by Art Levine
The Rebekah school ultimately landed in Missouri, a haven for allegedly abusive schools, under the name New Beginnings. Not surprisingly, these leaders were accused by Mother Jones and in a recent Change.org petition written by survivor Racheal Anthony of abusing teens once again. “They have beaten girls with curtain rods … they have force-fed girls beyond vomiting,” the petition declared. Spokesmen and the attorneys for the churches and schools have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing over the decades or refused to answer reporters’ questions.
The stern spirit of Lester Roloff lives on in the resistance by church leaders—often abetted by local politicians—to any government oversight under the guise of separation of church and state.
These schools and programs are just part of a vast, multibillion residential treatment industry that flourishes in the United States by selling an illusory promise: a quick (and usually expensive) fix for difficult mental health problems or addictions. Yet the potential danger of abuse and neglect is a real threat for 200,000 or more youths trapped in the poorly monitored secular and religious “group care” facilities, “troubled teen” residential schools and unlicensed treatment programs. They too often profit off the misery of emotionally troubled substance abusers and parents in despair from dealing with kids they can’t control.
Perhaps the largest alliance of such ultra-conservative churches is the far-flung Independent Fundamental Baptist organization with thousands of churches nationwide and numerous boarding schools that cite the Biblical importance of “breaking the will of the child.”
“If you’re not bruising your child,” a pastor declared in a 2007 sermon captured by ABC News’s 20/20, “you’re not spanking your child enough.”
• • •
THE LEADERS OF RESTORATION YOUTH ACADEMY, IT TURNED OUT, TOOK that crackpot religious philosophy to its most extreme, sadistic limits. After talking to Barry and other traumatized cadets during his initial visit, Captain Kennedy tried to protect the fifty or so kids there from retaliation by acting as if nothing was amiss. Confident that the facility’s staff would soon be arrested, he called Barry’s mom to reassure her that her son was safe now, and that no harm would come to him as he pursued his investigation.
A few days later, Kennedy returned to RYA with a female detective to interview more boys and girls, and discovered yet another terrifying feature of life at Restoration Youth Academy: Boys with boxing gloves, usually mismatched in size, were often grabbed out of their beds in the middle of the night and forced to fight until one of them was beaten to a pulp. Kennedy stopped just such a fight in the daytime during this second visit.
Knott’s casual attitude about the program’s unrestrained violence was underscored when Kennedy confronted a drill instructor (“DI”) about the attacks the boys watching the fight had quietly described to him. This DI, a six-foot-two, 280-pound man known as Mr. Kenny, lined up boys at shower time, where they stood naked, grasping towels, and then he walked by, randomly slapping them in the face and punching them in the stomach.
Chris Coronado, then a tough, six-foot-five fifteen-year-old Hispanic from Georgia with a history of gang-related arrests, recalls, “I knew this was something serious—it scared me. We were butt-naked and they were trying to scare you physically, treat you like a punk.”
When Kennedy asked Knott and Mr. Kenny about this practice, neither denied it took place.
Kennedy knew he had a criminal case, and knew he had to stop the abuse soon, but he also knew that he lacked the hard evidence he needed to make an arrest. To make a felony arrest, he needed either the support of the DA’s office, his personal observation of a crime in action or a criminal finding of abuse from the state child protection agency. For an arrest on a Class A child abuse misdemeanor, the standards weren’t as strict, but he still needed either his direct observation of a criminal act, an out-of-state parent to travel to Alabama to swear out a warrant, or an eighteen-or-older survivor of the program to request that a judge approve an arrest warrant.
And so he returned yet again to RYA. During one of those visits, he glimpsed on a closed-circuit monitor the image of a naked boy, Robert, crouching in a six-by-eight isolation room with a twenty-four-hour light bulb overhead.
Kennedy asked why this cruel and not-so-unusual RYA treatment was being inflicted on this boy. Knott explained, “He’s got an attitude. He’s only been there for a day, and he’ll be there for another day or two.”
“Can’t you give him some clothes?”
Knott gave a vague answer, and when Kennedy left later that day, the boy was still locked up, still naked.
Although the use of solitary confinement as punishment has been deemed torture by the UN Rapporteur on Torture, Kennedy knew that what he’d just seen wasn’t illegal in Alabama. He also knew that police investigations can be compromised because these institutions bar the young people they control from unmonitored communication with family and outsiders—and most states, including Alabama, don’t even protect workers who report child abuse from being fired. The result is abuse isn’t reported until much after it was committed, which makes investigations and prosecutions nearly impossible.
Throughout his investigation of RYA, Captain Kennedy had been updating his police chief, Jimmy Gardner, about the potentially criminal abuses he was finding, but his chief didn’t want to take action. “He telegraphed that he was not interested in making arrests, but interested in learning what I knew,” Kennedy says. “He was very buddy-buddy with the mayor and Rev. Young.” (Gardner says any allegations that he impeded Kennedy’s investigation are “absolutely ludicrous … I’ve never done anything like that.”)
When Kennedy returned to RYA two days later, Robert was still huddled in the isolation room, naked. Knott told Kennedy the boy deserved further punishment: “He told us he wanted to commit suicide.” Kennedy warned Knott that he was required to notify the local child welfare department of the fourteen-year-old’s precarious mental health and that he expected Robert to be released from solitary confinement immediately. He then left.
Kennedy returned again the next day to check up on Robert, who was still in the isolation room, for a fourth day, but no longer naked. He was wearing boxer shorts. Kennedy demanded to speak to him.
Robert was brought into the main office with the big glass windows and thin walls. He told Kennedy that after he had left the day before, Knott and Young took him from the isolation room and told him to shoot himself with a gun. He said Knott and the facility’s owner, “Bishop” John David Young, Jr., the pastor of Solid Rock Ministries in Mobile, were frustrated by Robert’s “poor” attitude and continuing depression while in solitary confinement (a leading cause of institutional suicide); and they were determined to change his behavior by any means necessary. They dragged him from the isolation room to Knott’s bedroom, where Knott handed the boy the gun and encouraged him to kill himself. Robert told Kennedy he placed the barrel of the gun against his head: “I pulled it, and it went click.”
When Kennedy confronted Knott and Young about this gut-wrenching, sadistic bit of theater, they didn’t deny the boy’s accusation. In fact, they seemed proud of their approach. Knott left the office, went back to his bedroom in the compound and returned with the gun; he placed it in Kennedy’s hand, and said, “I was just teaching him a lesson.”
Kennedy exploded, “This is how you treat a fourteen-year-old?”
“I knew then I was dealing with crazy people,” Kennedy says now. “They were insane: you don’t do that to a human being.”
Kennedy knew he had to move quickly to seek felony arrests but couldn’t do so without the go-ahead of the Mobile County DA, Ashley Rich. He returned to RYA in early November in a final effort to obtain confidential on-site interviews, but Knott arranged a bizarre way to thwart the investigation. Arriving after dinner, Kennedy thought he’d be allowed to interview the cadets privately in the office, but was instead led by Knott to a large shower and bathroom area where boys on their way to the shower were to
ld, one by one, to sit across from Kennedy—while naked—to answer his questions. Even in this surreal setting, Kennedy managed to glean more damaging information from the boys.
The purpose of this stunt was explained later by one of RYA’s many victims, William Vargas, who wrote, “After Captain Kennedy left, Mr. Will [Knott] told everyone to write a paper saying that Captain Kennedy wanted to see us naked, and make Captain Kennedy look like a pedophile.” This missive was added to the other letters, police reports, personal observations and additional evidence Kennedy passed to the local DA and the then-Attorney General, Luther Strange, in his futile efforts to get Knott and his sadistic staffers arrested.
After Captain Kennedy conducted those final, limited interviews in November 2011, he went to his chief, Jimmy Gardner, who gave him permission to present his findings to the DA. At that meeting, joined by DA Rich and her chief investigator, Mike Morgan, Kennedy says Gardner moved to give a briefcase to Rich with the documents Kennedy had compiled. Kennedy stopped him, and asked to check the documents before presenting them to the DA. When he inspected the briefcase, he found that half of the documents were missing, so he halted the meeting briefly and went down to his car, where he retrieved copies of all the documents intended for the DA. He then returned to give her a lengthy briefing about all he’d found at RYA—the forced fighting, the isolation cells and shackles, the beatings of naked boys.
After Kennedy made his presentation, he says Rich coolly responded, “Parents need to be more careful where they send their children.” (Morgan, speaking for the DA’s office, doesn’t recall Rich making such a statement.)
“I was in shock,” Kennedy says, “and I knew they weren’t going to do anything about it.”
To placate Kennedy, Rich sent Morgan to investigate. Morgan insists he conducted confidential interviews at RYA, but Kennedy says his cadet sources told him that most of Morgan’s interviews were either done while being observed by Knott—or were “cherry-picked” cadets petrified to speak honestly. As a result, the DA took no action.
Karin Bazor, a former instructor for the RYA girls who quit in disgust in July 2012, says that when she approached Morgan early in 2013 with more evidence about abuses at the facility, “He looked at me like I was crazy, and said it’s impossible to prosecute someone [whose program is] under a church covering.”
Kennedy now gave up any illusions that local law enforcement would do anything to stop the carnage at RYA, and pinned his hopes on the DHR’s Mobile-based Child Protection Services director, Beth Nelson. In a meeting with her on November 21, 2011, he laid out all he knew—the documents backing up the abuse and a long, detailed list of witnesses to contact.
Nelson, in turn, agreed to visit RYA. However, Kennedy says, again citing his sources, she made sure everything was ready for her by giving its leaders a two-day advance notice of her investigation.
Nelson found no signs of abuse at the facility, and two subsequent investigations by DHR also couldn’t confirm abuse there. Even so, after Nelson conferred with DHR Commissioner Nancy Bruckner and Mike Morgan, they reached an initial decision to close down Restoration Youth Academy on November 28th. But they changed their minds after talking to Young and Knott the next day, and realized they didn’t want to face the cost, liability and logistical hassles of removing the endangered kids, according to Kennedy.
Kennedy was infuriated, and called Nelson to protest. “Those are just troubled children and they got what they deserve,” the child protection administrator reportedly replied, he says, and told him the agency wouldn’t investigate RYA again, even if children escaped and went directly to DHR with recent bruises or wounds. “They’re not fresh, so they can’t be investigated,” she claimed about relatively older signs of physical abuse. (Nelson, since retired, was unavailable for comment, and a DHR spokesperson said it was agency policy not to comment on any closed investigations that didn’t involve a fatality.)
“There is more concern about chickens on a poultry farm in Alabama than for children!” says Kennedy.
Over the next few years, first as a police captain and then, after his 2014 retirement, as a concerned citizen, Kennedy wrote detailed letters to Alabama’s attorney general, governor, DHR commissioner and other officials outlining the rampant abuse at RYA. All the while he was adding new victims to his list of people to contact.
Early in 2012, Kennedy says he got a brush off from the Attorney General’s chief investigator, Tim Fuhrman, after he’d done an on site investigation that didn’t confirm Kennedy’s claims. Fuhrman apparently didn’t try to contact RYA’s former cadets or their families who were willing to speak about the program’s horrors, a point confirmed by some victims. “Nobody ever called me or cared, except Captain Kennedy,” says one parent.
On February 3, 2012, Kennedy says he got a call from Fuhrman, who told him the attorney general had determined the case wasn’t worth pursuing. Fuhrman relayed AG Luther Strange’s views: “These children are from out of state and their parents don’t vote here and I don’t want the churches mad at me.”
In his July 2016 letter to me, Strange denied making such a statement: “The quote attributed to me via Chief Investigator Fuhrman is not true. A potential victim’s residency has no impact on our investigation actions. The record of prosecution by this office clearly demonstrates a strong stance against the abuse of any child.” He added, “The allegation that my office did a ‘superficial job’ is unsupported and unfounded.”
Kennedy had appealed all the way up to the governor and attorney general, and nothing had happened, so he turned to the local newspaper, The Mobile Press-Register, as a confidential source. In March 2012, a story appeared about “questions” regarding RYA, but it focused, in the top section of the article, only on the lack of licensing for the program and its counselor, Aleshia Moffett. The article mentioned in a vague way the “rough treatment” cited by Barry’s father, the traumatized boy Kennedy had interviewed during his first visit.
The issue drifted away amid the drastic layoffs at the state’s major newspapers of two-thirds of their editorial staff.
In August 2012, Kennedy finally caught a break. He learned that Eric Reyes, by then eighteen, had escaped from RYA, and was not obligated to return to the school since he was now an adult. Reyes stayed with Kennedy until his father arranged to fly him home out west. Eric, who had spent eight months at RYA, was willing to fill out a police report alleging abuse against Knott. Kennedy aided him in obtaining a misdemeanor child abuse warrant that didn’t require the DA’s approval to be served. Eric said that in addition to witnessing the regular shackling and beating of other cadets, he had been brutally assaulted by Knott, who accused him of stealing money from another youth’s wallet. When Eric disputed that claim, Knott grabbed him by the neck and pushed him against a wall, then threw him so hard against a water fountain it fell apart when Eric’s head hit it, according to the police report and an eyewitness, Karin Bazor.
Eric filled out the police report on August 7, 2012, in front of Officer Robert Miles, who found it credible enough to serve an arrest warrant on Knott.
That same day, Miles got in his patrol car, heading to RYA, but his chief, Gardner, radioed him to return to police headquarters and hand over the original warrant, as opposed to returning it to the radio dispatch office for future service, according to Kennedy. (Miles could not be reached for comment.) In Kennedy’s view, Gardner committed a felony that day: “He hindered the arrest of Knott and the serving of a legitimate warrant.” (Kennedy says he still has the original crime report and unserved warrant; Gardner insists this incident never happened.)
In May 2013, facing the city’s demand for unpaid back rent, the Prichard school moved to buildings near Rev. Young’s Solid Rock Ministries church in Mobile. Kennedy didn’t know where they’d gone until he spotted a white boy a few months later peeking out of a boarded-up building where the boys now slept. Kennedy kept up his writing and calls to state officials and legislators, but no one responded.
• • •
IN 2015, AN OUT-OF-STATE MOTHER PICKED UP HER DAUGHTER FROM THE RYA girl’s program in Mobile. Horrified by what she saw there, she took cell phone photos of the isolation rooms and then called the on-duty juvenile division detective, Sgt. Joe Cotner, before going to the Mobile Police Department to file an abuse complaint. Cotner recalls that he was skeptical when he took that call, but after seeing the shocking photos, “We started listening to all the allegations of abuse.” In March 2015, Cotner referred the complaint to the local DHR for a child abuse investigation, and the new team there—Nelson had retired—took the allegations seriously. A DHR-led raid a few days later rescued thirty-six children. The investigators found malnourished children, isolation rooms and the terrified kids.
Charles Kennedy hadn’t known about the investigation, but he glimpsed the raid underway while he was rushing to keep an appointment with a federally-funded disability rights lawyer he was prepping to file a lawsuit against the program. Driving past the ramshackle boys’ home, he saw the yellow crime scene tape and the police squad cars surrounding the facility. His heart sunk: “I thought for sure someone had been murdered.” He couldn’t stop to find out what happened at the moment, but as soon as he dropped off additional evidence for the attorney, he wheeled around and headed back to the home, fearing the worst. When he pulled up next to the building, he saw then-Captain John Barber, outside after viewing the torture site.
“What’s happened?” Kennedy urgently asked him. “Have they killed somebody?”
“No, but I can’t believe they haven’t,” Barber said. “His face was as white as a sheet of paper,” Kennedy recalls. Barber, a veteran policeman whose brother James was the police chief, began recounting the unimaginable scenes of horror inside—the isolation cells, the shackles, the frightened children. Kennedy knew precisely what he was describing, the same crimes he had fought for nearly five years to stop, and told Barber, “In the trunk of my car I have two briefcases full of evidence on these people. If you want it, you got it.” A short while later, Kennedy, now retired, began briefing the lead detective on the case, Cotner, aiding him in building the case against the program’s leaders.