Suspected child molester left L.A. archdiocese for L.A. schools

A former priest and suspected child molester left employment with the Los Angeles archdiocese to work for the L.A. Unified School District, officials confirmed Sunday.

The former clergyman, Joseph Pina, did not work with children in his school district job, L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy said. He added that, as a result of the disclosures, Pina would no longer be employed by the nation's second-largest school system.

Over the weekend, Deasy was unable to pull together Pina's full employment history, but said the district already was looking into the matter of Pina's hiring.

"I find it troubling," he said of the disclosures about Pina. "And I also want to understand what knowledge that we had of any background problems when hiring him, and I don't yet know that."

L.A. Unified itself has come under fire in the last year for its handling of employees accused of sexual misconduct.

Pina, 66, was laid off from his full-time district job last year, but returned to work episodically to organize events. One event he may have helped organize was a ribbon-cutting Saturday for a new education facility. School district officials over the weekend, however, could not confirm that. Pina did not attend the event, and the district could not confirm payment for any help he may have provided.

Pina's name emerged in documents released by the archdiocese to comply with a court order. His case was one of many in which church officials failed to take action to protect child victims and in which first consideration was given to helping the offending priests rather than their victims, according to the documentation.

A just-released, internal 1993 psychological evaluation states that Pina "remains a serious risk for acting out." The evaluation recounts how Pina was attracted to a victim, an eighth-grade girl, when he saw her in a costume.

"She dressed as Snow White ... I had a crush on Snow White, so I started to open myself up to her," he told the psychologist. "I felt like I fell in love with her. I got sexually involved with her, but never intercourse. She was about 17 when we got involved sexually, and it continued until she was about 19."

In a report sent to a top Mahony aide, the psychologist expressed concern the abuse was never reported to authorities.

Pina's evaluation also includes a recommendation "to take appropriate measures and precautions to insure that he is not in a setting where he can victimize others." Pina continued to work as a pastor as late as March 1998.

School district officials could not verify Pina's hiring date over the weekend, but he took a job with L.A. Unified as the school system was carrying out the nation's largest school construction program. His job involved community outreach, building support for school projects, while also finding out communities' concerns and trying to address them, officials said. Such work was crucial to the program, because even though communities wanted new schools, their locations and other elements could prove controversial. Such projects frequently involved tearing down homes or businesses, environmental cleanups, and the blocking of streets and other disruptions.

"His duties were to rally community support and elicit community comments regarding schools in a neighborhood," district spokesman Tom Waldman said.

Pina's work did bring him into contact with families, frequently at public meetings organized to hear and address their concerns.

Projects that Pina worked on included a new elementary school in Porter Ranch and a high school serving the west San Fernando Valley, Waldman said. The high school, in particular, generated substantial public debate as a district team and a local charter school competed aggressively for control of the site.

The $19.5-billion building program is winding down, and, as a result, many jobs attached to it have come to an end. Pina's was among them.

The dedication he may have helped organize Saturday was for the Richard N. Slawson Southeast Occupational Center in Bell. Participants told KCET-TV, which first reported Pina's school employment, that he had assisted with community outreach on that project. The adult education and career technical education facility has 29 classrooms as well as health-career labs and child care for students. The school opened in August 2012.

Pina "was slated for some additional temporary work when the issue came to our attention last week and that work was canceled," Deasy said.

It may have been Pina who first alerted district officials that his name appeared in disclosed documents, Deasy said. Pina called a senior administrator in the facilities division. So far, no untoward issues have emerged regarding Pina's work for L.A. Unified.

howard.blume@latimes.com

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Reader Poll: Are You Binge-Watching <em>House of Cards</em>?

Last Friday, Netflix released 13 episodes — a complete season — of its new self-produced political drama House of Cards online at the same time. It was the first step in the company’s innovative media experiment, which obliterates the traditional television distribution model and poses the question: How will people choose to watch a new television show when its content is released en masse rather than parceled out week by week?

In a recent letter to investors, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings asked shareholders to imagine “if books were always released one chapter per week, and were only briefly available to read at 8 p.m. on Thursday. And then someone flipped a switch, suddenly allowing people to enjoy an entire book, all at their own pace. That is the future we are bringing about. That is the future of television. That is the future of Internet TV.”

Putting aside the fact that serialized literature was once a hugely popular format for fiction — and that modern writers like John Scalzi are resurrecting it in the digital sphere — it’s an ambitious and fascinating move that was greeted with mixed reactions from media critics, including Variety‘s Andrew Wallenstein, who dubbed it a “mistake” and declared that “Netflix must rethink binge-viewing.”

So how did the first Netflix-produced original content fare after its season-wide debut?

Karen Barragan, the Head of PR for Original Series at Netflix, told Wired the company was “very happy” about the show’s performance, but declined to release any data about its streaming viewership. “We’ve said from the beginning that this is a different model. I’m glad that we’re not going to jam the old metrics into the new model … because it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you watch it over the weekend, if you’re going to watch it over three months.”

But Procera, a network traffic management and tracking company that monitors activity on five out of the top 10 cable ISP providers and three out of the top five DSL providers in North America, released its own analytic snapshot of House of Cards viewership on one broadband network (which they declined to name) during Saturday, when they say binge viewing was most likely to occur.

“Two percent of the subscribers watched the first one, but maybe only .5% made it through to the final one,” Procera’s VP of Global Marketing Cam Cullen told Wired. “Although each episode was not a major factor in overall traffic on this network (especially since the episodes are ~50 minutes long), in aggregate they add up,” he elaborated in his online analysis. “It is clear that the first few episodes were the most heavily watched, but the later episodes got their fair share of action. We even saw one subscriber on a network that consumed 16G of his usage on House of Cards over the weekend.”

Cullen also noted that 11 percent of Netflix viewers watched at least one episode of House of Cards on one network they monitor, and comprised almost 5 percent of overall Netflix bandwidth usage on another.

The 13th and final episode of House of Cards pulled in roughly 28% the viewership of the series premiere in the Procera snapshot of Saturday traffic, indicating that quite a few people who started watching the series stayed in it for the long haul — and did so within a day of the release.

Despite the innovation involved in applying the full-season approach to new content, the (binge) viewing experience shouldn’t feel entirely unfamiliar — at least to anyone who’s watched television shows on Netflix before. After all, the video streaming (and previously, DVD-shipping) service is already how a lot of viewers catch up on entire seasons of TV shows that they’ve missed.

Netflix was how I watched the first three seasons of Lost after I showed up late to the party of that particularly addictive prime-time drama, and seeing it for the first time in a format where I could immediately fast-forward to the next episode was a revelation — and a recipe for binge-watching, particularly on a show where nearly every episode ended in a cliffhanger. A light went on inside the hatch! Next. Holy crap, a smoke monster! Next. No designated broadcast time slots, no waiting.

Of course, Lost was compelling enough that I would have waited the week and tuned in regardless — and did so, during subsequent seasons — but a better question is what sort of impact a full-season release could have for shows that aren’t quite so addictive, especially during the critical moment of their premiere. Speaking from personal experience: a lot.

After watching the mediocre premiere of the new Fox serial killer drama The Following a few weeks ago, a friend asked me if I’d tune in for a second episode. “Probably,” I said. And if I’d had the opportunity to click “Next Episode” the moment that premiere finished, there’s a good chance I would have. But when that second episode showed up on Hulu the next week, my cursor hovered briefly over the icon… and then moved on. It had been just good enough to pique my interest in the moment, but seven days later that middling momentum had been lost.

My reaction to the House of Cards premiere was equally mixed — on the one hand, Kevin Spacey; on the other hand, Kevin Spacey’s Southern accent — and yet somehow I still ended up watching the complete series in one sitting on Friday night, an absurd binge that ended somewhere around 5 AM on Saturday morning. Reflecting on it now, the most remarkable thing is that despite consuming 13 hours of the series, I can’t honestly say that I liked it.

It’s not a great show; it’s debatably a good one, but more relevantly it was just good enough to make me press “Next” every time the episode finished, like a bird pecking at a button that intermittently dispenses food in an operant conditioning experiment. Or perhaps more like Desmond, entering the Numbers over and over inside the digital hatch of Netflix — not sure what would happen if I stopped, and never quite mustering the will to find out when it was so much easier to keep on pushing the button.

Roberto Baldwin contributed to this report.

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NFL says no indication Beyonce show caused Super Bowl outage

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – The National Football League was still working with New Orleans officials on Monday to determine what caused the power outage at Sunday’s Super Bowl at the Superdome, so far dismissing any connection with the Beyonce halftime show.

With a record U.S. television audience watching along with viewers in 180 countries, about half the stadium lights went dark early in the second half of the game, in which the Baltimore Ravens defeated the San Francisco 49ers, 34-31.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told reporters on Monday an investigation was under way to determine the cause of the 35-minute disruption but one possible explanation had already been eliminated.

“There’s no indication at all that this was caused by the halftime show,” Goodell said. “I know that’s out there, that Beyonce’s halftime show had something to do with it. That is not the case from anything we have at this point.”

Entergy Corp, the utility providing power to the Superdome, said its distribution and transmission feeders were serving the Superdome at all times.

Early indications were that the outage resulted from an abnormality in the Superdome’s power system but it was too early to speculate on what went wrong, said Doug Thornton, senior vice president of the Superdome’s management company, SMG.

A piece of equipment designed to monitor electrical load sensed an abnormality in the system where the Superdome equipment intersects with Entergy’s feed into the building, triggering an automatic cut in power, SMG and Entergy said in a joint statement.

There was never any concern the power could not be restored, but it took time because of the size of the stadium and the complexities of the power system, Thornton said.

“We had people in place that could quickly work to restore power. We had experts on site, as we normally do when we have big events like this, our electrician, our electrical consultants were there and we were able to quickly work on that,” Thornton said.

“There were no injuries, people remained calm, we had a pre-programmed announcement that was actually played. These are things that we actually drilled for.”

None of the players or coaches said the stoppage had any impact on the game, and Goodell said the power problem would not adversely affect future bids by New Orleans to stage the Super Bowl, the United States’ most-watched sports event.

“I fully expect that we will be back here for Super Bowls,” Goodell said. “I hope we will be back. We want to be back … I don’t think this will have any impact at all on what I think will be remembered for one of the greatest Super Bowl weeks.”

(Editing by Daniel Trotta and Dale Hudson)

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Well: Expressing the Inexpressible

When Kyle Potvin learned she had breast cancer at the age of 41, she tracked the details of her illness and treatment in a journal. But when it came to grappling with issues of mortality, fear and hope, she found that her best outlet was poetry.

How I feared chemo, afraid

It would change me.

It did.

Something dissolved inside me.

Tears began a slow drip;

I cried at the news story

Of a lost boy found in the woods …

At the surprising beauty

Of a bright leaf falling

Like the last strand of hair from my head

Ms. Potvin, now 47 and living in Derry, N.H., recently published “Sound Travels on Water” (Finishing Line Press), a collection of poems about her experience with cancer. And she has organized the Prickly Pear Poetry Project, a series of workshops for cancer patients.

“The creative process can be really healing,” Ms. Lotvin said in an interview. “Loss, mortality and even hopefulness were on my mind, and I found that through writing poetry I was able to express some of those concepts in a way that helped me process what I was thinking.”

In April, the National Association for Poetry Therapy, whose members include both medical doctors and therapists, is to hold a conference in Chicago with sessions on using poetry to manage pain and to help adolescents cope with bullying. And this spring, Tasora Books will publish “The Cancer Poetry Project 2,” an anthology of poems written by patients and their loved ones.

Dr. Rafael Campo, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, says he uses poetry in his practice, offering therapy groups and including poems with the medical forms and educational materials he gives his patients.

“It’s always striking to me how they want to talk about the poems the next time we meet and not the other stuff I give them,” he said. “It’s such a visceral mode of expression. When our bodies betray us in such a profound way, it can be all the more powerful for patients to really use the rhythms of poetry to make sense of what is happening in their bodies.”

On return visits, Dr. Campo’s patients often begin by discussing a poem he gave them — for example, “At the Cancer Clinic,” by Ted Kooser, from his collection “Delights & Shadows” (Copper Canyon Press, 2004), about a nurse holding the door for a slow-moving patient.

How patient she is in the crisp white sails

of her clothes. The sick woman

peers from under her funny knit cap

to watch each foot swing scuffing forward

and take its turn under her weight.

There is no restlessness or impatience

or anger anywhere in sight. Grace

fills the clean mold of this moment

and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

In Ms. Potvin’s case, poems related to her illness were often spurred by mundane moments, like seeing a neighbor out for a nightly walk. Here is “Tumor”:

My neighbor walks

For miles each night.

A mantra drives her, I imagine

As my boys’ chant did

The summer of my own illness:

“Push, Mommy, push.”

Urging me to wind my sore feet

Winch-like on a rented bike

To inch us home.

I couldn’t stop;

Couldn’t leave us

Miles from the end.

Karin Miller, 48, of Minneapolis, turned to poetry 15 years ago when her husband developed testicular cancer at the same time she was pregnant with their first child.

Her husband has since recovered, and Ms. Miller has reviewed thousands of poems by cancer patients and their loved ones to create the “Cancer Poetry Project” anthologies. One poem is “Hymn to a Lost Breast,” by Bonnie Maurer.

Oh let it fly

let it fling

let it flip like a pancake in the air

let it sing: what is the song

of one breast flapping?

Another is “Barn Wish” by Kim Knedler Hewett.

I sit where you can’t see me

Listening to the rustle of papers and pills in the other room,

Wondering if you can hear them.

Let’s go back to the barn, I whisper.

Let’s turn on the TV and watch the Bengals lose.

Let’s eat Bill’s Doughnuts and drink Pepsi.

Anything but this.

Ms. Miller has asked many of her poets to explain why they find poetry healing. “They say it’s the thing that lets them get to the core of how they are feeling,” she said. “It’s the simplicity of poetry, the bare bones of it, that helps them deal with their fears.”

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Have you written a poem about cancer? Please share them with us in the comments section below.

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DealBook: Suit to Accuse S.&P. of Fraud in Mortgage Bond Ratings

The Justice Department, along with state prosecutors, plans to file civil charges against Standard & Poor’s Ratings Service, accusing the firm of fraudulently rating mortgage bonds that led to the financial crisis, people briefed on the plan said Monday.

A suit against S.&P. — expected to filed this week — would be the first the government has brought against the credit ratings agencies related to the financial crisis, despite continued questions about the agencies’ conflicts of interest and role in creating a housing bubble.

Several state prosecutors are expected to join the federal suit. The New York State attorney general is conducting a separate investigation, an official in that office said. The official declined to say whether New York State’s action involved other ratings agencies besides Standard & Poor’s.

Up until last last week, the Justice Department had been in settlement talks with S.&P., these people said. But the negotiations broke down after the Justice Department said it would seek a settlement in excess of “10 figures,” or at least $1 billion, these people said. Such an amount would wipe out the profits of S.&P.’s parent, the McGraw-Hill Company, for an entire year. McGraw-Hill earned $911 million last year.

During settlement negotiations, the Justice Department held out the threat of a criminal case against S.&P., the people said. Ultimately, the government plans to bring a civil suit, which has a lower burden of proof than a criminal case.

The case is expected to be brought in California, these people said. The state suffered disproportionately during the housing bubble, and the government is hoping the venue will yield more sympathetic jurors.

The case is focusing on about 30 collateralized debt obligations, an exotic type of mortgage security. According to S&P, the mortgage securities were created in 2007 at the height of the housing boom.

Prosecutors, according to the people, have uncovered troves emails by S&P, employees, which the government considers damaging. Portions of those emails are likely to be disclosed in the government’s complaint against S&P, these people said.

In a statement on Monday, S.&P. said it had received notice from the Justice Department over a pending lawsuit. The ratings agency argued any such legal action would be baseless, since it downgraded plenty of mortgage-backed investments, including in the two years leading up to the financial crisis. It also contended that other observers of the debt markets, including government officials, believed at the time that any problems within the housing sector could be contained.

“A D.O.J. lawsuit would be entirely without factual or legal merit,” the agency said in its statement. “With 20/20 hindsight, these strong actions proved insufficient – but they demonstrate that the D.O.J. would be wrong in contending that S.&P. ratings were motivated by commercial considerations and not issued in good faith.”

Shares of McGraw-Hill closed down nearly 14 percent on Monday, at $50.30.

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L.A. County removing metal detectors from some hospital facilities

It was typically chaotic in the emergency room at Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center that February day in 1993. Richard May was treating patients in the triage area when a disgruntled man started ranting about the long wait. Then, without warning, the man pulled a gun and started shooting, hitting May in the head, chest and arm and seriously wounding two other doctors.

The carnage, coming after a series of violent incidents, prompted a wave of safety improvements, including the installation of metal detectors at hospital entrances, bulletproof enclosures in emergency rooms and the addition of more security guards.

Now, 20 years after the attack, officials want the metal detectors removed from parts of county hospitals to make them more welcoming to patients in the newly competitive marketplace being created by the Obama administration's healthcare overhaul. The machines in the emergency rooms will remain, but the others are to be taken out by summer. The proposal comes at a time when high-profile shootings have put the nation on edge and prompted emotionally charged debates about the availability of assault weapons and the presence of armed officers in schools.

The county's director of Health Services, Mitchell Katz, says metal detectors stigmatize poor patients and visitors and give the impression that the county facilities are dangerous. Security is paramount, but metal detectors aren't the best way to ensure that, he argues. Most other urban hospitals in L.A. County do not have the machines, relying on guards to provide safety, he said.

"It is a different moment to look and ask ourselves, 'What is the best way to do security?'" Katz said.

But the proposed changes have patients, nurses and doctors worried and are drawing opposition from law enforcement and union members.

May, 67, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, is among those asking administrators to reconsider. He works part-time at the county's Hudson Comprehensive Health Center south of downtown, where he says the metal detector gives patients and staff peace of mind.

"I feel angry, frustrated and resentful," he said of the proposal to remove the devices. "We wouldn't have been shot if they were there then."

Paul Kaszubowski, 64, another doctor shot in 1993, said the bullet shattered his arm and grazed his head. He still suffers problems with his arm and has occasional flashbacks. Removing the metal detectors doesn't make sense, he said. Providing compassionate and high-quality care is the best way to attract and retain patients, he said.

Beginning next year, uninsured patients will be eligible for Medi-Cal coverage and have more options outside of the county's healthcare system. That is driving safety-net hospitals to improve their customer service so they are no longer the providers of last resort.

But that push is running headlong into a record of violence at urban medical facilities, where healthcare workers are often the victims of assault. Hospitals are intrinsically high-risk places, and metal detectors can help prevent violent attacks, said Jane Lipscomb, a University of Maryland professor who has studied hospital safety.

The county's largest public hospital workers' union is trying to stop the removal of the scanners and sent a letter to Katz saying the action is a "huge decision" that could put patients and staff in harm's way.

Longtime County/USC nurse Sabrina Griffin, a union representative, vividly remembers the 1993 shooting and fears something similar could happen again if the screening equipment is removed. She particularly worries about gang retaliation spilling into the hospital after a shooting or stabbing.

"I just feel safer having the scanners," she said.

Sheriff's Department Capt. Chuck Stringham, who oversees security at the county healthcare facilities, said late Friday that the department is opposed to the wholesale removal of the metal detectors without another plan for weapons screening.

County hospitals mirror the crime and violence of surrounding communities, he said, and the scanners serve as the first line of defense — finding guns, knives, box cutters and other weapons.

The county removed the metal detector equipment from the outpatient building at County/USC in July, and no violent incidents have been reported there since doing so, according to the Sheriff's Department. By June 30, the county plans to remove 26 more machines from County/USC, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Olive View Medical Center and the Martin Luther King and Hudson centers.

Patients and visitors entering another County/USC facility last week emptied their pockets of cellphones, keys and wallets before stepping through the scanners. In a period of a few hours, guards confiscated two pocketknives.

Walter Johnson, 59, who had an eye appointment, said removing the machines is "crazy." "How would they know if anyone is coming in with a gun, or an AK-47, or a knife?" he said. "The minute you take these out, you are gonna give some idiot some excuse to do something."

Michelle Mendez, an ER nurse, said metal detectors are needed in the emergency room but not elsewhere. "I think [visitors] would feel more comfortable when visiting their loved ones, knowing we aren't so concerned about violence and crime and weapons," she said.

Tammy Duong, a medical resident in the psychiatric unit, said the machines can be intimidating. But she worries about what might happen without them.

"Just because it is a hospital," she said, "doesn't mean violence can't spill over."

anna.gorman@latimes.com

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Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Wheatley Crater on Venus

Magellan radar image of Wheatley crater on Venus. This 72 km diameter crater shows a radar bright ejecta pattern and a generally flat floor with some rough raised areas and faulting. The crater is located in Asteria Regio at 16.6N,267E.

Image: NASA/GSFC [high-resolution]

Caption: NASA

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Zombie love story “Warm Bodies” heats up Super Bowl weekend

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – “Warm Bodies,” a romantic comedy featuring a warm-hearted zombie, lured teenage girls to the theater, collecting $ 20 million in ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada to take the box office title on a weekend dominated by Super Bowl parties and football watching.

Playing in more than 3,000 theaters, the odd-pairing of a pale-faced zombie with his breathing girlfriend faced little competition among new films and easily mauled last weekend’s winner “Hansel and Gretel,” an updated version of the classic fairy tale with witch-hunting siblings. The film collected $ 9.2 million this weekend, according to studio estimates.

The weekend’s other widely released newcomer, Warner Brothers’ “Bullet to the Head,” starring 66-year old Sylvester Stallone as a tattooed hitman, collected $ 4.5 million for sixth place.

Two weeks earlier, another aging action star, Arnold Schwarzenegger had a feeble opening in his own shoot-em-up, “The Last Stand.”

Based on a first time novel by Seattle writer Isaac Marion, “Warm Bodies” was produced for a little more than $ 30 million by Lionsgate’s Summit Entertainment, the studio that also produced the mega-blockbuster “Twilight” series.

The film stars 24-year-old British actor Marcus Brewer as the pale, stiff-walking zombie R, one of the few zombies capable of thought in a plaque ravaged world.

“We were above expectations going into the holiday weekend,” says David Spitz, Lionsgate’s executive vice president and general sales manager.

Spitz predicted that the film, which he referred to as a “rom-zom-com” would benefit from the upcoming long weekend in the U.S. that coincides with Valentine’s Day and Presidents’ Day.

Benefiting from the buzz following Oscar nominations for each of its four stars, “Silver Linings Playbook” was third with $ 8.1 million as it continued to open in more theaters and is now showing at more than 2,600 locations, according to the movie site Hollywood.com

Universal’s Pictures’ low-budget horror film “Mama”, starring Jessica Chastain, continued its improbable ticket-selling run, with $ 6.7 million to rank fourth. It grossed more than $ 58 million in the two weeks since its release.

Also benefiting from its Oscar buzz, the Osama Bin Laden hunt movie “Zero Dark Thirty,” had ticket sales of $ 5.3 million and has now surpassed $ 77 million domestically, according to the box office division of Hollywood.com. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Jessica Chastain‘s starring role.

“Django Unchained,” director Quentin Tarantino‘s western starring Jamie Foxx has a bounty-hunting former slave, passed $ 150 million in overall ticket sales and collected $ 3 million during the weekend. It was also nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and for Christoph Waltz‘s supporting role.

“Warm Bodies” surpassed industry projections of $ 18 million, and benefited from an aggressive marketing campaign that started last summer and included trailers attached to “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn” and 60-second commercials on AMC channel’s cult zombie hit “The Walking Dead.”

(Reporting by Ronald Grover and Andrea Burzynski; Editing by Sandra Maler)

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Concerns About A.D.H.D. Practices and Amphetamine Addiction

Before his addiction, Richard Fee was a popular college class president and aspiring medical student. "You keep giving Adderall to my son, you're going to kill him," said Rick Fee, Richard's father, to one of his son's doctors.

VIRGINIA BEACH — Every morning on her way to work, Kathy Fee holds her breath as she drives past the squat brick building that houses Dominion Psychiatric Associates.

Matt Eich for The New York Times

MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC Dominion Psychiatric Associates in Virginia Beach, where Richard Fee was treated by Dr. Waldo M. Ellison. After observing Richard and hearing his complaints about concentration, Dr. Ellison diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and prescribed the stimulant Adderall.

It was there that her son, Richard, visited a doctor and received prescriptions for Adderall, an amphetamine-based medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It was in the parking lot that she insisted to Richard that he did not have A.D.H.D., not as a child and not now as a 24-year-old college graduate, and that he was getting dangerously addicted to the medication. It was inside the building that her husband, Rick, implored Richard’s doctor to stop prescribing him Adderall, warning, “You’re going to kill him.”

It was where, after becoming violently delusional and spending a week in a psychiatric hospital in 2011, Richard met with his doctor and received prescriptions for 90 more days of Adderall. He hanged himself in his bedroom closet two weeks after they expired.

The story of Richard Fee, an athletic, personable college class president and aspiring medical student, highlights widespread failings in the system through which five million Americans take medication for A.D.H.D., doctors and other experts said.

Medications like Adderall can markedly improve the lives of children and others with the disorder. But the tunnel-like focus the medicines provide has led growing numbers of teenagers and young adults to fake symptoms to obtain steady prescriptions for highly addictive medications that carry serious psychological dangers. These efforts are facilitated by a segment of doctors who skip established diagnostic procedures, renew prescriptions reflexively and spend too little time with patients to accurately monitor side effects.

Richard Fee’s experience included it all. Conversations with friends and family members and a review of detailed medical records depict an intelligent and articulate young man lying to doctor after doctor, physicians issuing hasty diagnoses, and psychiatrists continuing to prescribe medication — even increasing dosages — despite evidence of his growing addiction and psychiatric breakdown.

Very few people who misuse stimulants devolve into psychotic or suicidal addicts. But even one of Richard’s own physicians, Dr. Charles Parker, characterized his case as a virtual textbook for ways that A.D.H.D. practices can fail patients, particularly young adults. “We have a significant travesty being done in this country with how the diagnosis is being made and the meds are being administered,” said Dr. Parker, a psychiatrist in Virginia Beach. “I think it’s an abnegation of trust. The public needs to say this is totally unacceptable and walk out.”

Young adults are by far the fastest-growing segment of people taking A.D.H.D medications. Nearly 14 million monthly prescriptions for the condition were written for Americans ages 20 to 39 in 2011, two and a half times the 5.6 million just four years before, according to the data company I.M.S. Health. While this rise is generally attributed to the maturing of adolescents who have A.D.H.D. into young adults — combined with a greater recognition of adult A.D.H.D. in general — many experts caution that savvy college graduates, freed of parental oversight, can legally and easily obtain stimulant prescriptions from obliging doctors.

“Any step along the way, someone could have helped him — they were just handing out drugs,” said Richard’s father. Emphasizing that he had no intention of bringing legal action against any of the doctors involved, Mr. Fee said: “People have to know that kids are out there getting these drugs and getting addicted to them. And doctors are helping them do it.”

“...when he was in elementary school he fidgeted, daydreamed and got A’s. he has been an A-B student until mid college when he became scattered and he wandered while reading He never had to study. Presently without medication, his mind thinks most of the time, he procrastinated, he multitasks not finishing in a timely manner.”

Dr. Waldo M. Ellison

Richard Fee initial evaluation

Feb. 5, 2010

Richard began acting strangely soon after moving back home in late 2009, his parents said. He stayed up for days at a time, went from gregarious to grumpy and back, and scrawled compulsively in notebooks. His father, while trying to add Richard to his health insurance policy, learned that he was taking Vyvanse for A.D.H.D.

Richard explained to him that he had been having trouble concentrating while studying for medical school entrance exams the previous year and that he had seen a doctor and received a diagnosis. His father reacted with surprise. Richard had never shown any A.D.H.D. symptoms his entire life, from nursery school through high school, when he was awarded a full academic scholarship to Greensboro College in North Carolina. Mr. Fee also expressed concerns about the safety of his son’s taking daily amphetamines for a condition he might not have.

“The doctor wouldn’t give me anything that’s bad for me,” Mr. Fee recalled his son saying that day. “I’m not buying it on the street corner.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 3, 2013

An earlier version of a quote appearing with the home page presentation of this article misspelled the name of a medication. It is Adderall, not Aderall.

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Iceland, Prosecutor of Bankers, Sees Meager Returns

Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times

"Greed is not a crime. But the question is: where does greed lead?" said Olafur Hauksson, a special prosecutor in Reykjavik.

REYKJAVIK, Iceland — As chief of police in a tiny fishing town for 11 years, Olafur Hauksson developed what he thought was a basic understanding of the criminal mind. The typical lawbreaker, he said, recalling his many encounters with small-time criminals, “clearly knows that he crossed the line” and generally sees “the difference between right and wrong.”

Today, the burly, 48-year-old former policeman is struggling with a very different sort of suspect. Reassigned to Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital, to lead what has become one of the world’s most sweeping investigation into the bankers whose actions contributed to the global financial crisis in 2008, Mr. Hauksson now faces suspects who “are not aware of when they crossed the line” and “defend their actions every step of the way.”

With the global economy still struggling to recover from the financial maelstrom five years ago, governments around the world have been criticized for largely failing to punish the bankers who were responsible for the calamity. But even here in Iceland, a country of just 320,000 that has gone after financiers with far more vigor than the United States and other countries hit by the crisis, obtaining criminal convictions has proved devilishly difficult.

Public hostility toward bankers is so strong in Iceland that “it is easier to say you are dealing drugs than to say you’re a banker,” said Thorvaldur Sigurjonsson, the former head of trading for Kaupthing, a once high-flying bank that crumbled. He has been called in for questioning by Mr. Hauksson’s office but has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

Yet, in the four years since the Icelandic Parliament passed a law ordering the appointment of an unnamed special prosecutor to investigate those blamed for the country’s spectacular meltdown in 2008, only a handful of bankers have been convicted.

Ministers in a left-leaning coalition government elected after the crash agree that the wheels of justice have ground slowly, but they call for patience, explaining that the process must follow the law, not vengeful passions.

“We are not going after people just to satisfy public anger,” said Steingrimur J. Sigfusson, Iceland’s minister of industry, a former finance minister and leader of the Left-Green Movement that is part of the governing coalition.

Hordur Torfa, a popular singer-songwriter who helped organize protests that forced the previous conservative government to resign, acknowledged that “people are getting impatient” but said they needed to accept that “this is not the French Revolution. I don’t believe in taking bankers out and hanging them or shooting them.”

Others are less patient. “The whole process is far too slow,” said Thorarinn Einarsson, a left-wing activist. “It only shows that ‘banksters’ can get away with doing whatever they want.”

Mr. Hauksson, the special prosecutor, said he was frustrated by the slow pace but thought it vital that his office scrupulously follow legal procedure. “Revenge is not something we want as our main driver in this process. Our work must be proper today and be seen as proper in the future,” he said.

Part of the difficulty in prosecuting bankers, he said, is that the law is often unclear on what constitutes a criminal offense in high finance. “Greed is not a crime,” he noted. “But the question is: where does greed lead?”

Mr. Hauksson said it was often easy to show that bankers violated their own internal rules for lending and other activities, but “as in all cases involving theft or fraud, the most difficult thing is proving intent.”

And there are the bankers themselves. Those who have been brought in for questioning often bristle at being asked to account for their actions. “They are not used to being questioned. These people are not used to finding themselves in this situation,” Mr. Hauksson said. They also hire expensive lawyers.

The special prosecutor’s office initially had only five staff members but now has more than 100 investigators, lawyers and financial experts, and it has relocated to a big new office. It has opened about 100 cases, with more than 120 people now under investigation for possible crimes relating to an Icelandic financial sector that grew so big it dwarfed the rest of the economy.

To help ease Mr. Hauksson’s task, legislators amended the law to allow investigators easy access to confidential bank information, something that previously required a court order.

Parliament also voted to put the country’s prime minister at the time of the banking debacle on trial for negligence before a special tribunal. (A proposal to try his cabinet failed.) Mr. Hauksson was not involved in the case against the former leader, Geir H. Haarde, who last year was found guilty of failing to keep ministers properly informed about the 2008 crisis but was acquitted on more serious charges that could have resulted in a prison sentence.

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