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Ex-Student Sues Utah 'Tough Love' Firm
BY MICHAEL VIGH
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
A former student of a "tough love" school in Jamaica for troubled teens filed a federal lawsuit Friday against a St. George company, alleging he was kidnapped from his home and mistreated in a "squalid" jungle camp overrun with vermin.
Samuel Bardin -- along with his mother, Patra Bardin -- says he was snatched from his Tennessee home by an "escort service" hired by the St. George-based Worldwide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASP), according to the suit filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City.
He was then allegedly shuttled to Brightway Hospital in St. George, before being flown to the Tranquility Bay treatment facility in Jamaica. There he was subjected to "sadistic and unwarranted physical and psychological abuse," according to the suit.
The abuse "comprised of holding [Bardin] in a steaming squalid jungle camp infested with flies, mosquitos, scorpions and vermin, with insufficient food," the suit states.
Other punishment, the suit filed by California attorney ThoÂmas K. Burton alleges, consisted of "being forced to lie on the floor for 24 hours without bathroom privileges and without letting one's chin touch the floor." " according to the suit.
The WWASP schools -- four based in Utah -- use controversial behavior-modification techniques to rehabilitate teens caught up in alcohol and drug abuse and other misconduct. In recent years, other students claim they have been the victims of physical and sexual abuse at the schools.
Since the late 1990s, the association has been sued seven times in Utah's U.S. District Court by parents, all alleging negligence and abuse at Paradise Cove in Western Samoa, Tranquility Bay and Montana's Spring Creek Lodge, according to court records.
Ken Kay, president of the St. George association, declined to comment on the case because he had not seen it. But he has pointed out in the past that the company has never paid damages to any plaintiff, and many of the cases have been dismissed.
Friday's lawsuit does not indicate when Bardin was allegedly forced into the school. But it says the boy had been using cocaine following the suicide of his father. After discovering her son's drug use, Patra Bardin decided to get him help.
When she agreed to let him be "kidnapped," she says the company's owners "represented [it] to her as a benevolent program employing positive tactics to help reform truant young people," the suit states.
The suit against WWASP -- which alleges negligence, false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, fraud and deceit -- also names as defendants Teen Help, Teen Escort Services, and company officials including Ken Kay, Robert B. Lichfield, Karr Farnsworth, Brent M. Facer, Jay Kay and David Gilcrease.
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Mar/03012003/utah/34117.asp