Soon after Peter Price arrived at the Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation to recover from a brain injury, he pleaded for a rescue.

“Jess, they beat me up,” Price told his sister, Jessica Alopaeus, in May 2009. “You have to get me out of here.”

Staffers at the center held him down and punched him in the face and groin, Price said. When Alopaeus’s efforts to transfer him stalled, Price took desperate steps.

He swallowed five fish hooks and 22 AA batteries he’d picked up during a patient outing at
Walmart. After emergency surgery to remove the objects, he was allowed to transfer to another facility.

Residents at the Florida Institute have often been abused, neglected and confined, according to 20 current and former patients and their family members, criminal charges, civil complaints and advocates for the disabled.

These sources and over 2,000 pages of court and medical records, police reports, state investigations and autopsies contain an untold history of violence and death at the institute known as FINR, located amid cattle ranches and citrus groves in Hardee County, 50 miles southeast of Tampa.

Patients’ families or state agencies have alleged abuse or care lapses in at least five residents’ deaths since 1998, two of them in the last 18 months. Three former employees face criminal charges of abusing FINR patients.

The complaints underscore the problems that 5.3 million brain-injured Americans have finding adequate care. Their numbers are growing, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as better emergency medicine and vehicle safety mean that fewer die from traffic accidents or other causes of traumatic brain injuries.

The long-term ills range from memory loss and physical handicaps to the inability to control violent anger or sexual aggression. Yet because insurance benefits for rehabilitation are scarce, less than half of those who need it receive it, according to the Brain Injury Association of America.

Operated for profit since 1992, FINR has become one of the largest brain-injury centers in the country, with 196 beds. Its marketing is focused on the relative few who can pay bills that reach $1,850 a day. That includes those injured on jobs with generous worker’s compensation benefits and car-crash victims in Michigan — which mandates unlimited lifetime benefits for automobile injury coverage.

Those who have clashed with the company over the treatment of patients say its efforts to keep costs down and extend the duration of stays take priority over care.

“All people are to them is a monetary gain,” said Jana Thorpe, a professional guardian who removed one of her wards from the company’s care in 2008.

Florida’s Department of Children and Families has received 477 allegations of abuse or neglect at FINR since 2005, including 36 that were “verified” by its investigations, according to the agency’s records. The verified claims and others were referred to law enforcement, according to Erin Gillespie, a spokeswoman for the agency, who said she didn’t know what became of the referrals.

FINR executives declined to comment and turned down a request to visit the Wauchula, Fla., facility. Owner Joseph Brennick said he “preferred to stay out of the news” before ending a short phone conversation and directing questions to a lawyer, who said he would not answer them.

The company has said previously that it vends “extremely high quality care to very difficult clients” aimed at returning them to their homes, doesn’t use seclusion and has “zero tolerance” for resident abuse.

Hardee County prosecutors have charged two FINR staffers with abusing autistic patient Danny Silva, 21. Video of the alleged crime shows two large men punching, elbowing and slapping a smaller figure between them on a sofa at least 30 times. Blows often come after moans from the man in the middle.

“Shut up, man,” they say in the video, taped by a FINR staffer, according to police. “You are getting on my damn nerves,” one of the hitters says between elbow shots.

Defendants LaKevin Johnson, 30, and Landrey Johnson, 39, of Fort Meade, Fla., have pleaded not guilty to the charges. Their lawyer didn’t return calls seeking comment.

Another video shows a man identified as FINR employee McKinley Scott pushing autistic patient Gabriel Allen away from him on a couch, standing him up, kicking his legs out from under him and leaving him on the floor next to a blinking Christmas tree. Scott, 48, has pleaded not guilty to an abuse charge prosecutors brought last December. His lawyer didn’t return calls.

Ex-residents of FINR said they were frequently “taken down” or knocked to the floor and restrained by staff, in a routine often accompanied by beatings. Blue mats sometimes used for the takedowns are ubiquitous at FINR, patients and visitors say.

“I was taken down at least once a week,” said Janet Clark, who stayed at FINR from 2006 to 2007 after being injured in a car crash. Clark keeps a photo from those days: She is expressionless and sports a black eye that she said came from staffers.

Clark, 55, said she had behavioral issues while she was recovering, including times when she needed to be restrained, but not with the force or frequency that FINR used. She said she received no psychological therapy there for her aggression although she was paying the company $310,000 a year from a personal injury settlement.

In an earlier incident, Michael Lieux, a brain-injured ex- Marine from Louisiana, suffocated when four FINR employees pinned him face down, according to a negligence lawsuit that won his family a $5 million jury verdict in 2005.

It was homicide by “positional asphyxia,” according to the medical examiner for Hardee County. The company denied it was negligent and lost its appeal in the case.

Two resident deaths at FINR that same year led to confidential settlements of lawsuits alleging negligence and care lapses that the company denied. In 2009, a FINR staffer pleaded guilty to battery charges after punching out a resident who had scratched him during a restraint.

Last December, Reginald Hicks was taken to the cafeteria by a FINR employee and given solid food that lodged in his lungs and killed him, according to his daughter, Heather Hicks. Her father, a former mortgage-workout specialist injured in a car accident, couldn’t swallow and had a care plan that called for tube feeding, she said. Autopsy findings cited aspiration of food and pneumonia as causes of death.

Connecticut resident Melinda Jakobowski, 24, was found in her bed on the morning of Feb. 10, 2011, not breathing, with her hair wrapped around her neck. She was later pronounced dead at a Tampa hospital.

A medical examiner concluded she died of natural causes. Jakobowski was supposed to be under constant watch by two employees. An investigation by Florida officials determined one of those workers was asleep and the other failed to watch Jakobowski for at least 15 minutes before she was discovered in her bed.

Ex-residents of FINR said they were frequently “taken down” or knocked to the floor and restrained by staff, in a routine often accompanied by beatings. Blue mats sometimes used for the takedowns are ubiquitous at FINR, patients and visitors say.

“I was taken down at least once a week,” said Janet Clark, who stayed at FINR from 2006 to 2007 after being injured in a car crash. Clark keeps a photo from those days: She is expressionless and sports a black eye that she said came from staffers.

“One time they had me down and one of the staff kicked me in the eye with a boot,” said Clark, a former prison guard who now lives on her own in Hillsborough, N.C. “They were saying shut up, screaming at me. I was hurting so much I couldn’t stop. It was terrifying.”

Clark, 55, said she had behavioral issues while she was recovering, including times when she needed to be restrained, but not with the force or frequency that FINR used. She said she received no psychological therapy there for her aggression although she was paying the company $310,000 a year from a personal injury settlement.

“Immediate and consistent psychological counseling and psychiatric treatment” were “clearly indicated” for Clark, according to an outside evaluation she obtained from Miami psychologist Sally Kolitz Russell nine months into her FINR stay.

— — — The company relies on guardians, case workers, doctors and lawyers to find patients. FINR also cosponsors events for the brain-injured in Michigan, home of the lifetime auto-injury benefit. There were 20 Michiganders at the facility at one point last year, according to court records.

FINR’s bills have also been paid by state governments and the District of Columbia, when the patients qualify for state assistance. Over the last four years, D.C. has recalled 21 patients from the facility. The pullout followed a 2008 investigation by the district’s designated disabilities advocate that found FINR violated patients’ human rights and D.C. policies by improperly secluding them in their rooms or using drugs as a form of restraint.

The company denied those allegations in a letter to the D.C. attorney general. It said patients weren’t restricted to their rooms, only to their cabins.

Price, 24, brain-injured since a bicycle accident at 8, said he wanted to leave FINR after he was punched in the face and groin there in May 2009. Alopaeus, his sister and legal guardian, supported the move. Steven Siporin, a Michigan attorney who was co-guardian, opposed it.

FINR’s treatment of Price was “inhumane,” said Alopaeus. Price had a “busted lip” and bruises that could have come from restraints, according to a sheriff’s deputy report dated May 8 of that year. Price had been trying to fight with staffers when they stopped him from leaving his cabin four days earlier, the report said.

FINR recorded his injuries in a “Body Sheet” diagram Alopaeus said the company gave her. Under “location of bruises, scrapes, scars, rashes etc.,” the diagram notes blue discoloration around his left eye, one testicle larger than the other, and discoloration on his arms and chest. The sheriff’s office concluded there was no evidence of abuse and said Price changed his story several times about which staffers were involved in the incident.

Price was taken down more than 20 times and confined to his cabin at FINR for weeks at a time, he said in an interview. Residents are kept in as part of “Therapeutic Cabin Based Programming,” used to protect them from hurting themselves or others, the company has said.

After one period of seclusion, he said, he was allowed to go to Wal-Mart, where he bought the batteries and fish hooks that he later swallowed. Price also cut his belly and stuffed two of the batteries and eight hooks into the wound.

“I planned this” as a way to get out of FINR, Price said. “My plan wasn’t to die.”

It was a month before he recovered from the surgery to remove the objects. He never returned to FINR, and Siporin agreed to give up his guardianship. Price now lives in an apartment run by a different center in Florida, where he is monitored but able to leave his apartment most days.

He said he goes on fishing trips, eats out, sees movies, and has never been taken down at his home.