 I was in a coma for a couple days. I woke up, I couldn't move. I was just angry, mad, upset, and hurt. One day you walk in the next day, you in the chair. She was shaking and crying, and the victim asked for an interpreter, and the police officer said, well, it will just take forever. Can we just write notes? And she said, no. She was shaking. She couldn't write. There were so many responses. Like, you mean, you found out you had a disability and raped you anyways? This person was seeing a perfect target, because he knew he could get in there and do that, to be and get away. And I wouldn't be able to get help right away. In a wheelchair to come up under here, they've got 25 inches. Most victim service people don't really think about people with disabilities. They don't come to their door for the most part, and so they really aren't aware that there is a high number of individuals with disabilities in their own community who have been victimized. Do you have material in braille? We have some of our materials so that we can blow them up. Often people say, well, I don't have anyone disabled, but then they have this image of someone completely immobilized and having this fictionalized figure in their head of what actually is a disabled person. Well, it's exactly 36. There is such a huge amount of underreporting, or not even underreporting, not telling people that we have been victimized by crime. And a lot of people don't understand why there should be anything special, quote special, for anyone else. There's a lot of fear among disability communities that social service agencies and criminal justice agencies really have as their goal to put people in nursing homes. We need to understand where somebody is coming from. So that we can be there for deaf victims. I think it's very important that victim services, advocates, staffs, board stop lumping people with disabilities together. It doesn't make sense. And it's not fair to us. Our needs are so much different from each other. People that have no other support would give up. There's what we call developmental disabilities, or disabilities that have an early onset. And then there are disabilities that are caused by accident or illness later in life. A person can be the victim of a purse snatching or a robbery or a burglary and be hitting the head and sustain a brain injury. They can be a shooting victim. They can lose their sense of smell, their sense of hearing with a blow to the head. People often think that serving people with disabilities is unique and different and special. It's not difficult. It's not overwhelming. It is something that you can do if you just start thinking about it and learn what you need to do to best serve a person with a disability. Occasionally, I encountered disabled victims. But Nikki was particularly unique with her set of circumstances being down syndrome and retarded. I had never had a victim like her. It's right from your cafeteria, huh? Nikki's case involved a sexual assault against her by a neighborhood boy. I'm going to put it in the fruit bowl, OK? Oh, OK. The young man that attacked her knew her. And she knew him because he's a neighbor, living only about four doors away from us. Nikki did not tell any of us in full detail what happened, not until a year later, almost. You should tell me. Go ahead. I was running my bike. I saw him right behind me. Right. They might not even know that it's abuse, people with disabilities, because perhaps they've never been taught that this act is not safe or there's a reason why you don't feel good after this happened to you. It was clear at the preliminary hearing this particular victim needed extra attention to get her comfort level up. How are you doing? Fine. Good. Good to see you. She invited herself to come to our home. And she did this a month or so before we even went to trial. She said, Nikki, you and I are going to be a team. And you're on my team. How you been? Fine. Good. My feeling was, if the jury can just see her and just listen to her, I'm in. I've got a good shot at winning because she's so wonderful as a witness and so credible. How could she lie? She can't be lying. And I touched a Bob book. Yes, you touched the Bible, right? What did Wendy tell you to do when you touched the Bible? What did you have to do when you touched the Bible? That was a truth. Right. Yes, you had to tell the truth, right? Do you remember Wendy? Communicating with someone is a little different when they have a disability, specifically mental retardation, because you might need to talk slower, for example, and give the person maybe more a quiet space when you're talking with the individual. Was it nice? Yes. If you want to win, no matter what it takes, you give to this victim the time that they need to come around to you. The jury did not take them long, I should say, to come back with a verdict of guilty. I wanted to climb in the jury box and hug every one of them. He ended up doing almost a year. His family took this to a higher court, and we were told that we had the right to go back and have the trial done all over again. But it wasn't important for Nikki to have to go through this whole trauma again. We just felt that he did almost a year, and let's let it go with that. I think that the trial was very difficult for them, emotionally, as it was for everybody, including myself. But it's very important for your child to know that I'm not just going to let someone hurt you and not do anything about it. Would I do it again? Sure, I would. A defendant like this needs the criminal justice system to come down hard on him so that he and others like him of his ilk get the message that you will not victimize a person like this and not pay a severe consequence. Cook County is very urban and is very large, and it is a very diverse population. We're one of the largest system space prosecutors offices in the nation. There are tens of thousands of felony cases, and some of the most challenging involve those with people with disabilities. It makes it easier to win cases when you have a disability specialist or a senior specialist who can help with the victim go through the process. They find that they're a little bit more willing to take part, willing to come forward and participate. When I first got hurt, I was sort of depressed or mad, because it was, it changed my whole life. You've got to go tomorrow. We're here after. Keith Shields was test driving a car that he had worked on for someone else, and it was a case of my mistaken identity, where they were firing for whom they believe was a driver of the car, but instead shot Keith in the head. That's too much gas. Well, it's hard to put my shoes on. It's hard to put my pants on. It was hard using the washroom. I used to have to have help. Telling you a car chase. I think sometimes people try to have the same approach to all people or think that they know what is best for someone. And that often works disastrously for people with disabilities. He couldn't do anything for himself. So I prefer to bring him home in the children's, in the relative. Family comes over and pitched in, give me a break. And they said, no, Keith won't go into his home. We can't have him in the nurse's now. We'll take care of him. Prickly people from minority groups, such as African-Americans or Latinos, for them, community plays a very important role, particularly issues of the supports from family and the supports of the extended family. Hello, Keith. How are you doing, Mr. Kelly? I'm fine. How about you? Oh, pretty good. If I haven't met Kelly, some of the things that I need now since I got hurt, maybe I would not have been able to get. No, because he helped me a lot with the human service people, the financial part, you know, getting my lift at my chair. Yeah, we have some compensation specialists. I think that victims respond to Kelly very well, and especially because of his blindness, because they see the things that he's able to do. And I think that they realize that if he could do it, maybe I could do it. How's your mom coming along? She's coming along pretty good. Getting a disability is a life-changing event, and often that means that supports need to be created, options need to be explored, services need to be developed, all from scratch from the ground up. I understand you're at the rehabilitation institute now. I think many of the specialists that we have in our office have been able to see me and see me interact with victims, with disabilities, and have an understanding and see firsthand what some successful approaches are. Otherwise, everything's gonna be all right. Very often, deaf victims want to know what's going on, and they're told, just hang on, hang on, and they sit and wait for hours, while all this activity is happening around them, about them, and it's a very discouraging feeling. We're more than just people without hearing. We have a language that's ours, and it's equivalent to English. We have cultural rules that are different from our hearing counterparts. It's focused just for those who identify with the deaf community. There is a large deaf community here in Austin, and while we were serving some of the deaf community, some would call, by no means was that community really accessing our services as well as they could have. When that service is created within the deaf community, then they're much more likely to access the service. We provide the same services as the general hearing agencies provide, except that we are focused on deaf women. We got funding from the Office for Victims of Crime, the OVC. And the idea is to help other deaf communities replicate our model. And I know that you're doing a great job, wow. 15 cities we've been training, and Austin is the star city, very much ahead of everybody else. She has really helped me, guided me on how to really set up deaf abused women and children advocacy services. Most victims do not victimize. However, most offenders were once victims. We have to network with the hearing agencies. We can't work in isolation. But it's more working as colleagues. We're here to serve the deaf, and you're here to serve the hearing, and we all have the same goal. And our goal is to serve victims. But lots of women, prior to our partnering with DACA, our staff didn't realize that we really needed to be careful about who we brought in as interpreters, that it is a fairly insular community, and we might be putting that woman in further danger. There was no assurance that that interpreter was somebody that would be understanding of what domestic violence, sexual assault are all about. You know, the deaf community is so small, and the grapevine is just incredibly efficient. And so we really need to prove to them that we do maintain confidentiality and ethics. It's to our benefit to help them to be successful because then we're successful. Now, the community provides better services. We'll do everything we can for you, okay? More people are getting services, people that weren't before. It was just amazing to see how much the deaf and hearing community have really supported this. It's just been wonderful. Eight years ago, when I was first asked to get involved in this issue, I argued up and down that we had more victims than we could handle, as it was, that we never saw a woman with a disability come in our program and that it was a non-issue. When I began looking at it, I realized that the reason that people with disabilities didn't come to us is because we didn't tell them who we were. They didn't know about us. This is some really good team effort and a great approach from the hospital to the police officers to the Victim Assistance Unit. There are lots of places in the community where we can establish a partnership and work with somebody so that they're getting their needs met. So many people with disabilities are older, they don't tell anyone about their victimization. If someone with a disability does not come forward or does not disclose, they're never gonna get beyond it. But I think when you tell someone and you talk to someone, that's part of the starting of the healing process. They're okay that you have friends. Learn about blindness, learn about mobility impairments, various types of sensory impairments. Like I would call. Hire a deaf consultant who is an expert on victim services and design a plan. Be open to listening to people who've been victimized and to maybe you don't know the solution today, but to have a commitment to finding a solution. It's something that's necessary and important to do now because the people are here, the time is now. If you say you haven't seen a person with a disability who is a victim of a crime, it just means that you haven't yet, but you will.