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A year-long investigation of living conditions of the most severely mentally ill patients in the Milwaukee area discovered that those conditions were far from ideal, sometimes filthy and dangerous. Among the discoveries were patients housed in illegal group homes which city building inspectors did not discover or report. In addition, caseworkers were still placing patients in homes despite knowledge of their poor and filthy conditions. At the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex, a 33-year-old woman died from dehydration and starvation after doctors allowed her to go nearly four weeks without food or water. Social service and government agencies had also passed up opportunities to accept federal money for construction of better facilities, $3.3 million in the past seven years.