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Major change is now possible for residents at California's 7,500 assisted living homes thanks to a team of reporters from U-T San Diego and the California HealthCare Foundation Center for Health Reporting at USC. It took a year's worth of data-collection and analysis, examination of thousands of paper documents and shoe-leather journalism to produce “Deadly Neglect,” a series of stories that exposed death and abuse at assisted living facilities in San Diego County. The stories revealed that over the past seven years at least 27 deaths had occurred to assisted living residents in which negligence played a role. They found homes where residents were given wrong or no medication, and a state agency that didn't keep track of the deaths it investigated. More than half a dozen state legislators,, outraged by the team's findings, have announced the Residential Care Facilities for the Elderly Reform Act of 2014, a group of 14 reform bills that will be introduced in this year's legislative session.