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The Hartford Courant investigates covered-up deaths resulting from neglect and staff errors in Connecticut's group homes for mentally retarded. Patients often fell victim to suffocation, drowning, choking, burns and potentially treatable infections. Other findings include that the state secretive system conceals suspicious deaths and their causes not only from the general public, but even from next of kin; that the death rate in group homes has tripled from 1990 to 2000; and that the State Department of Mental Retardation is ineffective in investigating and taking actions against faulty group home operators. The group home system costs Connecticut taxpayers $260 million a year, the Courant reports.