Desperate steps, dark journey
Troubled at home, a young man is spirited off to Costa Rica and learns how extreme tough love can be
By MARK JOHNSON
Posted: Nov. 7, 2004
First of three parts
The mother kept glancing at the clock as it ticked closer to 3 a.m. That was the hour she had told the men to come for her son.
They were professionals, and they had given strict instructions: Open the door. Introduce us. Leave the room.
Cathy Petershack would be delivering her boy to the care of strangers - men with handcuffs.
Despite his thieving, drug bingeing and fighting, despite the fear of him that drove her to deadbolt the bedroom door at night, she did not want to do this to her only son.
Breaking Joel
Desperate Steps, Dark Journey
Photo/Gary Porter
Now 18, Joel Snider faced the toughest challenge of his young life when his parents sent him to a harsh school in Costa Rica.
The Series
TODAY: The knock came at 3:05 a.m. Two men stepped from the darkness and went straight to the couch where the boy was resting. Joel Snider went for the back door, but before he could make it, he felt the pinch of a handcuff closing around his left wrist.
MONDAY: At the school in Costa Rica, Joel rebelled more. And the school got tougher. Hour after hour, he was forced to stand with his nose against the wall. At other times, he was made to kneel, nose to the wall, hands behind his back, as if he were under arrest.
TUESDAY: After months of trusting the academy, his mother suddenly was wary. Hours later, she heard her son's voice for the first time in five months. Joel was crying.
Quotable
I didn't have any emotions at all. Feelings were what I couldn't feel. That's why I was a cutter. I was so numb inside that the only way I could feel was to cut my body.
- Joel Snider
Four years earlier, Joel had been just another kid going to Cub Scouts with his stepfather and building a pinewood derby racer.
Now, in August 2002, her son was 16 and a 280-pound gangbanger and truant, the kind of youth people dismiss with a single word: "thug." And yet, Cathy looked at her baby-faced son lying on the couch in his boxer shorts, watching "The Lord of the Rings," and her heart broke.
His clothes lay folded in a Tupperware container, packed for departure. He didn't even know he was leaving.
At 1 in the morning, Cathy could not look in his eyes. She just wanted to hold him again as if he were still a child.
"I love you, hon," she said and left the room.
The knock came at 3:05 a.m.
When Joel's stepfather, Steven Petershack, opened the door, two men stepped from the darkness into his Milwaukee home. They went straight to the couch, where the boy was resting.
Joel looked up, startled. One of the men was actually bigger than him, half a foot taller, 300 pounds, muscular.
"These guys are going to take you to a school," Steven Petershack told his stepson, and at that moment he felt he had failed as a parent.
Joel shot up from the couch and went for the back door. Before he could get there, he heard a sharp, metallic click and felt the pinch of a handcuff closing around his left wrist.
"You're coming with me," the big man said, "either the nice way or the hard way."
As the men led Joel from the house toward a waiting car, his stepfather rushed to hug him. Joel swung with his uncuffed fist. Before he could strike his stepfather, the escorts pulled him away and guided him into the car.
Cathy walked outside, and one of the men unrolled a car window a few inches. She could see her son's face, his brown eyes squinting fiercely.
"I have to do this," she said, "because I love you."
Joel cursed and gave her the finger.
The car drove off.
Cathy prayed that the program would work and that in time her son would forgive her. She believed that to survive in the world, he'd have to learn to make good choices.
She wondered about the choice she had made.
Better than jail
Other options exhausted, parents take extreme action
In a final act of desperation, Cathy had paid $5,000 to have her son taken against his will and flown to a "tough love"-style boarding school in Costa Rica.
Every month, she and her husband would pay the Costa Rican school about $2,100 to do what they could not - straighten out their troubled boy.
Cathy, a boiler attendant at Juneau Business High School, and Steven, an engineer for 65th Street School, took out loans totaling $25,000, money that might have sent their son to college.
Still, if the Costa Rican school worked, it would be worth the cost.
"What's the price of a person's life, especially your son's?" Steven Petershack would later say. "We would have hocked everything to get him on the right path."
Everything they had tried - drug rehabilitation, counselors, threats, love - had failed. For two years they had been surfing the Internet and collecting catalogs on military schools, boot camps, even Boys Town, the Nebraska home for wayward youths.
But the night Joel was jumped in a park, his face beaten bloody in a dispute over girls and snitching, the Petershacks realized they could wait no longer. Cathy believed that without drastic intervention her son would end up dead - if not by someone else's hands, then by his own. A few days after the beating in the park, she phoned the men who would take Joel to Costa Rica.
Cathy knew extreme measures can change a life.
As a teenager in Kenosha, she had rebelled against her mother's strict Southern Baptist morals by drinking in bars and running away from home. After Cathy was arrested for being a habitual runaway, her mother let her sit in jail for almost a month. Behind bars, Cathy saw women in their 20s and 30s, and she wondered whether this was a glimpse of her future.
"I wrote a letter to God and to my mother, and read it in juvenile court," Cathy recalled. "It said something like, 'This is not the path I want to choose for my life.' "
Although the time in jail would not mark the last time she made a poor choice, 30 years later she would view it as a turning point.
Now, worried about the path her son was choosing, she had sent him to a foreign land. The brochures for the Academy at Dundee Ranch showed a swimming pool and assured parents that observing the abundant howler monkeys, green parrots and other Costa Rican wildlife, "one cannot help but gain a new perspective."
At least it wasn't jail.
A burgeoning business
New programs cater to tougher breed of teen
A generation ago troubled teens like Joel ended up in reform school. Today there are mellower-sounding "behavior modification programs," "specialty boarding schools," and "wilderness treatment facilities."
"They're exploding. They're opening all over the United States. They're opening in prairie towns and New England farms and the deserts of Arizona," said David L. Marcus, author of the forthcoming book "What It Takes to Pull Me Through: Why Teenagers Get in Trouble and How Four Got Out."
Teen crisis centers run by Americans also have opened in places such as Mexico and Costa Rica, where cheap labor and the strength of the U.S. dollar allow them to charge lower fees. But the practice has brought international scrutiny to the treatment of children tolerated by the United States, one of only two nations (Somalia being the other) that have never ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The U.N. document broadly defends the rights of children, including contact with their families, freedom of expression and protection from physical and mental abuse.
Moreover, critics have charged that some overseas facilities catering to American teens have employed harsh methods that violate the laws of their host countries.
In the U.S., the new programs fall into a regulatory gray area between residential treatment centers and traditional boarding schools; monitoring varies from state to state. No one even knows how many such facilities exist.
The 5-year-old National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs boasts 127 members in 30 states, "but I know there are a lot more than that out there," said Jan Moss, the association's interim executive director.
Today's programs must deal with a tougher breed of teenager, Marcus said, kids who face more temptations, take bigger risks and "are tripping up in bigger and more dangerous ways than kids did 50 years ago."
To bewildered parents like the Petershacks, these children are stumbling toward an overdose, suicide, imprisonment or life on the streets.
"Most of these families are strapped. You mortgage your house. You cash in your 401(k). But if your kid needed a liver transplant, you'd figure out where to get the money," said Ken Kay, president of the Utah-based World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, a group of schools for troubled teens.
Kay's association included the school in Costa Rica that Cathy Petershack chose for her son.
Father figures
Modeling his own upbringing, stepdad gave time, attention
Cathy, 47, had always hoped to give Joel and his big sister, Julie, a less turbulent childhood than her own.
Cathy was just 7 when her father effectively vanished from her life. He spent time in prison, and after his release, moved away. His contact with Cathy became a check at Christmas.
Cathy's son, Joel, was 4 when she divorced his father.
During a miserable first marriage, Cathy spent time in a shelter for battered wives. She claimed her husband punched her in front of the children, even as she told them, "Go play in the bedroom."
Joel took his surname, Snider, from his birth father - but little else. In an echo of earlier times, a check from his dad arrived at Christmas. On the rare occasions when they spoke, Joel took to addressing his birth father by first name, never "Dad."
That title passed to another man, Cathy's second husband, Steven Petershack. The couple met through friends in the school system and married six months after Cathy divorced her first husband.
Cathy was heartened by the way her son took to his stepfather. Joel was a loud, funny, independent child, much as Cathy had been.
When Steven introduced Joel to the structured world of Cub Scouts, the boy thrived. They went to troop meetings and played baseball together. On weekends and holidays, they fished at Steven's cabin up north.
"I sort of treated him the way my Dad treated me," Steven said.
Steven's own father had been generous with his time, and strict with his discipline. Steven felt such a mix of fear and respect that he craved his father's approval long after the old man died.
The bond between Steven and his stepson turned out to be more fragile.
The bond loosens
Rebellion escalates into drug abuse, violence
About the time Joel turned 13, he left Scouts and the family moved to another neighborhood in Milwaukee. Father and son found nothing to replace the Scouting activities that had helped them bond. The only time they were good together anymore was up north in the cabin.
Soon, Joel was less eager to make the trip to Rhinelander. He sat at home more, watching television and snacking. He gained weight, topping 200 pounds. With the weight gain came depression. He felt isolated - by his size and by the birth father who had rejected him.
Joel made no effort to hide his dark mood. When Cathy and Steven asked him to pick up clothing or lectured him about schoolwork - he'd already been held back a grade - Joel maintained a stony silence or walked away.
Very quickly, the Petershacks found themselves facing more than the typical surly teenager. The first clue was a call from Kmart security. Joel had been caught stealing pens and pencils.
He was in sixth grade.
His parents grounded him for weeks.
As he felt Joel pulling away, Steven grew angrier and less patient. He could not understand why Joel seemed unconcerned about consequences. The boy skipped school often, something Steven had been too afraid to do when he was young.
He yelled at Joel. That only made the boy rebel more against Steven, a man he began to view as merely a substitute father.
Early on, Steven had spanked Joel, just as his own father had spanked him. But Cathy disapproved; violence rekindled the bad memories from her first marriage. As a result, Steven was unsure how to discipline Joel.
"I didn't know whether to be nicer to him or be more strict," he said, "give him more privileges or take privileges away."
Like other parents, Cathy and Steven took away TV and video games and sent their child to his room. Like other parents, they heard the door slam in response. Like other parents, they searched their child's bedroom.
In Joel's room, they found his old toys - plastic bats and even a ceramic teddy bear; he had hollowed them into marijuana pipes.
He was in seventh grade.
Cathy knew about youthful rebellion, but her son's version seemed extreme and frightening. How can he be so unhappy? she wondered.
He ran away, and not just once or twice. He ran for days, even weeks, then returned to fill a backpack with fresh clothes, and ran again.
Joel bolted so often that Cathy took home a stack of "missing person" reports and filled out everything but the date and what her son was wearing.
He was in eighth grade.
When he was home, Joel brought new friends who wore dark "Goth" clothing, including long black coats. They made Steven and Cathy feel like intruders in their own house.
Joel and his friends broke into Cathy's prescription bottles, stealing not only pain pills, but blood pressure and even hormone pills.
She bought a small safe and locked up her medications.
One night Cathy awoke to find a friend of Joel's on the bedroom floor rifling through the pockets of her clothes and snatching wadded-up dollar bills. She chased the boy downstairs and forced him to return the money.
Then, Steven installed a deadbolt on the bedroom door.
"We couldn't lock him up," the stepfather explained, "so we locked us up."
Outside their house, Joel did worse things. He and some friends were involved in a gang. They mugged people for drug money. They fought in school and outside.
Sometimes Joel came home with black eyes and swollen lips.
However, no one damaged Joel's body more than Joel himself. What he did went beyond anything Cathy could imagine from her teen years.
One day she grabbed her son's arm because he was ignoring her. He jerked his arm back, his face stiffening in pain. Cathy rolled up his sleeve and discovered a series of cuts, more than a dozen, some deep and raw.
At the time he could not explain why he cut himself. Several years later he would put it this way:
"I didn't have any emotions at all. Feelings were what I couldn't feel. That's why I was a cutter. I was so numb inside that the only way I could feel was to cut my body."
One day Joel saw his mother crying at the kitchen table, and he knew she was crying over him. He felt nothing.
Alarmed by the cuts on his arms, the Petershacks took Joel to Milwaukee Psychiatric Hospital to undergo drug rehabilitation.
He was in ninth grade.
He spent at least three weeks at the hospital. He started taking the anti-depressants Zoloft and Wellbutrin. He saw a psychiatrist.
Nothing changed.
He was using cocaine. To pay for it, he sold a Game Boy his parents had bought him just a day earlier, shoplifted compact discs, and stole his father's collection of quarters, worth close to $1,000.
At one point, Joel lived with his sister, Julie, who was married and had children, but after six months he moved back home. Whatever progress he made with her was short-lived.
The drug use, fighting and stealing continued. His weight peaked at 350 pounds, before he resumed running away and eating irregularly.
Cuffs and barbed wire
Parents hatch plan to move son out of country
It was no secret to Joel that his parents had been looking at military schools and boot camps. Sometimes he picked up the mail, laughing as he delivered the brochures to his mother. Like you can afford these places, he'd say.
The Petershacks were not rich. But they were running out of ideas.
One day Cathy went to the computer and began typing phrases into an Internet search engine: "teen problems," "help for troubled teens."
A few keystrokes led her to a network of facilities for troubled teens, known as the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools. With headquarters in Utah, this trade association included more than half a dozen schools that used similar methods and treated 2,000 teens a year.
The schools were expensive, some well over $3,000 a month.
Cathy found that the most affordable was a place called Academy at Dundee Ranch. The academy, which opened in Costa Rica in 2001, looked beautiful in the photographs, a former resort set amid tropical fruit trees and flowers. Students took classes, as they would at school, and earned credits toward their high school diploma.
There was a videotape with testimonials from grateful parents and students, who explained over and over that the program had saved lives. Parents got back the loving sons and daughters they thought had been lost forever.
Cathy knew that Joel would not enter the academy voluntarily. Nor could he be tricked into believing the family was taking a vacation to Costa Rica. An official at the association of specialty programs and schools suggested one other option: Hire men to "escort" Joel.
Cathy soon faced a barrage of forms, waivers and applications, so many she bought a small fax machine to send and receive everything. She and Joel's birth father agreed to give temporary custody of their son to the men taking him to Costa Rica. They gave the academy permission to monitor Joel's mail, place him under observation away from other students and even physically restrain him.
It seemed as if Cathy was giving up a lot. But if Joel overdosed or crossed the wrong gang member, she might lose him forever. She signed every form.
Then, in the early hours of Aug. 7, 2002, the men with handcuffs came for Joel.
At Mitchell International Airport, sheriff's deputies checked with Cathy to make sure she approved of her son being taken away. The two escorts removed Joel's handcuffs as they boarded a plane to Atlanta. They took three seats and put Joel in the middle.
I'm screwed, he thought.
At the airport in Atlanta, Joel realized they weren't heading down the hallway to pick up baggage. The men were marching him toward the area for connecting flights. He pressured them until finally they told him where he was going: Costa Rica.
At 8 that morning back in Wisconsin, Joel's sister, Julie, awoke suddenly. Her mother had come over and was standing beside the bed. Cathy told her daughter that Joel was going on a plane. He was leaving the country. If she wanted to talk to him, she had to do it now.
Cathy dialed a number, then handed the phone to Julie. Joel said he didn't know what was going on. He sounded scared. He was crying. Julie hadn't known he was capable of tears.
Joel told his sister he loved her. But there was something he needed to get straight. Had she known he was going to be sent away?
"No," Julie said. "No, I didn't."
She wished she could jump through the phone and save him. All she could do was say goodbye. When she got off the phone, her mother was crying.
After the flight to Costa Rica and a two-hour drive through the green, mist-shrouded mountains, Joel arrived late in the afternoon at Academy at Dundee Ranch.
The academy, a 15-minute drive from the Pacific Ocean, had a curious entrance for a school: a barbed wire fence with old branches for posts. Inside, Joel passed an abundance of tropical flowers and palm, mango and lemon trees.
This would be his new home, though for how long he did not know. Legally he could be compelled to stay until his 18th birthday - 16 months away.
Joel was taken to the cafeteria, where he insulted a member of the staff.
Then, left alone for a moment, he remembered something. He'd hidden a small amount of cocaine inside a seam in his shoe. No one had stopped him at the airports. He reached down.
Still there!
In his first hour at the $2,100-a-month academy, Joel snorted cocaine.
For the last time.
Months at ranch leave son bruised, parents in turmoil
By MARK JOHNSON
Posted: Nov. 7, 2004
"Joel,
You don't know how bad I felt doing this to you, but I truly did it out of my love for you. I know you won't think so for a while, but this was the hardest thing I felt I faced up to in a long time...
I love you son. Please believe I'm doing this to save you from yourself...
Love, Mom & Dad."
- August 2002 letter to Joel Snider from his mother
Breaking Joel
Desperate Steps, Dark Journey
At Dundee Ranch in Costa Rica, officials of the harsh school cut Joel Snider's hair and shaved off the teen's goatee. Considered a "refuser" to the rules of the program, Joel (center), at the school about six months in this picture, was repeatedly punished for hours, painfully restrained and fed less than other students.
The Series
SUNDAY: The knock came at 3:05 a.m. Two men stepped from the darkness and went straight to the couch where the boy was resting. Joel Snider went for the back door, but before he could make it, he felt the pinch of a handcuff closing around his left wrist.
TODAY: At the school in Costa Rica, Joel rebelled more. And the school got tougher. Hour after hour, he was forced to stand with his nose against the wall. At other times, he was made to kneel, nose to the wall, hands behind his back, as if he were under arrest.
TUESDAY: After months of trusting the academy, his mother suddenly was wary. Hours later, she heard her son's voice for the first time in five months. Joel was crying.
About the story
Forced to fly from his home in Milwaukee to a tough Costa Rican boarding school in order to turn his life around, Joel Snider was not off to a promising start.
The staff at the $2,100-a-month Academy at Dundee Ranch had left him alone for just a few minutes. Joel, 16, hastily had snorted cocaine he'd hidden inside a seam of his shoe.
It was cocaine - along with the stealing, truancy and gang activity - that had convinced his parents, Cathy and Steven Petershack, to borrow $25,000 to send him to this last-chance school.
In the smoldering heat of Costa Rica, Joel's rebellious streak would collide with the academy's rigid system for breaking teens of destructive behavior.
That first day, Aug. 7, 2002, Joel met with a "buddy," a senior student who was supposed to explain the academy and its rules. Instead, he seemed more interested in hearing Joel talk about his misdeeds.
Joel would learn the rules on his own - mostly by breaking them.
In the first 24 hours, his hair was cut short. When the staff shaved off his goatee, he struggled so much he was shoved against a wall.
He had joined 134 teenagers at the academy.
At night, Joel and nine other boys shared a three-walled room, or "bat cave" as it was called. They slept in triple bunk beds. Speaking was not allowed.
The academy used a point system to reward students for good behavior and punish them for bad behavior. Points for good work and positive attitude allowed kids to move up in levels and gradually gain privileges.
A phone call home was a privilege that took students at least three months - and more often six - to earn.
Losing points was easy. Students forfeited points for rolling their eyes, burping, making rude comments about the program, looking at a member of the opposite sex.
After a few days, Joel realized he faced a choice: "If you're not working the program, you're refusing the program." From the beginning, Joel was a "refuser," the term the academy used for defiant kids.
His first act of rebellion: talking.
His first punishment: more than 12 hours of exercise - jumping jacks, push-ups and walking laps in the sizzling Costa Rican heat. Such physical activity did not come easy for Joel, who arrived at the academy weighing 280 pounds.
And yet, the punishment failed to make him compliant. He swore at the guards. In the classroom, students weren't allowed to glance up from their books, but Joel stood and walked out.
The staff responded day after day with more exercise and less food. They gave Joel rice and beans for all three meals, and as long as he refused to cooperate, he got less to eat than the other students.
At times, the exercises were so grueling that Joel thought he would pass out. He began to lose weight.
Anger kept him going. He knew the academy was costing his parents plenty; he would show them it was not only expensive, but futile. They would see no change in him, no improvement whatsoever.
No family contact
Treatment causes rift between mother, daughter
When he wrote his first e-mail to his mother and stepfather a few weeks after arriving in Costa Rica, the message was: I hate you. This place sucks. Do you know what you're doing to me?
The staff refused to send it. Nor would they send his second e-mail. Too angry.
Weeks passed before Joel's parents finally heard from him. By then Cathy and Steven had been warned to disregard any complaints from their son. Over the phone, a Dundee official had told the Petershacks to be wary if Joel claimed he was being abused. Staff routinely warned parents not to believe their children's complaints, according to Amberly Knight, a former director of the academy who quit in August 2002.
The Petershacks were told that kids will say anything to get out of the academy. They manipulate. Hadn't Joel been manipulating them for years?
But the phone call from the school alarmed Joel's older sister, Julie.
"You know Joel," she told her mother. "Joel's not going to be, like, 'Somebody's abusing me.' He's a tough kid. If he starts saying that stuff, you need to pull him out."
Cathy trusted the academy. She knew that Joel hated going to school and following rules. She'd have been suspicious if he loved the place.
Besides, the academy staff stressed the importance of not removing Joel from the program too soon. That would be like taking a cake out of the oven before it had fully baked, Cathy was told; the cake would collapse.
Such arguments did not persuade Julie, who is five years older than Joel. Secretly she and her husband discussed a radical step: fighting for custody of her brother.
In the end, Julie was talked out of a custody battle by her father-in-law; he feared the fight would drive a permanent wedge between Julie and her mother.
More than 2,000 miles away, Joel was still dividing his family.
Bruised knees, lost weight
Punishment begins to take physical toll
In Costa Rica, Joel rebelled more. The academy got tougher.
"It seemed like he was always in trouble," said Lindsay Garner, a teenager from Alabama who attended the academy with Joel. "I would always see him in O.P."
O.P. was shorthand for a punishment called "observational placement."
Day after day, while other students went to classes and watched educational videos, Joel was ordered to the observational placement room - a small, former bathhouse with a hard tile floor. There, he was forced to stand with his nose an inch from the wall, hour after hour, with only short breaks. At other times, Joel was made to kneel, nose-to-the-wall, hands behind his back, as if he were under arrest.
The kneeling bruised his knees. More noticeable than the bruises, though, was the weight Joel was losing.
"After a while, he got real skinny," Garner said. "He looked drained a lot of the time. His clothes were so baggy, they didn't fit anymore."
Although academy officials have insisted that students received plenty of food, the school's doctor, Edgar Leguizamon, said he saw some children who were losing too much weight. The doctor said he insisted they receive more food and even made a list of students to be given second helpings. For a few months, the students on the list did get seconds, but after a while, the academy stopped, the doctor said.
Leguizamon also worried that students were suffering from overcrowded conditions, insufficient psychological counseling and excessive sun exposure during the forced exercises. Many times he considered leaving the academy.
"I stayed for the kids," he said.
Broken will
After months of resistance, 'I just gave up'
The Spartan conditions at Dundee Ranch had not softened Joel's attitude. He still refused to obey rules, and that brought even harsher consequences.
One of the many forms Joel's parents had signed before sending him to Costa Rica had given the academy staff permission to restrain Joel in extreme circumstances, for example, if he endangered himself or someone else. In the observational placement room, Joel learned what was meant by "restrain."
Joel was seized by male staff members more than a dozen times - once for striking a guard and the rest for minor offenses such as talking. Each time, Joel lay on his stomach while a guard pressed a knee into his back and wrenched his arms back toward his head.
"You'd scream," Joel said. "Everybody screamed."
He fought the urge. As he felt his arms jerked behind him, Joel would tell himself: Don't let your enemy hear you scream. Before you know it, it will be over.
Garner said that as she studied in the classroom, she could hear the shrieks of fellow students coming from the observational placement room some 50 yards away. In her view, the practice "was like torturing people into being good."
Students were restrained only as a last resort, said Ken Kay, president of the association to which Dundee Ranch belonged. But Knight, the academy's former director, disagreed, saying that restraint "was commonly used as an intimidation technique, not as a last resort."
Joel found that during the days of exercise and observational placement, there was nothing to do but think. He picked over every aspect of his life.
It wasn't like a movie in which all of the thinking swells into a great wave of regret. Joel daydreamed about beating up the guards or running away. Often, he simply thought, I wish I hadn't got caught.
Still, there were things he regretted. Neglecting school was one. But what haunted him most were his last words to his mother as he'd sat in the car waiting to be taken far from home. He had cursed her. It pained Joel to think that if anything happened to either of them, his last message to his mother would not have been "I love you," but something ugly.
In December, with Christmas approaching, it dawned on Joel that he had been at the academy almost five months and was no closer to going home. He was tired of exercises, staring at walls, going to bed hungry and waking up the same.
"I just gave up. They broke my spirit. They broke my will," Joel said. "I'll write the letters you want me to write. I'll say what you want me to say. I'll be a goddamn robot."
He had refused the program. Now, reluctantly, he tried to follow it.
On Christmas Day, Joel got his first phone call home since his arrival four months earlier. It lasted five minutes.
With a member of the Dundee Ranch staff hovering nearby, Joel apologized to his mother for cursing at her in Milwaukee. Cathy Petershack wept and told her son that the family loved him and missed him.
She chose her words carefully, making sure not to say that she wanted him home right away. The academy staff had warned her not to tell Joel anything that might lead him to believe he'd be coming home soon.
In his absence, it was a grim Christmas. The family had not been told precisely when Joel would phone, and his sister, Julie, missed the call by a few minutes when she ran out for diapers. She spent much of the day in tears.
Raw emotion
As time wears on, frustration builds
After Christmas, Joel made a push to gain points, hoping this would help him to leave the academy sooner. He struggled, torn between rebellion and resignation.
Jan. 13.
"Hello mom and dad: I am doing great so far in school and in the program. I am busting butt. But I feel my anger has come up for me in a big way today."
When he wasn't in trouble, Joel now spent hours in the classroom staring at a world history book. Although the Dundee brochure had called the education "self-paced," the promotional video that the Petershacks watched appeared to show an instructor looking at a student's work and offering assistance.
In practice, no teacher lectured students. Kids were given a book to read, and when they finished, a test to pass. They could keep taking the test until they passed.
Cathy Petershack said she was told her son could keep up with his high school class in Milwaukee and perhaps even catch up the grade he had fallen behind. But Joel never approached that best-case scenario. For months, when Cathy phoned the academy for updates on Joel, his curriculum consisted of the same lone course: "World history."
He also was attending a daily "group session," in which students got to talk about their lives and reflect on their choices. At first, Joel said little. Gradually, though, he began to open up.
"He would talk a lot about his sister, how he had bounced around, drugs," said Christopher Carbo, a Florida teenager who met Joel at Dundee Ranch. "Everything he said was real on point, mature, the kind of thing an adult would say."
According to Joel's e-mails home, he was trying to follow the program. Yet at times he made little progress. The rules had changed, and Joel found it harder to earn points. He lost points for small infractions, like having a stain on his white T-shirt.
Frustration boiled over into his letters and e-mails, and into those from Cathy and Steven.
Joel to his stepfather:
"... As for me being a disrespectful Bleep that's the way you perceive me ... The reason a man would have done all you have as my father is because you LOVE my mother and eventually LOVED me. The fact is I am your son. I am more like you. No not blood, but values, behaviors, life. I am you."
Cathy to Joel:
"... I am at work right now, 2 a.m. with two hours sleep, feel like throwing up over the messes you put yourself into and dad and I along with you!! ... You are only headed down an express lane highway called Life ... At the rate of speed you keep going you are going to die. I don't care to watch it happening."
The lectures flowed both ways. Joel wrote Cathy about her drinking. Sometimes she thought it showed how much he cared; other times, it only proved how far he'd go to provoke her. Before her son sat in judgment, there were things she wanted him to know. She wrote:
"I have devoted myself to you from the day I made the conscious decision to want another child (YOU) enough to go 'cold turkey' in a clinic, off shooting heroin & cocaine to give birth to you. I have fought so much and overcame so much. You don't even know."
Joel sent drawings home. Cathy looked at his sketches of kids with angry faces and wondered if that's how Joel felt when he thought of her.
On other occasions, he doodled the word "mother" in graceful pen strokes and sent a beautiful drawing of a rose with a tear drop; Cathy saw love and sadness in these efforts.
As often as the good days lifted her spirits, the bad ones jolted her back.
She had borrowed so much money to send Joel to this school, and sometimes he just seemed angry.
After five months, Cathy reached a breaking point. Some relatives had grown tired of Cathy and the chaos that surrounded her. Her drinking had gotten worse. And harsh as Joel's letters were at times, she missed him and felt alone.
One day she typed an e-mail to her husband at work.
"Goodbye," she wrote. "It's not that I don't love you. I just can't handle any more of this."
She said she was leaving.
Steven placed frantic calls to Cathy's relatives. He brought home flowers and told Cathy that he loved her.
She didn't leave; in truth, she didn't know where she would go. But for several days, she shut herself in her room. Finally, Steven told her that together they had decided what to do about Joel; together they should see it through.
Shared experience
Parents get bitter taste of what son is enduring
From the beginning, Cathy had known that her son would have to work hard in Costa Rica to straighten out his life. Now she realized the struggle was not his alone.
That was a point Dundee Ranch officials impressed on parents by urging them to attend special seminars similar to those the children must complete. The seminars, which preach honesty, accountability and self-esteem, were sold to parents as a vital step in healing the whole family.
Over a long weekend in the spring, Cathy and Steven Petershackwent through their first seminar, "Parent Discovery," at a hotel in Chicago.
The rules were strict. Each day, parents had to be seated by the time the theme to "2001: A Space Odyssey" finished playing. If they were late, they were reprimanded.
Inside the training room, parents were not allowed to eat, drink or chew gum. Nor could they record the proceedings or take notes without permission.
During the seminar, parents were singled out and pressed to talk about traumatic events. Cathy was led to the front. Her knees shook. Under questioning from one of the seminar leaders, she talked about an event buried deep in childhood that did not involve her directly, but forever changed her family: Her father was convicted of incest and imprisoned.
In front of all those strangers, Cathy wept so heavily that when she had finished speaking, she asked to be excused to change her contact lenses. No, she was told, not unless she wanted to face a "consequence" or punishment.
Two thousand miles away, her son's school in Costa Rica was using a new punishment.
For several months, instead of exercises, Joel and other students were made to build a walled compound known as a "high impact" center.
The students dug trenches 5-feet deep, carried heavy bags of sand and mixed cement. Joel realized there would soon be a harsh, new place for the academy's hardest cases.
He was building it.
Second of three parts
http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/nov04/273168.asphttp://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/nov04/273251.asp