Reporter's notebook: Examining Minnesota's group home industry

NINA MOINI: Group homes give Minnesotans with disabilities or mental health diagnoses a place to live, with staff on site to keep them safe. But a new investigation from MPR News and APM Reports found a surprising number of people have been dying in Minnesota group homes.

The investigation discovered at least 50 deaths since late 2022, but state law allows only minor financial penalties against the group homes when they neglect their residents. Ellie Roth has the story.

ELLIE ROTH: The cell phone video shows Ryan Riggs on the dance floor. He's swinging his young nieces and the daughter of a family friend in big circles. One little girl is barefoot. Another is wearing light-up sneakers. It's August 7, 2021, Ryan's wedding day.

JULIE RIGGS: This was the happiest day for me.

ELLIE ROTH: Julie Riggs met Ryan through mutual friends. They had big dreams. They were going to build a house near her family's pheasant hunting preserve west of St. Cloud.

JULIE RIGGS: That's all I ever wanted in my life, is a happy ending. But I'm not going to get it.

ELLIE ROTH: Three years after the wedding, Ryan crashed his motorcycle. He suffered a traumatic brain injury and had to be airlifted to the hospital. When he woke up, Julie says he didn't know who she was.

JULIE RIGGS: He didn't know what he was doing. It was just weird. It wasn't Ryan.

ELLIE ROTH: Back home after the surgery, Ryan started to have violent outbursts. Julie was battling cancer herself, and she couldn't take care of him on her own. So staff at the hospital in St. Cloud recommended he stay at a group home while he healed. That way, he'd be supervised around the clock.

JULIE RIGGS: They would help him with his memory. They'd get him to all his appointments. There was always somebody there. They'd be taken care of.

ELLIE ROTH: Ryan spent about six months at a group home in Brooklyn Center run by fortunate homes. Then, last September, staff there called Julie. Ryan had gone missing.

INVESTIGATOR: Officer Wagner recorded statement. Date is 9/4/2025. Time is 1948 hours.

ELLIE ROTH: It wasn't until 29 hours later that they figured out where he was.

INVESTIGATOR: How come the police are here today?

SUSAN OBWAYA: We called the police because we found one of our clients, Ryan, back in the-- behind the garage, unconscious.

ELLIE ROTH: Susan Obwaya owns Fortunate Homes. She was interviewed by an officer from the Brooklyn Center Police Department after staff found Ryan lying in the backyard.

INVESTIGATOR: Is this normal for your client to be laying in the grass outside in the backyard?

SUSAN OBWAYA: Not that I know of, but he goes out for work, so if he likes to lay down on the grass, but I wouldn't know.

ELLIE ROTH: Ryan was dead, and police concluded that he had been for more than a day at that point. The autopsy found fentanyl in Ryan's system. And the medical examiner concluded he likely died of an overdose but couldn't rule out hypothermia. Julie says she'd never known him to use opioids.

JULIE RIGGS: He was out there right in the middle of the yard, and nobody went back in the backyard or searched between the garage and the fence. Why didn't anybody go back there? Like he laid there for 29 hours.

ELLIE ROTH: The Minnesota Department of Health investigated Ryan's death. And it found that Fortunate Homes had neglected him because staff should never have let him leave the house unsupervised and because Fortunate Homes didn't review its own surveillance video until the day after he disappeared. The Department of Health issued a fine against the group home. The initial amount, $1,000.

JULIE RIGGS: A fine for $1,000 to the home. So my husband was only worth $1,000. A slap on the wrist.

ELLIE ROTH: An attorney for Fortunate Homes said the company wouldn't comment for this story, and it's appealing the state's actions. The state of Minnesota paid Fortunate Homes more than $20,000 a month to care for Ryan. The $1,000 fine amounted to less than two days worth of those payments. And that's a pretty typical fine for cases like Ryan's.

Out of the 50 Minnesota group home deaths in recent years, there have been at least 19 cases where the state investigated and found neglect had occurred, with fines ranging from $1,000 to $5,000.

SUE ABDERHOLDEN: That's a lot of deaths.

ELLIE ROTH: Sue Abderholden is a longtime advocate for Minnesotans with mental health diagnoses, and she was stunned when she learned how many group home deaths. MPR News and APM Reports had uncovered.

SUE ABDERHOLDEN: I'm frankly in shock that that isn't known. If we had that many deaths in a state-run hospital or in a supported living arrangement, there would be an outcry. And then I guess I have to ask, so what is the department doing about it.

ELLIE ROTH: The Minnesota Department of Health declined an interview. A spokesman said it has revoked the licenses of two group homes where residents have died since 2021. But in one of those cases, it eventually backed down after the group home appealed. The spokesman also noted that the size of the fines the Department can impose is dictated by state law.

GINNY KLEVORN: Hi. I'm Ginny Klevorn. And I'm the State Representative for Plymouth and Medicine Lake, which is in the northwest suburbs of Minneapolis.

ELLIE ROTH: Representative Klevorn is sponsoring a bill that would increase training requirements for staff at group homes and other assisted living facilities. An earlier version of her bill would have raised fines when group homes neglect their residents. But she says she had to remove that provision because it didn't have enough support from her fellow lawmakers, and she worried it would doom the entire bill.

SUE ABDERHOLDEN: There are people who financially benefit by stopping this bill. Is it the right thing to do? I don't think so. But if I can get training, if I can get procedures, if I can get an emergency medical responder on site, that's a huge win. And then I'll come back for the fine.

ELLIE ROTH: Julie Riggs knows, pass or not, the bill won't bring her husband back. But she does want to see more oversight of group homes and more protections for their residents.

JULIE RIGGS: President Trump, or even our governor need to step up and do something, because $1,000 for Ryan that the group home had to pay is injustice.

ELLIE ROTH: In March, MPR News and APM Reports emailed the Minnesota Department of Health about Ryan's case. The email asked why the fine was only $1,000. The very next week, the Health Department sent a letter to Fortunate Homes.

The letter called the original fine an error, and the Department increased the fine to $5,000. That's the law allows. For Julie, it's still not enough. With reporting from Jennifer Liu and Christopher Peak, I'm Ellie Roth in Richmond.

NINA MOINI: Ellie Roth joins me in the studio now to tell us more about her reporting. Thanks for being with us, Ellie.

ELLIE ROTH: Hi, Nina. Thanks for having me.

NINA MOINI: Your story there, very shocking, focuses on the death of Ryan Riggs. What are some of the other examples, though, that you found in some of these deaths that occurred where neglect occurred?

ELLIE ROTH: Yeah, so we found 19 cases where the state investigated the death of a group home resident and found that either the facility or its employees had neglected the resident. Those include a case where-- at Arms Home Health Care in Minneapolis, where the staff said they were unable to prevent a resident from acquiring and using drugs both at the group home and out in the community. That resident died after their fourth overdose at the group home.

There was another one at Unique Homes in Robbinsdale. In that one, an employee told investigators the night staff was asleep on the couch when a resident was found unresponsive after an overdose. And the resident who died had actually provided first aid to another overdosing resident hours before their own death.

And then at Miles Vents Inc. in Brooklyn Center, there was a resident who had been reported missing for 20 days, only to be found dead of a suspected overdose in her own bedroom. Police said she had been dead for a significant amount of time when they finally found her in her own room.

The Health Department actually tried to revoke this group home's license in 2025, but the facility appealed. And the state eventually backed down after concluding Miles Vents Inc. had come into compliance with all regulations. That group home continues to operate today.

NINA MOINI: So I understand your team used artificial intelligence to help discover some of these deaths. Can you tell us about how that process worked?

ELLIE ROTH: Absolutely. So there are two agencies that license group homes-- the Minnesota Department of Human Services and the Minnesota Department of Health. Each agency has the ability to conduct investigations based on allegations of maltreatment. Those final reports are published online. And they're public, and anyone can view them, but there are thousands of them.

So my colleague, Jennifer Liu, downloaded all of these publicly available documents and then used an artificial intelligence application to identify cases of alleged neglect in which a group home resident died. Our team then reviewed each report for accuracy and created a database to analyze them.

In total, we found at least 50 Minnesota group home residents have died since late 2022 under circumstances serious enough to trigger that maltreatment investigation. And as I mentioned in 19 of those cases, state investigators concluded neglect occurred.

NINA MOINI: So why are the fines for maltreatment capped at $5,000, Ellie?

ELLIE ROTH: Well, that's what state law says. Now, the state does have the power to revoke a facility's license. But the Health Department, which oversees the facilities where most of the deaths happened, told us there have only been two cases where they ordered the revocation of a group home license. One was that case I mentioned earlier, Miles Vents Inc. where the group home appealed, and the Department backed down.

We also found six cases where the state only fined the group home $1,000 for neglect after a resident died. That includes when a resident's health slowly declined until she died of sepsis. The state fined group homes $5,000 for neglect when staff at group homes let a resident drink himself to death, didn't administer another residents life-saving medication for 15 days, and didn't stop a resident from overdosing twice in a single day. The public documented-- excuse me. The public documents detailing each case do not explain the variation in these fines.

NINA MOINI: OK, tell us a bit more, if you would, about just how the state investigates maltreatment complaints at these group homes and other facilities.

ELLIE ROTH: So when the state becomes aware of alleged maltreatment, usually through a report made through the Minnesota Adult Abuse Reporting Center, they triage the cases based on credibility and then decide which ones to review.

They look at the history of the facility and people involved and make phone calls to determine if further investigation is warranted. But at least when it comes to facilities licensed by the Minnesota Department of Human Services, very few cases make it past that initial assessment.

In the past year, only 7% of allegations reported across all programs licensed by DHS received a full investigation. The Health Department, which also licenses group homes, does not publish that same kind of data. So we don't know what percentage of allegations about facilities at licenses are getting investigated.

NINA MOINI: Ellie, thanks for sharing your reporting and staying on this for us. Really appreciate it.

ELLIE ROTH: Thanks, Nina.

NINA MOINI: MPR News reporter Ellie Roth. You can find the full story on mprnews.org, along with a video report on our YouTube page.