Mental Health Inc

by Art Levine

  A subsequent grand jury investigation led to the arrest of Knott and the other defendants for felony child abuse in August 2015.

  The trial began in January 2017, and Kennedy anxiously attended all four days of the proceedings. But as a potential witness, he couldn’t sit inside the courtroom and instead relied on a cousin, among others, to brief him on what was happening.

  On the final day, when the jury left to begin deliberations, the fatigued crusader drove home for a break. It was 5 p.m., and he was sitting on his front porch, when he got an urgent call from Leslie Crawford, the mother in Maine who had also long fought for Alabama law enforcement to crack down on RYA.

  “Did you hear about the verdict?” she asked him excitedly.

  It had only been two hours since the jury left, and Kennedy couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The jury, she explained, had convicted Knott, Young and Moffett on all eleven counts of aggravated child abuse, the maximum charge. Kennedy was ecstatic. He asked her to repeat the verdict again to make sure he’d heard correctly. Not only had he been personally vindicated, but the people he’d been fighting against were finally going to prison.

  As he put it in an email to friends and supporters: “All of the monsters were convicted!”

  • • •

  ON FEBRUARY 22, 2017, KENNEDY FELT A SIMILAR SENSE OF ELATION when a Mobile judge sentenced Knott, Young and Moffett each to twenty years in prison. But his feeling of triumph and vindication is tempered by the fact they got away with it for so long. “They all knew,” he says of the government agencies that ignored his pleas, “and they did nothing.”

  It’s a pattern that continues to this day. Neither the long prison sentences nor the shuttering of the brutal facility have fundamentally changed oversight of such programs in almost all states in the country. Over the past twenty years, the Mobile effort against Knott, Young and Moffett remains one of a handful of arrests and prosecutions for physical abuse allegations at any youth treatment facility in the country. With rare exceptions unmonitored religious and secular troubled-teen facilities in Alabama and elsewhere continue to operate with impunity, generally protected by the indifference of local and state police, prosecutors and child protection agencies. “We’ve received thousands of police reports,” but relatively few have led to prosecutions, says Angela Smith, the founder and national coordinator of the Seattle-based Human Earth Animal Liberation advocacy group, better known as HEAL.

  Now seventy-three, Kennedy is trying to close other facilities. Most recently, he’s briefed the district attorney’s office in Baldwin County, Alabama, about troubling abuse allegations at a facility in rural Seminole called Blessed Hope Boys Academy, which is run by pastor Gary Wiggins. In September 2015, an openly gay teenager, Lucas Greenfield, who had been imprisoned at RYA before the March raid was then shipped to Blessed Hope by his mother after he returned to his hometown; in a September 12, 2015 police report, and in conversations with Kennedy, the teen charged that Wiggins had assaulted him, declaring beforehand, “I’m going to get the demon out of you and make you straight.” In December 2016, DHR officials and county police raided the place in response to escapees’ complaints of solitary confinement and hours-long exercise sessions, leading twenty-two students to be sent back home. Thus far, however, Kennedy’s pleas for prosecution have been ignored. “Once again, Alabama law enforcement has failed to protect children,” he says. (Wiggins said of the charges: “It’s lies, all lies,” before hanging up.)

  Since the convictions, law enforcement and other public officials such as Morgan and Strange have begun trying to discredit Kennedy, using his final interview with the boys against him. While Kennedy says Knott forced the boys to take off their clothes—and the evidence from Vargas and others supports him—Knott told state and local investigators otherwise. Some officials such as Morgan and Strange now claim that’s in part why they failed to act—even though they’ve long been aware such charges are bogus, Kennedy says. “We had questions about the way Kennedy conducted his investigation,” Morgan told me, citing the naked interviews.

  Morgan added, slyly, “I don’t want to imply he did anything improper.”

  Kennedy’s response: “This is not true.”

  Kennedy is equally outraged that former state Attorney General Luther Strange has been appointed a US senator to replace Jeff Sessions, the new US Attorney General. “He [Strange] threw the children under the bus so he could grease the way for his political ambitions,” Kennedy says. “All these politicians have lined their pockets with the blood of children.”

  • • •

  THE REFUSAL TO ACT BY NEARLY EVERYONE IN AUTHORITY IN ALABAMA took its toll on the children imprisoned in the school, and its horrific legacy lives on long after the program was shut down. Erin Rodriguez, now eighteen, was a pill-popping runaway in suburban Atlanta before she was sent to RYA. “They would whip me,” she says. “They stripped me to my underwear and bra and took out a belt and hit me until I bled.”

  At Prichard, she was also placed in an isolation room for a month after an escape attempt. “I was crying and angry every day, and I was in shackles and handcuffs.” She pounded on the wood door, shouting to be released, but was only given brief bathroom breaks about twice a day, and, a few times a week, the chance to take a shower. “I felt like a dog,” she recalls, lying on the hard concrete floor with nails sticking up here and there, trying to avoid the bugs crawling all around. “It was nasty.”

  She tried to tell her father about the whippings and beatings and isolation rooms when she went back home on brief leaves, but he didn’t believe her and kept sending her back. She was there when the police and child protection workers swept in to take her and the other fourteen girls held in the all-girls facility, augmenting the raid that took away twenty-one boys from the home across from Rev. Young’s church about the same time. Erin says it felt like a SWAT team rescue operation. “They were shouting, ‘Where are the girls? Where are the girls?’” she recalls. “I was so happy to be going home to Atlanta.” She continues to have nightmares about what happened to her.

  There is plenty of talk these days among experts about “trauma-informed care” for young people whose brains are especially vulnerable to severe trauma as children and adolescents, but there is almost no guidance offered about how individuals—like these RYA survivors—can go about obtaining such specialized care.

  (There’s no definitive list, but good places to start are the certified Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy clinicians found at https://tfcbt.org/members/; the outpatient clinics that are part of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network at www.nctsnet.org/about-us; and the licensed professionals certified by the group promoting an alternative, evidence-based practice for trauma known as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy at www.emdria.org/search/newsearch.asp.)

  Dr. J. Douglas Bremner, the Emory University psychiatry professor who specializes in PTSD, has outlined self-help stress reduction techniques and a guide to proven professional care in his indispensable book, You Can’t Just Snap Out of It. He points out that only about 15 percent of people who experience traumatic events actually develop long-term PTSD, but, he says, “Half of those patients experience short-term symptoms, but they will eventually grow out of it.” Yet in the end, many of the young people who went through the program remain severely damaged. And neither the long prison sentences handed Knott and his accomplices nor the shuttering of their brutal facilities have fundamentally changed oversight of such programs virtually anywhere in the country.

  Yet, surprisingly, in fundamentalist-dominated Alabama, there’s finally some hope because of a new law in the state to regulate all private residential teen programs under DHR. Kids are required to be allowed unlimited communication with outsiders, while local police where the programs are located have been granted the unfettered right to inspect the sites in response to abuse allegations and bring charges if needed without relying on the children’s guardians or parents
. It’s the strongest law in the country, and with the support of the state’s religious groups, it passed the legislature unanimously in May. Its success was due in part to the exposure of the crimes of RYA leaders, with added attention brought to Kennedy’s reform crusade by an investigative feature in March 2017 on ABC’s 20/20 and, possibly, my article on the RYA sadists in Newsweek. But that law doesn’t help those people who’ve already been brutalized.

  After being released into the custody of his grandparents in a small Texas town, Robert, the bipolar teen given a gun to shoot himself by Knott, continued to unravel. In the late fall of 2016, the traumatized, suicidal youth was found by police sitting on his mother’s grave with a gun and some drugs, then arrested and sent to jail by the officers. The police and juvenile court judge ignored pleas from Captain Kennedy that he needed mental health treatment instead, as he had argued after his first drug arrest in 2015. After the first arrest, with his family too poor to afford bail, he wrote to Captain Kennedy, “Each day I’m subjected to ‘ISO’ [isolation], I grow more and more depressed. The flashbacks are becoming realer, so real in fact I’ve woken up in a cold sweat gasping for air as though I was being strangled, which was sometimes a daily event in RYA.” (As of this writing, he’s been suffering from untreated mood swings while in jail more than ninety days, even if he’s not kept in solitary confinement.)

  In another town, Eric’s father, Joe, is just left with the memory of all the money he wasted—nearly $15,000 on school fees alone—and a son, now twenty-two, continuing to deteriorate after coming back home to California.

  Eric shouldn’t have ended up in RYA in the first place after he mutated into a depressed, drug-abusing teen. There were few mental health professionals available in the Coachella Valley, where the Reyes family lived. One evening, Joe heard strange noises coming from sixteen-year-old Eric’s bedroom, and entered to find him hanging from a rope slung over the top post of a bunk bed. He rushed forward to hold up his body to prevent strangulation, then called 911. Eric was sent to an under-staffed area hospital for a few weeks, then he was kicked out without any treatment plan, medications or referrals, still deeply depressed. Joe turned to RYA after finding it online.

  These days, he is not always sure where Eric is: Sometimes he sleeps out in the streets, sometimes he drifts back to the house. “I am very upset. I can’t do anything for him,” Reyes says, unable to speak for a while, choking up with tears about the son he tried to help. “He’s not doing good at all. It’s taking forever to recover, and all he has are bad memories.”

  The traumas such young people face is why Kennedy continues to fight against abuse.

  “One of my greatest satisfactions is knowing that these children who suffered so much at their hands know that justice has been served in some way,” he says, but “you can’t return the youth that was stolen from them, you can’t restore the mental and physical damage that was done.”

  Yet for one forty-five-year-old woman, Jodi Hobbs, the president of Survivors of Institutional Abuse, the ongoing failures in Alabama and other states have a deeper, personal meaning. She has sought for over a decade to provide services to victims and prevent future abuse, in part to help others avoid the trauma she experienced as a seventeen-year-old girl in the Victory Christian Academy, shut down amid allegations of physical and sexual abuse in 1991. She worked with The Tampa Bay Times in publicizing and then helping close the founder’s new facility nearly twenty-five years later in Florida. She’s moved on with her life, becoming the mother of five and having a successful tech consulting career, while helping win passage last year of a California law extending at least nominal oversight to religious programs. But when she learned about RYA’s isolation rooms and violence, it brought her back to her own time that broke her spirit in her academy’s “Get Right” confinement rooms. “When I saw what happened at Restoration Youth Academy,” she says, “it breaks my heart, I feel so defeated as a survivor.”

  Despite recent successes, like the convictions of Knott and the new California law, she doesn’t see real change in enforcement happening until a broader shift in public and family attitudes takes place. “These are throwaway children,” she observes. “They are looked at as dollar signs, not as individuals.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Profits and Losses from Residential Treatment: The Story of Bain Capital and CRC Health

  THE APPARENT NEGLECT AND TORTURE ENDURED BY ERIN RODRIGUEZ and Eric Reyes and the other teens in an Alabama religious facility were, sadly enough, hardly unique. This sort of victimization did not result solely from a fanatical application of fundamentalist beliefs, but also arose from something even more common: exploiting desperation for profit.

  When Dana Blum, a recent widow living in Portland, Oregon, made the fateful decision to send her son Brendan to Youth Care, a residential program for troubled teens located in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, it seemed like a beacon of hope. “Our treatment center,” Youth Care’s website proclaimed, “is an excellent vessel for adolescents to begin turning their lives around with the help of our highly trained and dedicated professionals.”

  Brendan, a fourteen-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome, had been extremely aggressive for years; he was even arrested a few times after attacking members of his family. Local therapists hadn’t helped, and six months after her husband died, Dana was frantically casting about for solutions. A consultation with UCLA’s neuropsychiatric unit convinced her that Youth Care’s therapeutic and educational program would finally make a difference.

  Four months into his stay there, Brendan had earned a reputation as a temper-prone student who tried to shirk his obligations. So on the afternoon of June 27 when he complained to medical staff that he felt very sick, as if something was “crawling around” in his stomach, his concerns were dismissed. After 11 p.m., he woke up, complaining of stomach pain, and defecated in his pants. The on-duty monitors took him to the Purple Room, a makeshift isolation room used to segregate misbehaving students. There, he suffered a long night of agony, howling in pain and repeatedly vomiting and soiling himself. According to court transcripts and police reports, the two poorly paid monitors on duty did little more than offer him water, Sprite and Pepto-Bismol. They never telephoned the on-call nurse and waited until nearly 2 a.m. to contact the on-call supervisor, only to leave a voicemail. There was little else they felt they could do—Youth Care’s protocol on emergency services meant they were too low on the totem pole to call 911 themselves.

  “They didn’t trust our judgment in emergency situations,” explains Josh Randall, a former Youth Care residential monitor, who wasn’t on duty that night. “If you’re working for $9.50 an hour on the graveyard shift, you don’t want to buck the system.” At any rate, the monitors had little expertise in how to respond—it was an entry-level job requiring only a GED, plus a CPR and safety course overseen by Youth Care itself.

  When the morning staff arrived at 7 a.m., they discovered Brendan facedown on the floor of the Purple Room, his body already stiff with rigor mortis. The state’s chief medical examiner later determined that Blum had died of a twisted bowel “infarction,” which requires emergency surgical intervention.

  “It made me very angry that they couldn’t provide better emergency services for my son,” Dana Blum told the online magazine Momlogic in 2009. “I feel like he was murdered.” In fact, no court has ever found Aspen Education, the corporate division overseeing Youth Care, or its staffers and subsidiaries, guilty of murder or other crimes. Blum, with the help of insurance and school district aid, paid Youth Care $15,000 a month in 2007 for Brendan’s care. Now she can’t speak publicly about the case as part of a wrongful death settlement she reached in 2011 with Youth Care of Utah and its parent company, CRC’s Aspen Education.

  The failure at Youth Care was not due simply to the carelessness of a few workers—a point underscored when a Utah court found that the threshold needed to pursue criminal negligence charges against the two monitors in 2008 wasn’t met
and the charges were dismissed. And it wasn’t the only example of alleged negligence or abuse at treatment centers for adult addicts and “troubled teens” that were owned by Aspen’s parent company, CRC Health Group, according to a review of government reports, court filings and official complaints by parents and employees, along with interviews with former clients and staff.

  In late 2014, CRC Health was sold for $1.3 billion to Acadia Healthcare, a chain of addiction and mental health facilities. That amounted to a modest profit for Bain Capital, which bought the firm in 2006. But that acquisition doesn’t necessarily mean a shift in the CRC facilities’ corporate culture: The CEO of CRC Health Group, Jerry Rhodes, an executive with CRC since 2003, remained in charge as it joined Acadia. That could be seen as a potentially ominous sign for those aggrieved staff members, patients, surviving family members and young people all too familiar with those sorts of operations.

  To be fair, Acadia, under the leadership of CEO Joey Jacobs since 2011, has faced relatively few of the public lawsuits, investigations and complaints about neglect and deaths that have dogged the other major behavioral health companies. These include Jacobs’s own Psychiatric Solutions, Inc. (PSI), once the largest provider of inpatient psychiatric services, which he sold to the larger, scandal-plagued Universal Health Services chain in 2010 for $2 billion. Jacobs has long disputed allegations of neglect, sexual violence and wrongful death at PSI facilities following a ProPublica series that started in 2008.