The Prague Post, December
11, 1998
Morava Academy Heads
Arrested
By Ladka Bauerova
The American couple Glenda
and Steven Roach, arrested last month in the Czech Republic on
charges of illegal imprisonment and torture of the 57 teenagers
found at Morava Academy, have a past marred by similar offenses. The
couple has managed other illicit prison-like facilities for troubled
American teens and been arrested in other foreign countries.
According to U.S. social
worker Donna Headrick and her research team, the couple was arrested
May 1996 while running a girls' facility called Sunrise Beach on
Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. After three teenage girls escaped from
the institution and made complaints about sexual abuse, an
immigration inspector visited the facility and found that the girls
did not have the proper paperwork to be in the country. The
inspectors also found poor sanitation standards and signs of abuse.
Shortly thereafter, the
staff with 41 girls were intercepted at the local airport trying to
leave the country. Mexican federal police arrested the staff,
including Steven and Glenda Roach, and charged them with depriving
juveniles of their liberty and with running an unlicensed and
unsanitary facility. As at Morava Academy, Sunrise Beach was shut
down by police officials, and the couple eventually managed to leave
Mexico.
The Roaches are longtime
employees of an organization called Teen Help. Based in Utah, Teen
Help operates a network of institutions that promises to set
problematic kids straight. While many parents and children have
defended the program and claim it has changed their lives, others
report horror stories and speak of the staff's brutal practices,
including starvation, chemical burns, handcuffing and psychological
abuse.
"Kids are not treated well
in these facilities. I saw horrible things," said Donna Burke, 48,
from Houston, Texas. Her ex-husband sent their two sons to
Tranquillity Bay, another of Teen Help's facilities in Jamaica. She
told The Prague Post that in August 1997 an "escort service" -- two
men hired by her ex-husband -- kidnapped her then-14-year-old son,
Scott. "They handcuffed him and carried him out of the school
screaming," she said.
Three months later, the
escort service came for her elder son David, now 17. "I was trying
to get them back, but my ex-husband ran up my legal fees so high I
finally had to give up."
She went on describing the
poor hygienic conditions and maltreatment of the children in the
facility. "They take a shower with a hose, using only cold water,"
she said. During a surprise visit, she discovered that all the kids
had ringworm.
The staff attempted to treat
the fungus, but with horrible results. "My younger son had scars
from chemical burns," Burke said.
Complaining to state
authorities didn't help, she said: "The State Department people say,
'They're out of the country, there is nothing we can do.' One guy at
the State Department told me straight to my face: 'We don't like to
mess with rich people's kids.' " And rich they are, she added, since
one year's tuition at Tranquillity Bay costs $38,000 (1.14 million
Kc).
After 13 months, Burke's
older son David returned home, but his mother is distressed by his
state of mental and physical health. "He's been brainwashed," she
said. "We get in a fight every time we talk about the school, and he
yells at me for fighting against it. And this is a boy who was
begging, crying and pleading for me to take him home when I first
visited him," Burke said.
Cases where one parent
places the child in a behavior-modification facility against the
will of the other parent are not uncommon, according to social
worker Headrick. "They have their children legally kidnapped," she
said. "The people usually come in the middle of the night, wake the
kid up, handcuff him and take him away."
The Teen Help organization
is part of a complicated network of companies and nonprofit
organizations run mostly from La Verkin, a small community near St.
George, Utah. They have at least eight behavior modification schools
located in Mexico, Jamaica, Western Samoa, and the United States,
Teen Help also operates several hospitals and other "service
oriented" companies. One of them is Youth Transport Services (YTS)
which, according to Headrick, does the kidnapping. Another
organization, "Resources Realizations," runs seminars for parents
who have placed their children in one of the Teen Help schools.
Before taking part in the seminars, participants must sign a
confidentiality clause.
About a year ago, Teen Help
established a nonprofit organization called World Wide Association
of Specialty Programs (WWASP). Its Web page provides little
information and its president, Karr Farnsworth, who visited the
Czech Republic during the Morava Academy crisis last month, refused
to reveal details other than saying it is the umbrella organization
of the Teen Help facilities. In an interview for a Utah newspaper,
he compared the Czech police to the Soviet KGB, adding that Czech
police don't like Americans.
One WWASP partner, attorney
J. Ralph Atkin, is also registered as a majority owner of Morava
Academy and an owner of EuroSky Airlines, which provides special
flights to selected European cities including Vienna -- only two
hours away by car from Morava Academy.
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