Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2025
Good morning! In the news today: One woman’s battle to improve her father’s life in a Milledgeville veterans home; a Chatham County commissioner says, “Enough!”; and a mother and father in Savannah anguish over a future without Medicaid assistance for their disabled son. Finally, we note some things for your radar. Questions, comments, or story ideas? You can reach me at craig.thecurrent@gmail.com..
NEWS: INVESTIGATIVE
One woman’s battle
One fall Sunday last year, Connie Sewell embarked on what has become a routine 130-mile journey to visit her father at the Georgia War Veterans Home. When she arrived, she found him sitting unwashed in a soiled diaper outside a feces-smeared bathroom. It was, she said, a situation that had become depressingly routine for the 90-year-old Korea War veteran.
Two weeks later, Haskell Sewell was hospitalized after he fell, unattended, in his room. Emergency room doctors diagnosed him with sepsis, pneumonia and a urinary tract infection, none of which had been previously documented in his medical records.
The travails of her father, a former Navy machinist, illustrated what to Connie had been clear for some time: staffing levels at the veterans’ home in Milledgeville, which is managed by a Virginia-based company called STGi, were inadequate and failed to provide veterans with dignity and respect they are due, The Current’s Margaret Coker reports.
Since taking over the facility in 2024, the company has struggled to retain staff and maintain standards outlined in its contract with the state of Georgia, according to seven staff members who currently work at the home or who have recently quit. These staffers, who worked directly in patient care, as well as records and documents reviewed by The Current, point to systemic problems that impair the treatment and lives of many of the facility’s some 150 residents.
NEWS: GOVERNING
‘Egregious and inexcusable’
Calling the Chatham County Commission’s dispute with Chatham Area Transit “an embarrassment to our community,” District 4 Commissioner Patrick Farrell has disclosed plans to file motions at Friday’s regularly scheduled commission meeting to drop the county’s lawsuits against CAT and rescind a recent letter from chairman Chester Ellis announcing plans to stand up a parallel transit system.
In a letter to addressed to Ellis, fellow commissioners, and CAT’s board of directors, Farrell, a Republican candidate for the congressional seat held by Earl “Buddy” Carter, says he’ll also move Friday to have the commission appoint three members to the CAT board, as provided for under recently passed legislation.
The failure to do so, he writes, is “an egregious and inexcusable abdication of our responsibility to the citizens of Chatham County.” Ellis has refused to make the appointments.
“It is time to put petty personal politics aside and do our jobs as County Commissioners,” Farrell writes.
NEWS: HEALTH
‘Uncertainty is awful to live with’
In the 17 years since giving birth to her son, Eli, Savannah’s Michelle Heyman has become a master at the complex bureaucratic hurdles of Medicaid, the federal health insurance available to low-income children, the elderly and disabled in Georgia.
Born with a chromosome deletion disorder that requires substantial medication and frequent hospital visits necessary due to breathing issues, among other expenses, Eli is one of the more than 200,000 disabled Georgians that rely on the program for health care and services.
Now that funding is imperiled by cutbacks in federal funding, and Michelle Heyman and her husband Kevin, a special education reading specialist at Isle of Hope Elementary, are worried. It’s possible that the state won’t step in and that the funds she and her husband need to keep her son out of an assisted living facility will soon disappear, The Current’s Domonique King reports.
“Generally, when we’ve had travails in the past, we have been able to figure out how to work around them and move on,” said Heyman, a former health communication specialist. “Uncertainty is awful to live with on a day-to-day basis.”
NEWS: UPDATES
7 things for your radar
• Today is runoff election day in Midway for the mayor’s race between Stanley Brown and Malcolm X. Williams and in Richmond Hill for the city council’s post 2 seat between Kevin P. Bowes and Buck Holly.
• Chatham County Commissioner Bobby Lockett (District 3) is to hold a community meeting at 6 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 4, at the Public Works Training Center, 7226 Varnedoe Drive, in Savannah.
• See some details of plans to redevelop the Savannah Civic Center and take a survey.
• Democratic state Senate candidate Corey Foreman (District 1) describes how the Richmond Hill-Bryan County Airport Authority “really works.”
• In his weekly newsletter, Coastal Georgia Congressman Earl “Buddy” Carter praises President Trump for his efforts to stop the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. He made no mention of the president’s pardon of ex-president Juan Orlando Hernández, who once boasted that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses, and was convicted last year for flooding the U.S. with cocaine and sentenced to 45 years in prison.
• The House Committee on Economic Development and Tourism will hold an open meeting at the Jekyll Island Convention Center at 10:30 a.m. Dec. 12. The committee is chaired by Rep. Ron Stephens, and its members include Reps. Lehman Franklin (Statesboro), Bill Hitchens (Rincon), Edna Jackson (Savannah), Steven Sainz (St. Marys), Anne Allen Westbrook (Savannah), and Al Williams (Midway). Visit Savannah’s Joe Marinelli and Tourism Leadership Council’s Michael Owens are among those scheduled to deliver remarks.
• On the DEI front, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is planning for the U.S. military to sever all ties with the Boy Scouts, saying the group become an organization designed to “attack boy-friendly spaces.” Also, 591 books by Black authors have been banned from Pentagon-run schools and libraries, Onyx Impact says. The removed titles include works by Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Ibram X. Kendi.
Daughter’s battle for father’s care sparks scrutiny on Georgia War Veterans Home
Connie Sewell has been advocating for better care standards for her father and other veterans at the Georgia War Veterans Home due to inadequate staffing levels and systemic problems that have occurred since a new company took over management.
Massive Burt Jones-backed project among wave of data centers proposed for Georgia
A massive data center project backed by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and his family could be coming to Butts County, but many of the project’s details are still unknown. This story also appeared in Georgia Recorder Jones, a Republican, is running to be Georgia’s next governor. The Highway 16 Interstate Health Development near Interstate 75 owned by Jones’ father is set to include a 450,000 square-foot […]
Federal Medicaid cuts could limit access to services for people with disabilities
Medicaid cuts have left many people with disabilities in Georgia uncertain about their access to services, with families and providers worried about the potential impact on their quality of life.
Get out: Revolutionary War legacy preserved at Fort Morris
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Experts express concern over declining wild turkey numbers in Georgia
The number of wild turkeys in Georgia is declining due to habitat loss, but the state has taken steps to reverse the trend, including shortening the turkey hunting season and encouraging controlled burns.
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