PIERCE COUNTY, Wash. — When Brett Ryan was arrested for DUI in 2023, the Lakewood defense lawyer he hired quickly referred him to a substance abuse treatment clinic.
“It was obvious he needed help. That was his way to get it,” Ryan’s mother, Judy Russo, said of her 36-year-old son.
But interviews and public records obtained by KING 5 reveal that both the lawyer and the treatment clinic “failed” Ryan and many other clients, in what state health investigators described as “an extensive pattern of corrupt practices.”
Last November, State of Washington Department of Health investigators shut down the three branches of Rainier Recovery Centers in Lakewood, Puyallup and Gig Harbor. They accused CEO Jeremiah Dunlap of hiring unlicensed counselors, falsifying urinalysis test results, and reporting false information to judges on clients who had court ordered treatment, among other violations.
In an agreed order signed in December, Dunlap did not dispute the state’s findings, including statements that Dunlap had a “deal” with “a particular law firm” that “generated maximum revenue” for Rainier Recovery.
The KING 5 Investigators learned the attorney is longtime DUI defense lawyer Barbara A. Bowden, who represented Brett Ryan and many other DUI defendants she referred to Rainier Recovery.
Public documents released so far do not identify by name any of the individuals targeted in the state’s investigation.
But interviews with four former Rainier Recovery employees reveal how the agency routinely failed patients like Brett Ryan during a critical part of their intake process known as the “assessment.” That is when a state-licensed counselor, or a counselor trainee with proper oversight, evaluates a client’s level of addiction and makes a treatment plan.
Patients' results altered
Employees said Dunlap would “change patients assessment results … pursuant to the attorney’s direction” so that the “level of care would be changed ‘down to a bare minimum from needing a higher level of care,'” according to state records.
“And then it would be … we were just trying to make the attorney happy. Regularly it would kind of be just burned into your head, that’s the moneymaker,” said Alyssa Keane, who was Rainier’s director of operations and a licensed counselor until May of last year. Keane admitted she altered patient assessments based on Dunlap’s instruction, believing that he was a more experienced counselor.
Keane and three other former employees who did not want to speak on the record identified Barbara Bowden as the unnamed lawyer in state records.
Judy Russo said her son was a long-time drug and alcohol abuser. “He was probably about 17,” she said, when he first started using drugs that eventually included heroin.
He had a 2017 theft conviction that was alcohol related, and he had been ordered into treatment by Bonney Lake Municipal Court.
But records provided by Russo show a Rainier Recovery counselor trainee assessed Ryan as “NSP,” no significant problem, the lowest level of diagnosis that generally requires minimal treatment.
Bowden’s law firm submitted that report to the Pierce County District Court, which generally accepts treatment recommendations from state-licensed clinics. When he was sentenced in January of last year, Ryan received no jail time and three months of continuing oversight from Rainier Recovery – a minimal sentence.
“They’re the pros. They’re the ones that should have picked up on it right away,” an angry Judy Russo said of Rainier Recovery’s lenient recommendation to the court. “He should have been hauled off to a treatment center right then and there."
Within weeks, Brett Ryan was using drugs again.
Motivated by money
Employees and state records say money was the motive in the “deal” that brought more business to Rainier Recovery and the Law Office of Barbara A. Bowden.
“Management’s corrupt practices are motivated by financial considerations,” state investigators wrote in their November 26 enforcement order suspending Rainier Recovery’s license.
In the December “agreed order,” investigators said “this arrangement would give the law firm better success rates and make them popular” with clients. A defense attorney who gets lighter sentences and fewer treatment requirements in court is going to attract more clients. And Rainier Recovery benefitted with a steady stream of paying clients referred by Bowden’s legal team.
Bowden did not respond to several emails and phone calls to her Lakewood office.
“I have to go to court,” she said, refusing to answer a KING 5 reporter’s questions outside the Pierce County courthouse when she left a court hearing in March.
This isn’t the first time that Barbara Bowden has been the subject of a KING 5 Investigation.
Ten years ago, she was linked to five corrupt treatment clinics in Pierce County that were shut down by the State of Washington after the KING 5 series Sobriety for Sale.
Tomorrow, the KING 5 Investigators reveal more on that part of the story, plus they track down the counselor trainee who evaluated Brett Ryan and reveal Ryan’s fate after he started using drugs again.