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CALEB JENSEN:
Wilderness camp charged in teen’s
death July 15, 2008
By Patrick Healy, staff writer Daily Planet
Telluride, Colo. - More than a year
has passed since Caleb Jensen died in the mountains near Montrose,
in a wilderness camp for troubled kids. Languishing from an
untreated staph infection, the 15-year-old collapsed on his sleeping
bag one day and never got up.
That was May 2007. Yesterday, a
Montrose County grand jury indicted the camp, its corporate parent,
two camp staffers and a Utah doctor on charges stemming from the
boy’s death. They’re charged with manslaughter, criminally negligent
homicide and child abuse and face up to 12 years in prison.
Jensen’s mother, Dawn Woodson, said
she’d been waiting for this news in one form or another ever since
she got a phone call telling her that her son was dead.
“I’m glad to hear of it, and that
these people have been indicted,” she said in a telephone interview.
“But I still have a huge void and nothings ever going to fill it.”
The Utah boy spent the last month
of his life at Alternative Youth Adventures, a now-defunct youth
camp outside Montrose. He was sent there in late March 2007 after
getting into trouble and landing in the Utah Division of Juvenile
Justice Services.
The camp sought to rehabilitate
troubled kids with a menu of long hikes, tough physical exercise,
counseling and education. It was an offshoot of Community Education
Centers, a New Jersey company that runs programs nationwide for
adult prisoners and at-risk kids.
But Jensen’s experience became a
doomed nightmare.
He was prone to staphylococcus
infections and developed one after arriving at the camp,
investigators said. He complained, and other campers complained on
his behalf, but Jensen’s mother said those pleas fell dead to the
ground as her son’s skin went gray, his fever spiked and he started
hallucinating.
Jensen was even isolated for
insisting that he felt sick, his mother said.
“They were saying he was acting out
and lying, and he was being punished the entire time he was sick,”
Woodson said. “He was all by himself the whole time. He was dying
and he was by himself. He couldn’t talk to anyone the whole time he
was sick.”
On May 2, 2007, a month after he
entered the camp, Jensen died.
After the state suspended its
license, Community Education Centers shut down the camp permanently
in July 2007, “without admission of wrongdoing of any sort,”
according to a letter it wrote to the Colorado Attorney General’s
office.
The case went nearly silent until
yesterday’s indictments were announced.
Alternative Youth Adventures and
Community Education Centers were charged with child abuse resulting
in death and criminally negligent homicide, according to the
Montrose County district attorney.
James Omer, the camp’s program
director, and Dr. Keith Hooker, a Utah emergency doctor and
wilderness program expert, were also charged with child abuse and
criminally negligent homicide. Ben Askins, another camp staffer, was
charged with manslaughter and child abuse.
The three men could not be reached
for comment Wednesday. A spokeswoman for the Utah hospital that
employs Hooker said he remains in good standing on the medical
staff, but she said the hospital would investigate the charges.
Community Education Centers issued
this statement: “CEC stands by its position that at all times the
company acted appropriately and that the circumstances that lead to
Caleb Jensen’s death, while tragic, were not reasonably
foreseeable.”
The indictments offered a rare
moment of vindication for child-safety advocates. Isabelle Zehnder,
who runs the Coalition Against Institutionalized Child Abuse, said
that institutions and employees rarely face criminal charges after
children die or suffer abuse in custody.
The public agencies and private
companies that provide care for troubled kids are often the last
resort for parents, social services and judges. Their methods are
often meant to be tough, and when things go wrong, agencies say they
were simply acting in the name of treatment, Zehnder said.
“You don’t know how many cases we
have where everybody walks,” she said. “And then to have this — it’s
amazing.”
Jensen’s mother welcomed the
indictments, but said the pain of her son’s death couldn’t be calmed
by the justice system. Months pass, things get better, but then
she’ll chance upon a children’s book Caleb once loved, and confront
a wall of memories and hurt.
“I still battle,” she said. “I
don’t know how to tell myself, ‘You just have to understand that
you’re not going to have Caleb back.’ I want him back so much, it
hurts. It’s not easier or better. Somehow we find a way to get
through every day.”
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