Finalist: Chicago Tribune, by David Jackson, Gary Marx and Duaa Eldeib
For their exposé of the perils faced by abused children placed in Illinois's residential treatment centers.
Nominated Work
December 3, 2014
In Illinois residential treatment centers, youths are assaulted and sexually abused. But the state keeps sending them.
By David Jackson, Gary Marx and Duaa Eldeib
At residential treatment centers across Illinois, children are assaulted, sexually abused and running away by the thousands — yet state officials fail to act on reports of harm and continue sending waves of youths to the most troubled and violent facilities, a Tribune investigation found.
At a cost to taxpayers of well over $200 million per year, the residential centers promise round-the-clock supervision and therapy to state wards with histories of abuse and neglect, as well as other disadvantaged youths with mental health and behavioral problems. On any given day, about 1,400 wards live in the centers, although far more cycle through each year.
In the best cases, the facilities rebuild and even save young lives. But the Tribune found that many underprivileged youths — most of them African-American — are shuttled for years from one grim institution to another before emerging more damaged than when they went in.
Reports of patient-on-patient sexual assault are commonplace at some of Illinois' largest and most relied-on facilities. Child prostitution schemes take root. Vulnerable children are terrorized by older ones and taught a life of crime. Some are preyed on sexually by the adults paid to care for them. And staggering numbers of wards, some as young as 10, flee to the streets.
In the three years from 2011 through 2013, Illinois residential facilities sent the state Department of Children and Family Services 428 reports alleging a ward was sexually assaulted or abused while in their care, according to DCFS records not previously made public.
The facilities submitted an additional 1,052 reports that a ward was physically assaulted during those three years — in some instances by staff but usually by a peer.
And facilities notified DCFS of 29,425 incidents when a ward ran away or went missing. That is an average of nearly 27 runaway reports a day among wards in Illinois facilities.
Out on the streets where they had no family, friends, money or life skills, some runaways committed carjackings, armed robberies and home break-ins, the Tribune investigation found. Others fell victim to gang rapes and sex trafficking.
"I don't know who's there for me," said Meisha Singleton, 19, as she walked the Near North Side on a recent morning carrying her only change of clothes in a crumpled plastic bag.
Placed in state protective custody at age 14 after she was kicked out of her home at gunpoint and then sexually assaulted, Singleton was sent in 2012 to the 112-bed Indian Oaks Academy in Manteno, Ill. There she was attacked by peers, repeatedly bullied and taunted, government reports show.
Over the next year, Singleton ran away at least 11 times, government records show. She said she survived by prostituting herself in Chicago. Indian Oaks discharged her earlier this year.
"I'm hurting," she said. "I hate living like this, but the world isn't fair, and I have to make my way."
Operated by nonprofit agencies, for-profit firms or religious charities, Illinois' roughly 50 residential centers range in size from 10 to 150 beds and are spread from the North Side of Chicago to the farmland of southern Illinois. Some are large dormitories that occupy former state-run asylums and orphanages, while others are campuses lined with cottages.
The violent conditions inside these facilities have largely been hidden until now because strict juvenile privacy laws shield basic reports of harm to youths from the public, the media and even many government regulators.
Reporters pierced the secrecy by gathering more than 10,000 pages of confidential juvenile case files from sources across the state, and also using public records laws to get police and state monitoring reports. The Tribune also compiled internal DCFS data on facility discharge outcomes and rates of key events like runaways, detentions of youths, assaults and sexual abuse.
Taken together, the records provide an unprecedented look at the chaos, drug abuse, violence and victimization within many of the taxpayer-financed centers.
Serious child safety breaches emerged at facilities throughout the state, including several of the most respected institutions, the records showed. The Tribune's investigation centered on three of Illinois' most relied-on centers where officials continued to send wards despite persistent patterns of violence, sexual victimization and runaway episodes:
•At the 48-bed Lawrence Hall Youth Services facility on Chicago's Northwest Side, young residents squared off in gang fights, coerced peers into sex, smoked marijuana in front of staff and routinely walked out of the facility to work as prostitutes, break into apartments, steal cars and rob passers-by, records show. DCFS kept sending in young wards even as the nonprofit lagged well behind other facilities in the department's performance measures.
•At the 59-bed Rock River Academy in Rockford, a facility for girls, former residents described being pummeled by peers upon arrival. During the most recent nine-month period, Rock River filed reports of aggressive behavior by state wards more frequently than any of the 50 Illinois facilities where DCFS places children and teens, according to a review of DCFS records.
•At Indian Oaks, which specializes in treating children who have endured sexual trauma, the Tribune identified 17 reports of sexual assault or abuse during a 21/2-year period starting in September 2011. Facility reports to DCFS and police dismissed nearly half of those incidents as consensual, even when alleged victims were not old enough to consent or had cognitive impairments.
When young wards are hurt, the Tribune found, police and state officials rarely share their investigative reports with each other, making it difficult to uncover patterns of abuse and act aggressively to protect children.
The state's beleaguered child welfare agency, which has had four directors in the past year and seen its budget sliced by more than 10 percent since 2009, is more than a year behind in analyzing facility performance records that show how many days kids go on the run from each center, or are sent to jail or psychiatric hospitals.
And DCFS does little to analyze or act on Unusual Incident Reports that facilities are required to submit whenever a ward is hurt or put in harm's way while in their care.
"If you were getting these reports as a parent, you would be up in arms about the facility," said Cook County Public Guardian Robert Harris, whose office has filed court motions to remove individual wards from residential facilities for their safety.
DCFS acting Director Bobbie Gregg said she was outraged and disappointed to hear the Tribune's findings, adding that she was not aware youths were repeatedly sent back to facilities plagued by assaults, sexual abuse and runaways.
"What you're describing is not something that has been brought to my attention, but it is something that ... we should look into," Gregg said. "Whenever any of our children are harmed in our custody, I'm not satisfied."
The Tribune provided DCFS with its findings before interviewing Gregg. At that interview she said she had begun exploring ways to safeguard wards in residential treatment. Although the agency has 16 employees monitoring such facilities, Gregg said she plans to require more stringent oversight of the Unusual Incident Reports sent by the centers.
Acknowledging that the department does not have the ability to analyze those reports to quickly spot patterns, she said she was planning data upgrades.
"I, too, am frustrated that it takes us too long to get data to be able to make meaningful changes in our system," she said. "Like so many things, it's a question of resources."
She said she has set a goal of moving 165 wards from residential facilities to foster homes by Jan. 31. "Children should be raised in homes with families and not in institutional centers," she said.
As Michele Gans struggled to get help for her daughter, Emma, she saw residential treatment as her last, best chance.
The 16-year-old suffered from mental illness and hadn't been getting effective therapy from the clinics and programs in their western Illinois community.
Fifteen months later, Gans abruptly removed her daughter from Rock River Academy in 2013 after a beating by peers left Emma with a broken facial bone, two black eyes and chunks of hair torn from her head, according to Gans and facility reports.
Gans, a psychiatric nurse, said she arrived at the Rockford hospital to find her daughter "covered by cuts and contusions. She was bleeding profusely."
Emma had been improving at Rock River — she had a good therapist and adapted to the institution's routines, Gans said. But the girl's progress unraveled in a flurry of violence that shows how even children who benefit from residential care can still end up hurt and terrified inside facilities where the balance of power sometimes rests with the most aggressive youths.
Melees, fistfights and even stabbings are common in residential facilities across the state, the Tribune found, with chairs, pens and shards of glass used as weapons. The violence is fueled by an environment where youths say they are picked on and thrashed unless they earn respect by fighting back.
"The main thing they'd always stated when we first got there was that it's a safe place and there's enough staff to keep us safe from harm. But they couldn't provide protection for me when I needed it," said Krystle Gall, 23, who says she still has back pain from a severe beating by peers at Rock River.
Sometimes staff at these facilities reacted casually to the violence or even encouraged it, records show.
In 2012, a worker at Lutherbrook Child and Adolescent Center in Addison found a 17-year-old boy allegedly sodomizing a 15-year-old boy in a weight room, but the employee waited until the next day to notify supervisors, according to police records. A second staff member then falsely told residents that the younger boy was the perpetrator and they "should handle this matter themselves."
Police reports state that a group of residents chased the 15-year-old outside, beat him to the ground and kicked him for several minutes until a neighbor with a knife rescued him. Lutherbrook declined to comment on that incident.
At Rock River, Emma's problems started in May 2013 when a roommate began behaving in a sexually inappropriate way, facility records show. After Emma sought help from staff, other residents threatened her, and Emma was moved to a different suite of rooms in the red brick facility.
As Emma cleaned her new room with a bleach wipe, three of her suite mates confronted her. They said: "Why don't you leave and move back to Suite 5!" according to a report the facility sent DCFS.
One of those girls, then-16-year-old Ashley Phillips, grabbed some of Emma's clothes and threw them at her, saying, "Let me help you pack." When Emma stuffed a bleach wipe in Phillips' mouth, the three girls began kicking and punching Emma, according to the facility's report.
Two staff members were in the suite, but their calls for help were not immediately heeded because other facility workers were occupied with emergencies elsewhere, records show.
"Code was called several times before additional staff arrived due to other crises," said the facility report to DCFS. "During the melee, (Emma) fell to the floor and (the others) continued to punch, kick and pull her hair."
The girls "managed to pull great plugs of hair out," the report said.
"We started beating Emma. The staff let us fight," Phillips recalled in an interview with the Tribune. By the time help came, Phillips said, "she's leaking blood."
In the aftermath, as Gans was considering whether to withdraw Emma from Rock River, an employee took her aside and said the facility didn't have enough staff to ensure her daughter's protection, Gans recalled.
Gans brought her daughter home. There the girl has struggled.
"It was really quite painful to take her away," Gans said. "The community-based treatment is not working as well. But she was scared to death to return to Rock River."
The brutality and turbulence inside facilities are one reason residents flee — often for just a few hours, but sometimes for weeks and months.
Among the 1,284 individual wards who were gone from facilities for at least a day last year, 42 are still missing, DCFS officials say. They include several believed to be victims of sex trafficking in states as far away as Florida. One 16-year-old ward who has been gone from Indian Oaks since January was traced by police to an online escort service in the Wisconsin Dells.
While experts say there are many reasons youths run from placements, DCFS statistics from 2011, the most recent available, show the runaway rate at residential centers was more than double that of foster homes.
Behind the statistics are grievous, even deadly, consequences for youths and surrounding communities.
In October, two 17-year-old state wards ran from the UCAN residential facility on Chicago's Northwest Side and led police on a chase in a stolen Toyota Camry before crashing the car into a concrete barrier in the Little Village neighborhood, killing one of the teens, Darnell Williams Jr., and seriously injuring the other.
A 10-year-old boy named B.J. went AWOL from Lawrence Hall at least three dozen times during a two-month period in 2011, sometimes for days, and acknowledged being a lookout for the Latin Kings street gang. One Lawrence Hall report to DCFS said staffers followed B.J. after he left the Northwest Side center "until the neighborhood began to be unsafe."
Then the 95-pound boy was on his own.
Administrators and workers at several prominent residential centers told the Tribune that as many as a third of the children in their care should never have been admitted in the first place.
Among them are growing numbers of teens too volatile for the facilities to handle effectively — including those with violent criminal records and severe behavior disorders who can dominate an institution, disrupt treatment and threaten the safety of everyone else inside.
But they also talked about higher-functioning children who could thrive in a family-type setting but wound up in residential centers because Illinois does not have enough specialized foster homes equipped to care for kids with behavioral and mental health challenges.
"Some of our children who are ready to go, there is no place for them," said Mike Chavers, Indian Oaks' executive director. "The reality is, most kids don't need residential treatment centers. They would be better off in foster homes with support."
Serving a child in specialized foster care also costs taxpayers less than half of the $340-per-day rate that DCFS and Medicaid pay the state's biggest residential centers. But unlike many of their counterparts from New Jersey to Indiana, Illinois officials have been slow to build a robust network of community mental health programs for disadvantaged youths.
"You have a shortage of services, and we don't have a good solution for that problem," DCFS Associate Deputy Director Kristine Herman told the Tribune. "We are relying on residential as placement. But residential is not as viable as a family. It is a place where kids go to live that is not truly beneficial to them."
With few other options in Illinois, the percentage of young state wards whose first placement was a residential facility or group home rose steadily from 13 percent in 2006 to 21 percent in 2012, before dropping to 18 percent last year, according to DCFS data submitted this year to a federal court monitor.
The increase in these institutional placements "is not for therapeutic reasons," noted an analysis this year by the Children and Family Research Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Few people in state government or running the centers argue that the system is working. But efforts to change it have been piecemeal and slow.
Under Gov. Pat Quinn, officials launched a yearslong multi-agency effort to transform the state's Medicaid-funded health care system in ways that could reduce dependence on residential care. Separately, a federally funded pilot program is providing home-based services to troubled youths and their families in four midstate counties. Both efforts are years away from seeing results, officials said.
Meanwhile, Illinois' residential facilities have seen only one increase — of 2 percent — to their state reimbursement rates in the last seven years, although the costs of serving kids, maintaining properties and paying for employee health care have risen steadily.
"Every little bit helps, and we certainly appreciate it," said Mike Havera, executive director of Kemmerer Village in downstate Assumption. Still, "if the cavalry are coming, I don't see anyone on the horizon."
At least six of Illinois' high-profile residential centers have closed in recent years amid revenue shortfalls and outcries from community members after residents fled the facilities and committed violent or criminal acts. Those losses have exacerbated the shortage of placements for mentally troubled youths.
Since 2011, DCFS has placed 16 residential facilities and group homes on brief "intake holds" that stopped placements of wards at the centers because of problems ranging from quality of care to issues with timely reporting and staffing. But in only one case did the hold last as long as a year. Most — including a 2012 hold on Lawrence Hall and a self-imposed hold by Rock River this summer — were lifted after a few months.
Consider the 15-bed all-female south suburban Sadie Waterford Manor, which had nearly 2,000 police service calls last year, including 994 runaway reports. The facility was shut for two months this summer — not by DCFS but by Crestwood fire officials, who declared the premises unsafe for occupancy. After repairs including a $40,000 sprinkler system were completed, DCFS sent in more wards.
Since then, two Sadie Waterford runaways, ages 14 and 15, reported being sexually assaulted outside the facility in separate incidents, according to facility officials and Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, whose deputies helped Crestwood police with service calls from the center.
"We cannot continue to experiment with these kids and say, 'Let's just keep doing things that we know are not working,'" Dart told the Tribune.
Lester Harris, CEO at Sadie Waterford, said the facility offered close supervision and engaging activities to the girls who stayed there. "And yet if they choose to go, they're going," he said.
Like some other states, Illinois has laws allowing residential centers to secure their exit doors to prevent escapes by youths whose behavior creates "an established pattern of foreseeable serious risk of bodily harm to self or others." But officials in Illinois have balked at authorizing the locks, saying it could violate the human rights of children placed in state protective custody through no fault of their own.
Locking the exit doors also isn't a comprehensive solution to problems at facilities where residents don't feel safe or want to stay. The Tribune found some unlocked Illinois facilities had few runaways even though they serve youths with severe behavior disorders.
Still, several facility administrators said it's time for state officials to consider more protective measures — from physical barriers to higher staffing levels and better training.
"If you think about the facility as a parent, well, we expect parents to protect children from harmful behavior and not let them run away," said Sister Catherine Ryan, who runs the Maryville Academy network of youth treatment centers. But the power to lock an exit door can be abused, she said, "so it has to be clear which children, and under what circumstances."
Illinois' system for protecting and treating juvenile wards is so frayed that it can overwhelm even centers with experienced and dedicated leadership.
The Rice Child + Family Center in Evanston nearly closed seven years ago because of alarming rates of runaways and resident-on-staff assaults.
"The kids were not safe. Our staff was struggling," said Nancy Ronquillo, president and CEO of Children's Home + Aid, the $65 million-a-year nonprofit that runs the facility as well as several other Chicago-area youth programs. "We had to decide whether we were going to give our 30-day notice to DCFS."
Instead, Rice eliminated its troubled unit for older teenage girls and focused on a much younger population, offering therapies from yoga and drumming to complex treatments focused on the youths' underlying trauma. The average age of a facility resident is now 111/2.
Yet even with children who are less physically challenging to staff, the 45-bed facility still had 162 runaway incidents last year, a number that has climbed steadily from 31 in 2010, according to police and facility records.
Most of those children were returned within 24 hours, Ronquillo said, but she acknowledged that Rice's persistent runaways underscore a broader problem.
By the time a juvenile ward gets to a residential center, he or she has usually bounced through as many as 10 foster homes and often suffered further mistreatment and abuse. Ronquillo said juvenile wards should be diagnosed much earlier and placed in residential centers for shorter stints of about six months while authorities work to identify and support a suitable foster home, ideally with a relative.
"The system around the kids is dysfunctional," agreed Mary Shahbazian, who runs the Allendale Association center in Lake Villa.
Even at Allendale's picturesque campus of cottages spread across 120 acres by a lake, the starting-level $12-per-hour "direct care" jobs are dangerous and exhausting. Staff burnout and churn can demoralize residents whose only stable relationship may be with a favorite employee, Tribune interviews show.
While Allendale should have 120 frontline workers, "at any given time, we have about 20 open positions," Shahbazian said. About a third of these employees quit within 12 months, and nearly half said in exit interviews that the pay was too low and the work too demanding.
In its desperation to find workers, Allendale took on several who turned out to be "bad actors," Shahbazian acknowledged.
A facility mental health specialist was charged last year with aggravated battery after he allegedly slammed an 11-year-old boy's face onto a school desk — breaking off two of his front teeth — because the youth didn't answer a math question. After the fired worker agreed to pay the boy's medical bills, Lake County prosecutors dropped the charges with the family's consent.
Also last year, Allendale fired three staff members because they made inappropriate contact with residents in off hours, Shahbazian said. The year before, records show, the facility notified police that several female residents were planning to go AWOL with the help of a 30-year-old former employee who was allegedly luring them into prostitution.
In that July 2012 incident, four teens left the campus — two were 15, the other two 17. A day later, Chicago police found one of the older girls; she had been sexually assaulted in the city. The other three were "most likely prostituting" themselves in Chicago, a DCFS caseworker told Lake Villa police a month later.
One of the 15-year-olds was picked up by police in Tennessee two months after she vanished, according to a police report. The whereabouts of the other two remain unclear.
Keaira Sanders, a former Allendale resident who arrived with a history of being sexually abused, was targeted in 2012 by a male employee who took her to the laundry room and molested her, according to DCFS and police reports and Sanders' account.
"When no one was looking, he kissed me, grabbed me and said, 'You're mine,'" said Sanders, now 19. "When I was there, I felt helpless."
There were no police charges, but the employee left the facility amid this case and a separate allegation of molestation.
Even one of Allendale's most trusted workers turned out to be a predator. In July, veteran facility program director Kelvin Perry, 51, was imprisoned for sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl who had been under his supervision.
"One day he told me to get the towels from the kitchen and take them to the laundry room, and that's where he made his move. He got me against the wall," said victim Treona Thomas, who had been brought into DCFS custody because she endured childhood sexual abuse and was placed at Allendale in 2012.
As program director, Perry stood out as someone she could talk to about her painful past, Thomas told the Tribune. "He was somebody I trusted in and confided in."
She did not make a complaint and even came to consider him a boyfriend. The sexual encounters continued at the facility and then after she was discharged, according to court records and her account.
"I felt like I should tell somebody, but at the same time I felt like they all knew him for 15 years. I was just some girl," Thomas said. "Now I realize he took advantage of me."
December 3, 2014
Documents and interviews uncover a startling record of violence and runaways at Rock River Academy
By David Jackson and Gary Marx
With her belongings in a backpack, 16-year-old Jessica McQueen described wandering the streets of Rockford, begging for food and money.
It was a cold day in October, and she had no reliable place to stay. But McQueen told a reporter she was desperate to keep away from Rock River Academy, the residential treatment center she fled days before, according to police records.
"It was just crazy fights, and fights and jumps and all type of stuff. I'd rather be on the run than be in a place that don't help me and just push me down," she said.
McQueen's account of aggression and turbulence inside the facility was mirrored by Tribune interviews with 20 former residents and a dozen former workers, and buttressed by thousands of pages of confidential juvenile case files, police reports and other documents. Many young people spoke of developing relationships with trusted staff — only to see them quit or be fired. Others said workers mocked or ignored them, and few said they had been helped in any meaningful way, or even kept safe.
The records and interviews offer a detailed look at life inside the 59-bed facility for juvenile state wards and girls with behavior and mental health problems.
"It was frightening," said another 16-year-old who spent nearly two years in the facility. "I had to fight my way through it to get respect from the girls. I was just like Rock River when I got out."
From June 2013 through March, Rock River filed reports of aggressive behavior by state wards more frequently than any of Illinois' 50 other residential facilities, according to data from the state Department of Children and Family Services. At the Tribune's request, DCFS calculated annual rates for each facility by measuring the number of reports against the number of days each youth was in care.
Rock River's rate of these aggressive behavior reports has climbed sharply since 2009, the DCFS data show, and during that recent nine-month period it was more than five times the median rate among all facilities across the state. Rock River's rate was also more than twice that of the five other facilities that handle similar populations of youth with the same severe diagnoses, according to DCFS reports.
The Tribune also found that juvenile state wards at Rock River were administered "emergency" doses of powerful psychotropic drugs at rates far above those reported by most similar youth facilities.
In 2012, Ron Davidson, who then directed the mental health policy program in the University of Illinois at Chicago's psychiatry department, told DCFS in an email that his staff had interviewed several former Rock River residents who said "they would harm themselves if sent back to what they described as dangerous conditions at that facility."
Former resident and runaway Fayshawn Petty, 21, told the Tribune that she was attacked on one of her first days at Rock River. As Petty, then 15, took a seat in the lunchroom, "the girls came up behind me," she said.
"I was getting punched, kicked. ... It's like an initiation program. I felt like I wasn't being protected." Later, she said, "I was mocked by the staff: 'You got beat up!'"
In September 2011, Petty told staff she was going to contact TV personality and legal commentator Nancy Grace about alleged "verbal, mental and physical abuse" at the facility, according to a Rock River report to DCFS. Petty's vow to contact the media was reported under the category of "threats against ... facility," records show.
Five days later, Petty and a small band of girls ran off through the cornfields that border the facility, records show. Petty said she never returned.
While most of Illinois' residential treatment centers for youth are operated by nonprofit organizations and religious charities, Rock River Academy is owned by a for-profit company: Universal Health Services Inc., which runs more than 190 behavioral health facilities across the country.
Even as Universal's annual revenues have soared above $7 billion and its stock price has more than doubled in the last two years, the company is facing a widening federal probe into conditions of care and billing practices at 13 of its operations.
Four of the 13 facilities under investigation are in Illinois, including Rock River, which promises intensive, round-the-clock care to girls and was acquired by Universal in a 2010 merger. The other three are psychiatric hospitals.
Federal authorities have not accused Universal and its executives and staff of any wrongdoing, and Universal said in a written statement that the company is cooperating with the inquiries. "We are confident that when all of the information is presented in this matter, it will indicate that these facilities provided quality care and treatment to (their) patients," the statement said.
"We have not, do not and will not ever sacrifice patient care for financial benefit," added the company. It said that "contrary to the for-profit stereotype, Rock River has actually lost over $1 million in the past five years."
Universal officials said they "strongly dispute" the Tribune findings, which were based on detailed state records and police reports as well as interviews.
"You are receiving information from patients who have had often horrific life experiences and have mental health issues," the company said in its statement. "Their characterization of issues and facts do not accurately reflect what really happened. The facts are very different than what you are reporting."
Karen Johnson, senior vice president and compliance officer for Universal, said Rock River has helped severely abused girls turn their lives around. "We have a lot of success stories," Johnson said. "We've heard from parents that say, 'Thank you for giving us our daughter back.'
"We had five girls graduate from high school this year, and those stories need to be shared. They all have the opportunity now to do something with their lives with a diploma in hand. I am very proud of that."
Interviews with former Rock River residents and staffers, as well as DCFS reports, depict a chaotic environment that not only led to physical assaults but often thwarted efforts to help residents with their therapy and education.
At the facility's in-house therapeutic day school, according to these accounts, girls carried in blankets and pillows and slept in class, or loudly cursed teachers, turned over desks and strolled out when they wanted to.
"You have kids throwing chairs at teachers or other kids, or fights breaking out, and you have kids walking out of class," said former resident Dallas Donati, 18. "And if we don't want to be in the class, there's no one to stop us from just walking out. I used to throw chairs so I could get out of the room."
Unusual Incident Reports filed by the facility in 2011 through 2013 show educational time was often disrupted by the mayhem. One girl was arrested for assaulting a teacher with a crayon box; another tore apart the principal's office, sweeping the computer off a desk and hitting the principal in the head with a can of soda; a third girl was suspended for inappropriate sexual behavior with a younger resident in school.
"There was a lot of fights, there was screaming in the hallways," recalled former resident Kiana King, 19. "Some girls came knowing about those behaviors, but being around them girls made it even worse."
At Rock River, said former resident Shirley Collins, 19, "they combine the good girls and bad girls, and the bad girls influence the good girls. A lot of the girls that were good, they wanted to be like everybody else. They wanted attention. So the bad girls would influence them to fight and to run away, to be defiant."
Some former workers said staff shortages diminished the time allotted to therapy because counselors were often forced to interrupt sessions to help restore order elsewhere in the facility, or to pursue girls who ran off.
"It was hard to get individual sessions in because we were always in crisis. Crisis work ended up being the major focus, and you can put that down as therapy but it is not," said a former therapist who discussed resident treatment on condition that he not be identified.
Rock River sent the juvenile court glowing reports about the treatment of former resident Ashley Phillips, now 17. One said "overall Ashley's behavior has been very positive" and noted that "she receives group therapy at least three times per day for at least 45 minutes per session."
But Phillips told the Tribune: "At therapy you didn't do nothing but stare at the wall, play games and draw."
Although the DCFS reports examined by the Tribune describe aggressive behavior by many residents, Universal said in its statement that "the incidents of aggression are isolated to a fairly small number of residents who have engaged in repeated behavior at other facilities which has continued at Rock River."
Universal said Rock River exceeded required staffing levels and youths typically had three to five hours of therapeutic activity a day. If therapy was shortchanged because of inadequate staffing, "that certainly is not at all what we condone," Universal's Johnson said. "Those dynamics that you indicate have never been reported to us or to me, and if that were the circumstance I would certainly intervene."
One Rock River resident who appeared to deteriorate at the facility was a 15-year-old who had been abandoned by her mother on Chicago's West Side.
Sent to Rock River last year, she got into more than 20 fights during her first seven months, and staff put her in physical restraint holds more than 50 times, records show. In two cases, facility surveillance video showed workers punching the girl and once biting her. Rock River fired one of those staff members and suspended the other, government records show.
"(The girl) is not safe in her placement at Rock River and must be removed immediately," the Cook County public guardian wrote in one December 2013 juvenile court filing. "She has become dramatically more aggressive and has begun to engage in self-harming, a behavior she has not exhibited in the past. ... (She) must be moved to a facility that can appropriately and effectively address her mental health needs."
In an eloquent letter to relatives earlier this year, the girl expressed the fervent hope that she would soon leave Rock River. "It feels so good to say that, I'm coming home," she wrote, according to correspondence the family shared with the Tribune.
But before DCFS acted, records show, the girl was accused of assaulting peers and staff in the facility and sent to juvenile detention.
Most years since 2009, Rock River ranked among the top two Illinois facilities in the rate of dispensing emergency tranquilizers, according to DCFS data from 2009 through March 2014. The other facility, the 38-bed John Costigan Residential Center in Streamwood, also was run by Universal but closed last year.
Experts say high rates of emergency medication are a sign that a facility's therapeutic efforts — and the youths' day-to-day drug regimens — may be ineffective.
"It would suggest that their behavior modification program wasn't working all that well," said Daniel Safer, a researcher and associate professor at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
In nearly two decades running a Massachusetts residential center for youths with severe behavioral disorders, Tufts Medical Center psychiatrist Chris Bellonci said he recalled using emergency medications only a few times. "Emergency med use can be a proxy for programs that are struggling to meet the needs of these kids," he said. "It would certainly raise a red flag that there could be a problem at the facility."
In several cases examined by the Tribune, DCFS records show Rock River girls demanded and got emergency shots of anti-psychotic sedatives like Thorazine. Former residents said the tranquilizers, which some called "booty juice," helped them deal with the chaos inside the facility.
"A lot of (the girls) would flip out to get the shot," said former resident Eva Jackson, 21. "It was (a way of) coping with everything. It was really hard there."
A former Rock River nurse, who talked about patient care on the condition that she not be identified, said use of the emergency medications was commonplace in 2012 when she worked there. "We were told you have to give them the booty juice," she said. "We would have to call the doctor each time to get an order, and it was pretty much, 'Go ahead.'"
One 17-year-old state ward with a history of violence and mental illness was given emergency tranquilizers more than 40 times in a 21/2-year period from 2011 to last year, juvenile case records show.
At 8:30 a.m. one day in September last year, she approached the nurse's station and "requested the doctor be called for an injection," according to Rock River's subsequent report to DCFS.
"When the nurse refused and explained that the doctor would not be called, the girl became irate and said: 'I'm going to climb through this window and beat your ass,'" according to Rock River's report.
Before the nurse could close her station window, the girl crawled through it, grabbed the office phone, dialed the doctor's number and handed the phone to the nurse.
"Nurse explained to doctor the resident wanted an injection," said the facility's report to DCFS. "Doctor reviewed meds and gave an order for Thorazine 300 mg. Medication drawn up and administered."
While not commenting specifically on Rock River, Bellonci said such a practice could feed a youth's belief that only narcotics can relieve agitation, anger and other overwhelming emotions.
"That's not something that's going to be adaptive to life except if you then start translating it into substance abuse," Bellonci said. "That's disturbing on a number of levels."
The DCFS data provided to the Tribune show that during the most recent nine-month period, rates of emergency psychotropic medication fell sharply for all residential facilities in Illinois, and especially at Rock River.
"I am very proud to say that this facility has reduced the use of their emergency medications by over 90 percent as a result of their own continued improvement processes," Johnson said.
Universal's statement added: "Your references to the use of medications at Rock River are incorrect. ... Our patients are taught new coping mechanisms to manage their behavior including requesting medication if they recognize they are struggling to self-regulate their emotions."
December 4, 2014
Vulnerable youths are preyed on in residential facility and bring its violence into the community
By David Jackson and Gary Marx
One teenager raped a 50-year-old woman as she walked to the "L" stop at dawn.
A second was arrested nine times in one year on charges that included theft, property damage and groping and punching a girl.
A third was convicted in a series of cellphone robberies in which he punched passers-by to the ground, cracking the teeth of one victim and dragging another down the street by her purse.
"The entire time I was just praying someone would hear me screaming," that woman later told a judge.
These assailants weren't working for a powerful street gang or other criminal enterprise.
They were juvenile state wards promised round-the-clock supervision and intensive therapy in a taxpayer-financed residential treatment center or in a network of nearby group homes run by the same Chicago agency.
All three teens were placed in state protective custody because they had suffered abuse or neglect in the homes of their biological parents.
They arrived at Lawrence Hall Youth Services needing every bit of the expert care and close guidance expected from this nonprofit, which gets $20 million per year in government funds to treat state wards and other disadvantaged youths.
But at Lawrence Hall's 48-bed residential treatment center in the Ravenswood neighborhood — and its linked set of group homes and supervised apartments — children were preyed on by hardened peers and drawn into a life of crime that then spilled out into the community, a Tribune investigation found.
The conditions inside the residential center and group homes, detailed in thousands of pages of confidential juvenile case records since 2011, underscore the crisis in Illinois' loosely monitored system for housing disadvantaged youths who have behavioral and mental health problems. Amid staff shortages, youths are raped, assaulted and running away by the thousands, the Tribune found, and many come out more battered than when they were admitted.
Lawrence Hall's flagship residential facility would erupt in chaos as youths squared off in gang fights, pressured peers into sex, smoked marijuana in front of staff and openly discussed plans to steal from stores and rob people, the Tribune found.
The state Department of Children and Family Services was aware of the mayhem — the facility is required to send department officials a report every time employees learn that a ward was arrested or put in danger. Yet DCFS kept placing juvenile wards at Lawrence Hall even as the nonprofit lagged well behind other centers in the department's performance measures.
Even when Lawrence Hall youths are on the run, in jail or hospitalized, the state pays the facility about $340 per night per youth for up to 30 days.
On an average night in 2012, more than 16 percent of wards assigned to the Lawrence Hall residential center were in juvenile detention or psychiatric hospitals, internal DCFS child-tracking records show. An additional 11 percent had run away — about 10 times the average rate of other Illinois residential centers that house and treat teenagers with behavior problems.
"I was living the street life, the life I was used to," said former Lawrence Hall resident Jacaes Lipscomb, 21, who was recently released from prison following convictions for residential burglaries. Lipscomb said that as a teen he dealt heroin on the West Side while living in the residential center, keeping a car parked nearby so he could quickly return to his old neighborhood.
"We was living like we had our own crib; we just couldn't bring nobody in there," Lipscomb said.
The Tribune documented 103 police reports of crimes on Chicago streets by youths housed at Lawrence Hall's residential center at 4833 N. Francisco Ave. or in the agency's group homes from 2011 through 2013. Some of the runaway youths committed muggings, armed robberies, home burglaries and sexual assaults as well as selling drugs and sex.
Reporters also found 68 police reports of crimes committed during that period by Lawrence Hall residents in locations that could not be identified from available police and court records.
And during the same period an additional 76 crimes were reported inside the residential facility and group homes, where some staff said they felt outmanned, underpaid and overwhelmed trying to contain the wards.
Strict juvenile privacy laws made it difficult to learn the identities of most residents or research their criminal backgrounds, so those cases likely account for only some of the violence and lawbreaking perpetrated by youths under Lawrence Hall's supervision.
Lawrence Hall's chief operating officer, Kara Teeple, said the children being referred to Illinois residential facilities in recent years have increasingly troubled histories of trauma, failed placements in foster homes, school absenteeism and juvenile detention.
"We are not negating that we have room for improvement," Teeple said.
But, she said: "We have behavior treatment plans for each one of our kids from the minute they come in. ... We don't give up, and we do see successes. We see kids go home and to foster homes and become independent, self-sufficient adults."
Teeple said the failures uncovered by the Tribune highlight Illinois' urgent need to remake its child welfare system so officials can intercede earlier in the lives of abused youths, instead of letting children bounce around foster homes before they land years later as teens at centers like Lawrence Hall.
"Until you get the system transformed, you have kids with seven failed placements, and they see the street life as their family," Teeple said. "It's tough."
Teeple, a former DCFS deputy director in charge of residential services who joined Lawrence Hall last year, is part of several state commissions and pilot projects that aim to improve Illinois' mental health system for disadvantaged youths.
Plans are in the works, she said, but added: "It takes years to build a true intervention system."
Founded in 1865 as a shelter for homeless boys, Lawrence Hall has long been one of Illinois' most prominent child welfare organizations. The nonprofit's literature describes dawn-to-dusk programming in a protective environment, with individual counseling, group therapy, art classes and yoga.
But center administrators sent DCFS a stream of one-page Unusual Incident Reports that use clinical language to catalog the cruelty and tumult of life inside the facility.
Over a few days in October 2011 at Lawrence Hall, staff reported that one 15-year-old wrestled another boy to the floor, tried to undress him and "started to grind his private parts against peer's thigh and mid-section." Later the same boy pinned another resident to the ground and threatened to rape him. In another incident, he pushed a third youth to the floor, unzipped the victim's pants and groped him. The 15-year-old soon joined other Lawrence Hall residents who engaged in prostitution while living at the facility, government records show.
In November 2012, one 14-year-old punched and broke exit signs, kicked a door, shattered the cover to the fire alarm and tore down a water fountain. As he walked outside and threw rocks at the windows and scattered garbage around, "staff offered choices to client to go for a walk, yoga class that was being offered, and finishing programming on the unit," said a facility report to DCFS.
Two full-time repairmen start their day at the facility with a list of broken windows and doors to replace and damaged walls to patch and paint, Lawrence Hall officials said.
A 19-year-old Lawrence Hall resident named Brian was arrested nine times last year for alleged attacks against fellow residents and staff in the facility, or for street crimes. In April 2013, Brian flashed gang signs and then beat another resident for almost an hour as Lawrence Hall staff looked on, according to a facility report to DCFS.
"He chased his peer into a corner and pounded on him until the peer broke free. Then he chased him behind the desk and pounded on him some more," said the Unusual Incident Report that Lawrence Hall filed with DCFS. "He refused to comply with directives to stop the behavior. (Brian) got more intense each time his opponent was able to break free."
In another case, Brian was arrested after allegations that he repeatedly groped and then punched a mentally disabled 16-year-old girl who attended the facility's therapeutic school as a day student, court records show. For reasons that are unclear, prosecutors later dropped battery charges.
The girl's mother told the Tribune that staff frequently left her daughter unprotected while boys from the facility beat and bullied her and other day students. "It is really a horrible place to send your kid," the mother said. "It's a rough place to go."
Internal facility reports to DCFS show that youths at Lawrence Hall brazenly smoked pot and fell down drunk in front of staff, then slept through the school day when they felt like it. Some were being administered powerful psychotropic medicines — even though experts say alcohol and marijuana abuse can interfere with the prescribed medicines, lead to risky side effects and exacerbate the youths' underlying symptoms.
Teeple said Lawrence Hall prohibited youths from smoking marijuana or using other illegal drugs. "There's not a tolerance," Teeple said. "If kids refuse to give up a joint, we call police occasionally."
But among numerous cases examined by the Tribune was one from February of last year, when an employee watched as a 16-year-old ward prepared for a counseling session by going into the washroom. He told the worker he "had to get high in order to attend group."
To buy marijuana, that youth told a court official, he turned to street crime, including stealing cellphones and breaking into cars, for the first time. He said he "began committing robberies while living at Lawrence Hall," a court report said.
For some youths, the environment at Lawrence Hall was far from therapeutic.
Foster mother KaRon Brooks recalled getting frustrated as she sought psychiatric services for a 12-year-old boy in her care who was placed at Lawrence Hall when he was 9. During one visit, Brooks said, she discovered the boy had stitches in one hand and clothes smelling of urine.
At the same time, she said, he was becoming more violent while in the facility.
"This child needs intense and continuous therapy, and they are not giving that to him. He is not getting better; he is getting worse," Brooks told the Tribune. "In my opinion they are just milking the state and baby-sitting him."
A child can remain at Lawrence Hall even when it is clear the placement is not helping him — and even when a judge believes more intervention is needed. Often there is simply no other place in the state's overburdened system to place him.
One such youth is Albert, who endured years of torment before DCFS placed him at Lawrence Hall in 2012 at age 14.
DCFS had taken custody when he was hospitalized as a 3-year-old with broken arms and welts on his buttocks. The child welfare agency "indicated" his biological father for abuse — meaning the agency found credible evidence that mistreatment took place. Albert was put in a foster home but was removed five years later because of reported sexual abuse by an older male foster child, juvenile court records show. At his next placement, a foster brother attempted to choke him.
Described as book smart and street savvy, Albert told counselors he felt out of place at Lawrence Hall and had no friends. He became a chronic runaway.
When he returned, he was often under the influence of drugs and had "significant amounts of cash," according to a facility report to juvenile court a few months later. "There has been ongoing suspicion that (Albert) has been bringing drugs onto the LHYS property and also that he is selling drugs in the community."
But even after a juvenile court judge filed an order saying Lawrence Hall was no longer an appropriate placement, Albert remained there for months as his behavior worsened. He was removed from the facility only after he was convicted of violently beating a peer and shoplifting from an electronics store. His next home, at age 15, was an Illinois youth prison.
Arthur Zacharski, now 18, lived at Lawrence Hall for about a year starting in 2012 after DCFS removed him from his home because of mistreatment allegations. At Lawrence Hall, he said, "the police would come a lot." Zacharski said he was once taken to the hospital after another youth punched him in the head from behind.
But when Lawrence Hall calmed, "there was nothing to do," he said. "There was just TV. I stayed in my room all day. I would just sleep until dinner and then go back and sleep."
To escape the alternating tedium and violence, Zacharski frequently slipped through the unlocked doors or walked out of the neighborhood high school where he was sent for classes. He stayed away for days at a time.
When Cook County wards like Zacharski go AWOL from a facility, their caseworkers should file a juvenile court Child Protection Warrant, triggering a special team of sheriff's police officers who try to track down and return the missing youth.
But the Tribune found that in most cases, that doesn't happen, and when it does, the information in the warrant is often so sparse that it is of little use to the pursuit teams. Reporters asked law enforcement authorities to review records on 55 wards who frequently ran away from Lawrence Hall, and found protective warrants were issued for only 12.
Lawrence Hall's Teeple said the facility asked caseworkers to file the warrants only when they had strong suspicions about the whereabouts of any runaway who was gone for at least 24 hours.
DCFS acting Director Bobbie Gregg said she was disappointed to learn from reporters that child protective warrants were not being used effectively. "That's something that should change and will change," she said.
Only one warrant was issued for Zacharski, even though government records show he fled Lawrence Hall 21 times in an eight-month period.
"I'd just hide, because I didn't want to go back," he said.
The boy named Steven knew what it meant to be kicked around.
Born in a West Side home wracked by domestic violence, he had been placed in state protective custody at age 5 after his mother's boyfriend physically abused him and broke the leg of one of his brothers.
For the next decade, DCFS shuttled Steven through one failed foster home after another as he started to exhibit suicidal impulses and overwhelming rage.
Finally, in February of last year, state officials placed the 14-year-old in Lawrence Hall's four-story residential center.
In his first week, facility staff took careful notes as Steven mingled with other residents. When others tried to provoke a fight, Steven avoided the conflict, saying, "I'm staying cool," according to facility records.
But the taunting continued, and then a 16-year-old punched Steven in the face, threw him to the ground and kicked him in the head, records show. When staff eventually pulled Steven free, he had abrasions on his head but declined medical attention.
Steven soon developed a new way of coping with the trouble inside Lawrence Hall: He became part of it, joining in gang fights, smoking marijuana in front of staff and leaving at will with groups of streetwise boys.
"While the minor has had a long history of behavior and anger issues, he really had no criminal history until a few months after arriving at Lawrence Hall," said one juvenile court report. "The minor states he began to gravitate toward negative peers and began to participate in crimes with them in order to fit in."
In June 2013, Steven was one of three Lawrence Hall residents who mugged an investment analyst in the 600 block of West Madison Street as she walked home from work, chatting on her cellphone with her mother. The boys punched the woman in the head, knocked her to the ground, kicked her repeatedly and dragged her by her purse, according to juvenile court reports.
A day later, Steven was back on the same block with two other boys to rob a 30-year-old software engineer. That victim was taken to Rush University Medical Center with four cracked teeth and a cut lip.
The following day, Steven and other Lawrence Hall residents were arrested at State Street and Chicago Avenue for allegedly burglarizing a parked car, according to DCFS records. Police said Steven was carrying a stolen credit card.
Despite these arrests, which Lawrence Hall knew about, a subsequent facility report to juvenile court said Steven was making "fair progress" by talking to his therapist, taking deep breaths, going for walks and sometimes doing push-ups to relieve his anger. At the facility's Therapeutic Day School, he got an A in criminology.
But in the next few months, a Lawrence Hall report noted a significant increase in Steven's episodes of property destruction, fistfights and substance abuse. One week he was arrested four times.
Subsequently, in September, Steven and two peers robbed a 13-year-old at knifepoint in the park adjacent to the facility. The teen was walking home from an after-school tutoring session when the Lawrence Hall group forced him to surrender his cellphone and Nintendo game console.
"Lawrence Hall has been there forever, but this is a new thing, letting the kids bleed out of the facility and into the streets," said the 13-year-old victim's mother, Margaret Long. "It's their responsibility to keep these kids safe. It's scary."
The lack of supervision hurts the Lawrence Hall kids, said Long, who followed the juvenile court cases stemming from the crime against her son.
"It is ridiculous that these kids are given the opportunity to ruin their futures. Being arrested time and again, all they're doing is building a record that will make it harder for them to flourish in the future," Long said. "It's dangerous for everybody."
After his juvenile court conviction for that crime, Steven was briefly placed in detention, then sent right back to the facility. There, he and two other youths were soon arrested after they broke into a Lawrence Hall supervisor's office.
By December 2013, a Lawrence Hall report acknowledged Steven's "behaviors have become increasingly reckless and dangerous, marked by the client completely disregarding the terms of his electronic monitoring so that he can go AWOL and use substances."
In January, nearly a year after he was sent to Lawrence Hall and after numerous arrests, Steven was charged with aggravated battery, armed robbery and theft in yet another case. He was convicted, and in March the courts sent him to juvenile prison.
Lawrence Hall's Teeple said she's kept in contact with Steven. "He feels safer getting locked up," she said. "We're trying to be on the spearhead of, how do we catch those kids early, those kids with those backgrounds?"
An important measure for evaluating the effectiveness of a residential facility is the percentage of its residents who "step down" to a less restrictive setting like group or foster homes and remain for at least three months.
Statewide, only about 57 percent of youths discharged from residential centers had that kind of positive discharge during 2012, the most recent year for which data were available. The others went from the facility to jail or a psychiatric hospital, ran to the streets or moved to a more restrictive residential facility, according to DCFS records on 994 wards tracked for three months.
Lawrence Hall had an even worse rate. Less than 40 percent of the youths who left its program had a positive discharge in 2012, according to DCFS records.
Even for those Lawrence Hall residents who succeeded in moving to less restrictive settings, trouble could await. Many were placed in Lawrence Hall's own network of group homes and transitional living programs around the city, where the Tribune found similar patterns of flagrant drug abuse, gang intimidation and mayhem spilling into the surrounding communities.
"The program is set up to breed criminal behavior. It is really sad," said former group home staffer Reginald King.
Lawrence Hall in recent years has closed several of its satellite group homes amid budget constraints and community protests over the AWOL youths. But until now, the large number of serious crimes associated with those facilities has remained hidden.
Several of those cases involve James Miner, who roamed the streets and attacked women as he moved from one agency group home to another starting in 2007, when he was 12.
While living at one Lawrence Hall home, Miner was convicted of groping waitress Courtney Painton, then 23, from behind on the street. When she turned to challenge him, he stared her down, she said. "It was one of the more creepy things that ever happened," Painton said.
In a separate incident, another boy held a woman by the neck as Miner fondled her breasts and then took the wallet from her purse. A group home counselor found the victim's photo ID and wallet under Miner's mattress, and he pleaded guilty to aggravated robbery.
In a third case, Miner allegedly approached a woman from behind, dragged her by the neck into an alley and made off with her backpack as she screamed for help. Police retrieved the woman's bag from the roof of the Lawrence Hall group home, but authorities dropped the charges because the victim declined to cooperate.
And in a fourth case Miner allegedly pushed a woman to the ground and began to pull off her pants but fled with her bags when she screamed. He was caught with her distinctively engraved iPod. Miner was convicted of a probation violation.
All of these cases came to the attention of Lawrence Hall administrators, records and interviews show. Lawrence Hall officials declined to discuss their handling of Miner or any specific youth, citing privacy constraints.
Then, in December 2012, while Miner still was living at a Lawrence Hall facility, he raped a 50-year-old woman who was about to enter the CTA Red Line stop at Morse, punching and choking her until she blacked out. A passing construction worker stopped the attack. She was hospitalized for days.
Last month, Miner, 20, pleaded guilty to three counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault in that case. He was sentenced to 36 years in prison.
Tribune reporter Duaa Eldeib contributed.
December 6, 2014
Legislators join Rauner, Dart in expressing outrage at Tribune findings of ill-treatment at youth centers
By David Jackson, Gary Marx and Duaa Eldieb
Public officials on Friday reacted angrily to an ongoing Tribune investigation that found juvenile state wards were assaulted and sexually abused at government-funded residential treatment centers throughout Illinois.
Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner, state lawmakers, child welfare officials and Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart all expressed outrage at the abuse of youths at some of the state's most relied-on facilities, and they vowed swift action.
Rauner issued a statement saying he is "committed to working with the legislature in a bi-partisan fashion to closely examine what happened and ensure the necessary reforms are made to prevent future tragedies like these."
State Sen. Heather Steans, D-Chicago, said lawmakers will hold a special hearing next month to look into the unsafe conditions in the facilities, as well as forming a standing subcommittee to overhaul Illinois' frayed system for serving youths with mental health problems.
The state Department of Children and Family Services said it will immediately implement corrective actions:
•The department imposed an "intake hold" on two of the troubled facilities highlighted in the Tribune reports, meaning the state will not authorize placing wards there.
•Agency staff began analyzing data and reports of harm to determine whether other centers should be sanctioned.
•The agency said it will hire an independent expert to review conditions of care at 50 centers used by the state, and then make public the results and recommendations of that review.
DCFS "has zero tolerance for the allegations of abuse, neglect and negligence outlined by the Chicago Tribune," said a statement from the agency. "We have taken swift action to address any issues that could impact the safety of those in our care. We are working with our partners in the child welfare system to continue to improve the quality of services and use our collective resources to better the lives of children in care."
In a separate development Friday, Dart issued a blistering letter to DCFS acting Director Bobbie Gregg demanding that the agency halt placements at additional facilities featured in the Tribune.
"I was saddened and disturbed to read the Chicago Tribune's account of the outrageous problems taking place in many DCFS residential centers across the state," Dart wrote. DCFS must "immediately install competent and aggressive monitors at each of those facilities to take charge and hold these centers accountable for the millions in tax dollars they receive and the precious souls they've pledged to protect."
A Chicago Tribune investigation finds that children have been assaulted and sexually abused at taxpayer-funded residential treatment centers and that state officials continue to send wards to the most troubled facilities.
Dart also asked that officers from his Child Protection Unit be able to access the facilities to safeguard youth. "Reform needs to be swift," he wrote.
At a cost to taxpayers of well over $200 million per year, the residential centers promise therapy and constant supervision to disadvantaged youths with mental health and behavioral problems. On any given day, about 1,400 wards live in the centers, although far more cycle through each year.
The Tribune found state officials failed to act on reports of harm and continued sending youths to the most troubled facilities. In the three years from 2011 through 2013, Illinois facilities sent DCFS 428 reports alleging a ward was sexually assaulted or abused while in their care and an additional 1,052 reports that a ward was physically assaulted. The centers also notified DCFS of 29,425 incidents when a ward ran away or went missing.
Child prostitution schemes took root at some of the centers, the Tribune found, and vulnerable children were terrorized by older ones and drawn into a life of crime. Some were preyed on sexually by the adults paid to care for them.
State Sen. Julie Morrison, D-Deerfield, said she was angry that DCFS and residential facility officials had failed to disclose safety breaches at the centers during previous legislative hearings.
"I am really, really disappointed that neither the providers nor the agency were forthcoming. They had an opportunity to come before a panel that wanted to help, and they didn't do it," Morrison said. Now, she said, "people need to be called out. ... January 2015, they better buckle up."
Rep. Sara Feigenholtz, D-Chicago, said: "I want somebody to look me in the eye and say, this is the best we can do for some of these kids. ... These problems are not just about resources — it's about mission, priorities and getting back to child welfare and child protection."
DCFS said the two facilities placed on intake holds were the 48-bed Lawrence Hall Youth Services facility on Chicago's Northwest Side and the 10-bed ERIC Family Services on the West Side. Both centers had high rates of youths running away, and some were involved in prostitution, the Tribune found.
The agency is more than a year behind in analyzing facility performance records that show how many days kids go on the run from each center, or are sent to jail or psychiatric hospitals. The Tribune also found DCFS does little to analyze or act on Unusual Incident Reports that facilities are required to submit whenever a ward is hurt or put in harm's way while in their care.
DCFS now has 16 monitors for the roughly 50 residential centers spread from the North Side of Chicago to southern Illinois. While current budget figures were not available, in recent years the agency has spent more than $30 million annually on monitoring the facilities, according to state budget reports and interviews.
"That's a lot of money," said Mary Shahbazian, who runs the Allendale Association facility in Lake Villa. DCFS should take this opportunity to rethink how it deploys monitors, to focus on facilities with the most problems. "That system's broken," Shahbazian said.
State Sen. Mattie Hunter, D-Chicago, also expressed frustration that DCFS has not previously acknowledged the chronic violence and runaways at some facilities. "The situation in the newspaper didn't happen overnight. Where has the monitoring been?" Hunter asked.
December 7, 2014
By Duaa Eldieb and David Jackson
The 19-year-old lay awake at night, dreading the moment when his roommate would call to him from the bunk below.
There, in the dark, the roommate would utter his name, then force him to perform sexual acts, the 19-year-old eventually told police.
"Just do it because staff won't know, and I will hurt you if you don't do it," the roommate, who was 18, would say, according to a police report.
Mentally disabled with an IQ of 50, the 19-year-old state ward is kind and friendly, his older brother says, a guy whose ideal afternoon centers on playing basketball.
He endured six months of abuse, records show. In February, a staff member came across him being groped by the roommate. But it would be at least two more days before the boys were finally separated and state child protection authorities and police were called, government records show.
Like so many youths sent to Indian Oaks Academy, the 19-year-old was a victim of sexual abuse when he arrived. The 112-bed residential treatment center in Manteno, Ill. — about 50 miles southwest of Chicago — describes itself as a nationally recognized program that specializes in providing a safe environment for treating youths who have endured sexual attacks or victimized others.
But a Tribune investigation found that in a shocking number of cases, vulnerable and traumatized youths were sent to the facility for help only to be hurt again.
In all, the Tribune identified 17 cases of alleged sexual assault or abuse of youths under Indian Oaks' care during a 21/2-year period starting in September 2011. The total number of alleged attacks is larger because some reports, including that of the mentally disabled 19-year-old, involve multiple incidents.
What happens in Indian Oaks and other residential centers is cloaked in the privacy protections for youth, but the Tribune used court and police records, confidential child welfare files and interviews with former staff and residents to reveal the failures at the facility.
Youths with histories of predatory sexual behavior were loosely supervised even as reports piled up that they preyed on weaker residents.
In at least seven of the 17 cases, facility administrators waited a day or longer before notifying police of sexual abuse allegations, records show, even though experts say such cases should be reported and investigated immediately. The facility waited nine days in one of those cases — in August 2012, when a 13-year-old boy was allegedly raped by a 17-year-old, police records show.
And in an eighth case, the facility made no police report at all.
In nearly half of the 17 cases, Indian Oaks staff told police that they had interviewed the youths and considered the sexual incidents consensual. The alleged victim in one of those cases was only 14, while two others were 15 — well under Illinois' legal age of consent, 17. The alleged perpetrators were 18 in two of the cases and 17 in the third.
"They keep it hush-hush," Marsha Dailey, who worked at Indian Oaks for five years before leaving last year, told the Tribune. "(The kids) go to the doctor, get checked for STDs and then it's brushed under the carpet."
Characterizing sex involving an underage youth as consensual can be especially damaging to children with histories of sexual trauma, said Kathleen Coulborn Faller, a University of Michigan professor who studies child sexual abuse. "That really reinforces the child's view that they're culpable when they're not," she said.
Other alleged victims at Indian Oaks had severe cognitive impairments, raising questions about whether they could consent.
For the mentally disabled 19-year-old, the nighttime abuse in his room wasn't the only torment he endured. He also reported being sexually abused on five occasions by a second resident who "threatened him and bullied him" not to tell, according to a police report.
"I was shocked," his brother told the Tribune. "He just told me something bad happened to him. He said it was sexual."
Charges were not filed in the 19-year-old's case. The two alleged attackers stayed at Indian Oaks but were moved to different programs, records show.
For kids placed in state protective custody because they were harmed in their birth or foster homes, sexual attacks and mishandled investigations at residential facilities represent one more shattered promise, said Char Rivette, executive director of Chicago Children's Advocacy Center.
"The kids need to know that no matter what happened to them in the past, they're safe there," Rivette said. "Imagine the violation. You've already been through a difficult past. You go to residential and you're told you will be safe, and you're not safe."
Indian Oaks is run by Nexus, a Minnesota-based nonprofit that last year took in about $20 million in Illinois state contracts to house and treat state wards and disadvantaged youths at the Manteno facility and a 96-bed residential and group home campus nearby, records from the state comptroller show.
Indian Oaks Executive Director Mike Chavers, who has worked at the facility for 20 years and took over as executive director in 2007, acknowledged that staff in some cases failed to adequately supervise dangerous residents and missed signs of abuse.
But he said an ongoing $14 million remodel of the campus and more intensive staff training have gone a long way in transforming the facility and making it safer. In March, he said, most residents moved into new cottages with individual bedrooms and surveillance cameras in the common areas; youths are not sleeping three or four to a room anymore.
"It's no longer a program, it's a home," he said. "I don't want these kids to be forgotten or thrown away."
Chavers provided few specifics about the cases identified by the Tribune, saying confidentiality restrictions "prohibit public access to all extenuating circumstances." Still he said all reports of sexual encounters are thoroughly investigated by police, Department of Children and Family Services and Indian Oaks.
"We do take these things seriously," he said.
He also cautioned: "We will have failures in the future too. But our commitment is to learn from these and do better for our kids."
The facility works with sexually abused youths who can behave in ways that put others at risk, Chavers said. "The fact is, these are adolescents who are sexual beings and creatures."
But, he said, "even if it's normal development, it still shouldn't happen here."
One failure that Chavers said sparked a series of difficult staff meetings and led to heightened awareness about monitoring came after the 19-year-old stepped forward to describe the abuse he suffered.
Chavers said longtime facility workers questioned themselves and each other: "'How did we let this happen?' They had a good, solid team … and they missed it."
He added: "Heartbreaking is the only word that I can put with that."
Youths sent to Indian Oaks are a special population. About 90 percent are state wards — male and female — who survived a traumatic childhood beset by abuse, neglect and often sexual victimization.
Many of them share a past marked by years of disappointment in and harm by the adults who were supposed to care for them: a mother who could not escape the hold of drugs, a father sent to prison, a family friend who took advantage when others had their backs turned.
DCFS and other officials often place those wards — many of them from Chicago — in Indian Oaks in the hopes that the rural location will provide a respite from the lawlessness and temptations of city streets.
Data show that the state relies on the facility as its primary placement for youths with sexual problems; Indian Oaks served more of these teens than any other residential center or group home from 2011 to 2013. The waiting list can span months, Chavers said.
Judging from the facility performance measures used by DCFS, Indian Oaks is doing a good job. But the measures track how long juvenile state wards are at a facility and whether they successfully stay in a less restrictive group or foster home for 90 days after being discharged — not whether they are safe while in residential care.
At Indian Oaks, the Tribune investigation found violence inside the facility often forced vulnerable children to fend for themselves.
Residents brandished fire extinguishers, metal chairs and even desktop computers as weapons, according to police reports and Unusual Incident Reports sent to DCFS. Brawls ended in trips to the hospital. One girl was pulled out of a room by her hair. Another girl stomped on a peer's face and kicked her while she was being restrained by staff. Still another resident was bullied to the point of attempting suicide by choking herself with the cord from an MP3 player.
Davonlesha Calloway, a former Indian Oaks resident, said the physical restraint holds used by staff to restore order would spark flashbacks of the terrifying sexual assaults she endured as a child — the abuse that put her in DCFS care. Chavers said facility staff use restraints as infrequently and respectfully as possible.
"It made me want to isolate myself and sit in the dark," said Calloway, who now lives in a foster home. "I felt like DCFS, they take us out of the bad situation and put us in a worser situation."
Eager to flee, residents hurled bricks and pieces of broken furniture through the facility's windows. They passed notes to each other and slipped out through the unlocked and loosely guarded doors. Earlier this year, a 17-year-old girl went AWOL, running barefoot on a freezing February night. Her frostbite was so severe that she was temporarily in a wheelchair.
There were other consequences.
In a September 2011 incident, three boys and a mentally disabled 17-year-old girl ran from the facility and vanished into nearby cornfields. Their plan was to hide until morning and then keep running. But before morning dawned, one of the boys allegedly climbed on top of the girl, pulled off her clothes and raped her, the 17-year-old told police.
"I told him not to," she said to police. A second boy held her down during the episode, according to police records.
When the girl returned to Indian Oaks "dirty and disoriented," she was crying and "had corn in her hair," a former employee told the Tribune. Police found red marks on her neck. But at trial, the boys were found not guilty. They returned to Indian Oaks — as did the girl.
Angelique Borden, who spent nearly five years at the facility beginning in 2007, said the male residents often pressured the girls to go AWOL. "They were trying to get the girls to go on run with them to have sex," said Borden, now 22, who was a victim of childhood sexual abuse.
Many youths ran to an abandoned building across the street — a massive, asbestos-infested structure with rotting ceilings and floors that stands as one of the few reminders that Indian Oaks occupies the grounds of a former state psychiatric asylum. Youths, some of them sex offenders, would have sex with fellow residents on the cold floor or in the darkened basement, records and interviews show.
Last November, a 15-year-old girl told an Indian Oaks employee she had gone with an 18-year-old fellow resident to the abandoned building and had sex with him there.
The employee called police, telling them: "Kids are always going into it," according to a brief police report on the call. The employee said she would give the girl a pregnancy test and added that the sex was consensual. No officer came to the facility to investigate.
Calloway was another teen who went to the abandoned building to have sex with an older resident; she says he was 18. She was 14 and worried he could be put in jail if any adults found out.
According to a subsequent police report, Indian Oaks staff reported this as a "consensual sexual incident that occurred between two DCFS wards."
Some of the runaways make the 5-mile trek to truck stops along Interstate 57 in hopes of trading sex for a ride to Chicago, where many have family.
"The kids will do anything to get out of the area," said Lt. Chad Gessner of the Kankakee County Sheriff's Office, who also serves on an Indian Oaks community advisory committee. "When they're on their own, they're going to do whatever they need. If it's offering up sex to get a ride, they don't care."
Youths run away from Indian Oaks so often that police said they are accustomed to shining their spotlights into the cornfields and above the fences of unsuspecting neighbors.
"When you have sex offenders on the run, that's not good for anybody," Gessner said. "That's a danger to society."
Single-family homes with landscaped yards line the nearby streets. Neighbor Wayne Riner spoke of how his wife fears for her safety every time she sees an Indian Oaks runaway dart by.
"It bothers her," he said, adding that he would never have moved to the area had he known how distressing it would be to see the youths running past their home.
The case of 18-year-old Shawn Basner is emblematic of just how easily Indian Oaks youths can lure and attack peers in isolated areas like a vacant bathroom or closet.
When Basner arrived at Indian Oaks, he was a registered sex offender who had already faced a 2012 sexual abuse charge from his time at Lutherbrook Child and Adolescent Center, a residential facility in DuPage County, according to court records. In that case, Basner allegedly sodomized a younger resident in a facility weight room, then lied to police by telling them he was the victim, court records show.
Less than a year later at Indian Oaks, Basner was accused of cornering a 17-year-old in a bathroom, pressing a needlelike object against his back and threatening to stab him, according to a police report. He allegedly ordered the youth to disrobe, then raped him.
"Again, it was a breakdown in supervision," Chavers said.
Basner was not charged in that July 2013 case, records show.
Then in March of this year, Basner sexually abused a younger resident, this time in a cleaning closet. Although both residents described the acts as consensual, Basner told police he knew the victim was a minor and said "it was wrong," according to police records.
Basner was charged with criminal sexual abuse, which prompted DuPage authorities to ask for resentencing. In October, he pleaded guilty to the charge at Indian Oaks and began serving a two-year prison sentence in the DuPage County case.
"The kids show us the weaknesses in our system," Chavers said. "It's up to us to decide how we are going to learn from it."
A ward of the state who had suffered childhood sexual and physical abuse, Basner told the Tribune that he felt Indian Oaks provided little effective therapy or supervision.
"It's really easy to do what you want to do there. ... There'll be different times that there'll be only a couple staff and they'll be extremely busy, and that's when two clients can sneak into a bathroom or go on run," he said. From inside Stateville prison, Basner said he is now working with a chaplain to end the cycle of abuse that turned him from victim to perpetrator.
"I am trying to throw the past behind me. I don't want to live out the past," he said.
The Tribune found only one other Indian Oaks resident charged in a sexual assault case since 2011. Last year Joseph LaFan, then 18, allegedly took a box cutter from a closet, forced a younger boy to go outside, then allegedly raped him while wielding the box cutter and a brick, covering his victim's mouth to prevent him from calling for help, according to court and police records.
LaFan pleaded not guilty to felony sexual assault and abuse charges. At a September hearing, he stood silently in his orange jumpsuit and black-rimmed glasses, his hands shackled, as the judge set another date for his case.
Kimberley Donald, the Kankakee County public defender who represents LaFan, said no rape took place and added that she was surprised LaFan was prosecuted for alleged sexual conduct that so often goes without consequences at Indian Oaks.
"I just don't know why Joseph was singled out," said Donald, a former prosecutor. "It's odd because I know sexual activity occurs among residents. I don't know why Joseph was charged as opposed to other people."
Experts and advocates for exploited children say the protocol is simple when a child reports being abused at a facility like Indian Oaks: Immediately take the alleged victim to a neutral, nonthreatening area to be questioned by a trained forensic investigator.
That would eliminate any possibility that facility staff could try to protect themselves or their employers by coaching the youth to downplay what occurred. And it avoids having multiple people question the victim, which could muddy his or her account or re-traumatize the youth.
The Tribune found no signs in records or interviews that such a policy is in place at Indian Oaks.
Chavers said the facility calls police and DCFS, but it is up to those agencies — not Indian Oaks — to contact a trained, independent investigator. While he said such an investigator "appears to be consistently involved where there is evidence of a sexual assault," he could not list a specific number of cases.
DCFS acting Director Bobbie Gregg said she presumed that independent investigators were frequently used.
"I was not aware that this was an issue. ... That's something we should look at," Gregg said. While she saw the problem as one of limited resources, Gregg said: "Our primary responsibility to each one of our children is to keep them safe, and so decisions should be made on the child's safety."
Hearing from reporters about the repeated incidents of sexual abuse at Indian Oaks, Gregg added: "Obviously, it's distressing that that happened."
Among the most disturbing of the 17 cases examined by the Tribune were two reports of sexual misconduct by male employees.
In 2012, resident Nancy Rivera, then 17, waited 16 days before alleging that a facility employee had raped her on a couch in a common room.
"In my head I'm like, 'Should I tell? Will they believe me? He's been here a long time,'" Rivera, now 20, told the Tribune.
Police did not find DNA evidence, and no charges were filed. The employee was placed on administrative leave during Indian Oaks' internal investigation, Chavers said, but the staffer denied the allegations and eventually returned to work.
For Rivera, that outcome was crushing. "I've been abused and raped as a little girl," she said, "I went to Indian Oaks to deal with my trauma and behavior and my anger towards life — and then this happened."
Chavers stands by the facility's handling of the case, saying there was not enough evidence to find the allegation credible. "We didn't have reason to terminate," Chavers said.
In a second case, a 17-year-old female resident reported to an Indian Oaks supervisor in 2013 that an employee had approached her about "hooking up" to have sex when she was discharged, according to a subsequent police report.
Indian Oaks completed an internal investigation and determined that her complaint was unfounded, according to the police report. The employee, who was more than a decade older, was told to stay away from the girl.
A month later, records show, the girl again sought help from the Indian Oaks supervisor, saying she wanted pregnancy and STD testing because the employee had sex with her twice.
This time, the facility contacted police. An Indian Oaks supervisor told them the girl said the sexual incidents were consensual, records show. The employee was not charged.
Chavers said Indian Oaks officials placed the employee on administrative leave while they completed an internal investigation, then fired him.
Tribune reporter Gary Marx contributed.
December 7, 2014
Drug use, sex common inside decaying former asylum where youths go in search of sanctuary, knowing Indian Oaks staff won’t go after them
By Duaa Eldieb and David Jackson
The youths living at Indian Oaks Academy knew staff members were forbidden to follow them into the hulking abandoned building next door. With its crumbling walls, shattered windows and collapsing ceilings, it was too dangerous.
Once inside the building — the remnants of a decaying former psychiatric asylum — youths sometimes hid for days, former facility residents told the Tribune. They said they spent idle hours dancing, doing drugs, having sex and planning how to escape to the streets of Chicago and beyond.
The building presents an ongoing danger to the youths at Indian Oaks Academy, a 112-bed residential center in Manteno, Ill., that is supposed to provide intensive treatment and constant supervision for abused juvenile wards of the state. Beyond the physical hazards, time spent in the vacant structure undermines treatment and facilitates the delinquent behavior that can continue long after the youths have been discharged.
In May, a 15-year-old girl ran to the brick shell and attempted suicide by eating shards of glass and stabbing herself in the stomach, police records show. She vomited blood, sustained cuts to her arms and was rushed to the hospital.
On one fall morning, a moldy mattress, smashed beer bottles and cans of Silly String littered the ground. "We all come from broken homes," declared one of more than a dozen messages spray-painted on the building's pale walls.
The building doesn't look like any kind of haven, and the facility told residents to stay out. But one former Indian Oaks resident, Miss Cannon, said she found a strange comfort there as a 15-year-old. And running away to get inside was no problem.
"It was very easy," she said. "Easy as one, two, three."
Once, under the gaping holes in the ceiling, she "married" a fellow resident. He pulled out a white rubber loop — the kind used to weave bracelets — and slipped it on her finger. It was one of the few moments she felt happy at Indian Oaks.
"It wasn't a real ring, but I was blushing," she recalled.
Cannon was 13 when she was first sent to the facility to help address the sexual abuse she had endured and the post-traumatic stress that followed. But she felt caged there, she said, and internal Department of Children and Family Services reports show she lashed out at peers and staff. She would spend time in juvenile detention after she attacked a staffer, leaving him with a concussion, a broken jaw and a bite mark, records show.
This year, Indian Oaks discharged her to a group home on Chicago's South Side. She ran from there almost immediately and is now listed as missing by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The Tribune found her taking refuge in a foreclosed apartment on the West Side with no running water — and fearing for her future.
"I'm going to die soon. I know it," she said.
Like Indian Oaks, the abandoned building is part of the former Manteno State Hospital, a sprawling psychiatric asylum that closed in the 1980s amid allegations of patient abuse and a shrinking population.
Mike Chavers, Indian Oaks' executive director, confirmed that facility workers were instructed not to enter, even when they knew runaways were gathered there. "The building is just unsafe, completely, in every possible way," he said.
Records show that two businessmen bought the vacant building in 2005. One, Daniel Greene, filed for bankruptcy last year. The second, Michael Cousin, has not attended ongoing court proceedings related to the owners' failure to secure the building or address its asbestos hazards.
The two men told the Tribune they repeatedly boarded up the doorways and posted "No trespassing" signs, only to see these precautions removed.
Both said they had donated the building to Indian Oaks about a year ago, but Chavers said the donation has yet to be completed. Indian Oaks estimates it will spend more than $300,000 to raze the building.
"It's a magnet for our kids," Chavers said. "That's why we're paying to tear it down."
December 8, 2014
Residential centers’ staff look the other way as youths leave for street corners, pimps
By David Jackson and Duaa Eldieb
The central Illinois truck stop was chilly and dark on the November morning last year when Mary Bohanan was arrested for prostitution.
Handcuffed in a Bloomington police squad car, the 19-year-old squirmed in her tight miniskirt and crumpled knee-high boots. Blond-tinted curls fell around her face and dark liner rimmed her tired eyes. It was just after 5 a.m.
As police frisked her pimp, she expressed fear that he might spot her through the squad car window and punish her for getting caught. "I'm scared. ... He can see us?" Bohanan asked the arresting officer, according to the police video of the scene.
The young woman offered to truckers for $20 was a juvenile ward of the state who endured a history of abuse before being placed in 2012 at Rock River Academy in Rockford, where officials pledge to keep youths safe and give them a shot at a better life.
Instead she fell into a world of sexual exploitation that seems to be accepted as a fact of life at some of the large residential treatment centers that get millions of taxpayer dollars each year to care for Illinois' most destitute and troubled young wards, a Tribune investigation found.
The prostitution emerges against a backdrop of violence at the facilities where the threat of sexual coercion is common, residents frequently square off in fights, destroy property, abuse medications and attack peers or staff, government records show.
Teenagers who were prostituted told the Tribune they would run away to escape the turbulence and brutality — then do what survival required on streets where they had no money or life skills. At the facilities, experienced residents introduced others to pimps, escort websites and street corners. Some disappeared into this world and never returned.
Rock River promises close supervision and intensive therapy to youths with behavioral and mental health problems, but state records show that Bohanan was repeatedly attacked by tougher girls — punched in the face, hit with a chair and taunted by a peer who poured a carton of milk on her bed.
"The kids do what they want, and the staff can't control them," Bohanan told the Tribune. "To me, it's like a game to survive. There's fighting, there's sexual acts going on with the peers. ... Girls come out worse and have more mental problems."
Bohanan started running away to the streets, according to Department of Children and Family Services records.
Some Rock River staff were aware that Bohanan was being prostituted when she left the 59-bed facility. In one 2012 incident, Rockford police brought her back with a large bruise that she said came from a beating by a local pimp, government records show.
Another Rock River runaway, age 15, was admitted to a Chicago hospital after she was sexually assaulted at gunpoint by a man who was preparing to prostitute her from a South Side motel, according to Rockford police reports and DCFS records.
"It was this guy who said he would take me to get a tattoo, but he took me to a hotel room," the girl told the Tribune. "He made me put on whore's clothes. I got raped."
In a close look at two residential centers — Rock River and Lawrence Hall Youth Services in Chicago — the Tribune identified 14 youths since 2011 whose engagement in prostitution while on brief runs from the facilities was confirmed through police, court or child welfare records. In addition to the youths identified in government records, former residents and staff described cases of prostitution by some 20 other facility residents. The Tribune cross-checked these accounts through multiple interviews.
The newspaper also used records and interviews to reveal sex trafficking at several other government-funded facilities that house hundreds of state wards.
If young sex trafficking victims are picked up by police, a DCFS policy guideline says residential facilities should immediately alert state child welfare officials and offer counseling and practical assistance. But at Rock River and other facilities, Tribune interviews with former residents and staff revealed, some staff members openly mocked these youths, sometimes calling them whores.
"When the staff would find out about things like that, some of them would start hitting on the girls and some of them would start calling them names like whore and slut," said former Rock River resident Dallas Donati, 18. Experts say that response can destroy an already-distressed youth's sense of self-worth.
DCFS acting Director Bobbie Gregg said she was shocked to hear reports that facility staff had ridiculed residents who engaged in sex trafficking. "I'm outraged that any of the staff who work with our youth would have that kind of callous and irresponsible attitude. ... It's not acceptable," she said. "We do not consider them prostitutes. They are victims."
Gregg said the Tribune findings highlight an inherent problem with residential facilities. "One of the reasons not to have troubled youth in congregate care is because of the influence they can have on each other. That's another reason why my preference would be ... a family home setting," Gregg said.
Gregg said she was not aware of any specific pattern of prostitution at the state's residential centers. But DCFS officials separately acknowledged that only a fraction of the prostitution cases among state wards are identified by authorities.
The agency and Illinois law enforcement have taken initial steps to raise awareness and improve reporting "so we can get a more accurate indication of how extensive of a problem is it," Gregg said.
DCFS has held training sessions for hundreds of caseworkers and facility staff, and in May began placing posters in shelters and residential centers that show a notorious Chicago pimp with the words, "This is not your 'Daddy' ... You are not for sale."
Karen Johnson, a senior vice president and compliance officer for Rock River's owner, the multibillion-dollar Universal Health Services Inc., said she objected to any suggestion that there was a pattern of prostitution among Rock River girls or that a lack of care helped promote such behavior.
"It's important to also understand that in many cases ... these patients come in with long histories of abuse and trauma, including even being prostituted by their family members or their foster families or their guardians," Johnson said. "Many come with this as part of their picture, requiring the care that we, I believe, very carefully and thoughtfully provide to these troubled kids."
Johnson declined to discuss any specific residents.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart has hired and trained three former sex workers to counsel youths picked up on the streets and assigned a team of deputies to find those who are missing. But Dart expressed frustration at the number of youths who walk out the "revolving front doors" of residential centers and into the arms of sex traffickers.
"Can't we protect them better?" he asked. "The state is supposed to be taking the place of the parents. What parent would sit there, looking at her daughter, and say: 'Nothing I can do — she's 16 and she wants to just leave at 2 in the morning. Nothing I can do — she's been doing it for a month now. Nothing I can do — she's hanging out with pimps'?
"Nobody would do that. But yet we cling to this broken model."
In downstate Robinson Correctional Center, Darren Edmondson is serving a six-year sentence for crimes that include pimping Bohanan. Police records state that he offered her to men at the Bloomington truck stop by lifting her shirt to expose her bare chest.
She was the only Rock River resident he prostituted, he told the Tribune, but he said runaways from similar Illinois residential facilities had worked for him.
With histories of abandonment, abuse and exploitation, he said, many of these girls had come to feel on some level that they deserved harsh treatment.
"I learned that, being traumatized the way they were, they were open to anybody and subject to anything," said Edmondson, 28, who acknowledged pimping since he was a teenager.
"All they needed was a little attention. ... Whoever watches over these group homes, if they paid a little more attention to the girls' feelings and not just the rules, I think (the girls) would feel a little more comfortable in there. I know for a fact that is why they run. ... I would welcome them with open arms."
Asked to describe Bohanan, Edmondson said: "She is easily persuaded. She is real green — fresh, young-minded."
Adopted from Lebanon as an infant, Bohanan had learning and psychological disabilities and suffered abuse as a young girl, according to juvenile court records and her own account. She was raped at age 9 by a 12-year-old boy when they were on a special-education school field trip, records show.
Like some children who have experienced abuse, Bohanan went on to be accused of abusing younger schoolmates and peers. She also began running from her adopted home.
By the time she was 17, Bohanan experienced at least 11 psychiatric hospitalizations and was picked up by police more than 24 times, mostly for running away but also for allegedly stealing a cellphone and for possessing cocaine, records show.
"She has allegedly been prostituting," said a DCFS report from October 2011, when Bohanan was 17.
Placed at Rock River in May 2012, Bohanan was quickly embroiled in the fistfights that characterize daily life there.
She began fleeing the facility, and in one of the runaway reports examined by the Tribune, staff waited 16 hours to notify police. In that July 2012 incident, a Rock River administrator called police and said Bohanan had run away the night before. The administrator said she wasn't sure where Bohanan was "but believes she would go to the west side of Rockford where she can make money," according to a police report.
That night, Bohanan made local TV news when she was swept up in a Rockford police prostitution sting along with seven other women.
By that point in the evening, she had engaged in six or seven acts of prostitution, she later told police. Bohanan said she did not use condoms because she did not have any. She said she was given marijuana to smoke as well as "a white rock that was gooey inside" and also alcohol.
"Mary reports that she is scared of her pimp because he knows she is placed in Rock River," said a DCFS report to juvenile court from that incident. She was worried he could easily track her down.
Court documents show that Bohanan sought to remain in detention rather than return to Rock River. But youths in Illinois cannot be charged with prostitution, and she was sent back to the facility.
There, Bohanan engaged in sex with younger residents, according to facility reports — although she told the Tribune the incidents were consensual. Bohanan's DCFS caseworker repeatedly tried to get her placed in a more secure and therapeutic facility.
"Mary has made no treatment progress since coming into care" at Rock River, her DCFS child welfare specialist wrote in one 2012 report to a McLean County juvenile court.
But according to a juvenile court report, DCFS supervisors and Rock River staff argued that she should stay, "as they believe she will run away no matter where she is placed and there was not a clinical justification to move her."
Bohanan's mother, Antoinette Bohanan, recalled begging juvenile court and DCFS officials to put Mary somewhere she would be safe and secure and get meaningful therapy.
"Why did they just keep sticking her back at Rock River Academy?" Antoinette Bohanan asked. "One time she told me that she took three other girls with her on the run. I called Rock River corporate and said, 'Now she is taking younger girls with her — when is this going to stop?'"
Far from the cornfields and country roads surrounding Rock River, similar patterns of escape and sex trafficking emerged as the Tribune tracked down runaways and examined police records.
One young woman described to reporters how she was prostituted at age 15 on the streets of Chicago after she was sent to the 10-bed all-female ERIC Family Services residential group home on the West Side.
"It was easy," that teenager told the Tribune. "You see other people doing it; why not get out there and do it yourself?" At the facility, she added: "You turn into a whole different person."
That former ERIC resident told Tribune reporters she could make hundreds of dollars a night from 10 or more customers on nearby streets. But she kept little of the money because she soon came under the control of a West Side pimp. "Once you get a pimp, you had to do what you was told," she said. "It was frightening. You get traded, and now you're looking at this other pimp."
ERIC, which is paid about $900,000 a year by government agencies, had the state's highest runaway rate among residential facilities and group homes last year, with 16 percent of the girls AWOL on an average day, internal DCFS data show.
Former ERIC resident Tierra Tolentino, 20, said some staff were aware that residents were involved in prostitution from talking to the girls who returned with cash in hand. "They knew," she said.
In March, ERIC staff noted in a report to DCFS that a 16-year-old girl who left the facility in the evening had "yelled out that she was headed out to make her some money."
The Tribune made repeated attempts to get comment from ERIC officials but received no response.
Interviews with prostituted teens show they were driven by deeply complex motives. Many described how desperate they were to escape the violence of their institutions. Once on the run, with no one to turn to for even a hot meal, some believed the sex trade was their only way to survive.
At the same time, others spoke with pride about buying status-symbol jewelry and tattoos with the money they earned. Several said their pimps provided stability, protection and love — even as those adults took their pay, meted out beatings and sent them back to work.
With family histories of drug abuse and sex trafficking — and tragic personal stories of sexual victimization — many said they were living the only life they knew.
Jason "Keyona" Laws had already engaged in prostitution before entering a 48-bed residential center run by Lawrence Hall Youth Services in the Ravenswood neighborhood. But Laws, who was 16 when she arrived there in 2011, hoped the facility would offer a haven and a new start.
Laws was housed on a wing of the facility set aside for gay, bisexual and transgender youth, offering "a safe, non-judgmental space to express themselves," according to Lawrence Hall's website.
Instead, Laws said, she was taunted by two boys within days of arriving. A facility worker tried to stop the fight that broke out, but one of the boys knocked Laws down and stepped on her face, DCFS reports show.
Soon she was leaving the facility with other transgender or bisexual youth who would dress in short skirts and head out as a group many nights to sell their bodies for cash.
"We used to go out in below-zero weather to prostitute in the winter," Laws told the Tribune. "Staff knew what we were doing. We used to talk about it."
In September 2012, a Lawrence Hall worker was driving a van five blocks east of the facility when he saw a 15-year-old resident soliciting passers-by with offers of sex. According to a facility report to DCFS, the employee asked what that youth was doing. The resident responded: "Girl making my money."
In another report a month later, a 16-year-old boy left Lawrence Hall wearing red and black leggings, a trim leather jacket and a cat-ears headband as he announced to a peer "that he is going to the same spot they were at yesterday and make some more money."
The Tribune used police, court and DCFS records to identify at least nine Lawrence Hall youths who engaged in prostitution while living at the facility.
"Some of the younger ones started prostituting at Lawrence Hall," said Laws, now 19.
In a letter to the Tribune from the Pinckneyville Correctional Center, former Lawrence Hall resident Larry "Lala" Hartison wrote that she will be forever grateful for the facility's support as she achieved her identity as a woman.
But Hartison, who is in prison for stealing cars, also acknowledged being among a group that engaged in sex trafficking there.
"Nobody was forced into nothing; what I will call it was peer pressure," Hartison wrote. "Every kid went AWOL all the time, and of course kids went together when they did so."
Hartison was "pushed by an older resident to go and to make a quick buck."
"That always happens," Hartison added. "And where do most of them end up? On Belmont, selling sex for money."
Laws ran for good after a couple of months at Lawrence Hall, saying she felt safer on the streets. Looking back, she added: "I was out on the streets doing things I should not have been doing, especially being a DCFS ward. I feel like something needs to be done, so that this doesn't happen to other kids."
After examining the nine cases cited by the Tribune, Lawrence Hall Executive Vice President Julie Youngquist noted that about half of those youths came to the facility with histories of prostitution, and almost all had been sexually victimized. Youngquist said facility records from the last two years revealed no similar pattern of prostitution.
Kevin Pleasant, who headed Lawrence Hall's LGBT program before leaving this year, said it was widely known that groups of residents — some as young as 13 — were prostituting themselves, and there was little the facility could do about it.
"You can't stop them," Pleasant said. "The reality is you can't monitor them in the street because you are not there. ... It hurt."
In the wake of the Tribune's reporting on residential centers in recent days, DCFS last week placed Lawrence Hall and ERIC Family Services on intake hold — meaning no new wards will be sent there. "We have taken swift action to address any issues that could impact the safety of those in our care," the agency said.
At Rock River, some former staff also said they were aware that girls were regularly leaving to engage in prostitution.
In 2012, a 14-year-old Rock River resident named Claire was briefly detained in a high-prostitution area of Rockford standing alongside a registered sex offender and a parolee, police records show. She told police she was staying with a woman named Yolanda — a pattern and name familiar to at least one Rock River employee.
A Rock River nurse contacted by police said she had "heard through different girls in the facility" that Yolanda took in runaway girls. Yolanda, according to the nurse's account, "gave them a place to stay … in return she would prostitute them."
In Tribune interviews, two former Rock River residents recalled a separate incident involving Claire: As staff drove a group of residents back to the facility after an outing at a roller rink, they passed the girl walking the streets.
"The kids seen her in high heels and a dress. We go, 'Oh my God! That's Claire,'" said Izabela Stanislawczyk, 18, a former Rock River resident. "Staff said, 'What the f--- is she wearing?' They didn't do anything."
Claire has been missing since June, and in September the nonprofit Truckers Against Trafficking asked truckers to keep an eye out for the teen, posting an Internet profile with her photo and name and describing her as "at high risk for trafficking."
"These are kids who have no resources," said Kendis Paris, the organization's executive director. "They don't know where their next meal is coming from."
At the now-closed Larkin Center in Elgin, juvenile court records describe a 13-year-old girl who was prostituted by "an older male in his twenties" during her frequent runs from the facility.
During one run in 2011, staff followed for a short distance, admonished her that a police report would be made, and then left her. She was found a day later, beaten.
When she ran again a few months later, police picked her up in Rockford. Back at Larkin, she asked staff to examine her, saying she had sex with two men "to have a place to stay." On another run, she reported that she had been gang raped.
Larkin's former executive director, Dennis Graf, said staff did everything in their power to keep the residents from eloping and worked with police to help find them, knowing they faced dire realities on the street. "These young girls are not treated well. This isn't a 'Pretty Woman' type scenario," he said.
Some former residents of Indian Oaks Academy in Manteno, about 50 miles southwest of Chicago, told the Tribune that when they ran away they prostituted themselves so they would never have to go back to the bleak environment of the facility.
One 17-year-old who ran away last year described Indian Oaks as "the worst place anybody could be in." She said she begged for money for a train ticket to Chicago and, once there, initially sold candy bars on the street to support herself.
A few weeks later, she ran into another former resident who was prostituting. "I used to say I'm never going to do that," the 17-year-old said. But, she said, "selling candy bars wasn't making any money."
The girl soon joined "the ward squad," a group of former Indian Oaks residents who say they prostitute in the Roseland neighborhood.
Ward squad veterans gave her advice on everything from street survival to how much to charge johns, said another member, Kierra Scurry, 17, who said she no longer works as a prostitute.
"When you here, how you finna make money? You can't get a job. You on run. You either sell drugs or sell your body," Scurry said. "The streets make you turn a different way."
Indian Oaks Executive Director Mike Chavers said facility staff work closely with the youths who enter the program with histories of prostitution. When they run, he said, staff members follow and engage with the youths in hopes of bringing them back. But once they have disappeared, staff cannot control what they do next.
Another former Indian Oaks resident, who is 16, said in an interview from Chicago that she endured repeated attacks as she prostituted herself to pay for clothes, food, hygiene products and her cellphone service.
"I've been raped so many times," she said. "The struggle is real."
Mary Bohanan's journey to the Bloomington truck stop began in late October 2013, when two Rock River staffers drove her to Chicago for a psychiatric exam so she could qualify for disability benefits.
When no one was watching, she slipped through a hospital back door and down a stairwell, according to government records and interviews.
Bohanan told Bloomington police that she initially sought shelter from an 18-year-old Facebook friend named Jeremiah, records show. But instead, she said, "Jeremiah plays me and sells me."
Turned over to pimp Edmondson, Bohanan said she was kept in a Bloomington apartment and forced to have sex with more than a dozen men who gave Edmondson cash and drugs in return.
"He had me doing this all the three days I was gone," Bohanan told police. "I didn't want to."
At one point, Bohanan tried to flee with a woman named Holly. But Edmondson slapped Holly to the ground and grabbed Bohanan's arm and hair to drag her back, Bohanan told police.
"He said, 'Bitch, I own you!'" Bohanan told police. "So then I got to working. Because I got scared."
Now 20, Bohanan was recently living in a threadbare Rockford public housing apartment with a man she met at a Rockford bus station — someone she said she truly cares for.
"I can take a lot of pain, but I also hide the pain," Bohanan said. "It's weird. ... I feel like I'm strong because I have not yet been mean to other people."
Tribune reporter Gary Marx contributed.
December 9, 2014
Struggling to maintain control, some treatment centers call in police when young residents spit, throw food or push staff
By David Jackson and Gary Marx with reporting by Medill Watchdog
Placed in a Wisconsin residential treatment center for youths with behavioral and mental health problems, the teenager ran away for a night to visit his girlfriend.
He returned the next morning to find the facility doors locked. In a moment of anger, the boy broke a window and climbed back into the only home he had, frightening other residents.
Staff called police, and the youth was charged with criminal damage to property and disorderly conduct, then booked into the La Crosse County Juvenile Detention Facility, according to a police report from that November 2012 incident.
Across the country, including Illinois, arrests like this have become commonplace at taxpayer-funded facilities that house juvenile state wards with histories of abuse, as well as low-income youths with behavioral and mental health problems, an investigation by the Tribune and Northwestern University's Medill Watchdog found.
The residential facilities sometimes summoned police to quell disturbances and investigate reports of extreme violence, from gang brawls to rape, but law enforcement officers were also used as a behavior management tool as overwhelmed staff struggled to control youths in their care. The Tribune-Medill team found that police detained residents for throwing food, threatening workers, spitting, trying to run away or pushing back when employees restrained them.
In many cases, already disadvantaged youths acquired criminal rap sheets or faced court hearings for actions that were predictable given their behavioral and mental health problems.
No national data exist that track or categorize arrests of youths at residential treatment centers. But records show some facilities made hundreds of calls to police each year.
Among Illinois' roughly 50 residential centers, the median rate of police detentions has spiked tenfold in recent years, according to state Department of Children and Family Services data provided to the Tribune under open records laws. To calculate those rates, the department measured the number of times youths were detained by police against the number of youths in a facility's care each day from 2010 through 2013.
Experts say that repeatedly calling in police to restore calm is a sign that a facility has inadequate staff, poor training and ineffective programming — or that it is simply accepting kids it cannot handle.
"It shouldn't happen if you have the right kind of kids for your program, and the right program for their acting-out behavior," said Robert Bloom, a former facility director who now serves on the Illinois Community and Residential Services Authority, a state agency dedicated to improving services for youths with mental illnesses.
Mark Covall, CEO of the National Association of Psychiatric Health Systems, a trade group that represents facilities nationally, said of police interventions: "You should be putting in place procedures and approaches that minimize that."
At the Family and Children's Center in La Crosse, Wis., where the runaway was arrested for breaking back in, 16 residents were detained for disorderly conduct from 2011 through 2013. One youth's alleged crime was trying to push past a staff member to go to his room. Another ran outside and made noise in the parking lot. And a third threw a chair, breaking a light, and then pulled down a bookcase. Police took that boy away even though staff acknowledged he was acting on delusions during a mental health crisis.
Former facility President Mike Boehm acknowledged the apparent unfairness but said a growing police presence was inevitable given severe state budget cuts that have made it increasingly difficult to hire and retain quality staff.
"If you go back five years, you would see very few police calls to our residential facility — a small, small fraction of what you see today," said Boehm, who resigned last month after 18 years at the center.
The La Crosse facility can pay direct-care workers a starting hourly wage of only about $9.50, he said, and about half of those employees leave within a year because the job is exhausting and dangerous. Exacerbating the problem, government records and interviews show, is the growing number of severely troubled youths that state and local authorities across the country send to these facilities.
"We are in a downward spiral of quality and outcomes and our ability to survive," Boehm said of residential youth centers in Wisconsin. "I don't think it's good that kids who come into residential care don't have a police history or criminal record and when they leave they do. I think that's bad."
The pattern of arrests at residential treatment centers came to light in an unprecedented Tribune-Medill Watchdog investigation that gathered well over 66,000 pages of police and state monitoring reports on more than 100 facilities.
The records reveal brutality and turbulence inside many of the estimated 500 U.S. centers where some 50,000 mostly disadvantaged youths are placed for treatment, many of them children whose care is funded by government agencies.
Detailed law enforcement records were available for a subset of 37 facilities in nine states. There, young residents were detained by police at least 550 times during the three-year period from 2011 through 2013, reporters found.
In Berea, Ohio, a 17-year-old suicidal resident who broke a window with a chair and threatened to cut herself with a 10-inch piece of the shattered glass was charged with disorderly conduct and criminal damage before being taken to a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, police records show.
Facility owner OhioGuidestone said staff call police only when they can't calm a violent situation. "Charges are rarely filed against our youth unless they are excessively violent, fail to respond to our attempts to de-escalate them, or repeatedly engage in dangerous behavior," the company said.
In Georgia, several residents who were defiant and ran away from a Twin Cedars Youth & Family Services facility were charged with the status offense of being "ungovernable," police records show. The facility declined to comment for this story.
At Bar None Residential Treatment Services in Anoka, Minn., one resident was charged with assault for throwing two carrots at a peer, hitting him on the cheek, according to police records. Another youth who threatened staff and dislocated a worker's thumb when swinging part of a whiteboard was charged with terroristic threats, assault and criminal damage to property.
Terry Thompson, director of residential services for Volunteers of America-Minnesota, which runs Bar None, said that "regardless of what a resident is struggling with, we expect them to obey the law. If they are abusive to a staff member, our staff always has the right to press charges."
In an Indianapolis case, the mother of a boy arrested after a fistfight at a Lutheran Child and Family Services center complained to administrators that her son had been arrested for assault when "he was suppose(d) to have been sent to a safe place to work on substance abuse," according to a 2012 facility report to court officials. That facility declined to comment.
In the Tribune-Medill analysis, one of the centers with the most police interventions was Foundations for Living in Mansfield, Ohio. From 2011 through 2013, there were well over 100 reports of youths detained by police there, including cases where residents spit on staff while being restrained, stole cigarettes from a worker's car and pulled the casing off a smoke alarm.
In about 30 cases when police detained Foundations youths for allegedly attacking staff, police records said there were no injuries. In more than two dozen other cases, staff had minor injuries like scrapes and bruises.
Foundations' corporate owner, Universal Health Services Inc., said in a written statement that the facility strives to avoid police and court interventions but some youths are on probation and must be charged "even if we disagree. ... Our practice is not to press charges for minor incidents if we believe treatment is the better alternative for the patient."
In Illinois, a DCFS policy directive says police should never be called into a youth residential treatment center "as a form of discipline," when a child is resisting restraint or seclusion, or "to control the environment."
But at the Youth Farm residential center in Peoria, which provides care to children with emotional and behavioral problems, an 18-year-old female resident was handcuffed and booked at the county jail for aggravated battery after she shoved a teacher with open hands while running from a classroom. The teacher had no injuries, according to the police report.
When a 21-year-old Youth Farm resident said he was going to shoot a peer, police handcuffed him and arrested him for aggravated assault and disorderly conduct, although the only potential weapon they found was a video game system.
Youth Farm officials said in a statement that they could not comment on either case because of juvenile privacy protections but added: "It is our policy to work with youth to learn to cope with stressful situations in healthy and safe ways ... which we cannot do if the youth are incarcerated."
Across Illinois, wards were detained by police or charged with a crime 2,495 times from 2011 through 2013 while under the care of state residential centers, according to data provided by DCFS. About a quarter of Illinois' facilities had no police detentions, but a handful had rates far above the statewide median.
In 2009, the facility with by far the highest rate of detentions was the Catholic Children's Home in the historic Mississippi River town of Alton. Juvenile state wards were detained by police that year at more than 20 times the median rate for the state, the data show.
Under its contract with DCFS at the time, the Catholic home had no choice but to accept wards with severe behavior disorders and criminal backgrounds. But that "no decline" policy came under scrutiny after three residents went AWOL in November 2009 and choked and beat a local woman, then stuffed her into the trunk of her car.
"It was flashing in my head: I am going to die right now," recalled that victim, video producer Christina Geisen, then 35.
Geisen managed to pull herself out of her car trunk only to have the attackers pound her down to the cobblestone street. "I started screaming as loud as I could. ... I remember seeing bricks, my feet, then everything going dark."
Neighbors heard Geisen's screams and called 911. Police quickly rounded up the fleeing assailants. Not long after that, a female jogger was accosted and groped by another runaway from the Catholic home. The facility soon stopped accepting wards with severe behavior disorders and felony records.
In recent years, the Catholic home's rate of police detentions dropped significantly. But problems persisted, according to a Tribune-Medill review of 55 detentions of residents and day students at the facility's therapeutic school from 2011 through mid-2013. In well over half of those cases, Madison County prosecutors declined to bring charges or local authorities refused to jail the youth, calling into question whether police intervention was needed.
In one 2011 case, an employee had separated two youths arguing over a card game when one boy reached over the worker's shoulder and struck the other with an open hand. There were no injuries. Police were called when one of the boys overturned chairs and wouldn't calm down, but prosecutors did not file charges.
The same year, two students at the facility's therapeutic day school were threatening to fight when a teacher stepped between them. According to a police report, one student held his fist a few inches from the teacher's chin and said: "Get out of my way or I'll hit you." She wrapped him in a bear hug and escorted him to the counselor's office. The boy was taken into custody for aggravated assault but released after the detention center declined to accept him, police records show.
Steve Roach, executive director for Catholic Charities in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield, which runs the home, said he could not comment on specific cases because of privacy restrictions but said the spike in arrests took place during "a very specific time period" of three to four years before the facility ended its no-decline contract with DCFS.
"We were receiving children that should not have come there. ... We had notified DCFS repeatedly about the extreme behaviors of kids that we believe shouldn't be placed there, but we were having difficulty getting them re-placed at other facilities," Roach said.
Staff try to reduce police involvement by therapeutically addressing the emotional traumas that fuel youths' outbursts, he said, adding that the facility has helped thousands in its 130-year history. "You can be successful with some kids, and some kids who are not appropriately placed at the children's home, it doesn't work with them," Roach said.
"Clearly if children break the law, we believe they should be held accountable for that," he said, but added: "We try not to use the police department as an extension of our program."
For this story, 50 interns from Northwestern University's Medill Watchdog program worked with Tribune reporter David Jackson and Medill Senior Lecturer Fredric N. Tulsky to gather government, police and state monitoring reports of harm to youths at about 100 residential treatment facilities across the U.S. The team also interviewed former residents and staff, government officials, facility administrators and child welfare experts. Medill Watchdog has published additional material on its website.
Tribune reporter Duaa Eldeib contributed.
December 9, 2014
Employees at centers sometimes downplay incidents of harm to young residents, public records show
By David Jackson and Gary Marx with reporting by Medill Watchdog
Six years after the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that youths were beaten and abused inside residential treatment centers across the country, the mistreatment and violence continue amid inconsistent oversight by government agencies, an investigation by the Tribune and Northwestern University's Medill Watchdog program has uncovered.
Police and state monitoring records on more than 100 facilities across the country revealed about 5,000 runaways since 2011, as well as hundreds of reports of rape, sexual abuse and physical assault. Some of the youths who ran committed murders, carjackings and other crimes, or fell victim to sexual assault and trafficking, government records show.
Because of strict juvenile privacy laws, police and state monitoring agencies often fail to share information on injuries to youths and to coordinate their child protection efforts. Children whose peers beat or abused them were often failed again, public records show, when some facilities filed reports that minimized the violence or failed to cooperate with police who were looking into the incidents.
Ideally, children removed from unsafe homes are surrounded with therapeutic care. Families and government officials praise facilities for the instances when they have restored and even saved the lives of troubled children. But taxpayer-funded facilities that serve juvenile state wards and other disadvantaged youths are coming under mounting pressure as government agencies freeze or cut funding even as the youths being sent to facilities present increasingly severe behavioral and emotional problems, according to facility operators and other experts.
"Even the best-run places are going to have these incidents of violence," said Clark Peters, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri School of Social Work. The tested methods for de-escalating conflicts take training, experience and skill, Peters said. "If you're paying low wages and hiring poorly trained individuals practically off the street, that's not going to happen."
At the 274-bed campus of cabins run by Wolverine Human Services in Vassar, Mich., a 13-year-old boy reported being beaten and choked by older youths. During his first weeks at the facility in 2011, fellow residents also cleaned the toilets with his toothbrush, poured water on his bedding and smeared feces on his blanket, according to a Michigan Department of Human Services report and court testimony from a former worker.
"The kid couldn't defend himself," former facility worker Joseph Himmelein told Tribune-Medill in an interview, noting that the boy had to avoid violence because of a brain shunt that made punches to his head potentially life-threatening.
"Staff is supposed to protect kids. They didn't protect him," said now-retired state investigator Robert Jones, who investigated that case.
Jones said Wolverine was one of several Michigan organizations that take in youths whom they can't handle but who bring in hundreds of dollars a day in government funds. "Therein lies the problem," Jones said. "Everybody has to have the child in there for the per-diem rate. They end up figuring or counting more on that dollar than actually being able to help kids."
When Himmelein and fellow employee Richard Britton reported their concerns about the 13-year-old to supervisors, they allege, the facility dismissed his injuries as self-harm. After Wolverine laid them off in late 2011, Himmelein and Britton sued, alleging that they were let go as retaliation for telling state monitors about the 13-year-old's case and other alleged mistreatment. Wolverine denied wrongdoing and settled the lawsuit last year.
Wolverine's CEO, Judith Wollack, strongly denied that the facility discouraged workers from reporting incidents or that Himmelein and Britton were fired for contacting state officials. She said the two were among 100 laid off in a staff reduction.
State funding for the nonprofit organization has dropped from $40 million to $26 million in the last five years. Frontline workers start at a little above $9 an hour, and in recent years the facility has seen a 40 percent annual turnover in those crucial employees, Wollack said.
"We are getting kids coming in with tremendous amount of emotional mental problems," she said. "We do our very, very best to protect kids all the time."
Wollack also rejected the findings in the state report, saying the 13-year-old had learned to "cry wolf" about being attacked. "He was not being mistreated ... I do remember (he) had a big, big mouth. And (he) provoked and provoked and provoked."
But she said that over time, staff worked with him and "he did such a complete turnaround! That, like he said, 'I learned to shut my mouth.'"
At the time when the 13-year-old was at the facility, Wollack said, Wolverine's government contracts forced it to accept residents with dangerous backgrounds and behavior. But today it can turn away those youths.
"We're learning from every experience we have, and we always come out better for it," she said. "I can't tell you staff report everything all the time like they're supposed to. But as soon as we know things, it's handled."
Erica Heshelman, a former worker at the 135-bed Eau Claire Academy in Wisconsin, warned reporters not to trust what they read in the incident reports the facility is required to send state monitors whenever a resident is hurt or put in jeopardy.
"I would say any of the IRs that you guys have are total crap," Heshelman said of the hundreds of pages of reports filed by the center since 2011 and collected by the Tribune-Medill team.
"It's going to be really hard for you to get the truth, because a lot of the IRs are just handed back and rewritten," Heshelman said.
Current employee Jed Meinen said he was once admonished for a report he wrote on an incident that occurred when he was the only worker in the area.
"I wrote in the incident report that I was single-staffed and was told that I wasn't supposed to write that in there," Meinen said. "They also told me to leave things out like how long it took somebody to come up and respond to an incident."
Former crisis staff supervisor Jamero Ames said the practice of modifying incident reports was one reason he quit working at Eau Claire. "We were encouraged to change the IR to make it sound like ... the incident didn't happen the way it happened," Ames said
Kareena Tulloch, another former worker, said that when she restrained a young resident last year with a physical hold, she had worked at Eau Claire only a few weeks and had not yet received the mandatory training in using the risky techniques safely. In her incident report, Tulloch alleges, she was told to write that the youth had been physically redirected, a term that typically means guiding a resident away from a problematic location with a touch, as opposed to gripping them in a hold.
"They had me lie in the report. They had me, like, reword things," Tulloch said.
A copy of the incident report examined by the Tribune-Medill team says Tulloch physically redirected the resident. The form has a section that should be filled out when a restraint is used, but it is blank.
To outsiders the difference may seem small. But facilities are strongly encouraged to reduce the use of physical restraints, which in recent years have been linked to injuries and even deaths in centers in Ohio, New York and other states.
Eau Claire's corporate owner, the for-profit Clinicare Corporation, said in a statement that "it is not at all our policy to downplay or omit important information, and any employee being directed to do so should have reported it to our Human Resources Department." In the initial orientation, staff are trained to notify human resources "if they feel uncomfortable being asked to do something on the job or if they are experiencing other problems with doing their job," the company said.
"If a staff member was instructed to 'lie,' that is a clear violation of our policies," the statement said.
In Ohio, state officials this summer put the 84-bed Foundations for Living facility on probation and cut off admissions of new residents for three months. Earlier in the year, police had intervened in a near-riot by residents, and state inspectors found violations including a case where a poorly trained staff member injured a youth during a restraint while facility reports downplayed the incident, records show.
"It's the most stressful job I've ever had," said former worker Ashley Dewiel, who said that in her five years at the facility she suffered bites, punches and stabbings. "I'm 29, and when I wake up in the morning I feel like I'm 50."
Mansfield police Chief Ken Coontz said his agency conducted more than 80 preliminary investigations at Foundations last year. "They definitely have a turbulent past ... those issues have arisen many, many times," Coontz said.
It was the young residents who suffered most, the Tribune-Medill team found.
In September 2012, officials from a nearby county sent Foundations a 12-year-old boy who allegedly had been starved by his guardians. Five months later, a child welfare worker visited the facility and found the boy standing outside in 30-degree weather wearing a T-shirt, jeans, socks and flip-flops, according to a Seneca County Department of Job and Family Services report.
Covered in mud and hurting from the cold, he told the caseworker that his remaining clothes had been stuffed into a garbage bag and that other residents threw rotten cheese and eggs into the bag. He reported being hit, punched and kicked by older youths.
One of the boy's relatives told the caseworker that she had been informed by staff that they do not intervene because children need to learn coping skills, according to the county report. The relative said staff told her: "If someone gets beat up, that's the victim's fault," the report said.
Officials later removed the boy from Foundations.
The corporate owner for Foundations, Universal Health Services, said in a statement that it is not uncommon to correct deficiencies following state inspections but added that Foundations is currently "in good standing" with government regulators.
Universal disputed the accounts of former residents and workers, adding that it cannot comment in detail because of privacy laws. "We looked into the alleged incidents that you asked about ... and, in each case, the facts are very different than what you are reporting," the company said. "Any alleged mistreatment by our staff would be treated as a serious occurrence with full disciplinary action including termination."
The Tribune-Medill investigation found a total of 5,500 police reports of runaways or missing children from 130 facilities in 11 states. Some of the runway incidents lasted only hours, but many youths were absent for weeks or never found. And several led to high-profile news events in local communities.
In June of last year, a 13-year-old girl ran away from The Settlement Home for Children in Austin, Texas, and was sexually assaulted by several men, who recorded the attack on cellphone cameras, according to court records. Two men were convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to two-year prison terms. Police have issued warrants for three other men wanted in the attack.
Two weeks later, the girl ran again — despite being placed on "increased supervision precautions" — and reported being sexually assaulted at a house party where she was given alcohol until she passed out. A man was later convicted of child rape and sentenced to eight years in prison, court records show, and the girl was moved to another facility.
Also last year, two runaways, ages 15 and 16, from Lives Under Construction Boys Ranch in Lampe, Mo., allegedly beat and stabbed to death an elderly Michigan couple who were in their winter home near the Ozarks facility. A neighbor reported seeing two boys loading the slain couple's car with stolen goods. They face charges including first-degree murder.
In other cases, AWOL youths are sexually victimized or assaulted while others abuse drugs, steal cars, break into homes and sell sex in the surrounding communities as they struggle to survive on the streets with no money and few skills, the Tribune-Medill investigation found.
There are complex and powerful reasons youths run from residential facilities, said Rubina Mustafa, a staff attorney at the Detroit Center for Family Advocacy, a project of the University of Michigan Law School.
Many are desperately trying to reconnect with their families, even if they were abused there, or to return to their communities, even if those were unsafe. Others flee the violence of the facilities. And many foster children — who were placed in state protective custody because of abuse and neglect at home — simply reject the regimented, institutionalized life thrust upon them.
"You're sentenced to be part of this program," Mustafa said. "It's like, 'What did I do? Why am I here?' They did not feel like they were at a home, like they were with a family. They felt like they were being incarcerated."
Fifty interns from Northwestern University's Medill Watchdog program worked with Tribune reporter David Jackson and Medill Senior Lecturer Fredric N. Tulsky to gather government, police and state monitoring reports of harm to youths at about 100 residential treatment facilities across the U.S. The team also interviewed former residents and staff, government officials, facility administrators and child welfare experts. Medill Watchdog has published additional material on its website.
Tribune reporter Duaa Eldeib contributed.
December 3, 2014
To the jury:
They are mostly African-American kids, forgotten and discarded — state wards who have suffered abuse and neglect. Illinois officials send them by the thousands to live in residential treatment centers promising skilled therapy and close supervision.
These taxpayer-financed institutions boast of restoring and even saving young lives. But the horrific conditions inside were hidden from the public and even many government regulators until a yearlong Chicago Tribune investigation used confidential documents and sensitive interviews with youths to pierce the secrecy that surrounds the most troubled facilities.
Hundreds of Illinois wards are assaulted and raped by their peers each year as authorities fail to act on reports of harm and continue sending waves of youths to the most violent facilities, the Tribune’s “Harsh Treatment” investigation found.
Prostitution becomes a fact of life at facilities where experienced residents introduce others to pimps, escort websites and street corners. Youths with histories of sexual abuse are exploited by peers and even by their adult caregivers. And thousands of kids flee to the streets, where some sell drugs and sex to survive and others break into homes and mug passers-by. Dozens have never been found.
Many of these underprivileged youths are shuttled for years from one grim institution to another before emerging more damaged than when they went in.
Even before the third installment of this five-part series had been published in December, officials across the state were taking immediate steps to protect wards housed in the state’s 50 facilities and begin a systematic overhaul of Illinois’ mental health programs in ways that could better the lives of thousands of children.
Among those actions: increased monitoring and unannounced inspections; intake holds on five of the most troubled institutions and removal of wards from one; revised procedures for investigating allegations of sexual abuse or assault in facilities; training for facility staff and youths on human trafficking; and new requirements that facilities alert state authorities frequently about staffing shortages, inappropriate staff conduct, physical or sexual assault of youths, and runaway incidents.
The state General Assembly’s first action of the new year was to hold a specialHouse-Senate hearing in response to the Tribune series. In her testimony, the director of the state Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) called the newspaper’s findings “both appalling and unacceptable,” and announced that she had been asked to step down from her post.
State lawmakers immediately began introducing reform bills, and they created a bipartisan standing subcommittee to revamp Illinois’ tattered system for serving youths who have suffered trauma and developed mental health problems. Outgoing Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, tasked a new state panel with overseeing DCFS’s corrective actions. His successor, Republican Bruce Rauner, pledged a thorough review of child welfare in Illinois, declaring: “The recent reports are outrageous. ... We need to fundamentally reassess the way we approach child and family services in Illinois.”
Under intense scrutiny from the state brought on by the Tribune series, Rock River Academy — one of the most violence-plagued facilities in the state – announced it would shut down.
In Washington, meanwhile, Justice Department lawyers are exploring whether to intervene over possible civil rights violations.
Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, urged Justice’s Civil Rights Division to “do all it can within its authority to investigate these abuses and ensure that the constitutional and civil rights of these children are protected.” And Sen. Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican, called for an immediate investigation by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services and asked Medicaid officials to consider suspending unsafe and poorly run facilities from the federal health care program.
Without the Tribune’s digging, the public and even top government officials would have remained oblivious to the scope and intensity of abuse suffered by youths inside these facilities. Authorities responded to information requests by blacking out or withholding basic records of harm to young residents. Staff at troubled facilities kept silent as administrators closed ranks.
Illinois makes it a potential crime to divulge child welfare, medical or juvenile court files. But reporters David Jackson, Gary Marx and Duaa Eldeib gained the trust of attorneys, youth workers, medical professionals and others who put their careers on the line to share critical information. The reporters gathered confidential records that included more than 10,000 pages of the Unusual Incident Reports
facilities must submit whenever a youth is injured or put in jeopardy.
They successfully petitioned the Cook County juvenile court for access to the delinquency files of more than 100 residents. Through relentless FOIA appeals, they pried free police and state monitoring reports on violent incidents inside the facilities.
In addition, they compiled internal state data on discharge outcomes as well as key events like runaways, assaults and sexual abuse. Previously unpublished and stunning in themselves, those data revealed 428 reports of sexual assault or abuse at facilities across the state over a three-year period, 1,052 physical assaults and 29,425 runaways.
To get beyond Illinois and investigate the roughly 500 residential centers across the country, Jackson launched an 18-month-long collaboration with Northwestern University’s Medill Watchdog program, teaching 51 student interns how to obtain and analyze police and state monitoring reports. This effort yielded more than 66,000 pages of records, an unprecedented cache of documents revealing how facilities in other states also suffer from inadequate staffing, abuse and violence.
The records told part of the story. But it was when reporters began interviewing former residents that the true horror and the human cost became clear. Through painstaking street-level journalism, Jackson, Marx and Eldeib tracked down dozens of Illinois runaways and former facility residents. In one example, they got powerful on-camera interviews with both a pimp who explained how he recruited residential center runaways and one of the youths he prostituted.
From the first encounters, reporters gave youths the power to decide whether to share their accounts and multiple opportunities to change their minds and withdraw from the project. Even when young people were eager to cooperate, reporters and editors assessed whether telling an individual’s story could do him or her harm.
Time and again, these young people spoke of wanting their stories to be heard, of wanting to herald change. And that is exactly what they did.
“Nobody but u guys listened to us,” Angelique Borden wrote on Facebook. Added MsWhitney Holt: “Finally we are being heard!!! ... I really hope we helped them see the flaws in the system.”
For exposing those flaws, spurring tangible reforms that have already improved safety for children and catalyzing a broader effort to lift the lives of disadvantaged youths, we nominate Jackson, Marx and Eldeib for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting.
Sincerely,
Gerould W. Kern, Editor
Biography
David Jackson has been a Tribune reporter since 1991.
Gary Marx started at the Chicago Tribune in 1988 and was the Tribune’s South America correspondent from 1990 until 1994.
Duaa Eldeib is an investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune.
Winners
Prize Winner in Investigative Reporting in 2015:
Eric Lipton
For reporting that showed how the influence of lobbyists can sway congressional leaders and state attorneys general, slanting justice toward the wealthy and connected.
Investigative Reporting
The Jury
The Jury
Mark Schoofs(Chair )*
investigations and projects editor
Brett Blackledge*
investigations editor
Karen Bordeleau
senior vice president and executive editor
Mike Hudson
senior editor, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
Tim Golden
managing editor, news and investigations
Marty Kaiser
former editor and senior vice president
Emily Ramshaw
editor
Susan Snyder
reporter
Alan White
editor
Winners in Investigative Reporting
Chris Hamby
For his reports on how some lawyers and doctors rigged a system to deny benefits to coal miners stricken with black lung disease, resulting in remedial legislative efforts.
David Barstow and Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab
For their reports on how Wal-Mart used widespread bribery to dominate the market in Mexico, resulting in changes in company practices.
Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eileen Sullivan and Chris Hawley
For their spotlighting of the New York Police Department's clandestine spying program that monitored daily life in Muslim communities, resulting in congressional calls for a federal investigation, and a debate over the proper role of domestic intelligence gathering.
Paige St. John
For her examination of weaknesses in the murky property-insurance system vital to Florida homeowners, providing handy data to assess insurer reliability and stirring regulatory action.
2015 Prize Winners
Anthony Doerr
An imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.
Julia Wolfe
A powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.
Stephen Adly Guirgis
A nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death.
David I. Kertzer
An engrossing dual biography that uses recently opened Vatican archives to shed light on two men who exercised nearly absolute power over their realms.