Our local paper had a large review of Brat Camp this morning. I am trying to get them to do a feature on the "dark Side". Don't know if I will have any success. However - in my efforts I put together a small list of links with some quotes. My hope it that it might get their attention. It occurred to me others might also want to write the editors of their papers for this same reason - and if so, this might be useful. You can just copy and paste it over onto your letter, if you want. Maybe others can add to the list.
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The Death or Aaron Bacon
http://www.teenliberty.org/BootCamp.htmQuote:
The prosecution's evidence is stark: Aaron Bacon, a 5-foot-11-inch teen,
began the course weighing 131 pounds. When he died 30 days later, he weighed
108 pounds. Investigators from the Garfield County Sheriff's Department and
the Utah attorney general's office have found that during the last 20 days of
his life, Aaron went without food for at least 11 days. He also went without
a sleeping bag for 14 nights when the average overnight temperature was 32
degrees.
Aaron's worsening condition is chronicled in his journal as well as the
journals of other campers. He wrote about how his counselors laughed at him
for losing control of his bowel movements. Another teen wrote that Aaron was
starting to look "like a Jewish person in the concentration camps."
Defense attorneys will argue in court that what while their clients may have
shown poor judgment, they were not responsible for the death of Aaron Bacon.
Most of the counselors say they believed Aaron was faking his illness to
manipulate the group.
http://www.nospank.net/bacon2.htmQuote
But with the arrival of his remains at a Phoenix mortuary three days later, guilt gave way to anger. Pulling the sheet from Aaron's body, Sally was confronted with a battered, emaciated corpse. She started screaming hysterically and had to cover her eyes. "His legs were like toothpicks," Sally recalls, breaking into sobs. "His hipbones stuck way out, his ribs--he looked like a concentration-camp victim. There were bruises from the tip of his toes to the top of his head, open sores up and down the inside of his thighs. The only way we were even able to recognize him was a childhood scar above his right eye."
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Meanwhile, other counselors and students allegedly taunted Bacon, asking if he were "homosexual." On March 20, a counselor named Brent Brewer took away Bacon's sleeping bag as punishment and replaced it with a thin blanket. The next day, Bacon wrote that he hadn't eaten in 24 hours: "I feel like I am losing control of my body. I've peed my pants every night for the past three nights and today when we started our little hike I took a dump in my pants, I didn't even feel it coming, it just happened.... All the other students started to laugh.... I've been telling [the staff] that I'm sick for a while and they say I'm faking it."
It's unclear when Bacon developed the ulcer that killed him, but by this point the stress of the course had severely exacerbated the ailment. The next evening he wrote, "The cold and the wind is making me freeze up.... All I can think about is cold and pain.... I miss my family so much. My hands, my lips and face are dead."
Bacon's journal ends there, on March 22, but his travails continued. By this time, say witnesses, Bacon was too exhausted to keep up, and he abandoned his pack a second time as the students commenced a grueling climb to the summit of the Kaiparowits Plateau. He went without food, a blanket, or a sleeping bag from March 22 to March 25 on the 7,000-foot mesa, where nightly temperatures dropped below 22 degrees Fahrenheit.
On the 25th, Lance Jaggar and Bill Henry met Bacon's group on the Kaiparowits. According to witnesses, they gave him a blanket to replace his sleeping bag but took his cup away because "he wasn't keeping it clean." Jaggar also reiterated to the counselors that Bacon was "a whiner and a faker."
Bacon had been unable to control his bladder and bowels for many days, and on March 29 he was forced to hike without pants. The group descended from the high country and retrieved Bacon's pack, but Bacon was too weak to carry it. "The counselor got mad," recalls John Kulluk, one of the students, "and the rest of us had to carry it for him. Then, about a mile from camp, Aaron fell and couldn't get up, so we had to carry him, too. While we were carrying him he puked all over Travis [another student] and talked about seeing purple stars and a purple sky, like he was delirious."
That night, says Kulluk, Bacon complained again of being seriously ill, "but the staff just kind of blew him off and called him a faker. They yelled, 'Get off your lazy butt and go collect wood.' The next morning Craig [Fisher, a counselor] got really mad, grabbed Aaron by the shirt, and pulled him to the latrine."
In a rock-strewn Arizona canyon 300 miles south. . .
The Death of Michelle Sutton
http://blueprint.bluecrossmn.com/topic/suttonquote:
Andrea Dawes was Michelle's best friend. She was talked into accompanying Michelle on the Summit Quest program, where she saw counselors accuse Michelle of making up symptoms, even though she'd been throwing up water, falling down, and complaining of blurred vision the day she died. "They were telling all of us that she was just doing this for attention," says Andrea. "She had white stuff all around her mouth -- like cotton mouth real bad, I guess -- from the dehydration, and they would say stuff like, 'Oh, Michelle, you look like you ate marshmallows.'"
"I think that whole time toward the end, she was slowly dying. And that's when I got upset and started crying and stuff, and I couldn't watch," remembers Andrea, who was forced to finish the rest of the 19-week program after Michelle's death. "There was obviously something wrong with her. I don't see how they could have even thought she was faking that."
Michelle collapsed in the late afternoon, after hiking over a mountain. Summit Quest had no radios powerful enough to reach the camp base. Instead, the group set signal fires, and Michelle lay dead for at least 18 hours before a passing aircraft finally spotted the group. The Suttons settled a civil suit against Summit Quest out of court in 1992, but no criminal charges have ever been filed.
The death of Nicholaus Contreraz
http://www.nospank.net/azboys.htmQuote:
On the day he died, Nicholaus Contreraz was awakened at 6:30 a.m. He had been sleeping on a mattress positioned halfway in the bathroom of Barracks 31. Staff at the Arizona Boys Ranch had placed the 16-year-old Sacramento youth on Yellow Shirt status for, among other reasons, persistently defecating and urinating on himself. They wanted him to be near the toilet.
Employees at the paramilitary-style camp, where hundreds of California youth offenders are sent, had already tried to deal with Nick's incontinence by making him sleep in soiled underwear, ordering him to drop his pants so that other boys could inspect them, requiring he finish whatever physical activity he was engaged in before using the restroom, making him eat dinner while sitting on the toilet and, near the end of his life, making him carry a yellow trash basket filled with his soiled clothes and his own vomit.
At times he was instructed to do push-ups that lowered his face into the foul-smelling basket.
On the day before he died, Nick collapsed several times during physical training. After he fell while running up a hill, staff bundled him into a wheelbarrow and made another boy push him around the camp. Nick was told to make the sound of an ambulance siren.
On the day he died, a staff member told Nick he deserved an Academy Award for faking.
Nick collapsed for the last time about 5:30 p.m. on March 2. Staff members, who had spent the day ordering more and more physical punishment, issued their last command. Get up, Nick was told. "No" was the last word he spoke.
Nick was pronounced dead two hours later, succumbing to a massive, undiagnosed infection that had conspired with other illnesses raging in his body.
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http://www.nospank.net/azranch.htmQuote:
I HEARD A STAFF MEMBER OF THE B0YS RANCH TELL A PARAMEDIC THAT THE MALE SUBJECT, LATER IDENTIFIED AS A MR. NICHOLAS CONTRERAZ, HAD BEEN DOING PHYSICAL TRAINING (P.T.) AND HAD STOPPED BREATHING. THEY THOUGHT THAT HE WAS FAKING AND BROUGHT HIM TO OUR PRESENT LOCATION AND SPLASHED HIM WITH WATER. MR. CONTRERAZ DID NOT RESPOND SO THEY CHECKED HIM FOR A PULSE AND FOUND NONE. THEY THEN BEGAN C.P.R.. I NOTICED THAT MR. CORTRERAZ WAS WET AND THAT HE HAD VOMIT NEXT TO HIS HEAD. I ASKED ABOUT THE VOMIT AND THEY SAID THAT IT CAME UP WHEN THEY WERE DOING C.P.R.
AT ABOUT 1855 HOURS, AIR E VAC HELICOPTER LEFT FOR NORTHWEST HOSPITAL, IN TUCSON WITH MR. CONTRERAZ.
AT ABOUT 1915 HOURS, I CONTACTED THE STAFF DUTY OFFICER LT. MARTINEZ, BADGE #49, TO LET HIM KNOW WHAT HAD OCCURRED. LT. MARTINEZ TOLD ME THAT HE DID NOT NEED TO SEND OUT A DETECTIVE SINCE IT DID NOT S0UND LIKE THERE WAS ANY FOUL PLAY.
AT AB0UT 2017 HOURS, THE CHARGING NURSE SUE, FROM NORTHWEST HOSPITAL CONTACTED ME TO LET ME KNOW THAT MR. CONTRERAZ HAD DIED AND THERE WAS SIGNS OF ABUSE ON THE BODY. I ASKED WHAT THESE WERE AND SHE SAID HE HAD ABRASIONS FROM HEAD TO TOE. HE HAD BRUISING ON HIS FLANKS, HE HAD A RIGID STOMACH AND HE HAD BLOOD IN HIS STOMACH.
Partial listing of children killed in "programs"
http://www.teenadvocatesusa.homestead.com/tribute1.html