The Guiding Light Mission is one of the missions that claimed it could not permit Thomas Pauli a place to stay the evening when it was -3 degrees and blowing winds outside. Thomas Pauli ultimately FROZE to death on January 26, 2009 in a nearby auto junk yard.
3-9-2009 Michigan:
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) - The man in charge of the Guiding Light Mission said he was "disappointed...surprised and shocked" when he learned that one of his employees beat down a homeless man in January.
But at the time Guiding Light Director Rob Munger soft pedaled the incident to reporters.
A newspaper story at the time paraphrased Munger as saying "the employee was involved in a physical altercation with a homeless man who was using pain-killers mixed with alcohol and had been asked to leave the overnight shelter for the protection of other residents..."
Munger refused to show reporters video of the incident from several security cameras at the shelter.
But Target 8 Investigators obtained a version of the video recorded on a cell phone and it shows something more than just a physical altercation. It shows Intake Coordinator Ernest Long punching the man repeatedly as they push him out a door.
Night security man Brian Nowak said, "I grabbed and pulled him into the entryway and next thing I know, Ernie's just swinging on the guy and I did the best I could to get him away from Ernie and out the door."
An outside camera picks up the homeless man starting to walk away. Then Long bursts out the front door and punches the man again and again. The man falls onto the sidewalk and appears to land in the gutter as Long kicks at him so hard he himself falls down.
The man gets up and walks away. It's not known if he was hurt and he didn't complain to police.
Nowak, who was a resident of the shelter's recovery program and on security duty that night, said the man showed up after hours and said he had been drinking. That can be a reason to bar him from the shelter. Nowak said he also produced paperwork showing he had a prescription and was treated at a hospital for a fall the previous day.
Nowak said he called Long to decide what to do because, he said, medical treatment is an exception that might allow him in after hours. He said Long refused to let the man stay. Nowak said the man asked them to call police and that Long started to make the call but then said he'd put the man out himself.
What happens at this point is in dispute.
Munger, the mission director, said the homeless man hit Long. Nowak said he didn't. The copy of the video obtained by 24 Hour News 8 is not clear enough to tell. Munger claims the original video shows it clearly but, again, refused to let us see it.
He said Long, who was also homeless until he went through the mission's recovery program, still has his job. He's been ordered to take anger management training, is no longer in charge of clients, is doing mostly administrative work and no longer lives at the mission.
The Guiding Light gets no government money, according to Munger, but survives on charitable donations, which some might think requires some level of public accountability. Still the mission didn't report the beat down to police although authorities might have considered it a criminal matter.
"What are we going to get out of it, really?" Munger asks. He said he'd be making a police report every day if he went to the police with everything that happened at the mission.
Bottom line is that Munger doesn't think it's anyone else's business. "It's a private matter," he told us. "It's not a public item. Nobody's proud of it."
The penchant for privacy got the other man in the video, night security man Nowak, and another resident, Andy Stiegenga, kicked out of the Guiding Light's substance abuse recovery program. Their violation was discussing the incident with their mentors and, when they asked, showing them the video Nowak recorded on his cell phone.
Mentors are Christian volunteers who work with the men in the program, serving as role models and being there to discuss anything the men want to talk about as part of their recovery.
Nowak and Stiengenga were concerned about what they considered the disparity between what they knew about the incident and what the Mission told the public about it. Two of the mentors were disturbed by what they saw in the video and met with Director Munger.
Then Nowak and Stiegenga were told to leave.
Nowak said he recorded the video off the Mission's security cameras because he was in it. He wanted a copy to protect himself against anyone pointing a finger at him for the beat down.
"We were told we couldn't be trusted no more and that we were no longer members of the program," Stiegenga said.
Munger, Guiding Light's Director, said sharing the information and video is "just against the rules. You can't take information from Guiding Light Mission about guys that are homeless or in the program and then take it offsite."
Nowak counters that sharing video of a beat down by an employee is not the same as publicizing personal information about residents. "The community doesn't have any privacy," he said. "It's an overnight shelter. It's a nonprofit. And when that staff member drug him out to the street and was beating him on the street, that's no longer private anymore.
Anybody in the community could have seen that."
The Mission gave them an option to stay in its other program, the overnight shelter, which houses anyone who shows up at night. Both declined, they say, for safety reasons. They had both worked security and may have made enemies among some of the men with whom they'd be sharing the overnight dormitory.
The Mission also told them they'd review their case after a month.
But both men say they had graduated from the recovery program and were in a work-finding phase while still living at the shelter and don't want to go back. They are now getting housing help from their mentors and are looking for jobs.
They're also angry that the Guiding Light spent some $1,700 worth of their food stamps after they were told to leave the program. They signed a contract that gives the Mission the right to use their food stamp cards while they are in the program to provide meals.
Munger said cleaning out the food stamp cards is routine when men graduate from the program or leave it. He said the Mission thought the men would stay in the overnight shelter and that they were given until 8 p.m. that day to leave the recovery program.
Nowak and Stiegenga, however, said when they were told around 4 p.m. they were to leave, their contracts became void and that the Mission shouldn't have used their cards around 7 p.m. to buy hundreds of dollars worth of food.
The timing of it left Nowak without food stamps for the month. ..Source.. by WOOD TV8
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