Can KidsPeace 'withstand' award to boy's mother?
July 25, 2006
Paul Carpenter
Paul Carpenter
Just for the fun of it, suppose you are an institution with enough money to propose a $100 million expansion.
Let's say this expansion is approved by North Whitehall Township officials in 1997. (This is after a boy, Mark Draheim, is put in your care.) Even if you decide not to build the expansion, you have $100 million at your disposal.
That, in a conservative investment portfolio, would give you annual dividends 166 times what Marsha Draheim, Mark's mother, will get to compensate her for her son's asphyxiation. At that rate, you could throttle more than 100 kids a year without denting that $100 million principal.
A weekend news story was not supposition. It told how Lehigh County Senior Judge John P. Lavelle engineered a settlement in a lawsuit against the KidsPeace National Center for Kids in Crisis Inc.
The lawsuit involved the 1998 death of 14-year-old Mark Draheim at the big KidsPeace facility in North Whitehall Township. The suit also said KidsPeace did nothing to stop the sexual abuse Mark suffered while imprisoned there.
The story noted he was the second boy to die there while being restrained by staff members. Jason Tallman, 12, was killed in 1993. That death also resulted in settlement, which avoids exposure in open court.
KidsPeace, the story said, claimed in court documents that it ''was not in a position to pay a substantial judgment,'' and KidsPeace flack Mark Stubis was quoted as saying the Draheim settlement ''was structured in such a way that we can withstand it.''
How much did Lavelle decide KidsPeace can withstand? Marsha Draheim's end of a so-called $1.2 million settlement will come in dribs and drabs, at $30,000 a year. But Lavelle made sure the lawyers got their end — more than 40 percent of the $1.2 million — in a lump sum, hubba-hubba.
(If the lawyers put their share in an investment portfolio, they'll get nearly the same amount each year — but also without touching the principal — that Draheim will receive.)
There were a few items the news story did not mention. For example, both of the boys asphyxiated at KidsPeace were were of small stature when they were terminally ''restrained'' by big staffers. Both were sent to KidsPeace by county authorities against the wishes of their families.
The Draheim lawsuit alleged the boy was repeatedly raped at KidsPeace, and the rapists included at least one adult. Even KidsPeace's own medical records, prior to his death, revealed rectal injuries, but KidsPeace never reported the assaults to authorities.
The Tallman boy was killed by a KidsPeace staffer named Dean Sine, who faced a half-hearted prosecution and was acquitted with the help of testimony by Dr. Isidore Mihalakis, a pathologist who said the death was accidental.
When Sine was acquitted, he and his KidsPeace colleagues cheered in court, and Sine laughed in the face of the boy's father. KidsPeace kept him on the payroll after that.
Later, Sine was sent to prison for repeatedly raping a young boy in Montgomery County. Those assaults were a year before Mihalakis and his ilk testified on Sine's behalf.
I have written extensively about KidsPeace, and not just about the Tallman-Draheim cases. Based on what I have learned in the process, I cannot escape the feeling that this is a monstrous establishment.
I doubt, however, that it will ever be held accountable. It is powerful and it has a cozy relationship with youth authorities who use judges to wrest control of children from parents, forcing the parents to use medical insurance to pay for placements at KidsPeace.
Marsha Draheim will get $30,000 a year, and KidsPeace will continue to rake in untold millions of dollars with the help of that power structure.
paul.carpenter@mcall.com 610-820-6176