How Could You? Hall of Shame-Rock River Academy & Residential Center and Lawsuit
This will be an archive of heinous actions by those involved in child welfare, foster care and adoption. We forewarn you that these are deeply disturbing stories that may involve sex abuse, murder, kidnapping and other horrendous actions.
From Rockford,Illinois, Rock River Academy & Residential Center run by Universal Health Services closed in 2015 “after an investigation by the Chicago Tribune found the residents suffered severe abuse during their stays.”
“Illinois regularly sent foster children with a history of sexual abuse and emotional problems to a facility where they were raped and assaulted by staff members and other residents, former wards claim in court.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday in Cook County Court is latest misfortune to befall Rock River Academy & Residential Center, a residential treatment center for adolescent girls with severe emotional disabilities run by Universal Health Services.
The five plaintiffs behind Wednesday’s lawsuit say they were minors while the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) was contracting with the facility to provide female wards of the state with services.
They say Rock River failed to deliver on its promise of providing each resident with “exceptional personalized care” in a safe environment.
The Tribune’s investigation newspaper found that the Rockford Police Department fielded more than 700 reports “concerning victimization of girls under DCFS’s care including rape, aggravated battery and sodomy at the Rock River Academy,” during a four-year period, according to the complaint.
Each of the plaintiffs claim they were serially, sexually abused and raped by Rock River staff members, who “intentionally administered psychotropic drugs which they used to keep her in a semi-conscious state so that she could be more easily manipulated and sexually abused.”
In its investigation , the Chicago Tribune reported that violence was constant at the 59-bed home, with 10 to 20 fights breaking out between residents every day. The girls received little to no effective therapy or schooling, the Tribune reported.
It found that the rate of physical restraints at Rock River was nearly eight times the median for all Illinois facilities
Coupled with Rock River’s very high rate of dispensing psychoactive drugs, wards of the facility had the second-highest rate both of self-inflicted wounds and psychiatric hospital visits, the Tribune reported.
Universal Health Services, a market-leader in behavioral health that runs more than 190 facilities nationwide, denied the accounts that former patients gave the Tribune about their experiences at Rock River. Universal did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the new lawsuit.”
Severe Abuse Alleged at Illinois Home for Girls[Courthouse News 9/10/15 by Lorraine Bailey]
“With her belongings in a backpack, 16-year-old Jessica McQueen described wandering the streets of Rockford, begging for food and money.
It was a cold day in October, and she had no reliable place to stay. But McQueen told a reporter she was desperate to keep away from Rock River Academy, the residential treatment center she fled days before, according to police records.
“It was just crazy fights, and fights and jumps and all type of stuff. I’d rather be on the run than be in a place that don’t help me and just push me down,” she said.
McQueen’s account of aggression and turbulence inside the facility was mirrored by Tribune interviews with 20 former residents and a dozen former workers, and buttressed by thousands of pages of confidential juvenile case files, police reports and other documents. Many young people spoke of developing relationships with trusted staff — only to see them quit or be fired. Others said workers mocked or ignored them, and few said they had been helped in any meaningful way, or even kept safe.
The records and interviews offer a detailed look at life inside the 59-bed facility for juvenile state wards and girls with behavior and mental health problems.
“It was frightening,” said another 16-year-old who spent nearly two years in the facility. “I had to fight my way through it to get respect from the girls. I was just like Rock River when I got out.”
From June 2013 through March, Rock River filed reports of aggressive behavior by state wards more frequently than any of Illinois’ 50 other residential facilities, according to data from the state Department of Children and Family Services. At the Tribune’s request, DCFS calculated annual rates for each facility by measuring the number of reports against the number of days each youth was in care.
Rock River’s rate of these aggressive behavior reports has climbed sharply since 2009, the DCFS data show, and during that recent nine-month period it was more than five times the median rate among all facilities across the state. Rock River’s rate was also more than twice that of the five other facilities that handle similar populations of youth with the same severe diagnoses, according to DCFS reports.
The Tribune also found that juvenile state wards at Rock River were administered “emergency” doses of powerful psychotropic drugs at rates far above those reported by most similar youth facilities.
In 2012, Ron Davidson, who then directed the mental health policy program in the University of Illinois at Chicago’s psychiatry department, told DCFS in an email that his staff had interviewed several former Rock River residents who said “they would harm themselves if sent back to what they described as dangerous conditions at that facility.”
Former resident and runaway Fayshawn Petty, 21, told the Tribune that she was attacked on one of her first days at Rock River. As Petty, then 15, took a seat in the lunchroom, “the girls came up behind me,” she said.
“I was getting punched, kicked. … It’s like an initiation program. I felt like I wasn’t being protected.” Later, she said, “I was mocked by the staff: ‘You got beat up!'”
In September 2011, Petty told staff she was going to contact TV personality and legal commentator Nancy Grace about alleged “verbal, mental and physical abuse” at the facility, according to a Rock River report to DCFS. Petty’s vow to contact the media was reported under the category of “threats against … facility,” records show.
Five days later, Petty and a small band of girls ran off through the cornfields that border the facility, records show. Petty said she never returned.
While most of Illinois’ residential treatment centers for youth are operated by nonprofit organizations and religious charities, Rock River Academy is owned by a for-profit company: Universal Health Services Inc., which runs more than 190 behavioral health facilities across the country.
Even as Universal’s annual revenues have soared above $7 billion and its stock price has more than doubled in the last two years, the company is facing a widening federal probe into conditions of care and billing practices at 13 of its operations.
Four of the 13 facilities under investigation are in Illinois, including Rock River, which promises intensive, round-the-clock care to girls and was acquired by Universal in a 2010 merger. The other three are psychiatric hospitals.
Federal authorities have not accused Universal and its executives and staff of any wrongdoing, and Universal said in a written statement that the company is cooperating with the inquiries. “We are confident that when all of the information is presented in this matter, it will indicate that these facilities provided quality care and treatment to (their) patients,” the statement said.
“We have not, do not and will not ever sacrifice patient care for financial benefit,” added the company. It said that “contrary to the for-profit stereotype, Rock River has actually lost over $1 million in the past five years.”
Universal officials said they “strongly dispute” the Tribune findings, which were based on detailed state records and police reports as well as interviews.
“You are receiving information from patients who have had often horrific life experiences and have mental health issues,” the company said in its statement. “Their characterization of issues and facts do not accurately reflect what really happened. The facts are very different than what you are reporting.”
Karen Johnson, senior vice president and compliance officer for Universal, said Rock River has helped severely abused girls turn their lives around. “We have a lot of success stories,” Johnson said. “We’ve heard from parents that say, ‘Thank you for giving us our daughter back.’
“We had five girls graduate from high school this year, and those stories need to be shared. They all have the opportunity now to do something with their lives with a diploma in hand. I am very proud of that.”
Making it worse
Interviews with former Rock River residents and staffers, as well as DCFS reports, depict a chaotic environment that not only led to physical assaults but often thwarted efforts to help residents with their therapy and education.
At the facility’s in-house therapeutic day school, according to these accounts, girls carried in blankets and pillows and slept in class, or loudly cursed teachers, turned over desks and strolled out when they wanted to.
“You have kids throwing chairs at teachers or other kids, or fights breaking out, and you have kids walking out of class,” said former resident Dallas Donati, 18. “And if we don’t want to be in the class, there’s no one to stop us from just walking out. I used to throw chairs so I could get out of the room.”
Unusual Incident Reports filed by the facility in 2011 through 2013 show educational time was often disrupted by the mayhem. One girl was arrested for assaulting a teacher with a crayon box; another tore apart the principal’s office, sweeping the computer off a desk and hitting the principal in the head with a can of soda; a third girl was suspended for inappropriate sexual behavior with a younger resident in school.
“There was a lot of fights, there was screaming in the hallways,” recalled former resident Kiana King, 19. “Some girls came knowing about those behaviors, but being around them girls made it even worse.”
At Rock River, said former resident Shirley Collins, 19, “they combine the good girls and bad girls, and the bad girls influence the good girls. A lot of the girls that were good, they wanted to be like everybody else. They wanted attention. So the bad girls would influence them to fight and to run away, to be defiant.”
Some former workers said staff shortages diminished the time allotted to therapy because counselors were often forced to interrupt sessions to help restore order elsewhere in the facility, or to pursue girls who ran off.
“It was hard to get individual sessions in because we were always in crisis. Crisis work ended up being the major focus, and you can put that down as therapy but it is not,” said a former therapist who discussed resident treatment on condition that he not be identified.
Rock River sent the juvenile court glowing reports about the treatment of former resident Ashley Phillips, now 17. One said “overall Ashley’s behavior has been very positive” and noted that “she receives group therapy at least three times per day for at least 45 minutes per session.”
But Phillips told the Tribune: “At therapy you didn’t do nothing but stare at the wall, play games and draw.”
Although the DCFS reports examined by the Tribune describe aggressive behavior by many residents, Universal said in its statement that “the incidents of aggression are isolated to a fairly small number of residents who have engaged in repeated behavior at other facilities which has continued at Rock River.”
Universal said Rock River exceeded required staffing levels and youths typically had three to five hours of therapeutic activity a day. If therapy was shortchanged because of inadequate staffing, “that certainly is not at all what we condone,” Universal’s Johnson said. “Those dynamics that you indicate have never been reported to us or to me, and if that were the circumstance I would certainly intervene.”
One Rock River resident who appeared to deteriorate at the facility was a 15-year-old who had been abandoned by her mother on Chicago’s West Side.
Sent to Rock River last year, she got into more than 20 fights during her first seven months, and staff put her in physical restraint holds more than 50 times, records show. In two cases, facility surveillance video showed workers punching the girl and once biting her. Rock River fired one of those staff members and suspended the other, government records show.
“(The girl) is not safe in her placement at Rock River and must be removed immediately,” the Cook County public guardian wrote in one December 2013 juvenile court filing. “She has become dramatically more aggressive and has begun to engage in self-harming, a behavior she has not exhibited in the past. … (She) must be moved to a facility that can appropriately and effectively address her mental health needs.”
In an eloquent letter to relatives earlier this year, the girl expressed the fervent hope that she would soon leave Rock River. “It feels so good to say that, I’m coming home,” she wrote, according to correspondence the family shared with the Tribune.
But before DCFS acted, records show, the girl was accused of assaulting peers and staff in the facility and sent to juvenile detention.
Powerful drugs
Most years since 2009, Rock River ranked among the top two Illinois facilities in the rate of dispensing emergency tranquilizers, according to DCFS data from 2009 through March 2014. The other facility, the 38-bed John Costigan Residential Center in Streamwood, also was run by Universal but closed last year.
Experts say high rates of emergency medication are a sign that a facility’s therapeutic efforts — and the youths’ day-to-day drug regimens — may be ineffective.
“It would suggest that their behavior modification program wasn’t working all that well,” said Daniel Safer, a researcher and associate professor at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
In nearly two decades running a Massachusetts residential center for youths with severe behavioral disorders, Tufts Medical Center psychiatrist Chris Bellonci said he recalled using emergency medications only a few times. “Emergency med use can be a proxy for programs that are struggling to meet the needs of these kids,” he said. “It would certainly raise a red flag that there could be a problem at the facility.”
In several cases examined by the Tribune, DCFS records show Rock River girls demanded and got emergency shots of anti-psychotic sedatives like Thorazine. Former residents said the tranquilizers, which some called “booty juice,” helped them deal with the chaos inside the facility.
“A lot of (the girls) would flip out to get the shot,” said former resident Eva Jackson, 21. “It was (a way of) coping with everything. It was really hard there.”
A former Rock River nurse, who talked about patient care on the condition that she not be identified, said use of the emergency medications was commonplace in 2012 when she worked there. “We were told you have to give them the booty juice,” she said. “We would have to call the doctor each time to get an order, and it was pretty much, ‘Go ahead.'”
One 17-year-old state ward with a history of violence and mental illness was given emergency tranquilizers more than 40 times in a 21/2-year period from 2011 to last year, juvenile case records show.
At 8:30 a.m. one day in September last year, she approached the nurse’s station and “requested the doctor be called for an injection,” according to Rock River’s subsequent report to DCFS.
“When the nurse refused and explained that the doctor would not be called, the girl became irate and said: ‘I’m going to climb through this window and beat your ass,'” according to Rock River’s report.
Before the nurse could close her station window, the girl crawled through it, grabbed the office phone, dialed the doctor’s number and handed the phone to the nurse.
“Nurse explained to doctor the resident wanted an injection,” said the facility’s report to DCFS. “Doctor reviewed meds and gave an order for Thorazine 300 mg. Medication drawn up and administered.”
While not commenting specifically on Rock River, Bellonci said such a practice could feed a youth’s belief that only narcotics can relieve agitation, anger and other overwhelming emotions.
“That’s not something that’s going to be adaptive to life except if you then start translating it into substance abuse,” Bellonci said. “That’s disturbing on a number of levels.”
The DCFS data provided to the Tribune show that during the most recent nine-month period, rates of emergency psychotropic medication fell sharply for all residential facilities in Illinois, and especially at Rock River.
“I am very proud to say that this facility has reduced the use of their emergency medications by over 90 percent as a result of their own continued improvement processes,” Johnson said.
Universal’s statement added: “Your references to the use of medications at Rock River are incorrect. … Our patients are taught new coping mechanisms to manage their behavior including requesting medication if they recognize they are struggling to self-regulate their emotions.””
Violence at Rock River Academy: ‘I was getting punched, kicked’[Chicago Tribune 12/2/14 by David Jackson and Gary Marx]
“Shocking allegations of horrors behind the walls at Rock River Academy were brought to light in a Chicago Tribune article on December 15th, including dozens of claims of sexual abuse inside of the facility. “The staff was having sex with whomever they could have sex with…whoever was vulnerable,” says Fayshawn Petty, a former Rock River Academy resident. “They would bring the girls snacks, candies, cakes…whatever the girls wanted. Even weed and cigarettes,”
Residents were selling sex on “…Broadway, Auburn Street, Fairgrounds, Auburn Manor. Prostituting in the Auburn High School parking lot,” says Petty.
There were several reports of physical abuse, and dozens of fights daily. “A lot of girls’ arms got broke(n). Legs, ankles…my finger got broke from trying to get restrained, because I was trying to protect myself,” says Petty.
Fayshawn Petty says she saw it all. She was just 15 years of age when she was sent to Rock RiverAcademy, the 59-bed residential center for girls with behavioral and mental problems in Rockford,Illinois. Petty says her mom got a new boyfriend and kicked her out of the house. She had nowhere to go except into DCFS custody. “I was always calling my DCFS case worker, telling them that these people abuse me. I’m always calling my mama, even though she left me out to the wolves. Always calling my daddy, telling him they are abusing me in here, can you please take me out of Rock River,” says Petty.
“They (Rock River Academy staff) looked at us like animals,” says former Rock River Academy resident Darnella Campbell. Darnella was just 16 years-old when her mother died. Soon after, she was sent to Rock River Academy. The memories of her stay still haunt her years later.
Both girls remember the day they arrived at Rock River Academy, like it was yesterday. Petty says she was beaten and assaulted by other girls with no help from the staff. “All the girls were like attacking me. I’m not talking about like verbally attacking; I’m talking about like attack. Like punch you in your face, kick you. Staff was not helping,” says Petty.
She says fights, and even riots, broke out daily. “I could say 15 to 20 fights each day,” says Petty.
A log of police calls obtained by Eyewitness News appears to back that up. There were over 350 calls about the facility in a four year period; the latest report was within the past two weeks. Several calls were for assaults, and at least eight were for sex offenses like rape, fondling, and sodomy, and not just among the girls. Residents describe facility staff flirting with the girls, and trying to have sex with them. Allegedly, the staff was targeting residents that were known to have mental problems. ”They have sex with the girls inside of Rock River. With the girls that are really mentally slow,” says Petty.
According to the residents, one of the staff members, Ellis Simmons, a convicted child sex offender, once worked at Rock River Academy. “There were plenty of girls that said that he touched them,” says Petty.
Then there were the drugs. A Chicago Tribune investigation found that staff administered psychotropic drugs like Thorazine at dosages which were far higher than doses at similar youth facilities. The girls say they were knocked out for hours at a time from the meds. “They just came in there, picked me up and shot me in the butt with that stuff. I swear I was asleep for four days,” says Petty. But, Campbellsays the medicine did not knock her out. “Some people it put straight to sleep. It did not put me to sleep,” says Campbell.
Many became desperate to find a way to get out of the facility. About a dozen girls from Rock River Academy were allowed to attend Auburn High School. That is where, Petty says, many girls turned to prostitution. Selling sex, and saving the cash for when the day they escaped from Rock River Academy. “I was trying to survive. So, yes I was one of the ones that left and started prostituting,” says Campbell. Petty says these problems have been happening for years. “Please do not send anyone else to Rock River. I wouldn’t even send my dog there,” says Petty.
Rock River Academy says the recent hold placed upon the facility by DCFS put them in a situation where they can no longer operate, which will force them to close by April. DCFS says they are disappointed in what’s happened at Rock River, and are focusing on ensuring the smooth transition and appropriate placement of all the girls currently housed at the academy.”
Horrors Behind These Walls: Stories Of Alleged Physical, Emotional, And Sexual Abuse At Rock River Academy[My Stateline 2/3/15]
REFORM Puzzle Piece
Making a profit off of the most vulnerable is wrong. We need to end privatized CPS systems now!