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Lost Boy
July 2, 2000
By Lou Kilzer
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer
EL PASO, Tex. It was nothing new for Corey
Murphy and his mother Laura to argue. And it was nothing new for
Laura to gain the upper hand.
But this time, the quiet 17-year-old boy was
about to end the arguing forever.
Early in the afternoon of March 21, he strode
into the family kitchen, grabbed a black .38-caliber handgun from
the top of the refrigerator and bolted for his room.
A shot rang out.
At 1:01 p.m., El Paso fire department pumper 22
and paramedic van 11A got the call: "Suicide in progress."
Laura Murphy burst into her son's room.
He had fired a bullet into the wall. Now, he
stood by a love seat in the back of his room, gun in hand.
Laura, 50, a former Army nurse, told Corey to
put it down.
Instead he put the barrel of the gun to his
temple. When she pleaded again, he put it to his other temple.
Then, without saying a word, Corey pressed the
the barrel to his forehead, between his eyes, and pulled the
trigger.
Corey had come home to El Paso a few months
earlier after a long stint in the care of Teen Help, one of
America's toughest tough-love programs for defiant teens. His mother
had sent him to Teen Help while he was attending middle school in
the small Colorado town of Sterling, where the family was living.
He had been confined for 32 months in Teen
Help's behavior modification compounds in Montana and the Pacific
nation of Western Samoa. Corey made great progress after a rough
start, graduating at the highest level.
Now, he was dead.
Corey had snapped as he and Laura discussed
implementing one of Teen Help's latest practices removing kids
from their homes if they didn't follow a strict behavior contract.
Despite the tragic outcome, Laura says that
Teen Help was a godsend. Without it, she says, Corey might have died
years earlier.
Teen Help official Ken Kay says that only two
or three kids in the program have committed suicide, while hundreds
have benefited.
But several top-flight mental health
professionals say that the program's intense behavior control
techniques could produce "psychological casualties."
Was Corey a beneficiary of Teen Help? A
casualty? Or simply a teen-ager ground up by the raw emotions of
adolescence?
Corey Murphy spent part of his formative years
in Sterling, a farming town of 10,400 along the South Platte River
125 miles northeast of Denver.
Laura was an anesthesiology nurse at Sterling
Regional Medical Center. She, Corey and his older sister Kasio lived
in a handsome two-story home in one of Sterling's better
neighborhoods.
The children's father, Mitchell Humason, a
dentist, had long since been divorced from Laura.
Teachers and staff members at Sterling Middle
School, which Corey attended in 1995, remember the boy well.
Assistant principal Bill Herzog recalls Corey's
curly hair and gentle disposition. Herzog, the school's chief
disciplinarian, says Corey didn't cause trouble.
Donna Eves, now a Sterling High School guidance
counselor, taught Corey eighth-grade science. Corey, she says, was a
"cute little kid who worked well with whoever was in his group."
Kent Armstrong, Corey's history teacher, says
he was a "good kid" who liked to speak with his teacher between
classes.
Armstrong and Beth Savolt, Corey's eighth-grade
English teacher, noted one behavior that distinguished him:
"He liked talking to adults," Savolt says.
But the educators and neighbors sensed a
certain melancholy in Corey. They didn't know he'd already tried to
take his own life.
"Every time he had an argument with his mom,
he'd have a bad day in school," Armstrong says. "I'd ask what's
wrong, and he'd cry."
But Corey wouldn't talk much about what was
bothering him.
Suddenly in the 1995-1996 school year, he
stopped coming to class.
Corey was on a plane for Teen Help's compound
in Western Samoa. His mother had concluded that her son needed the
program's strict regimen. Families typically pay about $30,000 a
year to keep a child in the program.
Eves says that none of the teachers at Sterling
Middle School knew why Laura Murphy sent Corey half a world away to
a compound Teen Help calls Paradise Cove.
"We had no idea," Eves says. "She never came to
talk to any of us."
Also stunned by Corey's sudden departure were
Jeff and Kristy Chavez, neighbors of the Murphy family. Corey, they
say, acted as an older brother to their son, and Kristy and Jeff
often acted as surrogate parents to Corey.
Corey asked them to attend such school events
as track meets and Christmas programs but begged them not to tell
his mother.
Laura says she doesn't remember the Chavezes,
and knew nothing about Corey's relationship with them.
Corey, the Chavezes say, was constantly around,
taking out trash and performing family chores. "He liked the
discipline," Kristy says.
Laura recalls her days in Sterling as a time
when both her children were spinning out of control. And she says
she was only doing what every mother must looking out for her
kids' wellbeing.
"A lot of people think, 'Oh, yeah, my kid's
raised fine, that means I'm a good parent,"' she says. "That's bull.
I thought it, too, until I found out both my kids had a lot of
trouble. Being a good parent means you find something to try to help
them when they're in trouble."
Corey, she says, "never did well in school. He
always kept telling me, 'I can't do it, I can't do it, I can't do
it. I'm not smart.' Which wasn't true. He was very smart. He was
just very depressed."
Everything came to a head when Corey turned 13
and continued to underachieve in school.
"He was doing like he always did, which was not
very well," Laura says.
One day Corey took an overdose of
anti-depressants. He spent three nights in intensive care, then
returned home.
Laura read an advertisement in Sunset Magazine
for Teen Help. She called the company and soon concluded that its
tough love was just what Corey needed.
She removed Corey from Sterling Middle School
and sent him to Utah.
Corey landed inside Teen Help's Brightway
Adolescent Hospital a series buildings in St. George that the
company leased from the Utah Alcoholism Foundation. Brightway later
closed under pressure from the state health department.
Corey received a swift psychological
examination at Brightway. As they did with almost every other teen
to pass through Brightway, staff members recommended that Corey be
sent to a Teen Help compound.
Laura says she did not see a therapist or seek
other professional advice in Colorado before sending Corey to Teen
Help. She'd had it with traditional therapy.
"Every time I took him to therapists, they
would tell me I should give up all my expectations for him," she
says. "People didn't hold him to his greatness.
"I tried all of the conventional things. It
ended up tearing my family apart. The only thing that did anything,
that tried to put my family together again, was Teen Help."
Teen Help arranged for many teens at Brightway
to get passports. Soon Corey was off to Western Samoa and Paradise
Cove.
Teen Help is an umbrella name for a consortium
of companies headquartered in the red canyonlands of southwestern
Utah.
Together with local owners, the Utah group has
operated behavior modification camps for teen-agers in the United
States, the Czech Republic, Mexico, Jamaica and Western Samoa.
Thousands of parents have turned to Teen Help
and similar organizations in recent years to cope with potentially
self-destructive behavior by their adolescent children. Teen Help
uses sophisticated marketing to offer parents the hope of
extricating their teens from a downward spiral.
In glowing testimonials, many parents say that
Teen Help's methods allowed them to save their children. Laura says
it was her last hope.
"Kids are violent and they're scary and parents
are not empowered to do anything," she said. "Parents are told to
leave their kids alone and not be parents, which is the last thing
kids need.
"People are chased off by the government.
They're told they can't let their kids leave the house even when
their kids are extremely destructive to the rest of the family.
They're not given any help. They're not given any support. And
they're given all the blame. All you have to do is look at
Littleton. What a terrific example. Who helped those parents?"
But some mental health professionals suggest
that Teen Help's doctrines may be harmful to some in the long run.
Children sent to Teen Help's facilities undergo
a series of intense psychological programs often including
recovering memories of alleged early childhood trauma in an effort
to modify destructive behavior.
Parents also undergo the training in separate
multiday seminars, which are patterned after 1970s-era pop
group-awareness sessions of est and LifeSpring. It is an experience
that some participants describe as the most powerful in their lives.
Some of the children in Teen Help compounds,
however, do not develop the same adoration of the program as their
parents, and a dozen lawsuits have charged the organization with
abuse. Teen Help has denied the allegations.
Civil authorities have taken action against
some Teen Help facilities. Authorities in Mexico and the Czech
Republic raided facilities after receiving complaints that teens
were being mistreated there.
And Paradise Cove, the compound where Corey
Murphy spent 22 months in a thatched hut, came under scrutiny by the
Western Samoan government after the State Department received
allegations of abuse.
The State Department said it received "credible
allegations" in 1998 of abuse against American teens at Paradise
Cove, about the time that Corey Murphy's stay there was coming to an
end.
"The abuse alleged to have occurred includes
beatings, isolation, food and water deprivation, choke-holds,
kicking, punching, bondage, spraying with chemical agents, forced
medication, verbal abuse and threats of further physical abuse,"
according to a September 1998 State Department cable sent from
Washington to the U.S. Embassy in Apia, Western Samoa.
The State Department asked the Western Samoan
government to investigate.
Ken Kay, president of the World Wide
Association of Specialty Programs, a Teen Help umbrella
organization, says he knew nothing about the State Department's
probe. He says it "never was, never has been part of the treatment
to beat or abuse kids." Teen Help ended its involvement with
Paradise Cove at the end of May.
Kay calls Corey's death "terrible."
"It's devastating," he says. "Our whole life
and being is to do what we can to help people so they don't get to
that spot."
While Corey was off in Western Samoa, his
petite, auburn-haired sister Kasio, then 15, also was having
problems, Laura says.
Teachers at Sterling Middle School described
Kasio as an intellectual girl who sometimes wrote poetry.
Laura says the problems went well beyond that.
"I took her to the local mental health center,"
Laura says. "I said we need family counseling. We need it very
badly."
But Laura says it didn't help.
"All the local mental health facility did was
listen to Kasio tell them that the problem was all me," Laura says.
"That she was not using drugs, even though I found a bong (a pipe
for smoking marijuana) in her room and told them about it. They
believed her!"
After Kasio ran away once for three days, her
situation came to the attention of Logan County social workers.
Eventually, Kasio was placed in a treatment
program with a foster family in Breckenridge.
Jetta Schmitt, the foster mother, says Laura
agreed with the placement but soon changed her mind and demanded
Kasio's return.
"She did everything she could to regain
control," Schmitt says.
Laura says she never agreed to give up custody.
The dispute landed mother and daughter before
Logan County District Judge Steven Shinn.
"There were just a lot of issues going on
between Kasio and her mother," Shinn says. "My main concern for
Kasio was to get her in a program that she liked ... one that she
was adjusting to, where I wasn't concerned about her running or even
going one step further and doing something destructive to herself."
He ordered that Kasio remain with Schmitt in
Breckenridge.
"The information I was given certainly led me
to believe that she was doing well" in Schmitt's home, the judge
says.
Schmitt, who takes in as many as four children
at a time for theraputic foster care, says that Kasio arrived
defiant but soon got on well in the family.
"She made some incredible breakthroughs," says
Schmitt. Laura, though, still insisted on Kasio's return.
"They put her in a foster home and told me she
was there permanently," Laura says. "I said, 'How can you do this?
You never had a counseling session with us.' We never had family
therapy, we never had a psychiatrist see her. We never had anything.
They just decided they didn't like what I wanted to do."
In an interview with the News, Laura says that
during a 10-month legal skirmish in Logan County District Court, the
foster parents checked her letters to Kasio and limited access to
her daughter.
Finally, Shinn decided that Kasio had improved
enough that she could return home. He says he had heard that Kasio's
brother was in a program on a Pacific island and he was afraid that
if Kasio thought she was going there, she might run away or hurt
herself.
So he insisted that Laura agree to one
condition for Kasio's return: the girl could not be sent out of
state without his permission.
But after Shinn issued his ruling, Laura paid a
company linked to Teen Help to remove Kasio from her home and
transport her to the program in Utah. Soon, Kasio was at Teen Help's
Spring Creek Lodge compound in northwestern Montana.
"You know what?" Laura says. "I had her taken
to the program and I left the state four days later and haven't been
back."
Shinn says that had he known what had happened
he could have found Laura in contempt.
Records show that Laura sold her Sterling house
for $170,000 on July 18, 1997.
She bought a stucco home in El Paso, far from
the jurisdiction of Shinn and Logan County social workers.
While Corey was confined in Western Samoa,
Kasio was breezing through Teen Help's Montana program. She
"graduated" from Spring Creek Lodge in 16 months.
Judge Shinn says that he and Kasio's social
workers received an invitation from Laura to attend her graduation.
"I truthfully was hopeful that it was sent in
the spirit of just saying 'she succeeded,"' Shinn says.
Others, he says, weren't so sure.
"Their interpretation was that it was sort of a
message saying, 'I told you so."'
Laura says her reason was simple: "I wanted
them to know that she was doing fine despite the fact that they
didn't like what I had done with her, and in spite of the fact that
they didn't like me."
After she graduated, Kasio returned to Spring
Creek Lodge as a staff member. She decided to leave after several
months.
On her way to El Paso, she stopped by Jetta
Schmitt's home in Breckenridge, telling the foster mom that "she
would have never made it" without the "tools she learned living
here," says Schimtt.
After visiting her mother, she hoped to move to
Denver and start college, Schmitt says.
Kasio began living with Laura. But by last
November there were signs that things weren't turning out as Laura
Murphy wanted.
In an Internet chat room for parents of Teen
Help enrollees and graduates, Laura posted long letters encouraging
parents to get tough with their kids and to believe in Teen Help.
Some of those postings were sent to the Denver
Rocky Mountain News by a social worker who received them from a
parent in the group.
Laura complained to other parents that Kasio
was "unwilling to invest any effort in making friends and building a
life here in El Paso because she has decided to dislike the town."
Kasio, she said, was looking for answers
elsewhere.
"Elsewhere," Laura concluded, "is where she
will find them."
Kasio moved out and was last known to be living
in North Carolina. Efforts to reach her for comment were
unsuccessful.
Kasio's phone has been disconnected, but Laura
says she has called her recently.
Life in the Teen Help camps is highly
regimented.
A pecking order puts each teen in one of six
status categories, or levels. New arrivals begin in Level 1,
stripped of almost all personal freedoms. Staff members or other
teens shadow them around the clock.
As teens attend group encounter sessions and
embrace prescribed behavior patterns, they move to higher levels
that offer more freedoms. If they really get with the program, they
reach Level 6 and can become junior staff members.
But if the teens resist, they can remain in
Level 1.
Many parents swear by the unflinching Teen Help
code, certain it saved their children from self-destruction. Other
parents have grown disenchanted, convinced the program stripped
their teens of their individuality and was tantamount to abuse and
brainwashing.
"If brainwashing makes you clean up your life
and live well after that, what's wrong with that?" Laura Murphy
asks.
Psychologist Margaret Singer, professor
emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, says that Teen
Help practices "large group awareness training," a technique
designed to turn an individual into an instrument of a larger group.
In an interview last year with the Denver Rocky
Mountain News, Singer said that not everyone is capable of coping
with the tactics and that some will suffer psychological damage.
Corey began his Teen Help stay at Paradise Cove
at a compound called Le Tiera. According to allegations in civil
lawsuits filed in the United States against Teen Help, physical
punishments ranging from isolation, hog-tying and rape were used at
Le Tiera to assert control over American teens.
Teen Help denies the allegations.
A notebook written by Corey Murphy was found in
one of the isolation cells at Le Tiera, says Barbe Stamps, a
crusader against behavior modification camps who visited the
facility in October. By then, Le Tiera had been abandoned. The
notebooks littered the floors of the cells.
Corey never got past Level 3 in Paradise Cove.
Laura says that once he got there, he gradually regressed to Levels
1 and 2.
Teen Help discourages parental visits until
teens reach the upper levels. Laura did not visit Samoa to see her
son.
But Laura says the lack of freedom and family
contact didn't bother her son.
"Corey was very happy in the program," she
says. "It was the best place for him. He was happy the whole time."
Laura says proof that Corey was happy and
well-adjusted at Paradise Cove can be seen from letters he sent home
saying he loved being there.
Paul Richards, a Washington boy who was at
Paradise Cove with Corey, scoffed at this. He says that if a teen
didn't write positive letters about the program, he couldn't advance
to a higher level. Richards says Paradise Cove's staff reviewed all
letters.
Richards recalls Corey's trying to show a
winning attitude.
"He was a bright kid with a really young face,"
Richards says. "He always had this kind of cherry smile on his
face."
Writing of her decision to send Corey to
Western Samoa, Laura says: "I had no intention of sending him to
Easy Street. He had earned some serious lessons. And he got them."
With Corey still stuck on the lower levels in
Western Samoa after almost two years, Laura had her son transferred
to Spring Creek Lodge in Montana. Kasio was there as a staff
member and she encouraged the move.
But Corey's activities were still restricted.
When Mitchell Humason came to visit his
children there, he was allowed to see only Kasio. Corey was not yet
on a high enough level to allow a visit from his dad.
Spring Creek Lodge sits in the mountains, where
the air is crisp and the lodgings far more comfortable than those in
Western Samoa.
In seven months in Montana, Corey broke into
the upper levels. The shy, introspective boy even made it to Level
6.
Before he could leave, however, he had to pass
one last hurdle: joint parent-child seminars in Utah. It is an
emotional reunion of a child with the parent or parents.
With his mother there, Corey passed.
But with Teen Help, completing the program does
not always mean leaving it.
Laura, like many other parents in the program,
became a fervent backer of all aspects of Teen Help. She began
staffing the program's seminars for parents and touting the benefits
of Teen Help.
"People revere it as though it were a
religion," Humason says.
Corey, too, was tethered to Teen Help. Last
summer, when he was 16, Laura discovered that he had drunk beer and
smoked cigarettes.
She sent him back to the Montana compound for a
three-month refresher. And she kept a close eye on him when he
returned to El Paso.
"What I learned is that it doesn't make sense
to threaten them with anything that I don't intend to do," Laura
said in an Internet posting.
"I did return my son Corey to SCL (Spring Creek
Lodge) after he'd been home a year the moment I found out that he
was drinking and smoking pot. ... He is now back home again, but he
understands that if he runs away from home, he stays wherever he
runs to. I WON'T HAVE HIM IN MY HOUSE WITH THIS BEHAVIOR.
"And I've just stopped feeling that I need to
have him in my control. ... My son threatened to call Child
Protective Services just once. I told him that if he did, he could
stay with them. I wouldn't fight with them, and I wouldn't have him
back. If they put him into a foster home, then he would find out
what living without the advantages I could give him would be like.
... It'd be a great life lesson for him.
"He shut up with that threat mighty fast."
Now came the "exit plan," Teen Help's final
step for a child who has "graduated."
Until a teen reaches the age of majority 17
in Texas the procedure for handling "non-working behavior" of a
graduate is to do what Laura did with Corey: send him back to Teen
Help.
But after the age of majority, a more severe
remedy is recommended.
Teen Help encourages parents of children who
remain defiant to have little personal contact with them and to
offer them almost no financial support for a set period of time.
It suggests that parents keep health insurance
on the teen for six months and give their child $30 and three
nights' lodging in a motel. Otherwise, teens are on their own.
The "exit plan" spells out the rules of
banishment and the conditions, if any, for the child's return to the
family.
The only way of re-entering the home is for the
adolescent to agree to abide by the parents' rules.
David Gilcrease, who designed Teen Help's
behavior modification seminars, hit upon the exit plan after he
noticed that some kids in the program were merely going through the
motions, trying to hold out until they reached adult age, when the
program no longer could legally confine them.
"We do the exit plans because the exit plans
work," says Teen Help's Kay. "We know it works. It works for
thousands of families.
" ... If you have a set of rules in your home,
and if that kid, if they are not living by the rules and if their
behavior is really threatening to themselves and to others, you have
to take drastic measures.
"Sometimes the only thing that you can do is
tell them that if you are going to continue this behavior, that's up
to you. You're a big boy or a big girl now. But you can't live in
this home while you do it."
In the months before his death, Laura and Corey
often talked about the "exit plan," Laura told the News.
Back from Spring Creek Lodge last summer, Corey
still had a way to go in Laura's eyes.
Last October, a month before his 17th birthday,
Laura was contemplating kicking Corey out of the house.
She told fellow Teen Help parents that Corey
was "wavering ... His ability to walk the straight and narrow is
still in question for me. He's walking close to the edge. If he ever
makes the decision to jump over, he's gone from my house and he'll
have to take what the world gives him with no help from me."
In another post, Laura wrote: "I've made it
really clear to my son that if the law gets involved and he's back
on the dope, I won't even bail him out he'll take the fall. The
good thing is that he KNOWS I mean it."
When Corey turned 17 Nov. 23, Laura wrote:
"It's been a LONG haul through his teens (of
course, they aren't over yet), but today is the day that I am able
to insist that the STATE make Corey take his own responsibility,"
she wrote. "Today is the day whereby, in the great state of Texas, a
teen is considered old enough to be accountable and no longer drags
parents into 'juvenile' concerns.
" ... I take my son to dinner tonight to
celebrate his 'majority.' And to celebrate my freedom to be involved
or not as my parental judgment tells me is appropriate when my
kids ask me to do something ... like help them out of a jam of their
own making. Yaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!"
The incident that precipitated Corey's final
showdown with his mother involved beer, cars and friends.
The weekend before he died, Corey and a friend
had a party at Laura's house, says Mitch Humason, Corey's father.
Laura was away.
The friend told Humason that he and Corey had
been "smoking marijuana before the weekend was over, like on Sunday
night." Corey gave the leftover pot to his friend, "I guess in
anticipation that Laura was going to be looking around the house for
marijuana or something," Humason says.
What Laura did find was enough.
"She had told him not to use her automobiles,
which he did," Humason says. "She told him not to have kids over to
the house, which he did. She told him not to drink, which he did.
"And I guess he left the barbecue on."
Corey set off the exit plan by choosing to
leave home rather than follow the rules, Laura says.
"He wasn't being sent from the house," she
said. "He was electing to leave. He knew he could stay here as long
as he wanted. All he had to do is follow house rules, just as you
have follow rules when you work in a hotel."
She suggested he might want to go live with his
dad in New Mexico, Laura says.
The discussion upset Corey and as he charged
through the house, he tipped over a lamp, breaking it.
Laura gave the News this account of what
happened March 21:
"I dialed 911, and then he went into the
laundry room and I thought, well, he's going to cool off. It's going
to be OK. And so I hung up. Well, 911 calls me back.
"And I was in the process of telling them,
'Well, you know, Corey, my son, is thinking about leaving the house,
and he's a little upset right now, and he's looking like he's maybe
going to break a few things. But I think we'll be OK, I think he's
going to calm down.'
"And while I was talking to them, he ran. I had
the gun up above my refrigerator way high. I'd have to get on a
stool to get it, but Corey didn't. He could jump. And he jumped up
there. I thought he was getting a stash of pot or something 'cause
he thought the police were coming to the house.
"And he ran into the bedroom and locked the
door. And when I realized what he had, I was screaming at him and
calling 911 again. He didn't say anything to me. He didn't say a
word to me."
Shortly after he shut the door, Corey fired a
shot into the bedroom wall.
Then, Laura told the News, "I broke the door
down. I broke in and he was standing there loading the gun. And I
said, 'Please, Corey, put it down. Please put it down. Don't do
this.' And he started showing, you know, right hand, right temple,
left hand, left temple. And kind of dancing around the room.
" ... He was just being kind of an ass and
posing with it. You know what I'm saying? He was playing with it,
and I think that ... he would have eventually put it down, but
because of his behavior it would have forced me to put him back into
the program rather than letting him take his exit plan.
" ... And he pointed it straight at his
forehead. And I think he was just as shocked as I was when it went
off. I don't think he knew what was going to happen."
Laura says she is convinced that Corey did not
know the revolver could go off with the pressure he was putting on
the trigger.
She also says she thinks she knows why Corey
was behaving dangerously.
"I think he was trying to manipulate me into
sending him back into the program where he could get the help he
really needed," she says.
"It is very unfortunate that in his inability
to cope with life he couldn't just ask me, because I would have sent
him back if he wanted to go ...
"He was happy in the program ... All you have
to do is read his letters."
Corey wanted something else from his mom, Laura
now believes.
"He wanted me to say, 'I don't want you to
leave the house,' which was true, and he already knew it. But he
wanted me to say it. He wanted me to forbid him to leave the house.
If I had known that he was as upset as he was, I certainly would
have."
Inside Corey Murphy's backpack when he died
were two photos. One was of his car, a source of pride for him until
a friend took it for a spin that weekend and scraped its side. The
other picture showed Corey with a girl.
Mitchell Humason, Corey's dad, says he was
surprised by the kids who came to Corey's funeral.
"Many were kind of Rastafarian, with dreadlocks
hair and, you know, kind of stoner kids," he says.
Humason had been golfing recently with Corey
and noticed that the boy grew anxious as the day went on. But
Humason didn't suspect that something powerful could be happening
psychologically with his son.
Presiding at the funeral was the director of
Teen Help's Spring Creek Lodge.
At the service, Humason says, he told his
ex-wife, "Wow. I really didn't know him."
"Don't feel bad," he says Laura responded. "I
lived with him and I didn't know him."
Kasio told her mother she wasn't surprised by
Corey's early death.
"To be honest, Mom, I could never see him
growing up," Laura says Kasio told her. "He was too vulnerable. He
was too tender."
The day of the funeral, Laura eulogized her son
on the Internet.
"My beautiful and loving son Corey killed
himself Tuesday morning," she wrote. "I heard many people speak at
his funeral about his power, his caring and his willingness to be a
friend, a guide and a support in the midst of their pain.
"Parents MOTHERS AND FATHERS I must tell
you to STOP fighting among yourselves and BELIEVE in your kids."
She says she had no regrets about Teen Help's
programs.
"Without the program, Corey would never have
had a vehicle for his power and his 'highs.' ... I KNOW I did
everything I could for Corey, and I don't regret for a moment that
he was involved in this program. ... I only wish Corey had been less
successful at concealing his pain and his morbid sense of failure.
"Many others manage to survive BECAUSE OF
THIS PROGRAM AND THE HELP IT GAVE THEM."
Teen Help, Laura told the News, "is not nearly
as harsh as jail, or boot camp or life in general. I think a lot of
these kids really need to understand that life is not necessarily
kind."
Contact Lou Kilzer at (303) 892-2644 or kilzerl@RockyMountainNews.com.
July 2, 2000
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