White Mountain terrain

Nobody saw Michael Villa duck into the shade of the ponderosa pines that June afternoon.

No one watched the boy pick his way along the well-worn mountain trail that led to the high mountain clearing where he retreated whenever he was sad or lonely or frightened. From up there, Michael could look out across the vast expanse of the White Mountain Apache Tribe's reservation. He could imagine that he could see Fort Apache in the distance, where, he said, he had been beaten and starved and dragged by the neck by drill instructors at the Buffalo Soldiers' tough love boot camp where he spent time the year before, until he lost consciousness. Ever since, he had been haunted by nightmares.

But up there on the mountain, Michael was invisible

Nobody saw Michael pick up the rope he had hidden there weeks earlier. No one watched him as he tossed one end of it over a low hanging branch. Nobody saw the 16-year-old boy slip the noose around his neck.

Nobody saw him die.

At about the same time that Michael was twisting at the end of a rope, Chuck Long, the self-appointed "Colonel" of America's Buffalo Soldiers' Re-enactors, was assembling his latest young recruits at a park in the sparkling suburbs of Phoenix.

A smooth-talking former Marine, who had never risen above the rank of corporal, the "Colonel" had promised the desperate parents of those boys and girls, troubled teens, kids much like Michael Villa, that he held the secret to bringing those kids back into line.

Charles "Chuck" Long mugshot

 

The parents were frightened that their teenage boys, most of them confused, many of them suffering from psychological problems or learning disorders, many of them having just experienced their first encounters with the law would soon be swallowed up by a juvenile justice system that increasingly treats teenage kids like hardened criminals.

But Chuck Long had promised in his brochure that in just a few weeks, through a mixture of tough love and thrilling adventure, their recalcitrant teens would be whipped into shape at his boot camp.

"Don't worry," one of the parents recalls him saying. "I've never brought a kid home dead. If I did, I'd be out of business."

Within a few days, Chuck Long would be under investigation by the Maricopa County Sheriff's department in connection with the death of a 14-year-old learning disabled boy named Anthony Haynes. A few months later, Long would be charged with second-degree murder in connection with the death of Anthony Haynes. Hearing impaired, and overweight, an immature kid who collected Beanie Babies and once got caught shoplifting a plastic action figure," Tony was far from a hard case. He was a kid whose worst adolescent offense was that he slashed his mom's tires with a kitchen knife. It was a desperate act, his mother later said, which he committed so that she wouldn't be able to drive him to an America's Buffalo Soldiers' weekend. It was, she would later say, as a result of that offense that Anthony died June 30, 2001 at Chuck Long's summer boot camp.

Death in the Desert

The autopsy report said Anthony Haynes died of dehydration.

Anthony Haynes, victim

But authorities now insist that it was more than that. According to investigators and witnesses, Tony Haynes died as a result of excesses they claim were routine at Chuck Long's boot camps. Witnesses and authorities allege that on the day he died, the 5-foot-8, 200-pound teenager, along with several other children, was forced to remain in the sweltering Arizona sun for hours, with little water. His crime was that he had stepped forward when Long had asked if anyone wanted to drop out of the program.

 

The punishment proved to be too much for Tony, his mother would later say. A kid who was known for his wild imagination, Tony is said to have begun to hallucinate. He started to shovel dirt into his mouth, yelling to the other kids, "I found water!" He ran around the remote desert campsite, an hour's drive from the nearest hospital, telling his friends, his drill instructors, anyone who would listen, that they were under attack by Indians, and that he would save them. Then he collapsed.

According to investigators, staff members at the camp dumped the barely conscious boy into the bed of a green pickup truck. Then they drove the boy 12 miles across rutted roads to Long's motel room. They stripped his clothes off and dumped him in the shower. He spit up mud and almost drowned.

But Long allegedly believed the boy was faking.

He ordered the staffers to bring the boy back to the camp..

It was only then, three hours after he first collapsed, that Long's wife, Carmellina called for help.

The transcript of the 911 call, provided to this reporter, provides a chilling glimpse into the panic that gripped the camp as Anthony slid toward death.

DISPATCHER: What happened? I need to know what happened?

CARMELINA LONG: He refused to drink water. Every time we tried to hydrate him he was just refusing because he doesn't want to be here. He was eating dirt all day long.

DISPATCHER: Okay. Whoever is screaming in the background, tell her settle down...Is he breathing at all?

CARMELINA LONG: Is he breathing, Colonel? They want to know if he's breathing.

CHUCK LONG: What?

CARMELINA LONG: Is he breathing?

CHUCK LONG: No.

CARMELINA LONG. No he's not.

They use military time at the Maricopa County Medical Examiner's Office. At 2300 hours on July 1, 2001, fourteen-year-old Anthony Haynes was pronounced dead at Marysville Hospital.

A Grim Pattern

Anthony's death and the subsequent investigation -- which included among other things the seizure of Long's computer records, along with a copy of a pornographic pamphlet and a video tape detailing how to cultivate marijuana from Long's home -- set off a storm of controversy in Arizona and beyond.

Legislators and activists called for stiffer regulations in Arizona, and there were calls for federal oversight of the burgeoning boot camp industry.

All say they were shocked and appalled by the abuses that authorities allege were commonplace at Long's camp and others.

Even Joe Arpaio, the tough-as-nails sheriff of Maricopa County who prides himself on his reputation as one of the nation's most severe jailers, and a supporter of boot camps in principle, blanched when he learned details of the abuses Long and his workers are alleged to have committed. "You know he handcuffed kids behind their back and threw them into his pool," the sheriff said. Arpaio said he expects that criminal charges will be filed in connection with the death of Anthony Haynes.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio

But it was hardly the first time in the 20-year history of tough love programs that things went horribly wrong. Though reputable wilderness programs abound, carefully monitored and generally effective programs that use a blend of psychology, educational techniques and physical exercise to teach wayward youngsters self reliance, there are others -- some run by inexperienced or unscrupulous contractors which have given the wilderness therapy concept a bad name, experts say.

The record is replete with tales of horror.

Gina Score, victim

 
T

"My surviving kids ask me what I'm doing all night and I tell them I'm looking for dead children." She said in an interview at the time.

By July of 2001, she had found 34

On the Reservation

Prosecutors, cops and even parents on the White Mountain Apache Reservation say no one should have been surprised by reports of brutality at Long's summer camp that summer.

A year earlier a litany of abuses, all chillingly similar to those reported at the camp where Anthony died, were documented in an 80-page report compiled by the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Navajo County Sheriff's Department, and the state's Child Protective Services Agency.

It was the summer of 2001 and 160 miles east of Scottsdale, Brent Leonard sat at his desk behind a name plate that says "Tribal Prosecutor" thumbing through an 80-page indictment that he signed the previous summer charging two of Long's drill instructors with assault in connection with a series of abuses against kids who had been enrolled in Long's summer camp.

"I'm actually surprised that nobody's ever asked for this before, after all the reports of what's been going on down in the valley" he said in an interview at the time.

The document reads like an indictment at a war crimes trial. There are allegations of physical brutality, kids being beaten. One kid was allegedly choked with the handle of a rake. Children reported that they were starved, fed a diet that included nothing more than an apple in the morning, a carrot stick at lunch and half a bowl of beans for dinner. One reservation nutritionist referred to it as a "starvation" diet; a total of 400 calories, roughly a third the amount of calories contained in the daily rations for inmates as Auschwitz.

Kids were allegedly forced to stand for hours at parade rest, their hands bound in front of them, and that rope in turn looped around the neck of the next guy in line. If they tired and dropped their hands, the kid next to them would choke, witnesses said.

There was the statement taken from a white kid, who says his chief offense was that he got on Long's wrong side. As punishment, he was forced to stand for up to five hours in the searing Arizona sun with a noose around his neck, the document and witnesses alleged.

Morning workout routine

"The Colonel come over and pulled on the rope a couple of times," the boy told this reporter. "I couldn't breathe." A day later, he and an eight-year-old Apache boy were forced to lie on their backs doing stomach crunches, and all the while, Long poured bucket after bucket of water on them. "I could take it," the boy says. "But I was older. That little kid, he was just crying and choking."

Another boy, Clifton Lupe, then just 14, was forced to run for hours in the middle of the night until his hamstring snapped. It wasn't until days later that he received medical attention.   Another complained of stomach pains for days before he was finally taken to a hospital. Doctors there discovered that the boy had appendicitis.

Long, in an interview in 2001 had an explanation: "Young Native Americans don't like boot camp" he says, then adds quickly. "That's a joke."

But one investigator who probed the incident failed to see the humor in it. "I couldn't treat an axe murderer that way. If I did, I'd be in jail. And these weren't axe murderers. These were kids."

Over the Rainbow

Drive down the dusty main street of White River, the capital of the White Mountain Apache Reservation, and hang a left at the boarded-up pizza place.

Follow the rutted macadam road past an overgrown field where an old paint pony lazily swats horseflies and nibbles at the weeds that grow at the base of the yucca plants.

Keep going until you reach the neighborhood at the top of the hill, a collection of sagging, single-story, prefab houses that are good enough for government work.

Arizona Map

Look to your right. There, sitting underneath an anemic elm tree, is all that remains of Arkie Suttle's twenty-year-old Oldsmobile. Arkie attacked that car one night last fall with an axe because his mother wouldn't let him drive it. The shards of windshield glass are still lying on the blue vinyl driver's seat.

Next door, an old mongrel is gnawing at an open sore on his back.

Stop when you reach the Dead End sign. You're there. Hon-dah. Welcome to Over the Rainbow.

Dorothy, Oz and Toto are all dead ends too.

If ever there was a place caught in limbo, Over the Rainbow is it. The neighborhood and the people who live there believe they are lost halfway between the old Apache ways and the world of the Anglos outside the reservation. All you need to do is look at their roofs to see that. On one end, there are satellite dishes sucking images of blond-haired, blue-eyed, fair-haired talk show hosts out of the ether.

On the other side of the roofs, deer antlers are left to bleach in the sun in keeping with an ancient Apache tradition. Few people on Over the Rainbow can remember how the tradition began or why they still follow it. It's just what you do there. Bleach the antlers. Watch TV. Re-runs. Westerns. "Fort Apache" with John Wayne and Henry Fonda.

Infant mortality. Alcoholism. Drug abuse. Suicide. There are only so many ways to escape Over the Rainbow. That's why people were so excited when they heard that Chuck Long planned to open a boot camp on the reservation in July 2000, said Elicia Seymour, an Apache tribal policewoman who enrolled her two sons, Arkie and Jeremiah Suttle, in Long's program.

"Mr. Long, he promised that the kids would come back more disciplined. More respectful. He promised a lot of good things would come out of it," she says. "Except that it was all false."

Fort Apache

Residents of White River tend to be ambivalent about Fort Apache, a decaying collection of rotting wood and sagging stone slung together on a windswept mesa by the U.S. Army during a 75-year military occupation of the reservation.

Sure, the place is part of American mythology. Back in the Fifties, Lincoln Logs used to make a special Fort Apache play-set, complete with little plastic teepees and wild savages raising lethal looking tomahawks high above their full-feathered ceremonial bonnets. Even now, in this supposedly more enlightened time, Fort Apache still draws the occasional tourist, and those tourists are usually willing to spend a few bucks at the tribal museum and gift shop, even if they only walk away with a souvenir tom-tom, a handful of postcards and a hankering to find their old Fort Apache play set.
Fort Apache Stockade

But Fort Apache was also the site of unspeakable horrors -- rapes, murders, and worse -- committed against the Apaches by the Army. Among the units that participated in the ongoing subjugation of the Apache Nation were the Buffalo Soldiers, the predominantly African-American Ninth and Tenth Cavalries, whose "legacy of desire, dedication and discipline" Long now hoped to impart to the Apache children.

Logo of the Buffalo Soldiers' Re-enactment ABSRA

Long had first come up with the idea of running one of his boot camps on the Apache reservation in the spring of 2000, when he was invited there by former NBA star Kareem Abdul Jabar, a history buff, who had once spent a year on the reservation as a basketball coach.

In an interview with the FBI, Long later claimed that "the idea for running the boot camp originated with...Jabar." He amended that in a 2001 interview with this reporter, saying that he and Jabar had talked about a great many things. Jabar's lawyer, Barry West amended it further.

"Long expressed an interest in holding a camp on the reservation and Kareem suggested that he speak to the tribal council. That was the end of it," West says. "Kareem Abdul Jabar has not been involved with Colonel Long, or any of Colonel Long's activities since the first annual Fort Apache Heritage Reunion."

Long managed to use his introduction to Fort Apache as a springboard to reach the tribal council, said David Osterfeld, then a tribal lawyer, and he buttonholed leaders like Tribal Chairman Dallas Massey and persuaded the council to give him a chance to bring the tribe's aimless youth a sense of honor and discipline. It would cost the tribe $2,500 per kid.

Eleven-year old Frank Villa was sitting in his mother's tiny living room, with a look of world-weariness that you would expect to see on the face of a man four times his age. His brow was furrowed. He was a little frustrated that day. His white teachers at the reservation school had asked him to write a poem about himself. They told him he could write about his favorite movies, or his favorite songs. "I don't have none," the little boy said.

But he did remember a few snippets from a ditty that he learned in the summer of 2000 when he was at Colonel Long's boot camp at Fort Apache.

"It goes, 'Kill, Kill, Kill,' something like that," he says.

Young Frank was a witness to the abuse that allegedly occurred at Fort Apache at the hands of Long and his drill instructors. He remembered the beatings; he remembered the constant gnawing feeling of hunger. They were, after all, fed a diet that contained just 400 calories.

But most of all, he remembered the day that his brother was choked until he passed out.

Michael's Story

Michael, then 15, wasn't a bad kid, said his mother, Esther Villa. It was just that he had a way of getting under people's skin. His mouth had often gotten him in trouble, she said. He was regularly suspended from school. In one case, he was jailed briefly after verbally assaulting a teacher.

"He was one of the slow students and he would get in trouble without even knowing it. He would say something and people would take it real bad and he wouldn't even know what he did wrong."

All the same, Michael Villa had one driving desire: he wanted to be a soldier in the worst way. To a 15-year-old boy like Michael, with no special talents and certainly no aptitude for schooling, the military offered the quickest way to escape from the squalor and meanness of reservation life, to fly from streets with almost mocking names like "Oz" and "Dorothy" and "Over the Rainbow."

His father had been in the Marines. It had made a man out of him. And a year earlier, Michael had convinced his parents to scrape together the money to send him to a Marine Corps-run summer camp outside San Diego. He had loved the experience. But the Villa family couldn't afford to send the boy again all the way to California. There were other mouths to feed. Bills to pay.

So when Michael heard that Col. Chuck Long was about to start a boot camp right on the reservation, Michael pleaded with his parents to let him join up.

"We thought it was going to be a good thing," Esther Villa recalled. The Villas said they thought the stern discipline Long promised might help their son learn to control his fast mouth, and perhaps even teach him some respect.

Perhaps, his parents thought, a little tough love would take the edge off of the boy. And the Buffalo Soldiers' program did seem to have a patina of respectability. On his web site, Long proudly displayed photos of himself with dignitaries like Jesse Jackson, Colin Powell, and then Texas Governor George W. Bush, grip and grin photos taken at various events where the Buffalo Soldiers had been enlisted to serve as a color guard.

Besides, Michael's parents thought, Jeremiah Suttle, their son's best friend who lived two doors down was going. So was Suttle's brother, a troubled young man on the brink of delinquency, named Arkie.   If their mother, Apache policewoman Elicia Seymour, thought the camp was all right, they thought, it must be.

They agreed to let Michael go. But he had to take his kid brother, Frank.

Chuck Long with Collin Powell
It was the beginning of the third week of camp, Frank recalled, and Michael Villa was sitting with a group of other youngsters, trying to duck the relentless sun on the broad parched parade ground, when a drill instructor ordered Michael to stand up.

"She didn't say nobody's name. And we was looking at her like,   'Which of us?'" Frank said. When Michael failed to respond, another drill instructor grabbed him by his kerchief, Frank said. "She just... twisted it around and dragged him backwards, and he just fell down."

According to court records, the boy was dragged across the dirt and rocks and scrub grass and dumped just outside a nearby tent, set up for the comfort of Long's drill instructors. As he lay there unconscious, drill instructors dumped water on the gasping boy.

Chuck Long poses with children

Federal and state investigators later concluded that Michael "remained tied up for about four hours and he was left in the sun with no water," a foreshadowing, perhaps of the treatment Tony Haynes allegedly endured a year later.

The boy, who had always been plagued with migraines, suffered a severe headache, and finally, Curtis Suttle, a tribal member and a former Marine who witnesses say had tried to mollify Long's rage from time to time, took pity on the boy. He allowed him to go home to fetch medicine.

Before Michael was allowed to leave, Long confronted him, Esther Villa says.

"Colonel Long was in Michael's face...he told him not to say anything of what's going on there when he leaves."

But Michael didn't keep the Colonel's secret.

He told his parents, and his father, the former Marine, rushed the six miles back to Fort Apache where he confronted Long and some of his drill instructors. The confrontation turned physical. Manuel Villa was arrested, and taken to the White River Jail. But authorities later released him and focused their investigation on Long and his operation.

The truth was, even before the Villa incident, grim rumors had begun circulating through the reservation. But rumors were starting to leak out. One night, a young Apache boy, then just 16, escaped from the camp. A call went out to the Apache Police to retrieve him. Elicia Seymour found the boy cowering in the weeds at the end of Over the Rainbow.

"He started crying," Seymour recalls. "He said he was abused. He goes those guys hit on me, they beat on me, they hit me in the stomach. He said, "Is Arkie your son?' and I said, 'Yeah.'

"He says I would pull him out. It isn't worth it."

It was not until several days later, when her own sons finally tried a daring escape, rushing across the open mesa, jumping a 12 foot cliff into the waters of the White River, only to be captured and pummeled by drill instructors, that Seymour would finally really believe what the runaway boy had told her.

She had proof. Arkie's broken rib.

Within hours of the Villa incident, the state's Child Protective Services Agency, the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, as well as police, descended on the camp. According to witnesses, about half the children begged to be rescued. One mother remembers seeing a bus load of Buffalo Soldiers' recruits, "piggies" the drill instructors called them, their arms sticking out the window of the bus, tears streaming down their faces, imploring their parents for help.

"These were teenage boys," said Claire Lavender. "These were white boys, and Indian kids, and an older boy. I really looked at him because he was in the back and he was saying; 'Do you have any food? Please give me something to eat,   'I'm hungry'. And then the others said, 'Are you going to take me home? Did you come to take me home?

"And then I saw my son sitting there and he was crying."
Push-ups by kids in detailed unit

Tribal authorities immediately closed the camp, and the youngsters were taken to a nearby shelter for protection, tribal leaders said.   Through it all, Frank Villa said, Long tried to keep a tight reign on rumors about the treatment the kids were receiving. Parents say they were ordered to remain far away from the camp, and believing the Colonel knew best, most of them say they agreed. Long prohibited the young recruits from writing anything to anyone about the actions of the camp's staff, and warned that he would be reviewing all of their letters home, Frank says.

But investigators had not yet completed their probe, and the full scope of the alleged abuses at Fort Apache had not yet been documented, said David Osterfeld, the assistant tribal counsel. Long, who still maintains that his boot camp was "attacked by Child Protective Services," insisted that the camp be reopened.

Uncertain who to believe, the tribal council hammered out a compromise, Osterfeld says. Council members agreed to allow Long's camp to remain open if he signed a waiver, stating among other things, that he would notify parents that there had been allegations of child abuse at the camp, that he have at least one parent on the grounds for the remainder of the camp's term, and provide proper food and medical attention to the campers.

Long never signed the document. Instead, he loaded the three dozen or so remaining campers, most of them kids who had previously attained the elevated status of "crossed sabers" into a bus and drove them off the reservation to Fort Navajo, where they were graduated early.

Long for his part, insisted that nothing out of the ordinary took place at Fort Apache.

Chuck Long leads group of boys

 

Daily Bread

By the time the report, compiled by authorities for White Mountain as well as local and federal investigators, was completed, the camp had already closed for the season. But the details contained in it were chilling. There were reports of beatings and forced marches in the middle of the night. Kids were handcuffed together, in some cases, authorities allege, for days at a time.

Some, among them children as young as seven, were forced to stand for hours, their hands tied, and a noose looped around the next person in line so that if they tired, and dropped their hands, their neighbor would choke, all the while Colonel Long, a pistol on his hip, looked on, the report alleges.

In one case, a boy was forced to stand beneath the Fort's old hanging tree for hours -- perhaps as many as five hours -- in the scorching Arizona sun, his hands cuffed behind his back, a noose looped around his neck and fastened to the tree, authorities allege. From time to time, the boy says, the Colonel would come by and pull the rope tight and choke him.

The boy's offense?

Long insisted that the boy had smuggled drugs into Fort Apache's drug free zone.

But investigators who probed the Colonel's operation at the White Mountain Apache Reservation, say it was far simpler than that. The boy had challenged Long's authority, he had tried to escape, they said. What's more, the boy says, after being starved and beaten, he snuck into the supply tent and stole a small bag of pretzels from the drill instructors' private stash.

"Long wanted to make an example of him," said one investigator who spoke on condition that he not be identified.

The Limit of the Law

Judicial sovereignty. It's the moldy hardtack the federal government gives to the legal system on the nation's reservations. Under the law, Native American cops, theoretically agents of independent nations, have the authority to arrest Indians for crimes against Indians, as long as the crime occurs on an Indian reservation.

But there's a catch. The law only allows Indian cops to charge Indians, and then only with minor crimes. Assault is the most serious. And Indian courts can only sentence Indian convicts to a year in an Indian jail.

More serious crimes -- like child abuse, or civil rights violations, for example -- are supposed to be investigated and prosecuted by state or federal authorities. But that seldom happens.

All over the West, tribal prosecutors and Indian activists complain that federal and state officials tend to turn a blind eye to crimes that are committed by non-Indians against Indians on the reservations.

That's what happened at Fort Apache. The feds said they thought the state should handle the case. The state thought it was the fed's responsibility.

That left it up to Brent Leonard, the tribal prosecutor, to file the only charges he could, the assault charges against the drill instructors. Long has repeatedly insisted, "no one got charged at Fort Apache."  But the tribal charges were legally valid, even if they weren't particularly effective at hobbling Long's operation, said Michael Endfield, then first deputy prosecutor at White Mountain.

Joe Arpaio, the gun-grip-hard sheriff of Maricopa County, is the kind of guy that Chuck Long admired. After all, Arpaio earned his reputation -- both in Arizona and nationally -- through a series of get-tough programs that he instituted at the Maricopa County Jail. He put thousands of inmates in tents in the sweltering desert, and stripped them of all but the barest necessities. When inmates complained about the conditions, Arpaio told them, "If you don't like it here, don't come back."

Mariposa County Sheriff's Cruiser

In a lot of ways, Arpaio has built a career as a kind of patron saint of the same in-your-face approach to justice that Long embraced. In fact, a few years back, Long's Buffalo Soldiers' Re-enactors named Arpaio "Humanitarian of the Year."

But that didn't stop Arpaio from pursuing the investigation into Long's operation as fervently as he does any other cases.

The way Arpaio saw it, the February 2002 arrest of Long on charges of assault and second degree murder made a clear distinction between the kind of programs he endorses, and those embraced by Long and others.

"I don't think hiding behind this type of operation really alleviates any of the problems that could occur when you abuse children," he says. "You can be tough and still be humane, too.

"You know, people are arrested every day for abusing children, every day they're being arrested, and they get big-time in jail."

A Box of Memories

A few weeks after Tony Haynes collapsed in the Arizona desert and died, Long was at it again.  The tough-love boot camp instructor who had once told a group of parents that he had "never brought a kid home dead; if I did, I would be out of business," was standing behind a table in a Scottsdale Park on an unusually hot Saturday afternoon, writing down the names of a smaller-than-usual group of new recruits for his 13-session weekend program.

"There wasn't anything we could really do to stop him," Arpaio said at the time, though since then, the program has closed.

Melanie Hudson, Tony's mother

 A

There were a few Beanie Babies inside. Some toys and games. A few spiral notebooks filled with schoolwork. A red bandana. Tony's hearing aid.

"I wanted to get his glasses back so I could put them in there," along with his uniform from America's Buffalo Soldiers. Together, they would complete the little cardboard memorial to Tony.

Hudson tries not to let her emotions get the best of her when she talked about Long and his boot camp.

After all, no one had forced her to enroll her son in the program. It had seemed like a worthwhile program, at least from the brochure, the perfect thing for a single mother like herself, trying to deal with a difficult kid while at the same time working her way through a bitter divorce from her second husband.

She had been told that the instructors at Buffalo Soldiers "would get in his face, they would not cut him any slack. Hold him responsible for his actions, you know?"

In short, they were promising "the same thing that I was looking for," she said.

In hindsight, she said, she realized that the hard-line approach never really worked with Tony. Although his behavior would improve slightly each weekend when he came home, "he'd backslide" and usually right away.

Perhaps she should have realized that the program wasn't working, she admitted, when she came out and found her tires slashed that morning in June, 2001.

The same thing had happened the week before, she said, and although she is convinced that Tony had no part in that incident, he did get a benefit out of it. He didn't have to spend the weekend with Long and his drill instructors.

"He got to spend the weekend at home before, the last weekend, so he thought maybe I'll get another weekend at home," Hudson surmised.

Instead, Hudson forced her son to go the America's Buffalo Soldiers' program that weekend, where he spent most of the day Sunday handcuffed to a tree in Long's suburban back yard. Hudson knew about the handcuffing. "I figured if he was arrested, he would have been in handcuffs," and so she let it slide. In fact, she said, she and her first husband, Tony's father, arranged to have the boy placed in the summer camp to really drive the point home.

In the days before he left for camp, Tony seemed better. "He was doing pretty good. He seemed to be cooperating a little more. I almost called them that Sunday and said, 'he's doing better, forget this,' " Hudson says.

"But his dad and I talked. We couldn't forgive him over the slashing of the tires. Forgive is the wrong word. We couldn't excuse what he did, by letting him off. He had to learn that there was a consequence for what he had done."

Tony told his mother that he understood. He told his father that he would make him proud.

Melanie Hudson remembers the last time she saw her son alive.

She had just wheeled her car into the lot at Chaparral Park, the rallying point for America's Buffalo Soldiers' summer camp, and was chatting with Long's wife, Carmelina, making sure that she understood how and when Tony was supposed to take his prescription of Depracote.

"And then I turned to Tony and he gave me a hug. And he kissed me and he trooped off, just like a little man, and stood in line, at parade rest, with everybody else."

The Call

It was about 10 p.m. on Sunday night when Melanie Hudson's telephone rang.

"It was Carmelina, and she said, 'the Colonel needs to talk to you, " Hudson says.

Then Long got on the phone, she says.

"He said, 'Tony got in with the wrong crowd today and they decided that they were going to take off', " Hudson said, replaying the conversation in her mind.

"He said Tony had started to walk out of camp and that one of the drill instructors grabbed a hold of his arm and pulled him back and he said he swung at him, which didn't sound like Tony. He was not the type to throw a punch. He was a wuss. But they just kept going on and on about Tony eating the dirt and not wanting to drink the water. They just kept repeating it.

"And I heard him say one time that they've got a pulse. They've got a heartbeat. And I'm sitting here going, 'why all that?'

"I kind of giggled a little and said,   'Well, yeah, it sounds like I've got a kid that really wants to come home, doesn't he?' And he says 'Yeah, he does.'

"So I'm thinking, the rationale in my mind is 'I've got a kid that's got a real bad tummy ache here.'"

By the time Hudson reached the hospital at Maryville, 40 minutes or so after the phone call from the Longs, investigators from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department were already at the campsite, interviewing Long and his staff and taking statements from the children. The cops already knew they had a homicide investigation on their hands.

But Melanie Hudson didn't know that.

"When I get there, there's nobody there besides me."

She told the night duty nurse that she'd come to see her son, who had been brought in a short time earlier by medevac helicopter. A troubled look crossed the nurse's face.

"She says, 'Oh.'

"They took me to one of those little family waiting rooms that are behind the doors in the emergency room," Hudson recalls. "Then a doctor and two nurses came in. The doctor looks at me and he says,  'we tried to do everything that we could.'

"Shock went across my face and I said,   'don't you dare tell me my son's dead.'"

"And he looked at me like, 'you didn't know?' "

The Colonel Speaks

Chuck Long didn't want to talk about the investigation into Tony's death. He didn't want to talk about handcuffs or beatings. He didn't want to talk about hanging trees or the kids being forced to stand in the sun for hours.

He wanted to talk about honor and respect and discipline and the history of the real Buffalo Soldiers.

But he would allow this: "The children that come to America's Buffalo Soldiers' program are children who have run away. Children who are truant. Children who are, in turn, doing drugs, okay?" The program, he said, was designed to help combat that.

"It is not a trip to Disneyland, Magic Mountain, okay? Some children refer to it as a trip through hell. And we don't apologize for it," he says.

But is it effective?

Can Long, whose trial is slated to begin in November, or other boot camp operators point to statistics to challenge government studies that have found that the many of these programs don't work?

"That's a numbers game, and I'm not going to get into it," Long said in the 2001 interview.

But back at the White Mountain Reservation, where the results of Long's experiment in tough love are still being compiled, there are a few people who have opinions on the subject, people like Elicia Seymour, whose son Arkie continued to deteriorate in the months following his stint at the camp.

There was the night that he attacked his car with the axe, showering Over the Rainbow with shards of shattered glass. By the time he turned 18, the young man, who had not been in any serious trouble from the time he was 13, was now serving a year in the tribal jail for a host of alcohol-related offenses.

Clifton Lupe, the teenage boy who was forced to run until his hamstring tore, was experiencing a problem with alcohol.   It was a problem that really developed after he left Long's camp, he said at the time. If he had a choice between spending a few weeks at Long's boot camp or a year at White Mountain's musty and decrepit jail, Lupe says he'd choose the jail hands down. "They don't beat you here," he said.

And what about Michael Villa, the boy who was dragged by his neckerchief until he blacked out?

It was June 25, and Colonel Long's latest group of "piggies" -- young Anthony Haynes among them, were bound for Buckeye and a summer of tough love.

That night, a thick cloud mantle hung over the moon on the White River reservation, and Michael Villa seemed more distant than usual. Ever since he had been rescued from the boot camp the year before, he had seemed more disturbed, his mother recalls.

He had a recurring dream that haunted him. "He would see things,' his mother recalled. " He would feel something behind him. Something dark,"

"I know he was scared. I could see it in him that he was scared. He was always a tough kid, but he was always acting scared."   The dream worried his mother enough that she was trying to make arrangements to have him talk to a counselor.

So did other elements of his behavior. One day in May, she recalls, Michael and she had squabbled over nothing particularly important. The boy grabbed a rope and ran up the mountain to his special place. When she found him, he was sitting down, throwing rocks off the edge of the mountain.

"He was laughing, she remembered. "He said, Mom why did you have to come looking for me?"

"I said because I didn't want you to do anything to yourself.

He said, "Mom, I'm not that crazy."

That June night, Michael, who could not read, asked his mother to read him a bedtime story. He wanted her to read him a story about hell, about lakes of fire, and about eternal torment.

The next day, Michael Villa slipped away when no one was looking, threw a rope over a low hanging branch, and slipped the noose around his neck.

And so, Michael Villa died alone and unseen.

His father would later admit that he wonders whether the boy's experience at Chuck Long's boot camp may have been a factor. "I know what they were doing wasn't right," Manuel Villa says, and perhaps, the slow and painful death his son chose for himself reflected that.

"Even him choking," he says. "Maybe that was him thinking, it's not that hard to take my own life, after getting choked and passing out."

But in the end, no one really knows for sure why Michael Villa hanged himself. There could have been a thousand reasons why a kid from Over the Rainbow would want to take his own life.

All the same, Dawn Takeuchi, the grieving mother who spends her nights scouring the Internet searching for the names of kids who have died in the country's boot camps, added Michael's name to her list.

He was number 35.

Bibliography

This story is based on a court records and interviews conducted by the author in the summer of 2001.

For additional information:

"Discipline to Death", Reader's Digest, July 2002, by Seamus McGraw

"Boot Camps for Wayward Youths Offer Hope, Help, Hell." Associated Press, June 13, 1999, by Michelle Ray Ortiz.

"Autopsy Results Released in Death of Arizona Boot Camp Teenager", Arizona   Republic, August 23, 2001

"Teen Behavioral Centers Push Tough Love", Scripps Howard News Service, July 21, 1999, by Lou Kilzer.

"Why Are You Crying? Answer: "My Life, Sir,"" the first of a four part series that appeared in the Baltimore Sun, Dec. 5, 1999, by Todd Richisson.

Juvenile Boot Camps and Military Structured Youth Program, a March 2000 report by the Koch Crime Institute.

"On Adolescent Crime, Time to End Fad Justice", By Douglas Nelson, president of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, in Advocacy, Spring 2003 edition.

About the Author

  Seamus McGraw

Seamus McGraw has been writing about crime and criminals for nearly 20 years.

He was formerly senior writer for the popular true crime site, APBnews, and before that, he was a columnist and crime writer for the Bergen Record. McGraw has won numerous journalism awards including the Associated Press Managing Editors Freedom of Information Award for a series of stories on police secrecy. Most recently, he was honored by the Casey Foundation for his reporting on issues involving Megan's Law. 

McGraw has written for SPIN magazine, Stuff, Reader's Digest, LexisOne, and The Forward.

McGraw lives in the bear infested woods of Northeastern PA with his wife, Karen, four children, Miriam, Yona, Seneca and Liam, and their dogs, Girl, Dharma and Dogma.

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