a snitch, and deliberately bumped her shoulder in a hallway. She said she was made to feel by her co-workers that her empathy for the residents was the problem.

“They absolutely hated that I was nice to them,” she said.

She had sought a meeting with Mr. Bruno after receiving an alarming phone call from another police officer two days earlier. He told her that fliers with her photo had been found all over town, advertising her for sex work. “Item for sale,” they said. “Want your Popsicle blown?” They included tear-off slips with her phone number. She went looking, and found them on utility poles, in bathrooms, at public parks and at a vocational training site used by Greer.

Her supervisor declined to intervene, saying it wasn’t clearly a company issue. Ms. Tobiason could be heard crying during the conversation, which she secretly recorded. “You have to get your emotion under control,” her supervisor said.

“I have people with my photo, and my number, calling me late at night,” she protested.

He later chided her for “not taking any kind of responsibility for your part in this.”

Mr. Bruno, 30, who had joined the police force after serving as an Army medic, had been looking for a case where he could have an impact, do some good. He thought he might have found one.

“These are probably some of the most vulnerable people in this state, and they’re up there by themselves,” he said in an interview later. “Somebody needs to actually care about these people and do something right by them.”

Reports of abuse and neglect have long been endemic in the care of those with developmental disabilities. For decades, Liberty Healthcare, a private company with contracts in more than a dozen states, has pitched itself as an alternative for disabled adult services that typically are provided directly by states or charities. But in Oklahoma, it has left behind a trail of litigation and outrage, highlighting the potential problems with outsourcing care of a largely powerless population to a profit-making company operating with limited oversight.

While Greer has received widespread attention in Oklahoma, The New York Times interviewed two key insiders for the first time: Ms. Tobiason, as well as an elusive former resident who provided a rare firsthand account of what happened and emerged as a critical potential witness who could open the door to criminal prosecutions.

This article is also based on dozens of accounts from families, regulators, the police and Liberty employees, as well as police reports, court affidavits and personnel records. Photographs and medical records documented years of injuries, as did decades of Greer’s own internal abuse reports, along with recordings of interviews with victims and suspects.

What they showed was how difficult it is to hold the perpetrators of such abuse accountable. Criminal charges were brought against eight Greer employees based on the investigation that Mr. Bruno would undertake. But the cases were dropped before they went to trial. Even after a new contractor took over this year, some managers who failed to heed abuse reports kept their jobs or were promoted.

Together, these accounts told a story of a nightmare that went on behind locked doors for years, its victims often unable to recognize the depravity of what was happening to them, let alone sound an alarm.

“It’s just a tragedy that should never happen,” Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, a Republican, said in an interview. “Whatever control that company got in place, it didn’t work.”

‘Is That a No-No?’

During a half-century-long push to deinstitutionalize care for people with mental illness and developmental disabilities, state hospitals that had acted as little more than warehouses were largely emptied out. After federal litigation in the 1980s pushed Oklahoma toward more community-based care, the state contracted work to Liberty, a company that provides a variety of services to support challenging populations.

Liberty’s operations have been the subject of controversy before. A 2007 Times report revealed failures at a Liberty-run sex offender treatment center in Florida, which one mental health counselor called “a cesspool of despair and depression and drug abuse.” In California, State Senator Brian Jones, the Republican minority leader, complained in 2023 that Liberty “sneaks into unsuspecting communities” to “secretly release dangerous” predators.

Company officials declined to answer most questions about Greer, citing continuing litigation. But in court filings, Liberty denied many allegations of abuse and inadequate oversight, contending that it “performed within accepted industry standards.” It fired several Greer employees accused of misconduct and agreed to some corrective actions, including instituting morning meetings to review what happened the previous evening.

As Mr. Bruno began investigating, he learned that state regulators had already cataloged a spate of serious problems, including accusations of beatings by staff members. One resident was blinded in both eyes. Another suffered leg injuries that a doctor likened to those seen in a car crash. Mr. Bruno noticed that injuries were typically reported as accidental. It “got worse and worse and worse with the more that I found out,” he said.

In the months that followed, families of more than 20 residents, including one who died at Greer last year, hired lawyers who gathered evidence backing up abuse claims leveled by Ms. Tobiason and other whistle-blowers.

The lawyers had dozens of photos showing residents with black eyes or covered with large patches of deep purple bruising. Some residents claimed that they had been sexually assaulted, according to state records.

Many accounts focused on a cadre of men on the night shift, several in their early 20s, whom residents accused of routinely engaging in abusive behavior. The residents described enduring “choke-and-revive” games that appeared to be no more than an effort by the night crew to pass time.

But the residents often had trouble understanding what was happening. One told a specialist brought in by Mr. Bruno that a caregiver “tried to choke me with a towel” and in a videotaped interview described getting his head dipped in a toilet.

“Is that a no-no?” he had asked.

As Mr. Bruno widened his inquiry, it appeared that plenty of people had tried to raise alarms. A former Greer nurse filed a lawsuit against Liberty in which she said the facility had become a “hell on earth for many of its residents.”

she doesn’t have eyes,” Ms. Moore said, adding that her daughter is now heavily medicated. “Her life is gone now. She sits in a chair and that’s what she does.”

That same year Mr. Bruno asked Liberty’s internal investigator, responsible for examining reports of abuse and other problems, why her caseload increased 50 percent from a year earlier. He was concerned by her dismissive response. She told him that she normally started investigations believing “the client is lying about what happened,” he said later, describing the conversation.

a common impediment in such cases.

“Oftentimes your victims cannot tell you what happened,” Mr. Bruno said, adding that one resident in his 20s who might have been a witness “has the mentality of a 2- or 3-year-old.”

But a victim would soon emerge who was not like the others.

‘I Used to Be an Outlaw’

One night, Mr. Lott said, he saw his friend being held down in a chair, with towels wrapped around his neck.

“They’d take Sonic cups and pour it on his face,” he said, “make him pass out and beat him awake.” (A similar account appears in a lawsuit brought on behalf of another former Greer resident, Matthew Owens, alleging that he was “strangled” with bedsheets or wet towels until unconscious, then struck “repeatedly until he woke up.”)

Mr. Lott said “it was a horrible sound” when his friend was jarred back awake during the beatings.

“I’m thinking, man, I need to tell somebody this, but I don’t want to be a snitch,” he said. “But I actually talked to my mama about it and she was like, ‘Richard, if that’s going on, ain’t nobody going to say nothing to you about snitching.’”

By mid-November 2023, Mr. Bruno had convinced the district attorney, and arrests began, with Mr. Martinez among the first, charged with felony abuse by a caretaker and conspiracy. A week later, Mr. Webster and two other employees were charged.

Days later, Mr. Bruno and a state investigator sat down with Hugh Sage, Liberty’s top Oklahoma executive, in a conversation later recounted in an interview and a police report. Mr. Sage told them that he had not seen any injuries to residents. Mr. Bruno, exasperated, pulled out several of what he called “black and blue” photos showing injuries.

but you really wasn’t,” he told The Times. “I never even knew the word until I explained it to the detectives, and they said, that’s called ‘waterboarding.’” He also claimed that he had been sexually abused by Greer employees on several occasions.

Mr. Bruno believed Mr. Lott was telling the truth, and pressed to refile charges.

But Mr. Humphries was still not convinced.

“Obviously there are some inappropriate things that have gone on,” he said later in an interview. But he said he felt that Mr. Lott had changed his story, and he was no longer certain that his testimony would stand up in court.

In May, Mr. Martinez was arrested again — this time on drug trafficking and gun charges. According to court filings, he was found with 44 grams of cocaine, mostly in a safe, and an AR-15 rifle. He pleaded not guilty, and both he and his lawyer declined to comment on the new case, which is pending.

A Change in Management

The controversy over Greer generated months of headlines in local news outlets like The Frontier and The Oklahoman, which reported last year that the Department of Human Services was seeking to continue the state’s contract with Liberty.

The department said in recent statements that it had considered keeping Liberty amid “intensive safety remediation efforts,” and pointed to several actions the state took after the scandal became public, including putting monitors inside Greer and installing cameras. Liberty, in court filings, defended its management, saying that none of its actions were “unlawful, reckless, willful” or “malicious,” and in a brief statement to The Times said its local staff had included “experienced clinical and operations managers.”

The plan to retain Liberty drew immediate pushback.

“I told them they are not renewing that contract,” said Senator Paul Rosino, a Republican who chairs the Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee. “Why in the world would we renew a contract,” he added, “for people who tortured and abused people?”

The state ultimately terminated the contract, a move that Governor Stitt said was made “as soon as we felt like we legally could,” adding that the situation was “just an absolute tragedy.”

Liberty continues to operate elsewhere, however. In its home base, Pennsylvania, it has contracted with the state since 2015 to oversee investigations of abuse of people with developmental disabilities. The state said it recently reviewed completed cases “to ensure proper handling.”

Greer was taken over in February by Respectful Partners, an Oklahoma company that operates group homes. Concerns linger. Some people currently working at Greer expressed unease to The Times that the new company had retained or promoted several former Liberty officials, including Ms. Tobiason’s old supervisor.

Ms. Tobiason, who has filed her own lawsuit against Liberty, said she found it hard to believe that there were so few repercussions.

“I feel like the D.A. not prosecuting just makes people more scared to stand up and speak out,” she said.

Mr. Lott has also joined litigation against Liberty, but wonders why he talked to the police. “I kind of feel like I wasted my time,” he said.

Mr. Bruno is still on the job; he recently assisted after a fatal shooting at a local hospital. The outcome of the Greer case left him “frustrated and disappointed,” but he said he didn’t regret pursuing it.

“Somebody has to tell people what happened up there,” he said.

Danny Hakim is a reporter on the Investigations team at The Times, focused primarily on politics.

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