Lou Kilzer is a pulitzer prize winner and has also written a series on WWASP called "Desperate Measures" a 3 day series at
http://www.insidedenver.comdo you think this kid ruined his mom's life??
Lost boy
By Lou Kilzer
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EL PASO, Tex. ? It was nothing new for Corey Murphy and his mother Laura to argue. And it was nothing new for Laura to gain the upper hand.
But this time, the quiet 17-year-old boy was about to end the arguing forever.
Early in the afternoon of March 21, he strode into the family kitchen, grabbed a black .38-caliber handgun from the top of the refrigerator and bolted for his room.
A shot rang out.
At 1:01 p.m., El Paso fire department pumper 22 and paramedic van 11A got the call: "Suicide in progress."
Laura Murphy burst into her son's room.
He had fired a bullet into the wall. Now, he stood by a love seat in the back of his room, gun in hand.
Laura, 50, a former Army nurse, told Corey to put it down.
Instead he put the barrel of the gun to his temple. When she pleaded again, he put it to his other temple.
Then, without saying a word, Corey pressed the the barrel to his forehead, between his eyes, and pulled the trigger.
Corey had come home to El Paso a few months earlier after a long stint in the care of Teen Help, one of America's toughest tough-love programs for defiant teens. His mother had sent him to Teen Help while he was attending middle school in the small Colorado town of Sterling, where the family was living.
He had been confined for 32 months in Teen Help's behavior modification compounds in Montana and the Pacific nation of Western Samoa. Corey made great progress after a rough start, graduating at the highest level.
Now, he was dead.
Corey had snapped as he and Laura discussed implementing one of Teen Help's latest practices ? removing kids from their homes if they didn't follow a strict behavior contract.
Despite the tragic outcome, Laura says that Teen Help was a godsend. Without it, she says, Corey might have died years earlier.
Teen Help official Ken Kay says that only two or three kids in the program have committed suicide, while hundreds have benefited.
But several top-flight mental health professionals say that the program's intense behavior control techniques could produce "psychological casualties."
Was Corey a beneficiary of Teen Help? A casualty? Or simply a teen-ager ground up by the raw emotions of adolescence?
Corey Murphy spent part of his formative years in Sterling, a farming town of 10,400 along the South Platte River 125 miles northeast of Denver.
Laura was an anesthesiology nurse at Sterling Regional Medical Center. She, Corey and his older sister Kasio lived in a handsome two-story home in one of Sterling's better neighborhoods.
The children's father, Mitchell Humason, a dentist, had long since been divorced from Laura.
Teachers and staff members at Sterling Middle School, which Corey attended in 1995, remember the boy well.
Assistant principal Bill Herzog recalls Corey's curly hair and gentle disposition. Herzog, the school's chief disciplinarian, says Corey didn't cause trouble.
Donna Eves, now a Sterling High School guidance counselor, taught Corey eighth-grade science. Corey, she says, was a "cute little kid who worked well with whoever was in his group."
Kent Armstrong, Corey's history teacher, says he was a "good kid" who liked to speak with his teacher between classes.
Armstrong and Beth Savolt, Corey's eighth-grade English teacher, noted one behavior that distinguished him:
"He liked talking to adults," Savolt says.
But the educators and neighbors sensed a certain melancholy in Corey. They didn't know he'd already tried to take his own life.
"Every time he had an argument with his mom, he'd have a bad day in school," Armstrong says. "I'd ask what's wrong, and he'd cry."
But Corey wouldn't talk much about what was bothering him.
Suddenly in the 1995-1996 school year, he stopped coming to class.
Corey was on a plane for Teen Help's compound in Western Samoa. His mother had concluded that her son needed the program's strict regimen. Families typically pay about $30,000 a year to keep a child in the program.
Eves says that none of the teachers at Sterling Middle School knew why Laura Murphy sent Corey half a world away to a compound Teen Help calls Paradise Cove.
"We had no idea," Eves says. "She never came to talk to any of us."
Also stunned by Corey's sudden departure were Jeff and Kristy Chavez, neighbors of the Murphy family. Corey, they say, acted as an older brother to their son, and Kristy and Jeff often acted as surrogate parents to Corey.
Corey asked them to attend such school events as track meets and Christmas programs ? but begged them not to tell his mother.
Laura says she doesn't remember the Chavezes, and knew nothing about Corey's relationship with them.
Corey, the Chavezes say, was constantly around, taking out trash and performing family chores. "He liked the discipline," Kristy says.
Laura recalls her days in Sterling as a time when both her children were spinning out of control. And she says she was only doing what every mother must ? looking out for her kids' wellbeing.
"A lot of people think, 'Oh, yeah, my kid's raised fine, that means I'm a good parent,"' she says. "That's bull. I thought it, too, until I found out both my kids had a lot of trouble. Being a good parent means you find something to try to help them when they're in trouble."
Corey, she says, "never did well in school. He always kept telling me, 'I can't do it, I can't do it, I can't do it. I'm not smart.' Which wasn't true. He was very smart. He was just very depressed."
Everything came to a head when Corey turned 13 and continued to underachieve in school.
"He was doing like he always did, which was not very well," Laura says.
One day Corey took an overdose of anti-depressants. He spent three nights in intensive care, then returned home.
Laura read an advertisement in Sunset Magazine for Teen Help. She called the company and soon concluded that its tough love was just what Corey needed.
She removed Corey from Sterling Middle School and sent him to Utah.
Corey landed inside Teen Help's Brightway Adolescent Hospital ? a series buildings in St. George that the company leased from the Utah Alcoholism Foundation. Brightway later closed under pressure from the state health department.
Corey received a swift psychological examination at Brightway. As they did with almost every other teen to pass through Brightway, staff members recommended that Corey be sent to a Teen Help compound.
Laura says she did not see a therapist or seek other professional advice in Colorado before sending Corey to Teen Help. She'd had it with traditional therapy.
"Every time I took him to therapists, they would tell me I should give up all my expectations for him," she says. "People didn't hold him to his greatness.
"I tried all of the conventional things. It ended up tearing my family apart. The only thing that did anything, that tried to put my family together again, was Teen Help."
Teen Help arranged for many teens at Brightway to get passports. Soon Corey was off to Western Samoa and Paradise Cove.
Teen Help is an umbrella name for a consortium of companies headquartered in the red canyonlands of southwestern Utah.
Together with local owners, the Utah group has operated behavior modification camps for teen-agers in the United States, the Czech Republic, Mexico, Jamaica and Western Samoa.
Thousands of parents have turned to Teen Help and similar organizations in recent years to cope with potentially self-destructive behavior by their adolescent children. Teen Help uses sophisticated marketing to offer parents the hope of extricating their teens from a downward spiral.
In glowing testimonials, many parents say that Teen Help's methods allowed them to save their children. Laura says it was her last hope.
"Kids are violent and they're scary and parents are not empowered to do anything," she said. "Parents are told to leave their kids alone and not be parents, which is the last thing kids need.
"People are chased off by the government. They're told they can't let their kids leave the house even when their kids are extremely destructive to the rest of the family. They're not given any help. They're not given any support. And they're given all the blame. All you have to do is look at Littleton. What a terrific example. Who helped those parents?"
But some mental health professionals suggest that Teen Help's doctrines may be harmful to some in the long run.
Children sent to Teen Help's facilities undergo a series of intense psychological programs ? often including recovering memories of alleged early childhood trauma ? in an effort to modify destructive behavior.
Parents also undergo the training in separate multiday seminars, which are patterned after 1970s-era pop group-awareness sessions of est and LifeSpring. It is an experience that some participants describe as the most powerful in their lives.
Some of the children in Teen Help compounds, however, do not develop the same adoration of the program as their parents, and a dozen lawsuits have charged the organization with abuse. Teen Help has denied the allegations.
Civil authorities have taken action against some Teen Help facilities. Authorities in Mexico and the Czech Republic raided facilities after receiving complaints that teens were being mistreated there.
And Paradise Cove, the compound where Corey Murphy spent 22 months in a thatched hut, came under scrutiny by the Western Samoan government after the State Department received allegations of abuse.
The State Department said it received "credible allegations" in 1998 of abuse against American teens at Paradise Cove, about the time that Corey Murphy's stay there was coming to an end.
"The abuse alleged to have occurred includes beatings, isolation, food and water deprivation, choke-holds, kicking, punching, bondage, spraying with chemical agents, forced medication, verbal abuse and threats of further physical abuse," according to a September 1998 State Department cable sent from Washington to the U.S. Embassy in Apia, Western Samoa.
The State Department asked the Western Samoan government to investigate.
Ken Kay, president of the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs, a Teen Help umbrella organization, says he knew nothing about the State Department's probe. He says it "never was, never has been part of the treatment to beat or abuse kids." Teen Help ended its involvement with Paradise Cove at the end of May.
Kay calls Corey's death "terrible."
"It's devastating," he says. "Our whole life and being is to do what we can to help people so they don't get to that spot."
While Corey was off in Western Samoa, his petite, auburn-haired sister Kasio, then 15, also was having problems, Laura says.
Teachers at Sterling Middle School described Kasio as an intellectual girl who sometimes wrote poetry.
Laura says the problems went well beyond that.
"I took her to the local mental health center," Laura says. "I said we need family counseling. We need it very badly."
But Laura says it didn't help.
"All the local mental health facility did was listen to Kasio tell them that the problem was all me," Laura says. "That she was not using drugs, even though I found a bong (a pipe for smoking marijuana) in her room and told them about it. They believed her!"
After Kasio ran away once for three days, her situation came to the attention of Logan County social workers.
Eventually, Kasio was placed in a treatment program with a foster family in Breckenridge.
Jetta Schmitt, the foster mother, says Laura agreed with the placement but soon changed her mind and demanded Kasio's return.
"She did everything she could to regain control," Schmitt says.
Laura says she never agreed to give up custody.
The dispute landed mother and daughter before Logan County District Judge Steven Shinn.
"There were just a lot of issues going on between Kasio and her mother," Shinn says. "My main concern for Kasio was to get her in a program that she liked ... one that she was adjusting to, where I wasn't concerned about her running or even going one step further and doing something destructive to herself."
He ordered that Kasio remain with Schmitt in Breckenridge.
"The information I was given certainly led me to believe that she was doing well" in Schmitt's home, the judge says.
Schmitt, who takes in as many as four children at a time for theraputic foster care, says that Kasio arrived defiant but soon got on well in the family.
"She made some incredible breakthroughs," says Schmitt. Laura, though, still insisted on Kasio's return.
"They put her in a foster home and told me she was there permanently," Laura says. "I said, 'How can you do this? You never had a counseling session with us.' We never had family therapy, we never had a psychiatrist see her. We never had anything. They just decided they didn't like what I wanted to do."
In an interview with the News, Laura says that during a 10-month legal skirmish in Logan County District Court, the foster parents checked her letters to Kasio and limited access to her daughter.
Finally, Shinn decided that Kasio had improved enough that she could return home. He says he had heard that Kasio's brother was in a program on a Pacific island and he was afraid that if Kasio thought she was going there, she might run away or hurt herself.
So he insisted that Laura agree to one condition for Kasio's return: the girl could not be sent out of state without his permission.
But after Shinn issued his ruling, Laura paid a company linked to Teen Help to remove Kasio from her home and transport her to the program in Utah. Soon, Kasio was at Teen Help's Spring Creek Lodge compound in northwestern Montana.
"You know what?" Laura says. "I had her taken to the program and I left the state four days later and haven't been back."
Shinn says that had he known what had happened he could have found Laura in contempt.
Records show that Laura sold her Sterling house for $170,000 on July 18, 1997.
She bought a stucco home in El Paso, far from the jurisdiction of Shinn and Logan County social workers.
While Corey was confined in Western Samoa, Kasio was breezing through Teen Help's Montana program. She "graduated" from Spring Creek Lodge in 16 months.
Judge Shinn says that he and Kasio's social workers received an invitation from Laura to attend her graduation.
"I truthfully was hopeful that it was sent in the spirit of just saying 'she succeeded,"' Shinn says.
Others, he says, weren't so sure.
"Their interpretation was that it was sort of a message saying, 'I told you so."'
Laura says her reason was simple: "I wanted them to know that she was doing fine despite the fact that they didn't like what I had done with her, and in spite of the fact that they didn't like me."
After she graduated, Kasio returned to Spring Creek Lodge as a staff member. She decided to leave after several months.
On her way to El Paso, she stopped by Jetta Schmitt's home in Breckenridge, telling the foster mom that "she would have never made it" without the "tools she learned living here," says Schimtt.
After visiting her mother, she hoped to move to Denver and start college, Schmitt says.
Kasio began living with Laura. But by last November there were signs that things weren't turning out as Laura Murphy wanted.
In an Internet chat room for parents of Teen Help enrollees and graduates, Laura posted long letters encouraging parents to get tough with their kids and to believe in Teen Help.
Some of those postings were sent to the Denver Rocky Mountain News by a social worker who received them from a parent in the group.
Laura complained to other parents that Kasio was "unwilling to invest any effort in making friends and building a life here in El Paso because she has decided to dislike the town."
Kasio, she said, was looking for answers elsewhere.
"Elsewhere," Laura concluded, "is where she will find them."
Kasio moved out and was last known to be living in North Carolina. Efforts to reach her for comment were unsuccessful.
Kasio's phone has been disconnected, but Laura says she has called her recently.
Life in the Teen Help camps is highly regimented.
A pecking order puts each teen in one of six status categories, or levels. New arrivals begin in Level 1, stripped of almost all personal freedoms. Staff members or other teens shadow them around the clock.
As teens attend group encounter sessions and embrace prescribed behavior patterns, they move to higher levels that offer more freedoms. If they really get with the program, they reach Level 6 and can become junior staff members.
But if the teens resist, they can remain in Level 1.
Many parents swear by the unflinching Teen Help code, certain it saved their children from self-destruction. Other parents have grown disenchanted, convinced the program stripped their teens of their individuality and was tantamount to abuse and brainwashing.
"If brainwashing makes you clean up your life and live well after that, what's wrong with that?" Laura Murphy asks.
Psychologist Margaret Singer, professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, says that Teen Help practices "large group awareness training," a technique designed to turn an individual into an instrument of a larger group.
In an interview last year with the Denver Rocky Mountain News, Singer said that not everyone is capable of coping with the tactics and that some will suffer psychological damage.
Corey began his Teen Help stay at Paradise Cove at a compound called Le Tiera. According to allegations in civil lawsuits filed in the United States against Teen Help, physical punishments ranging from isolation, hog-tying and rape were used at Le Tiera to assert control over American teens.
Teen Help denies the allegations.
A notebook written by Corey Murphy was found in one of the isolation cells at Le Tiera, says Barbe Stamps, a crusader against behavior modification camps who visited the facility in October. By then, Le Tiera had been abandoned. The notebooks littered the floors of the cells.
Corey never got past Level 3 in Paradise Cove. Laura says that once he got there, he gradually regressed to Levels 1 and 2.
Teen Help discourages parental visits until teens reach the upper levels. Laura did not visit Samoa to see her son.
But Laura says the lack of freedom and family contact didn't bother her son.
"Corey was very happy in the program," she says. "It was the best place for him. He was happy the whole time."
Laura says proof that Corey was happy and well-adjusted at Paradise Cove can be seen from letters he sent home saying he loved being there.
Paul Richards, a Washington boy who was at Paradise Cove with Corey, scoffed at this. He says that if a teen didn't write positive letters about the program, he couldn't advance to a higher level. Richards says Paradise Cove's staff reviewed all letters.
Richards recalls Corey's trying to show a winning attitude.
"He was a bright kid with a really young face," Richards says. "He always had this kind of cherry smile on his face."
Writing of her decision to send Corey to Western Samoa, Laura says: "I had no intention of sending him to Easy Street. He had earned some serious lessons. And he got them."
With Corey still stuck on the lower levels in Western Samoa after almost two years, Laura had her son transferred to Spring Creek Lodge in Montana. Kasio was there ? as a staff member ? and she encouraged the move.
But Corey's activities were still restricted.
When Mitchell Humason came to visit his children there, he was allowed to see only Kasio. Corey was not yet on a high enough level to allow a visit from his dad.
Spring Creek Lodge sits in the mountains, where the air is crisp and the lodgings far more comfortable than those in Western Samoa.
In seven months in Montana, Corey broke into the upper levels. The shy, introspective boy even made it to Level 6.
Before he could leave, however, he had to pass one last hurdle: joint parent-child seminars in Utah. It is an emotional reunion of a child with the parent or parents.
With his mother there, Corey passed.
But with Teen Help, completing the program does not always mean leaving it.
Laura, like many other parents in the program, became a fervent backer of all aspects of Teen Help. She began staffing the program's seminars for parents and touting the benefits of Teen Help.
"People revere it as though it were a religion," Humason says.
Corey, too, was tethered to Teen Help. Last summer, when he was 16, Laura discovered that he had drunk beer and smoked cigarettes.
She sent him back to the Montana compound for a three-month refresher. And she kept a close eye on him when he returned to El Paso.
"What I learned is that it doesn't make sense to threaten them with anything that I don't intend to do," Laura said in an Internet posting.
"I did return my son Corey to SCL (Spring Creek Lodge) after he'd been home a year ? the moment I found out that he was drinking and smoking pot. ... He is now back home again, but he understands that if he runs away from home, he stays wherever he runs to. I WON'T HAVE HIM IN MY HOUSE WITH THIS BEHAVIOR.
"And I've just stopped feeling that I need to have him in my control. ... My son threatened to call Child Protective Services just once. I told him that if he did, he could stay with them. I wouldn't fight with them, and I wouldn't have him back. If they put him into a foster home, then he would find out what living without the advantages I could give him would be like. ... It'd be a great life lesson for him.
"He shut up with that threat mighty fast."
Now came the "exit plan," Teen Help's final step for a child who has "graduated."
Until a teen reaches the age of majority ? 17 in Texas ? the procedure for handling "non-working behavior" of a graduate is to do what Laura did with Corey: send him back to Teen Help.
But after the age of majority, a more severe remedy is recommended.
Teen Help encourages parents of children who remain defiant to have little personal contact with them and to offer them almost no financial support for a set period of time.
It suggests that parents keep health insurance on the teen for six months and give their child $30 and three nights' lodging in a motel. Otherwise, teens are on their own.
The "exit plan" spells out the rules of banishment and the conditions, if any, for the child's return to the family.
The only way of re-entering the home is for the adolescent to agree to abide by the parents' rules.
David Gilcrease, who designed Teen Help's behavior modification seminars, hit upon the exit plan after he noticed that some kids in the program were merely going through the motions, trying to hold out until they reached adult age, when the program no longer could legally confine them.
"We do the exit plans because the exit plans work," says Teen Help's Kay. "We know it works. It works for thousands of families.
" ... If you have a set of rules in your home, and if that kid, if they are not living by the rules and if their behavior is really threatening to themselves and to others, you have to take drastic measures.
"Sometimes the only thing that you can do is tell them that if you are going to continue this behavior, that's up to you. You're a big boy or a big girl now. But you can't live in this home while you do it."
In the months before his death, Laura and Corey often talked about the "exit plan," Laura told the News.
Back from Spring Creek Lodge last summer, Corey still had a way to go in Laura's eyes.
Last October, a month before his 17th birthday, Laura was contemplating kicking Corey out of the house.
She told fellow Teen Help parents that Corey was "wavering ... His ability to walk the straight and narrow is still in question for me. He's walking close to the edge. If he ever makes the decision to jump over, he's gone from my house and he'll have to take what the world gives him with no help from me."
In another post, Laura wrote: "I've made it really clear to my son that if the law gets involved and he's back on the dope, I won't even bail him out ? he'll take the fall. The good thing is that he KNOWS I mean it."
When Corey turned 17 Nov. 23, Laura wrote:
"It's been a LONG haul through his teens (of course, they aren't over yet), but today is the day that I am able to insist that the STATE make Corey take his own responsibility," she wrote. "Today is the day whereby, in the great state of Texas, a teen is considered old enough to be accountable and no longer drags parents into 'juvenile' concerns.
" ... I take my son to dinner tonight to celebrate his 'majority.' And to celebrate my freedom to be involved ? or not ? as my parental judgment tells me is appropriate when my kids ask me to do something ... like help them out of a jam of their own making. Yaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!"
The incident that precipitated Corey's final showdown with his mother involved beer, cars and friends.
The weekend before he died, Corey and a friend had a party at Laura's house, says Mitch Humason, Corey's father. Laura was away.
The friend told Humason that he and Corey had been "smoking marijuana before the weekend was over, like on Sunday night." Corey gave the leftover pot to his friend, "I guess in anticipation that Laura was going to be looking around the house for marijuana or something," Humason says.
What Laura did find was enough.
"She had told him not to use her automobiles, which he did," Humason says. "She told him not to have kids over to the house, which he did. She told him not to drink, which he did.
"And I guess he left the barbecue on."
Corey set off the exit plan by choosing to leave home rather than follow the rules, Laura says.
"He wasn't being sent from the house," she said. "He was electing to leave. He knew he could stay here as long as he wanted. All he had to do is follow house rules, just as you have follow rules when you work in a hotel."
She suggested he might want to go live with his dad in New Mexico, Laura says.
The discussion upset Corey and as he charged through the house, hetipped over a lamp, breaking it.
Laura gave the News this account of what happened March 21:
"I dialed 911, and then he went into the laundry room and I thought, well, he's going to cool off. It's going to be OK. And so I hung up. Well, 911 calls me back.
"And I was in the process of telling them, 'Well, you know, Corey, my son, is thinking about leaving the house, and he's a little upset right now, and he's looking like he's maybe going to break a few things. But I think we'll be OK, I think he's going to calm down.'
"And while I was talking to them, he ran. I had the gun up above my refrigerator way high. I'd have to get on a stool to get it, but Corey didn't. He could jump. And he jumped up there. I thought he was getting a stash of pot or something 'cause he thought the police were coming to the house.
"And he ran into the bedroom and locked the door. And when I realized what he had, I was screaming at him and calling 911 again. He didn't say anything to me. He didn't say a word to me."
Shortly after he shut the door, Corey fired a shot into the bedroom wall.
Then, Laura told the News, "I broke the door down. I broke in and he was standing there loading the gun. And I said, 'Please, Corey, put it down. Please put it down. Don't do this.' And he started showing, you know, right hand, right temple, left hand, left temple. And kind of dancing around the room.
" ... He was just being kind of an ass and posing with it. You know what I'm saying? He was playing with it, and I think that ... he would have eventually put it down, but because of his behavior it would have forced me to put him back into the program rather than letting him take his exit plan.
" ... And he pointed it straight at his forehead. And I think he was just as shocked as I was when it went off. I don't think he knew what was going to happen."
Laura says she is convinced that Corey did not know the revolver could go off with the pressure he was putting on the trigger.
She also says she thinks she knows why Corey was behaving dangerously.
"I think he was trying to manipulate me into sending him back into the program where he could get the help he really needed," she says.
"It is very unfortunate that in his inability to cope with life he couldn't just ask me, because I would have sent him back if he wanted to go ...
"He was happy in the program ... All you have to do is read his letters."
Corey wanted something else from his mom, Laura now believes.
"He wanted me to say, 'I don't want you to leave the house,' which was true, and he already knew it. But he wanted me to say it. He wanted me to forbid him to leave the house. If I had known that he was as upset as he was, I certainly would have."
Inside Corey Murphy's backpack when he died were two photos. One was of his car, a source of pride for him until a friend took it for a spin that weekend and scraped its side. The other picture showed Corey with a girl.
Mitchell Humason, Corey's dad, says he was surprised by the kids who came to Corey's funeral.
"Many were kind of Rastafarian, with dreadlocks hair and, you know, kind of stoner kids," he says.
Humason had been golfing recently with Corey and noticed that the boy grew anxious as the day went on. But Humason didn't suspect that something powerful could be happening psychologically with his son.
Presiding at the funeral was the director of Teen Help's Spring Creek Lodge.
At the service, Humason says, he told his ex-wife, "Wow. I really didn't know him."
"Don't feel bad," he says Laura responded. "I lived with him and I didn't know him."
Kasio told her mother she wasn't surprised by Corey's early death.
"To be honest, Mom, I could never see him growing up," Laura says Kasio told her. "He was too vulnerable. He was too tender."
The day of the funeral, Laura eulogized her son on the Internet.
"My beautiful and loving son Corey killed himself Tuesday morning," she wrote. "I heard many people speak at his funeral about his power, his caring and his willingness to be a friend, a guide and a support in the midst of their pain.
"Parents ? MOTHERS AND FATHERS ? I must tell you to STOP fighting among yourselves and BELIEVE in your kids."
She says she had no regrets about Teen Help's programs.
"Without the program, Corey would never have had a vehicle for his power and his 'highs.' ... I KNOW I did everything I could for Corey, and I don't regret for a moment that he was involved in this program. ... I only wish Corey had been less successful at concealing his pain and his morbid sense of failure.
"Many others manage to survive ? BECAUSE OF THIS PROGRAM AND THE HELP IT GAVE THEM."
Teen Help, Laura told the News, "is not nearly as harsh as jail, or boot camp or life in general. I think a lot of these kids really need to understand that life is not necessarily kind."
Contact Lou Kilzer at (303) 892-2644 or
[email protected].
July 2, 2000
