Broken Trust

He was supposed to help fragile clients rebuild their lives. Instead, they claim, he inflicted fresh wounds.

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Illustration by Joseph Daniel Fiedler

In the days leading up to the weekend of Feb. 2, 2007, a secretary at the University of Michigan’s Med Rehab Adult Day Treatment Program in Ann Arbor called up the center’s recycling contractor and asked for an extra bin for social worker Thomas Higgins, who, at age 67, had made a spontaneous decision to retire.

After 15 years of trying to help people rebuild lives shattered by debilitating brain injuries, Higgins had a lot of private files to clean out. Sometime over the weekend, he arrived at the rehab center near Briarwood Mall and began excising his clients, one life at a time. He deleted e-mail folders and other online files, but most of the patients’ records — and their secrets — were in two shoulder-high, four-door cabinets in Higgins’ unadorned office, which Higgins emptied into the blue recycling bin specially designed to secure private medical records until shredding. On Monday morning, recycling workers picked up the bin, fed the files through a portable shredder in the parking lot, and hauled away the ribbons.

It wasn’t until later that week that the full weight of Higgins’ seeming act of professional due-diligence became clear. The thrice-married father of five adult children hadn’t randomly picked February 2007 as the best time to retire and empty his office. Higgins, in fact, was feeling a noose tighten.

Over the previous three years, Higgins had been selecting from among his brain-damaged clients women who had also been victims of sexual abuse. Then, according to allegations contained in court filings, Higgins used his role as a therapist, his professions of Christian faith, and a knack for ferreting out vulnerable pressure points to manipulate at least three of the women into sexual liaisons, including re-enacting their past abuse, in his office, in a university van, in his car, and in the women’s homes.

So when Higgins put in for retirement that winter, he wasn’t planning to ride off gently into his golden years. He was running.

In the more than two years since Higgins shredded his files, much has changed in his life and in the lives of the women he targeted.

Higgins, now 69, is incarcerated in the West Shoreline Correctional Facility in Muskegon Heights after pleading guilty in Washtenaw County Circuit Court to 11 counts of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct involving a mental-health professional, and one count of assault with intent of sexual penetration.

None of those charges include first-degree criminal sexual conduct (rape), which was the original charge and what at least three of the victims claim he did. Rape in Michigan carries a potential life sentence. Under the plea bargain, Higgins could be released as early as March 2010, or held until March of 2018.

When Higgins entered his guilty plea in January 2008, The Ann Arbor News reported that the deal brought “slight smiles and sighs of relief from some of the victims.” But they weren’t happy. In pleading guilty, Higgins admitted only to fondling three female patients, acts that his defenders sought to categorize as aberrations in a life devoted to serving others.

“Did I get justice? No. I don’t think two years [the minimum sentence] is enough,” Caryn O’Connor says. “I don’t think I should get longer than he does,” alluding to her ongoing emotional trauma.

O’Connor and three other women who say Higgins abused them (the fourth was not part of the criminal case) have filed civil lawsuits against Higgins, alleging, among other things, that he abused his position as a case worker, lied about his credentials as a sex therapist, and took advantage of his clients’ diminished mental capacity. They also have sued U-M Health System, arguing that Higgins’ bosses failed to properly monitor his behavior despite such red flags as his moving some sessions with the women off the system’s books, and let him maintain a hostile environment in violation of Michigan civil rights laws.

U-M Health System officials declined to be interviewed for this story; in court filings they say, in essence, that whatever Higgins did he did on his own, and the Traumatic Brain Injury Program in which the women were enrolled, and the rehab center where Higgins worked, weren’t responsible. One of the victims has reached an out-of-court settlement.

If it hadn’t been for O’Connor, Higgins might never have been caught.

O’Connor says she was first raped at age 13 when she became separated from friends at a downtown Detroit concert. All she remembers are blue eyes, a knife, the man pinning her against something. She was too shaken and confused to remember much more, or to tell anyone until she confided it a few years later to her first serious boyfriend.

Years later, when O’Connor was living at Detroit’s Riverfront apartments and working her way up the ladder at Ford Motor Co., a neighbor knocked on the door and she invited him in. That visit ended in rape, which she never reported, she says, adding that she carries a heavy sense of guilt because the man later raped another neighbor.

The aggregate effect of those experiences was crushing. O’Connor continued to function. She took a leave from Ford to complete an MBA at Columbia University, started her own online company that never really took off, then landed a job as vice president for finance at the Ann Arbor-based Busch’s grocery chain. But in June 2005, a few weeks after she started work there, O’Connor was involved in a bizarre freeway incident that left her brain-damaged and without memory of what happened.

The best O’Connor and her doctors can reconstruct is that something — maybe a truck tire — flew at her car as she was driving to Busch’s Ann Arbor office from her Whitmore Lake home. O’Connor slammed on the brakes, missing the object but snapping her head around violently inside the car and against the steering wheel. The next detail O’Connor remembers is being confused and at work. It would be days before the internal bruising seeped to the skin, and before doctors realized that she had suffered a serious brain injury.

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