You guys are breaking my heart.
A few qualifiers and disclaimers if I may: You must do your research before leaving your child in ANYONE'S care for ANY length of time. SO I'm not going to make any generalizations about all wilderness camps or even all of Aspen's programs. I also know that by the time a family is thinking about wilderness camps their kids need pretty serious help.
I don't give a shit about Aspen because I have never cared for their corporate approaches. But they are the parent company of LoneStar Expeditions...and I worked there for three years, including the time frame when Matt died.
Matt was not in my group (I worked with girls) but I did hang with the guys for a bit one afternoon right after Matt got there. I met him and shook his hand. And I know every single one of the people that worked with Matt very well, in fact, I personally trained most of the people working there now. If you don't know me or my former coworkers, please don't judge us as sicko sadists who like to punish kids and make them suffer.
Truth is...everyone I ever knew at LoneStar was there for the love of children. We know how awesome it is when you do something difficult and succeed...and we knew those kids needed some self-esteem. We did not push our kids to dangerous places either physically or mentally. And we did NOT neglect their health, we had kids in and out of the doctor and ER every damn day, half of them faking and us wanting to be sure there wasn't something really wrong. In fact, half our staff was coming out of wilderness first responder class (80 hours total to handle things like this) on our week OFF the day that Matt died. We piled into about 3 vehicles and drove like bats outta hell to get there. There were about 20 medical professionals with Matt that day. 8 WFR trainees plus our instructor from out of state, an ambulance crew, our field medic, and Matt's field staff members could not keep Matt alive. It just was not true that people just stood back and watched him die unconcerned.
What happened is that Matt sat down by the tree away from his group and started making snoring noises. His group and staff thought he was goofing around, joking about how tired he was. Why? Because Matt was a funny funny guy, I know that just from meeting him in one afternoon! Why else? Well, do any of YOU know what a death rattle sounds like? I don't and neither did his staff. But they knew Matt...and they knew that he was pretty respectful to them, so when he didn't stop snoring when they told him enough was enough...they went to check on him and found him in cardiac arrest and started CPR.
Matt's autopsy revealed that he died of an unknown heart defect that no one could have found prior to his placement with LSE, and that it would have killed him that day whether he was hiking in the Texas heat, or sitting home in the AC watching TV.
When all this happened we were all devastated and we weren't just out to cover our asses either. We were horrified that something could happen to one of OUR kids. Our staff was made of people who had made their LIVES of helping kids...and we did a damn good job of it too.
LoneStar is the place where I met some of my best friends and have some of my fondest memories...because when I worked there, I was part of something WONDERFUL. If I'm a sadistic prick who enjoys victimizing children, I will eat the roof off my house.
What you guys don't see in the statistics while you are looking for ways to horribleize my job, is that I met about 200 kids in three years there, and I know exactly that many stories. I could tell you EVERY ONE of them just by a picture alone...and about 20 of them are still in touch with me on a weekly basis. About half of those 200 kids hugged me and sobbed when they left...and a handful of mothers knew all about me from letters their children wrote home, and wanted to hug me and thank me for all I had done to take care of their baby. And I'm just ONE that happened to be a lot of kids' fav. I trained another round of staff as my legacy and they are helping kids as I type this.
LSE helps many many many kids, usually when we get them we care more about them than they care about themselves. Not because it is Aspen, not because it is wilderness, but because of the people who live and work with these kids every day.
