|
July 16, 2001
Tough Love,
Teen Death
By Jane Spencer
M.H. wanted to
get her 14-year-old son T.H. some help. At heart, she knew he was a
good kid. He had an insatiable appetite for Harry Potter books, and
dreamed of building a Lego robot that would do all of the housework
for her. But T.H. had been caught shoplifting a $12 action figure,
and he'd recently slashed the tires on a car. M.H. feared she was
losing control, and that her teenage son needed the kind of
discipline that she alone could not provide. "I'd tried everything I
could think of," M.H. told Newseek. "I'm a single mom, and I needed
help." So she turned to an outfit called
America's Buffalo Soldiers Re-Enactors Association (ABSRA), which runs summer
and weekend boot camps for troubled kids.
T.H. died less
than a week after arriving at the dusty camp outside Buckeye, Ariz.
Autopsy results haven't been released yet, but T.H.'s fellow campers
say that counselors beat him, then denied him water even though he
was clearly dehydrated in the 114-degree heat. "He was
hallucinating," says a 13-year-old camper who was sitting beside
T.H. before he died. "He kept saying Indians were chasing him. He
started eating handfuls of dirt, saying 'the ocean, the ocean'." The
Maricopa County sheriff last week deemed the death "suspicious," closed the camp and
quickly launched a criminal investigation. ABSRA president and
founder Charles F. Long II did not return repeated phone calls;
Long's lawyer, Larry A. Hammond, refused to comment while the matter
was still under investigation.
Where does
"tough love" end and unlawful abuse begin? And shouldn't somebody be
watching to ensure that counselors at boot-camp facilities don't
cross the line? Whatever the cause of T.H.'s death, it was no
isolated incident: at least six children have died in boot camps
around the country over the last decade, including another teenager
at an Arizona camp in 1998. Yet such privately run facilities often
operate with little or no oversight. In Arizona, for example, any
private youth program open less than 12 months a year does not have
to be licensed by the state.
T.H.'s death
focused attention on the president of the Buffalo Soldiers outfit. A
former Marine lance corporal who served in Vietnam and liked to be
called "The Colonel," Long was arrested in 1989 for breaking through
an ex-girlfriend's door with a sledgehammer, the local sheriff's
office confirmed. (She declined to press charges.) In 1991 he
received a fine and probation for punching the same girlfriend in a
dispute, according to The Arizona Republic. Allegations of abuse
have also been leveled against another of Long's youth programs.
Just a year ago teens at his Apache Indian Reservation camp claimed
they were beaten and handcuffed for extended periods. The FBI
investigated, but no charges were filed and Long closed the camp.
Long never
suggested that his camps were easy retreats, and many parents
believe his brand of rugged discipline has helped turn their kids
around. M.H. M.H. had read publicity materials warning that the
Buffalo Soldiers program was "not a fun-in-the-sun camp" and she
signed a release authorizing the use of corporal punishment. (T.H.'s
father, who has remarried, approved the decision to send him to the
camp.) In the spring T.H. had attended weekend camps run by Long
without incident, and M.H. believed they were improving T.H.'s
attitude.
Some children
in the summer program now say they were punched, kicked and forced
to eat dirt for minor infractions such as failing to stand up
straight. Campers say they had bruised ribs from an exercise in
which they were ordered to lie on their backs while counselors ran
across their chests in boots. One 13-year-old camper says females
faced additional harassment, and that counselors (who liked to be
addressed as "sergeant") called her "whore" and "prostitute." "They
asked me how much I charged," she told Newseek, adding that one of
the youngest counselors touched her hair and said he was going to
"mess with her." Campers say Long was absent on the day of the most
severe corporal abuse, but they believe he was generally aware of
the situation at his camps.
Counselors may
have thought T.H. was exaggerating his thirst when he begged for
water. After he collapsed, the counselors had him loaded into a
pickup and drove to the Day's Inn in Buckeye, some campers say, to
clean him up because he had been vomiting mud. According to
investigators, the counselors returned to the camp more than an hour
later with T.H., who still had not received medical attention. "It
looked like he was already dead," recalls one camper. "His face was
blue and his eyes were rolled down in his head." Long, back at camp,
tried to revive him, failed, and help was called. But by then, no
amount of tough or even gentle love was going to save T.H.
(Out of
respect for the family, the child's and parent's names were omitted,
using only their initials.)
|
