Three former employees of the Psychiatric Institute of Washington have been indicted on criminal charges related to the 2020 death of a patient at the long-troubled facility, US Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced Wednesday.
A grand jury indictment charged 37-year-old Nelson Kuma, a former PIW tech, 45-year-old Richard Hounnou, a former PIW tech, and 68-year-old Norma Munoz-Bent, a registered nurse, with one count each of criminal negligence. If convicted, they face up to 20 years in prison. All three have pleaded not guilty, according to Pirro.
“When medical professionals are paid to save lives, and instead, they stand and watch a life disappear,” Pirro said at a press conference Wednesday, “that is not mere negligence, that is criminal behavior.”
The US Attorney’s Office alleges that on April 26, 2020, the three former PIW staffers found a 58-year-old patient—a man identified only as “G.W.”—unresponsive in his room, but failed to provide potentially lifesaving measures for at least 21 minutes.
During the press conference, Pirro said that the incident was captured on video. According to her, a PIW tech entered the room around 12:38 PM and found the patient with no clothes on and apparently struggling to breathe, but took no actions for four minutes. When a second PIW tech entered the room, he fist-bumped the first PIW tech, and the two had an animated conversation for seven minutes. “It’s as though the patient on the floor who was suffering from labored breathing is not even there,” Pirro said.
Eventually, Munoz-Bent, the nurse, entered the room. “She too, stares at the patient,” Pirro said. “She puts her hands on her hips. She doesn’t touch the patient.”
By the time the PIW staffers administered chest compressions, some 21 minutes after the first tech arrived in the room, G.W. couldn’t be saved, Pirro said. “He was left to die, and they violated the most basic standard of medical care,” she said. “They abandoned even basic entry-level medical competence. They stood over him without offering help.”
Attorneys for Kuma and Hounnou declined to comment. An attorney for Munoz-Bent did not return messages seeking comment.
During her remarks, Pirro credited LaVan Griffith, the director of the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit at the Office of the Inspector General for the District of Columbia, for his assistance in bringing the case to her attention.
Pirro also recognized the work of Disability Rights DC, the watchdog group that issued a report detailing the circumstances surrounding G.W.’s death in June 2021.
In a statement to Washingtonian, Andrea Procaccino, a senior staff attorney for Disability Rights DC, said that the organization “released two additional public reports since our June 2021 report—Do No Harm (July 2022) and Unsafe and Unprotected (July 2024). The reports detail DRDC’s investigations into allegations of abuse and neglect at PIW. Our recommendations address systemic failures and include enhanced staff training and more staff support from the PIW administration, as well as increased District government oversight. We remain concerned about patient safety and adequate psychiatric treatment at PIW and continue to monitor the facility. At our recommendation, the hospital has engaged an expert in trauma informed care and patient safety to work with and train the staff.”
A lawyer for PIW, K. Nichole Nesbitt, did not respond to an email seeking comment on the indictments.
The indictments represent the latest black eye for PIW, the for-profit psychiatric hospital in Northwest DC where the majority of Washington’s involuntarily committed psychiatric patients are sent. In 2023, police arrested a PIW employee and charged him with the sexual abuse of a patient who was in his care. Several teenage patients escaped from the facility the following year. That December, a former female patient accused PIW in a lawsuit of failing to prevent her from being raped at the facility. (In legal filings, PIW denied it was responsible for this incident.)
In February of 2025, a group of former PIW patients filed a class action lawsuit against PIW and its corporate parent, Universal Health Services. The lawsuit alleges that UHS “has employed and continues to employ a brazen corporate strategy of involuntarily hospitalizing PIW patients without cause or indication [and] prolonging patients’ hospitalizations unnecessarily and without cause or indication. . . . These illegal actions have been and continue to be driven by a focus on profit at the expense of patient care, safety, and treatment.”
PIW’s lawyer, K. Nichole Nesbitt, has denied these allegations.
In addition, PIW was the subject of two investigative feature stories by Washingtonian, published in September 2025 and February 2026, which exposed new allegations of unsafe conditions, routine violence, and poor care at PIW. “I mean, this place is actually trauma-inducing,” one former health aide told Washingtonian.
Responding to Wednesday’s indictments, DC Council member Christina Henderson issued a statement: “Since becoming chair of the Council’s Committee on Health in 2023, I have prioritized oversight of our in-patient psychiatric facilities and the overall behavioral health ecosystem. The Committee has conducted multiple hearings, done site visits at PIW engaging with the staff, and have also pushed the District’s regulators DC Health and the Department of Behavioral Health to conduct regular oversight visits at PIW.
“A grand jury indictment is a serious matter, and I, along with my health agency partners will be reviewing the charging documents when they are made available.”
In an interview with Washingtonian earlier this year, Henderson said that the city’s oversight of the PIW is complicated by its dependence on the psychiatric hospital. “I think that this is one of those issues of when you have these monopolistic relationships that make it really difficult to do the oversight,” Henderson said. “PIW is our largest provider [for emergency involuntary commitments],” she added.
Luke Mullins, a former Washingtonian senior writer, is coauthor of The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government.
