Exposing the Greer Center: Abuse, Power, and the Price of Silence

ENID, Okla., (The Oklahoma Post) – September 15th, 2025

In an Oklahoma County courtroom, a civil case (CJ-2023-6934) is unfolding that lays bare a nightmarish saga of abuse and betrayal at the Robert M. Greer Center in Enid. Presiding Judge Anthony L. Bonner listens as Jane and John Does, nameless for their protection, finally have their day against a powerful for-profit care company. The tone is somber yet electric; the allegations read like something out of a gothic novel, yet every claim is tragically real. This is Doe et al. v. Liberty of Oklahoma Corporation, a lawsuit that has pulled back the curtain on years of suffering, corporate neglect, and official inertia. The claim combines the graphic brutality of a Wild West saloon brawl with the calculated malice of a tyrant in velvet robes all taking place in a state-run institution entrusted with society’s most vulnerable. What follows is an exposé of abuse, power, and the price of silence at the Greer Center, told in painstaking detail and unapologetic truth.

Hell on Earth: Survivor and Guardian Allegations

The Robert M. Greer Center is supposed to be a place of healing and safety for adults with developmental disabilities and mental illness. Instead, according to the survivors’ guardians, it became “hell-on-earth” for its 50 or so residents. For years, certain caretakers at Greer turned cruelty into a routine. In whispers and now in sworn statements, victims recount horrific abuses: staff members allegedly waterboarded residents in the facility’s showers, restrained them and poured water to induce the terror of drowning. At other times, they choked residents with bedsheets until the victims fell unconscious then beat them until they came to. One resident was hurled headfirst into a door with such force that it rattled the halls Caretakers even enticed and bribed residents, adults with the minds of children, to attack each other for staff amusement, offering trivial rewards like food to a compliant resident if he would brutally pummel a fellow patient. The picture painted is one of systematic torture and humiliation, perpetrated against people largely unable to defend themselves or speak out.

Survivors’ families and guardians describe not only physical assaults but profound emotional abuse and neglect. Imagine the terror of a non-verbal resident, every day a gauntlet of unpredictable violence, incapable of articulating their fear except through tears or withdrawn silence. Staff members allegedly capitalized on this voicelessness, creating a climate of fear where any protest was met with retaliation or further cruelty. Indeed, the abuse was carefully coordinated and covered up through intimidation and manipulation, according to the lawsuit, suggesting that this was no rogue employee situation but rather an entrenched culture. Residents who tried to defend themselves or report abuse were ignored or punished. Despite multiple attempts by some residents and conscientious employees to report the ongoing atrocities, the brutality continued “daily,” the plaintiffs allege. A detective’s affidavit from Enid describes how one employee did try to blow the whistle internally only to have a unit manager flatly refuse to listen. It appears that at Greer, silence was forcibly imposed: by chokehold, by threat, or by bureaucratic stonewalling.

The allegations extend to gross neglect of basic care. In one incident, a resident wandered away from the facility entirely; he was later found walking alone along a highway, vulnerable to traffic and exposure. Another resident endured a sexual assault by a peer, an assault that proper supervision should have prevented. Such incidents underscore that Greer was not just a site of active abuse, but also a place where passive neglect and absence of care created life-threatening situations. The environment of coercion at Greer was so pervasive that even employees who didn’t participate in abuse were pressured to look the other way. Whistleblowers faced vicious retaliation: one former nurse who dared report the abuse was harassed mercilessly by co-workers—so much so that someone plastered the town of Enid with defamatory flyers showing her photo and phone number, lewdly (and falsely) advertising her availability for sexual favors. This cruel campaign of public shaming forced a judge to issue emergency protective orders to ensure her safety. In another case, a nurse who reported abuse was iced out and driven to severe anxiety and depression by colleagues’ harassment. The message from certain Greer staff was clear: speak up, and you will be made to suffer.

All the while, many Greer Center residents could not speak up at all. Many have the cognitive abilities of young children; some are non-verbal or profoundly delayed. They were effectively trapped in a nightmare, unable even to articulate the abuse they were enduring. This powerlessness was exploited by what the plaintiffs call an “organized pattern of abuse and deception”. Staff falsified injury reports to cover up the bruises and broken bones, inventing benign explanations for broken teeth or mysterious bruises. Caretakers lied about providing required care, logging check-ins and therapies that never happened. The truth, long suppressed, is now finally spilling into public view through court filings. As one might imagine Dr. King Schultz remarking with cutting irony, such “caretakers” acted more like jovial devils, merrily committing unspeakable deeds under the mantle of respectability. The survivors’ allegations, now before the court, serve as a searing indictment of a system that not only allowed these abuses, but in some cases actively silenced those who sought to stop them.

The Liberty Empire: Corporate Structure and Systemic Failures

At the center of this storm is Liberty of Oklahoma Corporation (LOC), the private contractor paid to operate Greer Center. LOC is not an isolated entity; it is an affiliate of Liberty Healthcare Corporation (LHC), a for-profit health services company headquartered a thousand miles away in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. In fact, since 2000, Liberty of Oklahoma has managed the Greer Center on behalf of the state, enjoying a near quarter-century monopoly over this vital institution. Both LOC and LHC—along with a related entity, Liberty Health Services, LLC—sit under the umbrella of an out-of-state corporate family owned and led by Dr. Herbert T. Caskey, a physician-businessman who founded Liberty Healthcare in 1986 and has served as its CEO ever since. From a comfortable office in Pennsylvania, Dr. Caskey’s company has been reaping profits by contracting with Oklahoma to care for its most vulnerable citizens. The Greer Center contract was just one among Liberty’s ventures here: Liberty also ran a Tulsa facility for developmentally disabled youth and was even entrusted to help eliminate Oklahoma’s long waitlist for disability services. On paper, Liberty presented itself as a seasoned expert in specialized care. But within the Greer Center’s brick walls, that polished image gave way to operational chaos and cruelty.

How did Liberty’s corporate policies and management contribute to this disaster? The emerging evidence suggests a toxic combination of cost-cutting, remote management, and willful blindness. A consultant’s investigation, the Benchmark Human Services report, commissioned by Oklahoma authorities after the scandal broke offers a damning peek behind the curtain. Benchmark’s reviewers found a facility in disarray, starting with severe understaffing. Greer Center was so short on staff that existing employees were essentially worked to exhaustion. In April 2024, for example, the center paid for over 2,267 hours of overtime in a single month; equivalent to 13 employees working 16-hour double shifts every day. It was common for staff to pull back-to-back double shifts for days on end. In such conditions, burnout was inevitable and the risk of abuse or neglect “increased” with each exhausted caregiver. This was not a one-time anomaly, but a chronic condition. Why wasn’t Liberty hiring more staff? Plaintiffs argue that underfunding and profit-driven parsimony were at fault – that Liberty squeezed its payroll to pad its bottom line, leaving the Greer Center dangerously lean of qualified caregivers. Liberty’s contract with the state undoubtedly provided a fixed sum for operations; every dollar not spent on care could be a dollar in corporate profit. It appears that calculation prevailed over compassion.

Even beyond raw staffing numbers, Liberty’s management practices were profoundly deficient. The Benchmark report noted that Greer’s leadership structure was basically broken: “The facility’s governing body…was not functional,” the consultants observed bluntly. In theory, a governing body (likely comprised of Liberty corporate managers or local administrators) should have been coordinating oversight, setting proper policies, and swiftly correcting problems. In practice, it was absent or inept, allowing chaos to fester. Communication was abysmal, when state inspectors cited the facility for violations that put residents in “immediate jeopardy of harm or death,” Greer’s management would scribble out new procedures on paper to appease regulators, but failed to actually convey the changes to frontline staff. This bureaucratic theater meant that even after tragedies and near-misses, staff often didn’t know about new safety policies or simply ignored them. Follow-ups were rare to nonexistent. In one striking example, during a period when the state had formally declared residents to be at grave risk, only a single administrator was on-site over a three-day weekend, and the only oversight of the staff’s emergency fixes came from two bemused Benchmark consultants who happened to be present. In the words of Benchmark’s report, “the facility continues to face significant challenges in making major changes in operational structure and creating and sustaining a ‘culture’ that recognizes the positive attributes and worth of everyone , residents and staff alike”. Translation: Liberty’s management had utterly failed to instill a culture of dignity or accountability, and morale was in the gutter. Staff were treating residents as less than human, and no one in Liberty’s chain of command effectively said “Enough!” or enforced basic standards.

If Liberty’s Pennsylvania executives knew about these issues, it appears they did too little, too late. And if they didn’t know, that ignorance itself was a product of distant management and poor oversight. The Liberty corporate model seemingly involved parachuting into Oklahoma, collecting state contracts, and managing from afar with minimal day-to-day presence. The president of Liberty of Oklahoma, and even Dr. Caskey himself, are named as defendants for a reason: the plaintiffs allege that the very policies and budgeting decisions set at the top created the conditions for abuse. For instance, the lawsuit points out that Liberty set the pay scales and staffing ratios that left Greer Center desperately shorthanded. It alleges Liberty failed to implement proper training or background checks, resulting in hiring “caretakers” with propensity for violence. And when warning signs emerged – injuries, internal complaints, high staff turnover Liberty’s response was to paper them over, not fix the root causes. Indeed, internal incident reports were systematically falsified to hide the abuse, a deceit that could not have persisted unless management looked the other way or tacitly encouraged it. In court filings, the plaintiffs depict a corporate culture fixated on protecting the Liberty brand and contract, rather than protecting the residents. Workers who abused clients felt emboldened because the oversight was lax and the consequences negligible. It is telling that *even after multiple staff were arrested in 2023 for assaulting Greer residents, Liberty officially “denied” all allegations of wrongdoing. The company’s public stance was that nothing was amiss a position that, in hindsight, is tragically farcical.

The State of Oklahoma bears its share of responsibility in this saga, and that is part of the plaintiffs’ story as well. Oklahoma Human Services (OKDHS) contracted with Liberty and was supposed to monitor the Greer Center’s performance. There were indeed red flags over the years: state inspectors repeatedly cited Greer for “serious regulatory violations” and abusive situations that put residents in jeopardy. By late 2023, after the abuse scandal became public, the Oklahoma Health Care Authority (which oversees such facilities) calculated that Greer legally could be fined $10,000 per day, accruing over $500,000 in penalties, for its failure to keep residents safe. And yet, in a mystifying show of leniency, state leaders decided not to impose those fines or revoke Liberty’s contract. Instead, they chose the consultant route: Benchmark Human Services was paid up to $1.5 million to recommend changes and watch over Liberty’s shoulder. State officials rationalized that crushing fines might only make a bad situation worse by sapping the facility’s resources. Perhaps so, but the net effect was that Liberty faced little immediate consequence beyond scrutiny and bad press. One can practically hear Dr. Schultz’s sardonic commentary: “How curious, that a company accused of barbarism was spared a financial bruise out of concern for its well-being.” Benchmark’s oversight did lead to improvements on paper, new behavior analysts hired, better communication with DHS, etc.but it could not force Liberty to change its stripes. Indeed, Benchmark had “no authority to require” Liberty to implement its suggestions, acting only as advisors Real accountability, it seemed, would have to come from elsewhere.

Shockingly, even after all the public exposure of the Greer Center’s troubles, some DHS officials were ready to extend Liberty’s tenure. Internal discussions came to light revealing that in August 2024, almost a year after the abuse came to light, top executives at DHS attempted to renew Liberty’s contract to run Greer Center. Only an outcry and higher-level intervention appears to have halted that. By October 2024, facing mounting pressure, Liberty of Oklahoma announced it would cease managing the Greer Center (and a second facility in Tulsa) and exit the state. In a public statement, Liberty’s COO cited unspecified “external challenges” as the reason for this “very difficult decision,” while pledging a smooth transition for residents. To some observers, this sounded like Liberty was falling on its sword before it could be fired; a face-saving retreat by a company in over its head. Oklahoma officials, for their part, scrambled to find new management for Greer, all the while insisting that resident safety was now their utmost priority. It is a bitter ending to Liberty’s 25-year contract: not a termination for cause, but a quiet bowing-out amid platitudes. As of this writing, Liberty’s website still proudly touts its successes (such as helping Oklahoma reduce its DDS waitlist with millions in state funding), yet says nothing of the “truly horrific” allegations of abuse under its watch at Greer. The silence in that omission is deafening. It speaks to the very “price of silence” that the Greer Center scandal exemplifies: when corporate profit and reputation take precedence over transparency, vulnerable people pay the price with their suffering.

Justice Deferred: Legal and Political Implications

Inside Judge Bonner’s courtroom, the civil lawsuit marches forward, promising a measure of justice that so far has eluded the criminal system. The case Doe et al. v. Liberty of Oklahoma Corp. now encompasses a growing list of plaintiffs, multiple John and Jane Does represented by their guardians and an expanded roster of defendants that includes not only the Liberty entities and local administrators, but also Dr. Herbert Caskey himself and other corporate officers. In essence, the suit seeks to hold the entire chain of command to account, from the abusive frontline staff all the way up to the distant owner in Pennsylvania. The causes of action include negligence, breach of statutory duty, and civil claims of abuse; the plaintiffs seek well over the statutory minimum of $10,000 in damages, in fact, they seek punitive damages sizable enough to send a message. As the evidence is gathered, Judge Bonner has already made at least one notable ruling: when Liberty could not produce certain critical evidence, the court granted an adverse-inference spoliation sanction, meaning the jury will be instructed that the missing evidence (such as destroyed incident videos or records) should be presumed unfavorable to Liberty. In plain terms, if Liberty lost or erased evidence of abuse, the law will not let them benefit from that loss. It’s a small but meaningful victory for the plaintiffs – a sign that the court recognizes the gravity of what was at stake.

Yet, while the civil case girds for trial, the criminal justice response to the Greer Center scandal has been halting and fraught with frustration. In late 2023, Enid police and Garfield County prosecutors did charge six former Greer Center employees under Oklahoma’s caretaker abuse statutes. The charges mirrored what the civil suit describes: for example, one charge accused staff of using a sheet to choke a resident with the mental capacity of a 4-year-old, another charge detailed how staff bribed a resident with food to beat up a fellow resident. For a moment, it seemed the abusers would face orange jumpsuits and handcuffs. But by August 2024, those criminal cases largely fell apart. The local District Attorney’s office (in Garfield County) moved to drop charges against all but one defendant, citing the inability to locate a key eyewitness who was critical to the case. Families of victims watched in anguish as, one by one, the accused walked free. The complex circumstances of developmentally disabled victims many non-verbal and unable to testify coherently made the criminal burden of proof daunting. As Enid’s police spokesman put it, “our burden of proof is quite a bit higher” in these cases. With the main whistleblower (presumably the missing witness) off the radar, the prosecutions collapsed. By the time Oklahoma County District Attorney Vicki Behenna took office in 2023, the locus of the crimes was elsewhere, and indeed no new criminal charges have been filed under her jurisdiction related to Greer Center. DA Behenna’s role in this saga is mainly noteworthy by its absence: she oversees the county where Liberty’s headquarters in Oklahoma yet has so far had no cause (or no willingness) to bring the weight of her office into the fray. The criminal accountability gap remains, for now, a yawning chasm.

This vacuum has not gone unnoticed. The Oklahoma Attorney General, Gentner Drummond, has been publicly pressed to intervene, to do something , but so far he too has kept his distance. Earlier this year, a citizens’ group in Garfield County known as Grand Jury Justice took the extraordinary step of petitioning for a county grand jury investigation into the Greer Center affair. Their petition doesn’t mince words: it accuses state and county officials of “conspiring to cover up crimes” and “neglecting their duty” to protect the disabled.. The group explicitly called out AG Drummond, claiming he said he would “not prosecute procedural misconduct” and alleging that he ignored pleas from families to get involved. (What exactly “procedural misconduct” refers to in this context is unclear, but the phrase suggests the AG saw the matter as local or administrative rather than a cause for state-level criminal action.) Drummond, for his part, did not respond to media inquiries about these claims. The Grand Jury Justice petition essentially asks for a grand jury to be empaneled with broad powers to investigate and indict officials of OKDHS, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI), or anyone else who “compromised the safety” of Greer Center residents. It’s an attempt to haul the overseers themselves into the spotlight of accountability, under the theory that the abuse was enabled by systemic governmental failure as much as by individual cruelty.

As of today, neither AG Drummond nor any other statewide authority has directly intervened in the Greer Center criminal matter. But the political winds may yet shift. Oklahoma’s Attorney General does have the power to convene multi-county grand juries or take on cases of statewide importance, especially if local authorities are perceived to have dropped the ball. The public outrage stirred by this case and the vivid testimony that will emerge as the civil trial proceeds could prompt a second look. The Oklahoma County DA’s stance could likewise change if new evidence of crimes (especially any that occurred within her county, such as evidence tampering or conspiracy) comes to light. For now, however, the responsibility of airing out the truth has fallen largely to the civil litigation and to investigative journalism rather than criminal prosecutors.

In the court of public opinion, the Greer Center scandal has already triggered calls for reform. Oklahoma DHS Director Dr. Deborah Shropshire issued a formal apology to the victims’ families, calling the allegations “truly horrific” and vowing to “do everything in [our] power” to ensure safety in care facilities. New admissions to Greer were halted, and a top-to-bottom review of hiring and training practices was launched. These are remedial measures, perhaps long overdue. Politically, the case has cast a harsh light on Oklahoma’s practice of outsourcing care for vulnerable populations to private contractors without robust oversight. Legislators have begun asking pointed questions about how a situation this awful was allowed to fester “for at least a year” (and, if the lawsuit is correct, for decades) without DHS noticing. There is a palpable sense at the State Capitol that heads could roll – whether those of agency officials who were asleep at the wheel, or of the corporate executives who took Oklahoma’s money while flouting Oklahoma’s laws.

Ultimately, Doe v. Liberty of Oklahoma Corp. is more than a lawsuit; it is a reckoning. It is the voice of the silenced finally ringing out in a cry for justice. Each graphic description in the complaint, each heart-wrenching affidavit, ensures that the price of silence is paid no more. The survivors and their families have shattered the conspiracy of silence that protected abusers and enablers alike. And in doing so, they have forced Oklahoma to confront a painful question: What is the value of a vulnerable person’s life, and what will we do to shield it from predators? The answer will be written in the outcome of this case, in the reforms (or lack thereof) that follow, and perhaps in criminal courts yet to convene. As the story stands today, we see a glimmer of accountability on the horizon but also a sobering lesson. Abuse thrives in darkness and silence. It took the combined light of brave whistleblowers, persistent journalists, and determined lawyers to pierce that darkness at Greer Center. Now that we can finally see what was happening, we as a society are left with the moral imperative to ensure it never happens again. Or, to invoke the sharp moral clarity: We have a grave responsibility to confront this evil head-on, with unflinching resolve, for those who cannot fight for themselves.

Sources:

• Third Amended Petition in Doe et al. v. Liberty of Oklahoma Corp., Oklahoma County Case CJ-2023-6934nixlaw.comnixlaw.com
• Nix Patterson law firm statement on Greer Center abuse casenixlaw.com
• The Frontier (Oct. 17, 2024) – Oklahoma has no plans to fine a troubled center…readfrontier.orgreadfrontier.org
• The Frontier (Oct. 28, 2024) – Company plans to leave troubled Oklahoma center…readfrontier.orgreadfrontier.org
• NonDoc (Dec. 7, 2023) – ‘Truly horrific’: DHS apologizes to families…nondoc.comnondoc.com
• News 9 (Mar. 24, 2025) – Garfield County group calls for grand jury…news9.comnews9.com
• OKC Fox 25 (Aug. 9, 2024) – Former nurse sues, alleges retaliation…okcfox.comokcfox.com
• Medium (First Watch) (Oct. 29, 2024) – Oklahoma DHS Wanted to Extend Troubled Greer Center Contractmedium.commedium.com

Writing By: King Shultz | Editing by Robbie Robertson

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