Inside a 'Hell on Earth' in Oklahoma

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/us/liberty-greer-center-abuse-oklahoma.html

https://archive.ph/gqQfJ

Inside a ‘Hell on Earth’ in Oklahoma
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.
By Danny Hakim and Rachel Nostrant
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.

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