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Autistic man Tazed on Tybee, family says
Tybee police charge 18-year-old with disorderly conduct in Friday incident
Posted: May 23, 2010 - 12:48am
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Clifford Grevemberg says he was Tased twice by police and thrown to the ground, breaking one of his front teeth.
Clifford Grevemberg doesn't want to go to jail.
On Friday night, the lanky 18-year-old was arrested by Tybee police on a disorderly conduct charge in front of the Rock House on 16th Street.
He says he was Tased twice and thrown to the ground, breaking one of his front teeth and leaving scrapes on his face and knee.
Read the incident report here.
But Grevemberg, who suffers from a form of autism, still wants to know what he did wrong.
"I just wanted to go to sleep," the 6-foot-9-inch tall, 170-pound teenager said Saturday. "I sat down on the curb and put my head in my arms, and they stopped me."
Tybee police officials could not be reached for comment Saturday, despite multiple attempts. Phone messages left for Tybee Chief James Price went unanswered, and a Tybee police dispatcher said no one could comment on the issue until Monday morning.
Tybee Mayor Jason Buelterman said he was not aware of the incident, adding that several attempts to reach the island's city manager Saturday night were unsuccessful.
Dario Mariani, Grevemberg's brother, said they planned to end their day at Friday's Beach Bum Parade with some food, but the island revelry left many of the restaurants with two-to-three-hour wait times.
So Mariani and Grevemberg stopped by the Rock House.
"I asked the bouncer, 'We just want to get food, and can he come inside?'" Mariani said. "He said no, so I told Clifford to stay outside while I ordered some cheeseburgers."
Mariani said he walked outside a few minutes later to find his brother in handcuffs, his face covered with blood. Two Taser barbs were stuck to the lower portion of Grevemberg's back, and their wires were wrapped around his legs.
Mariani says his brother was Tased twice.
"I asked them what ... they were doing, and they said he was being drunk and disorderly," he said. "I said, 'No, he's a special needs child. He hasn't drank alcohol in his entire life.
"Their eyeballs got about that big when I told them he has a heart condition," Mariani added. The family said Grevemberg's heart must be regularly monitored due to the severity of the condition.
Mariani said that after Tybee police told him he could be arrested, too, his brother was taken to the Tybee police station and later released.
Grevemberg's mother, Nancy Grevemberg, tearfully admitted Saturday night that she would have understood the officers' actions if they had apologized after learning her son suffers from autism.
"If they would have looked at me and said, 'OK, we're sorry,' that would have been fine," Nancy Grevemberg said. "Instead, they just kept on going."
Clifford Grevemberg is scheduled to appear before the Tybee Municipal Court on July 27.
Last month, I speculated in Slate that the mounting incidence of childhood autism may be related to increased television viewing among the very young. The autism rise began around 1980, about the same time cable television and VCRs became common, allowing children to watch television aimed at them any time. Since the brain is organizing during the first years of life and since human beings evolved responding to three-dimensional stimuli, I wondered if exposing toddlers to lots of colorful two-dimensional stimulation could be harmful to brain development. This was sheer speculation, since I knew of no researchers pursuing the question.
The Cornell study represents a potential bombshell in the autism debate. "We are not saying we have found the cause of autism, we're saying we have found a critical piece of evidence," Cornell researcher Michael Waldman told me. Because autism rates are increasing broadly across the country and across income and ethnic groups, it seems logical that the trigger is something to which children are broadly exposed. Vaccines were a leading suspect, but numerous studies have failed to show any definitive link between autism and vaccines, while the autism rise has continued since worrisome compounds in vaccines were banned. What if the malefactor is not a chemical? Studies suggest that American children now watch about four hours of television daily. Before 1980—the first kids-oriented channel, Nickelodeon, dates to 1979—the figure is believed to have been much lower.
But the fact that rising household access to cable television seems to associate with rising autism does not reveal anything about how viewing hours might link to the disorder. The Cornell team searched for some independent measure of increased television viewing. In recent years, leading behavioral economists such as Caroline Hoxby and Steven Levitt* have used weather or geography to test assumptions about behavior. Bureau of Labor Statistics studies have found that when it rains or snows, television viewing by young children rises. So Waldman studied precipitation records for California, Oregon, and Washington state, which, because of climate and geography, experience big swings in precipitation levels both year-by-year and county-by-county. He found what appears to be a dramatic relationship between television viewing and autism onset. In counties or years when rain and snow were unusually high, and hence it is assumed children spent a lot of time watching television, autism rates shot up; in places or years of low precipitation, autism rates were low. Waldman and Nicholson conclude that "just under 40 percent of autism diagnoses in the three states studied is the result of television watching." Thus the study has two separate findings: that having cable television in the home increased autism rates in California and Pennsylvania somewhat, and that more hours of actually watching television increased autism in California, Oregon, and Washington by a lot.
Research has shown that autistic children exhibit abnormal activity in the visual-processing areas of their brains, and these areas are actively developing in the first three years of life. Whether excessive viewing of brightly colored two-dimensional screen images can cause visual-processing abnormalities is unknown. The Cornell study makes no attempt to propose how television might trigger autism; it only seeks to demonstrate a relationship. But Waldman notes that large amounts of money are being spent to search for a cause of autism that is genetic or toxin-based and believes researchers should now turn to scrutinizing a television link.
There are many possible objections to the Cornell study. One is that time indoors, not television, may be the autism trigger. Generally, indoor air quality is much lower than outdoor air quality: Recently the Environmental Protection Agency warned, "Risks to health may be greater due to exposure to air pollution indoors than outdoors." Perhaps if rain and snow cause young children to spend more time indoors, added exposure to indoor air pollution harms them. It may be that families with children at risk for autism disorders are for some reason more likely to move to areas that get lots of rain and snow or to move to areas with high cable-television usage. Some other factor may explain what only appears to be a television-autism relationship.
Everyone complains about television in a general way. But if it turns out television has specific harmful medical effects—in addition to these new findings about autism, some studies have linked television viewing by children younger than 3 to the onset of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder—parents may urgently need to know to keep toddlers away from the TV. Television networks and manufacturers of televisions may need to reassess how their products are marketed to the young. Legal liability may come into play. And we live in a society in which bright images on screens are becoming ever more ubiquitous: television, video games, DVD video players, computers, cell phones. If screen images cause harm to brain development in the young, the proliferation of these TV-like devices may bode ill for the future. The aggressive marketing of Teletubbies, Baby Einstein videos, and similar products intended to encourage television watching by toddlers may turn out to have been a nightmarish mistake.
If television viewing by toddlers is a factor in autism, the parents of afflicted children should not reproach themselves, as there was no warning of this risk. Now there is: The American Academy of Pediatrics currently recommends against any TV for children under the age of 2. Waldman thinks that until more is known about what triggers autism, families with children under the age of 3 should get them away from the television and keep them away.
Researchers might also turn new attention to study of the Amish. Autism is rare in Amish society, and the standing assumption has been that this is because most Amish refuse to vaccinate children. The Amish also do not watch television.
Correction, Oct. 17: Steven Levitt's name was misspelled in the original version of this article. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
For most kids, learning handwriting can be dull and repetitive, but it's a task mastered midway through elementary school.
For many children with autism, though -- even those with higher IQs than most -- handwriting becomes an arduous chore, because the very act of writing letters takes them so long to do.
A new study out this week in the journal Neurology explains some of the reasons for that phenomenon -- and why bad handwriting might even lead to nonverbal communication problems.
While researchers may have realized that many autistic children have bad handwriting, they did not know if it related to their autism, or whether it was a problem understanding the forming of words, or whether it had to do with motor skills.
Barbara Wagner, a mother of two boys with autism spectrum disorders, enrolled her older son, Austin, 14, in the study, although she knew beforehand there was something different about how he wrote.
"When they print, they don't like you and I do," she said. "They actually draw their letters. It's really slow," explaining that when she watches her son, he is very deliberate.
Wagner said enrolling her son in the study will help with the rest of his education. She has had conflicts in the past with administrators at Austin's school over his Individualized Education Program -- a set of goals for a child with a disability. She said the study has helped get more attention paid to occupational therapy and improving Austin's writing.
Additionally, Wagner said she has started her younger son, Ian, 7, on occupational therapy to help him avoid having similar handwriting problems later on.
For the study, which was done at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, researchers gave a handwriting test to 14 children with autism (ages 8 to 13) who had normal IQs and 14 children with normal development.
"What we were interested in is understanding whether a problem of something as important as handwriting, which folks need for school and general life, whether that deficit is really due to a problem with controlling movement, versus some other problem," said Amy Bastian, an author of the study and director of the motion analysis lab at Kennedy Krieger. "What we found is these kids have handwriting problems that really correlate with their motor findings."
While handwriting may seem a relatively minor problem, it can greatly affect an autistic child who is otherwise functioning at the expected or a better-than-expected level.
"We've not had any kind of educational issues," said Wagner of Austin, who is in tenth grade, a year ahead of other 14-year-olds. But handwriting can set him back.
However, she wrote in a statement to Kennedy Krieger, "An assignment that would take him 15-20 minutes if he could dictate the answers would often take up to an hour and a half to two hours if he was required to do the physical writing himself (versus keyboarding or allowing me to act as his scribe). To this day, Austin swears that he simply cannot print."
On Friday night, the lanky 18-year-old was arrested by Tybee police on a disorderly conduct charge in front of the Rock House on 16th Street.
He says he was Tased twice and thrown to the ground, breaking one of his front teeth and leaving scrapes on his face and knee.
Read the incident report here.
But Grevemberg, who suffers from a form of autism, still wants to know what he did wrong.
"I just wanted to go to sleep," the 6-foot-9-inch tall, 170-pound teenager said Saturday. "I sat down on the curb and put my head in my arms, and they stopped me."
Tybee police officials could not be reached for comment Saturday, despite multiple attempts. Phone messages left for Tybee Chief James Price went unanswered, and a Tybee police dispatcher said no one could comment on the issue until Monday morning.
Tybee Mayor Jason Buelterman said he was not aware of the incident, adding that several attempts to reach the island's city manager Saturday night were unsuccessful.
Dario Mariani, Grevemberg's brother, said they planned to end their day at Friday's Beach Bum Parade with some food, but the island revelry left many of the restaurants with two-to-three-hour wait times.
So Mariani and Grevemberg stopped by the Rock House.
"I asked the bouncer, 'We just want to get food, and can he come inside?'" Mariani said. "He said no, so I told Clifford to stay outside while I ordered some cheeseburgers."
Mariani said he walked outside a few minutes later to find his brother in handcuffs, his face covered with blood. Two Taser barbs were stuck to the lower portion of Grevemberg's back, and their wires were wrapped around his legs.
Mariani says his brother was Tased twice.
"I asked them what ... they were doing, and they said he was being drunk and disorderly," he said. "I said, 'No, he's a special needs child. He hasn't drank alcohol in his entire life.
"Their eyeballs got about that big when I told them he has a heart condition," Mariani added. The family said Grevemberg's heart must be regularly monitored due to the severity of the condition.
Mariani said that after Tybee police told him he could be arrested, too, his brother was taken to the Tybee police station and later released.
Grevemberg's mother, Nancy Grevemberg, tearfully admitted Saturday night that she would have understood the officers' actions if they had apologized after learning her son suffers from autism.
"If they would have looked at me and said, 'OK, we're sorry,' that would have been fine," Nancy Grevemberg said. "Instead, they just kept on going."
Clifford Grevemberg is scheduled to appear before the Tybee Municipal Court on July 27.
TV Really Might Cause AutismA Slate exclusive: findings from a new Cornell study.
Posted Monday, Oct. 16, 2006, at 6:52 AM ETListen to the MP3 audio version of this story here, or sign up for Slate's free daily podcast on iTunes.Last month, I speculated in Slate that the mounting incidence of childhood autism may be related to increased television viewing among the very young. The autism rise began around 1980, about the same time cable television and VCRs became common, allowing children to watch television aimed at them any time. Since the brain is organizing during the first years of life and since human beings evolved responding to three-dimensional stimuli, I wondered if exposing toddlers to lots of colorful two-dimensional stimulation could be harmful to brain development. This was sheer speculation, since I knew of no researchers pursuing the question.Today, Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3. The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders.
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StumbleUponLast month, Gregg Easterbrook presciently proposed television as a potential cause of autism. Last year, Arthur Allen eviscerated the claim that autism is caused by mercury compounds in vaccines. Austan Goolsbee explores an economics take that sticks up for television. Emily Bazelon harks back to the glory days of The Electric Company.
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The Cornell study is by Waldman, a professor in the school's Johnson Graduate School of Management, Sean Nicholson, an associate professor in the school's department of policy analysis, and research assistant Nodir Adilov. "Several years ago I began wondering if it was a coincidence that the rise in autism rates and the explosion of television viewing began about the same time," Waldman said. "I asked around and found that medical researchers were not working on this, so accepted that I should research it myself." The Cornell study looks at county-by-county growth in cable television access and autism rates in California and Pennsylvania from 1972 to 1989. The researchers find an overall rise in both cable-TV access and autism, but autism diagnoses rose more rapidly in counties where a high percentage of households received cable than in counties with a low percentage of cable-TV homes. Waldman and Nicholson employ statistical controls to factor out the possibility that the two patterns were simply unrelated events happening simultaneously. (For instance, petroleum use also rose during the period but is unrelated to autism.) Waldman and Nicholson conclude that "roughly 17 percent of the growth in autism in California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s was due to the growth in cable television."But the fact that rising household access to cable television seems to associate with rising autism does not reveal anything about how viewing hours might link to the disorder. The Cornell team searched for some independent measure of increased television viewing. In recent years, leading behavioral economists such as Caroline Hoxby and Steven Levitt* have used weather or geography to test assumptions about behavior. Bureau of Labor Statistics studies have found that when it rains or snows, television viewing by young children rises. So Waldman studied precipitation records for California, Oregon, and Washington state, which, because of climate and geography, experience big swings in precipitation levels both year-by-year and county-by-county. He found what appears to be a dramatic relationship between television viewing and autism onset. In counties or years when rain and snow were unusually high, and hence it is assumed children spent a lot of time watching television, autism rates shot up; in places or years of low precipitation, autism rates were low. Waldman and Nicholson conclude that "just under 40 percent of autism diagnoses in the three states studied is the result of television watching." Thus the study has two separate findings: that having cable television in the home increased autism rates in California and Pennsylvania somewhat, and that more hours of actually watching television increased autism in California, Oregon, and Washington by a lot.
Research has shown that autistic children exhibit abnormal activity in the visual-processing areas of their brains, and these areas are actively developing in the first three years of life. Whether excessive viewing of brightly colored two-dimensional screen images can cause visual-processing abnormalities is unknown. The Cornell study makes no attempt to propose how television might trigger autism; it only seeks to demonstrate a relationship. But Waldman notes that large amounts of money are being spent to search for a cause of autism that is genetic or toxin-based and believes researchers should now turn to scrutinizing a television link.
There are many possible objections to the Cornell study. One is that time indoors, not television, may be the autism trigger. Generally, indoor air quality is much lower than outdoor air quality: Recently the Environmental Protection Agency warned, "Risks to health may be greater due to exposure to air pollution indoors than outdoors." Perhaps if rain and snow cause young children to spend more time indoors, added exposure to indoor air pollution harms them. It may be that families with children at risk for autism disorders are for some reason more likely to move to areas that get lots of rain and snow or to move to areas with high cable-television usage. Some other factor may explain what only appears to be a television-autism relationship.
Everyone complains about television in a general way. But if it turns out television has specific harmful medical effects—in addition to these new findings about autism, some studies have linked television viewing by children younger than 3 to the onset of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder—parents may urgently need to know to keep toddlers away from the TV. Television networks and manufacturers of televisions may need to reassess how their products are marketed to the young. Legal liability may come into play. And we live in a society in which bright images on screens are becoming ever more ubiquitous: television, video games, DVD video players, computers, cell phones. If screen images cause harm to brain development in the young, the proliferation of these TV-like devices may bode ill for the future. The aggressive marketing of Teletubbies, Baby Einstein videos, and similar products intended to encourage television watching by toddlers may turn out to have been a nightmarish mistake.
If television viewing by toddlers is a factor in autism, the parents of afflicted children should not reproach themselves, as there was no warning of this risk. Now there is: The American Academy of Pediatrics currently recommends against any TV for children under the age of 2. Waldman thinks that until more is known about what triggers autism, families with children under the age of 3 should get them away from the television and keep them away.
Researchers might also turn new attention to study of the Amish. Autism is rare in Amish society, and the standing assumption has been that this is because most Amish refuse to vaccinate children. The Amish also do not watch television.
Correction, Oct. 17: Steven Levitt's name was misspelled in the original version of this article. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
For Intelligent Children With Autism, Handwriting Is Barrier
For Some, Handwriting Homework Becomes Hours-Long Nightmare
Nov. 10, 2009
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For many autistic children, even those with higher IQs, handwriting can be an arduous chore.
(Tim Flach/Getty Images)A new study out this week in the journal Neurology explains some of the reasons for that phenomenon -- and why bad handwriting might even lead to nonverbal communication problems.
While researchers may have realized that many autistic children have bad handwriting, they did not know if it related to their autism, or whether it was a problem understanding the forming of words, or whether it had to do with motor skills.
Barbara Wagner, a mother of two boys with autism spectrum disorders, enrolled her older son, Austin, 14, in the study, although she knew beforehand there was something different about how he wrote.
"When they print, they don't like you and I do," she said. "They actually draw their letters. It's really slow," explaining that when she watches her son, he is very deliberate.
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Additionally, Wagner said she has started her younger son, Ian, 7, on occupational therapy to help him avoid having similar handwriting problems later on.
For the study, which was done at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, researchers gave a handwriting test to 14 children with autism (ages 8 to 13) who had normal IQs and 14 children with normal development.
"What we were interested in is understanding whether a problem of something as important as handwriting, which folks need for school and general life, whether that deficit is really due to a problem with controlling movement, versus some other problem," said Amy Bastian, an author of the study and director of the motion analysis lab at Kennedy Krieger. "What we found is these kids have handwriting problems that really correlate with their motor findings."
While handwriting may seem a relatively minor problem, it can greatly affect an autistic child who is otherwise functioning at the expected or a better-than-expected level.
"We've not had any kind of educational issues," said Wagner of Austin, who is in tenth grade, a year ahead of other 14-year-olds. But handwriting can set him back.
However, she wrote in a statement to Kennedy Krieger, "An assignment that would take him 15-20 minutes if he could dictate the answers would often take up to an hour and a half to two hours if he was required to do the physical writing himself (versus keyboarding or allowing me to act as his scribe). To this day, Austin swears that he simply cannot print."
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