When an individual with a disability is seriously injured, sexually assaulted, bullied, exploited, or abused in a residential facility, school, group home, supported living program, or other disability service setting, proving liability requires far more than traditional personal injury experience. These cases often involve complex federal disability laws, Medicaid regulations, licensing standards, behavioral health principles, special education requirements, Fair Housing Act obligations, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, all of which establish duties that extend well beyond ordinary negligence. Matthew Dietz brings thirty years of nationally recognized experience in disability rights litigation, institutional reform, community integration, Fair Housing Act litigation, Medicaid services, and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In representing injured individuals with disabilities, Matthew Dietz investigates the institutional failures that allowed preventable harm to occur, establishes disability-specific standards of care, develops targeted discovery, works with leading subject matter experts, and presents how failures in staffing, supervision, behavioral supports, accommodations, and resident safety caused serious injuries. His unique combination of disability law expertise and litigation experience allows him to frame these cases within the broader context of civil rights, institutional accountability, and the professional standards governing disability service providers.

Safe Housing with Essential Disability Supports

Every individual with a disability has the right to live, learn, and receive services in an environment that is safe, respectful, and free from abuse, neglect, exploitation, and preventable harm. That responsibility extends to every organization entrusted with the care, education, housing, or support of individuals with disabilities, including group homes, supported living programs, disability-specific apartment communities, intermediate care facilities, nursing facilities, residential treatment centers, schools, day programs, and other congregate settings. These organizations do far more than provide housing or educational services. They assume legal responsibilities to protect vulnerable individuals, identify foreseeable risks, implement reasonable safeguards, and provide the individualized services necessary to ensure residents and students can safely participate in community life.

Unfortunately, the need for those protections is well documented. According to the United States Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, individuals with disabilities experience violent crime at nearly four times the rate of persons without disabilities. Although individuals with disabilities comprise only about 12 percent of the United States population, they account for more than one-quarter of all victims of violent crime. Persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities experience the highest rates of victimization of any demographic group, with approximately 83 violent victimizations per 1,000 individuals each year. Equally significant, nearly 40 percent of violent crimes against people with disabilities are committed by someone known to the victim, including caregivers, facility employees, fellow residents, classmates, transportation providers, or others who obtained access through the institution itself. These statistics demonstrate that the greatest dangers often arise not from strangers, but from failures within the very systems entrusted with protecting vulnerable individuals.

When Essential Supports Are Denied

Liability arises when housing providers concentrate large numbers of highly vulnerable individuals with differing support needs into congregate settings while failing to provide the individualized staffing, behavioral services, supervision, security, and operational safeguards necessary to protect everyone living there. The danger is created not by disability itself, but by institutional decisions that ignore foreseeable risks and fail to provide promised or required supports.

Many residential communities serving individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities are created, financed, licensed, or marketed based upon representations that residents will receive individualized support services enabling them to live safely and independently in integrated community settings. These services commonly include behavioral supports, independent living instruction, crisis intervention, medication management, transportation, employment assistance, case management, personal care, supervision, and mental health services. These supports are not simply conveniences or optional amenities. For many residents, they are the very reason independent community living is possible.

When providers reduce staffing, eliminate behavioral supports, fail to coordinate care, discontinue case management, or require residents to pay additional fees for services that were represented as part of the residential program, foreseeable risks increase dramatically. Residents become increasingly vulnerable because individuals whose behavioral or psychiatric needs are no longer being adequately addressed may require intervention, supervision, or treatment that is no longer available. The resulting harm is often entirely foreseeable and frequently preventable.

Those failures frequently lead to resident-on-resident violence, bullying, harassment, intimidation, sexual assault, financial exploitation, emotional abuse, coercion, property destruction, and other preventable injuries. Research consistently shows that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. At the same time, when an individual does engage in sexually inappropriate or aggressive conduct, these risks require individualized assessment, trauma-informed treatment, supervision, and appropriate supports—not placement in congregate housing without safeguards. One recent study of more than 3,000 incarcerated sexual offenders found that approximately 19 percent had either an intellectual disability or borderline intellectual functioning, a rate far higher than in the general population, while also documenting high rates of psychiatric disorders, suicide attempts, and other adverse experiences.

Facilities and schools have a legal obligation to anticipate foreseeable dangers before serious injuries occur. They include conducting individualized risk assessments, appropriately evaluating resident compatibility when housing assignments are made, carefully screening and supervising employees, maintaining adequate staffing levels, developing effective behavioral intervention plans, responding promptly to complaints, monitoring changing resident needs, investigating allegations of abuse or bullying, reporting suspected abuse to appropriate authorities, and ensuring that known risks are not permitted to recur. Prior incidents of violence, repeated complaints, staffing shortages, failures to provide promised services, behavioral warning signs, or inadequate supervision often provide compelling evidence that subsequent injuries were foreseeable and could have been prevented through reasonable institutional practices.

If someone with a disability has been injured, abused, assaulted, exploited, or neglected in a facility, school, group home, supported living program, or other disability service setting, immediate action matters. Critical evidence can disappear, records may be incomplete, witnesses may move on, and institutions may try to characterize the harm as an isolated event rather than the result of preventable systemic failures. Matthew Dietz brings thirty years of disability rights and litigation experience to uncover what happened, identify the legal duties involved, and pursue accountability for failures in staffing, supervision, behavioral supports, accommodations, safety planning, and resident protection.