http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10664038/ Death in the desert
A 14-year-old boy dies in a wilderness boot camp. Was too much 'tough love' equivalent to murder?
Anthony Haynes was a troubled teenager? so his mother enrolled him in a wilderness boot camp program. She knew it would be tough, but she didn't know it would be the last time she'd ever see her son alive.
Yearbook photo
PHOENIX, Ariz. - Chuck Long ran a wilderness boot camp ? a 'tough love' program that was supposed to give troubled teens a new start. It was a beacon to desperate parents that is, until, a tragedy struck: A 14-year-old boy died while being punished in the scorching Arizona desert.
Soon other teens came forward, telling stories of abuse and violence. The camp's director was charged with second degree murder. Was this teenager's death a crime, or an accident?
'Tough love'
This is a story about tough love, and a boot camp commandant named Charles Long. His methods, when it came to his little army of angry teenagers, was, shall we say, ?direct.?
Keith Morrison, Dateline correspondent: So what do you do?
Charles Long: Say, ?Hey, if you really feel that angry, then maybe we need to wrestle.?
Morrison: You do that?
Long: I said "maybe we just need to wrestle a little bit." Wrestling can be very mental. And it can also be very physical.
For all his bluster, Charles Long was worshipped by scores of Phoenix-area parents who loved the way Long made personal projects of their troubled teens.
And among those kids was the boy at the center of this whole story: Melanie Hudson?s big, bad 14-year-old misfit son, Anthony Haynes.
Melanie Hudson, Anthony Haynes' mother: He was 5 feet 8 inches, and about 216 lbs. So he was getting to be a very big boy. He ran away once. He did the shoplifting once. He was constantly fighting with his step-dad. And we had filed incorrigible charges on him. And so he was on probation for a year.
Morrison: Was he angry?
Hudson: Very.
The breaking point was when Anthony slashed the tires on her car. Out of options and money, Hudson begged Long for help. He finally agreed to take Anthony into his five week summer boot camp as a charity case.
Morrison: What was it about Charles Long that made you think that he would be good for Tony?
Hudson: He kept telling me that they would make him be responsible for his actions. They would help me get him to that point to realize that there are consequences.
Were there ever.
A different kind of boot camp
In the Sonoran desert, suburban-soft Anthony experienced the particular joys of close order drill, calisthenics, and desert survival skills, always with a drill instructor by his side and a summer sun above.
Anthony and the others were treated like raw recruits? but not for anything like a modern army. Charles Long?s boot camp for wayward teens was not quite the same as others around the country. His was an imagined imitation of something right out of the 19th century ? the Buffalo soldiers.
Long?s idea at the beginning, a dozen years ago, was for men like him to celebrate or ?re-enact,? as he would say, the famed black cavalry of the old west. He even gave himself a rank and got everybody to call him ?colonel.?
And with their prancing horses, campaign hats, and cavalry uniforms, the Buffalo soldiers were a favorite attraction in local parades. They even performed as escorts for visiting dignitaries, like then-governor George Bush and retired general Colin Powell.
At one event in 1994, Powell asked Long to help troubled kids.
Long: When you get a general to ask me to do something like that, I took great pride in it.
To a former Marine like Long, General Powell?s suggestion felt more like an order. So Long expanded his Buffalo soldier program to include at-risk kids.
He wasn?t trained for such a thing, wasn?t a counselor or therapist, but that didn?t seem like an obstacle to Long, who had his own ideas about the value of psycho-therapy.
Long: So, you prescribe a child medication? Oh, it?s okay because it?s legal? He?s still taking a drug. So that?s more acceptable to you than if he?s taking cocaine, crack or smoking marijuana?
Long?s idea of therapy consisted of drill instructions and desert isolation.
Long: Not only do we have rattlesnakes out here, we have mountain lions out here. We have coyotes out here. And because of the problem of us not having a great amount of rainfall the last couple of years, we have bears out here. Going into the desert is an opportunity, in my opinion, to face your demons. Jesus went there. And you want to know why I go there? He went there.
That?s the other thing: Long is very clearly a sincere evangelical Christian who considers himself a ?soldier of the Lord.?
Morrison: What makes you a soldier of the Lord?
Long: In my opinion, I honestly believe, know, and can say, that by my faith in God, I?m here today.
So, Long built his boot camp not solely on military discipline but also on old testament principles.
Long: It?s called "not sparing the rod," is what it?s called.
Morrison: You beat them?
Long: No, sir. I do not beat children. No, sir. I have a paddle. Three strikes? And you?re subject to corporal punishment. But you don?t get corporal punishment by a paddle unless your parents have said, ?Oh yeah, go ahead,? and give them permission for that.
Morrison: Right, but you use a paddle?
Long: Yes, sir. And I?m the only one to do that.
Morrison: Sometimes are they chained together...
Long: We have extreme volatile situations at times, that one of the ways to help get a child to calm down is to restrain him.
Morrison: I?d love to know if there?s any body of evidence, anywhere, that says that the kind of program you?re running actually makes a positive difference in the lives of people.
Long: I have six young people in Iraq right now who literally started out in the Buffalo Soldiers as young people who were disrespectful. We have proved to the families who brought children to the Buffalo soldiers that going to the desert is a miracle worker.
One of Long?s most noted supporters was the local sheriff Joe Arpaio, a man who?d developed his own national reputation for tough love.
Joe Arpaio, local sheriff: I was impressed with his efforts to take care of kids, young kids, especially those that have problems.
In Sheriff Arpaio?s jails, inmates work in chain gangs are made to wear stripes and pink underwear, and some actually sleep in desert tents, much like Long?s Buffalo soldiers.
Arpaio: The kids seemed to really appreciate that program.
Arpaio and Long seemed a perfect match, the self-proclaimed ?toughest sheriff? in the land.
Arpaio would even attend Buffalo soldier graduation ceremonies. In appreciation, Long awarded the sheriff the ?Buffalo soldier humanitarian award.?
Of course there was one big difference between the two: Sheriff Arapio was dealing with convicted criminals, Charles Long with confused youngsters.
Morrison: Didn?t you put these kids in position of mortal risk?
Long: Excuse me? give us some, if you can, respect, that we?ve been in the desert for 13 years. And we had out of 13 years, we had an incident.
By ?incident? he means the very story you?re about to hear: what happened to young Anthony Haynes who was being punished one day Buffalo soldiers-style. He was forced to stand in the desert for hours on a blazing summer afternoon.
That evening his mother, Melanie was called to the hospital, and no one told her why.
Hudson: I thought I was going to treat a child with a stomach ache. But when I got to the hospital, they took me into a separate room as soon as I told them who I was. And that?s when doctors come in and told me that my son was gone. And I just looked at him and I pointed, ?Don?t you tell me my son?s dead.?
Who or what killed Anthony Haynes? And why would these two boosters of tough love, the desert sheriff and the Buffalo soldier, soon find themselves on opposite sides of the law?
CONTINUED: How did Anthony die?
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