Blame: Death, Disability, and the Search for Justice for Guy Mitchell

Summary

On April 29, 2012, a private world of deceit and neglect came crashing down when Guy Mitchell, a thirty-eight-year-old man with developmental disabilities, died confused and alone, thrashing in a dark underground tank on the rural property where he lived.

When police arrived, they found a far larger crime scene: a house of horror where Guy had been living with two other vulnerable individuals under the care of a young woman with serious psychological issues. The home had no running water and no heat. Human waste filled the toilets and covered bathtubs, walls, and floors. Yet the agency overseeing the home gave it a pass just two days before Guy's death.

Blame: Death, Disability, and the Search for Justice for Guy Mitchell attempts to find meaning and justice in the tragic death of a vulnerable individual whose circle of care failed him. Dramatic nonfiction that reads like a legal thriller, Blame resists easy answers, exposing a tangled web of negligence, indifference, and systemic failure and probing the deeper structural forces behind Guy's death. What emerges is a powerful indictment of a broken system and a strong argument that the duty to care for society's most vulnerable ultimately lies with us all.