Forty years after health official scaled fence in Jackson to save malnourished personal care home residents, unchecked horrors remain - Mississippi Today

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Forty years after health official scaled fence in Jackson to save malnourished personal care home residents, unchecked horrors remain - Mississippi Today

Neighbors could hear yelps from inside a 10-by-10-foot shed behind a house on Grand Avenue in west Jackson on an October afternoon in 1982. The location was a known unlicensed personal care home — facilities meant to care for adults, often with mental illness, who cannot live on their own, but which have never been regulated by any state agency. Local police said they couldn’t enter without a warrant and called Mendal Kemp, then-chief of licensi…