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WANT YOUR KID TO
DISAPPEAR?
By Nadya Labi
Legal Affairs, July
2004
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For $1,800, former
Atlanta police officer Rick Strawn will make that problem child
someone else's problem. He even makes house calls.
Louis Boussard has
hired a professional to abduct his son.
Flicking on the
lights to look for Boussard's number, Strawn dialed his cellphone.
"Um, Louis. Hi. Does your house have a circle driveway with a Jag in
it?" he said. "If you're ready, we'll come on in. Is he asleep?" The
connection broke up. Moments later, Strawn's phone rang. "Much
better, yes. No, don't wake him up. We're going to talk to you for
about an hour," he said. "I'm going to help you through all that.
Okay. Bye-bye."
We drove back to
the house at a crawl and got out of the car, easing the doors shut.
Both men wore khaki pants and dark blue shirts embossed with a globe
logo and the website address of Strawn's company. Strawn walked up
the stone pathway, peered in the window of the front door, and
lightly rapped. No one answered. "Maybe he said go around the back,"
Strawn said. "Wait here for a second." He began to walk toward the
back of the house when a light came on inside.
A Haitian-American
man in his late 40s opened the front door and beckoned us inside.
Boussard (his name and the names of his wife and son have been
changed) guided us to a dining-room table covered by a white
tablecloth. It held a white vase filled with artificial pink flowers
and two fat red candles in wrought iron stands. The matching white
cushions of the dining-room chairs were covered in plastic. Boussard
sat at the head of the table, flanked by his wife, Sandra. In spite
of the late hour, they were impeccably dressed—he wore a beige linen
suit and she wore a scoop-necked sweater set off by a gold necklace
and bracelets. The couple's formality, however, soon gave way to the
urgency of the task at hand. Two rooms away on the other side of the
kitchen, their 16-year-old son, Louis, Jr., lay asleep in his
bedroom.
The Boussards had
hired Strawn Support Services to transport Louis, Jr. to Casa by the
Sea, a school near Ensenada, Mexico that seeks to "modify" the
behavior of troublemaking teens. Casa takes kids who parents have
decided are out of control, usually because the teens are talking
back, getting poor grades, staying out late, drinking, having sex
too soon, or taking drugs.
Louis, Jr.'s
parents had not told him that he was going to Mexico—nor how he
would be taken there. They thought he would run if he knew what was
about to happen. Now they kept glancing in the direction of the
kitchen. "Louis is very suspicious," Sandra whispered about her son
as her husband began a hurried account of the teen's misbehavior.
The troubles had
begun a year earlier when Louis, Jr. was in 10th grade. His grades
fell from A's and B's to C's and below. He stopped playing
basketball with his father. He started talking back when his mother
wouldn't let him go out to clubs with his friends. He broke his
curfew, which was 7:30 p.m. during the week and 9 p.m. on the
weekends. Often he left the house by his bedroom window. The
Boussards thought Louis, Jr. might be smoking pot. Then all of a
sudden, his report cards improved dramatically. "I thought,
something is not right," said Boussard, squinting at the memory. He
discovered a bad report card in his son's backpack, and Louis
admitted that he had faked the good ones.
The Boussards
enrolled their son in counseling; the counselor said he was doing
fine. They sent him to boot camp for a day, where he got
anger-management and drug counseling. He behaved better for about a
week. At around the same time, Louis was told that he had to repeat
10th grade. His parents transferred him to a vocational program in
carpentry at his high school with the hope that he would find the
schoolwork easier. Louis hated it.
Strawn listened to
this litany of frustrations, nodding sympathetically. Then, he took
a breath and started the spiel that he has honed over the course of
six years and some 300 transports. "Behavior is as addictive as any
drug or alcohol," he told the Boussards. Like all troubled kids,
Louis, Jr. needed to recover from his bad behavior. "The way I look
at it," Strawn continued, "any good recovery has three components:
breaking down old habits, building a strong foundation, and building
new habits." But Boussard père was not paying attention. He was
still steamed about the fake report cards. "I said 'Something is not
right,' " he repeated.
There was a slight
noise, and he and his wife jumped.
"Do we need to have
Josh go outside?" Strawn asked, referring to his assistant.
"He's very
suspicious," Sandra whispered, glancing over her shoulder toward her
son's room.
Strawn went outside
to make sure that Louis had not climbed out of his bedroom window.
The teen seemed to be asleep, but Strawn left Dalton outside to
stand guard. On the air conditioner outside the window was a bottle
of cologne, which Strawn guessed Louis used to freshen up before his
nights out.
Strawn squeaked
back into his chair and rushed through his usual script. Now was not
the moment to dwell on his own recovery from alcoholism, or to lead
the prayer circle that he often suggests before a trip. He ran
through what his clients should expect when he entered Louis's room.
Strawn advised them to introduce him to Louis, to give their son a
hug if Louis let them, and then to walk away. "The hardest thing I
ask a parent to do is to turn around and walk out," he said. "Don't
come back, no matter what you see or hear."
The mother and
father nodded, shifting in their seats. Boussard got a black
overnight bag from a closet and handed it to Strawn, along with a
check for $1,800. In return, Strawn asked him to sign a notarized
power-of-attorney that authorized his company to take "any act or
action" on the parents' behalf during the transport to Casa. The
document also promised that the couple would not sue for any
injuries caused by "reasonable restraint." Strawn warned them that
he would take Louis away in handcuffs. The father signed the
release, then seemed to have a moment of buyer's remorse. He said
he'd been obsessively reading the catalogue for Casa. "All of a
sudden, the intensity just takes off," Boussard said about sending
his son away. "We feel like we failed."
"Let me help you
out there," Strawn reassured him. "I go to families all the time
with four or five siblings. Only one of them decided to take this
path. If it had anything to do with your parenting skills . . . "
His voice trailed off. "It isn't because of that."
"We don't want to
see him go to prison or jail," said Boussard, rubbing his hands over
his face again and again. "Will he understand what we're trying to
do for him?"
Boussard got up
from the table with a sigh. The rest of us followed close behind. He
walked into the kitchen and took a dinner knife out of a drawer,
explaining that he would use it to pry open his son's locked door.
Sliding the knife into the crack between the door and the wall, he
prepared to enter.
RICK STRAWN IS AN
EX-COP WHO STARTED HIS COMPANY in 1988 to help police officers find
off-duty work guarding construction sites. Ten years later, he was
asked by a member of his United Methodist church to transport the
churchgoer's son to Tranquility Bay in Jamaica. The school is run by
the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs, a company
headquartered in Utah that owns eight schools in the United States
and abroad, including Louis, Jr.'s destination.
Strawn said no to
that first inquiry because he knew the boy involved. But he had
stumbled upon what he now believes is his calling. In his first year
of business, he escorted eight teens to behavior modification
schools. Since then, his company has transported more than 700 kids
between the ages of 8 and 17. Strawn has gone on about half of the
trips himself; on the others he has sent agents. Either way, the
company generally uses two escorts for the part of a trip that's on
the road. Girls are escorted by coed teams; in the early years,
Strawn relied on his wife, mother, or older daughter to help him on
these trips. Now his wife, Susan, runs the company's office from the
family home in the Atlanta suburb of Suwanee. After every trip, she
sends the client a card with the message: "Just a note to say thank
you for allowing us to assist your family."
Balding and
slightly soft in the gut, Strawn is a reassuring 52-year-old. He
speaks with a light drawl—he was born in Lubbock, Tex.—and he seems
to mean it when he drops endearments like "hon." Strawn's easy
manner has won over many parents and school administrators. "He's
one of the few escorts who takes the time and effort to talk to the
kids," said Karina Zurita, the admissions coordinator at Casa. "He
lets kids know that they'll be in good hands."
But if Strawn is
decent and likable, he will also go to almost any length to get his
charges to do what their parents want. He has chased kids down. He
has dragged teens to the car in their underwear. He has used a choke
hold, learned as a cop, to render a few others unconscious. He has
taken suicidal kids from hospital treatment to reform school.
Most of Strawn's
clients are genuinely concerned about their children's welfare. They
believe their children are at risk and want to save them. But these
parents also revel in forcing their kids to sit up, pay attention,
and do what they're told. Glenda Spaulding, who took out four loans
to send her 14-year-old daughter to a WWASP school in South Carolina
last November, had three words for Strawn before he took the girl
away: "Go get her."
Strawn's
willingness to use force differentiates him from other escorts.
While no one tracks the teen transport industry, those in the
business estimate that more than 20 companies nationwide take kids
to behavior modification schools, residential treatment centers, and
boot camps. Some of the bigger companies are more selective than
Strawn about what they'll do. The Center for Safe Youth in Atlanta,
for example, doesn't use restraints to force a child to go anywhere.
And the center won't transport kids to WWASP schools because
educational consultants with whom the company works don't recommend
them. Its owner, John Villines, would like to create a professional
association to oversee the transport industry. The standards he
proposes are rudimentary: no agents with felony convictions or
histories of irresponsible driving or drug and alcohol abuse. But
they set the bar higher than almost any state does.
Instead of
operating by rules, the escort industry runs on trust—the trust that
parents won't put their kids in harm's way. But there is no trust
between parents and kids in the households that Strawn enters. It
has broken down so completely that parents think it's okay, and even
courageous, to send a stranger into their child's bedroom. Strawn
makes his living from that judgment and he is willing to mislead a
child for what he sees as the greater goal of reform.
Once parents put
their kids at Strawn's mercy, for a short time he is in loco
parentis—in the place of the parent—in the fullest sense of the
term. He has the authority to tell a kid what to do and to punish
him for failing to obey. At the same time, he is the only person
left to cling to when a kid is on the threshold of a scary, unknown
world.
Three years ago,
Strawn escorted Valerie Ann Heron, a 17-year-old from Montgomery,
Ala., to Tranquility Bay. The school is the most hardcore in the
WWASP system, the one to which students are sent when they
repeatedly cause trouble at other schools. The trip went smoothly,
according to Heron's mother, Nell Orange, and Strawn played his role
well. "He made her feel comfortable with him. She trusted him. He
talked to her about what to expect, where she was going," Orange
said. "She gave him a hug when she left him."
The day after that
hug, Valerie rushed out of a second-floor classroom and jumped to
her death off a 35-foot-high balcony.
The suicide didn't
faze Strawn. He didn't ask himself whether he should have taken
Valerie to Tranquility Bay and left her there, or whether she needed
more help and tenderness than the tough-love school provides. He
doesn't even acknowledge that she might have been upset or unhinged
enough to kill herself. "We had a really good trip. We were laughing
and cutting it up," Strawn recalled. "Was she suicidal? Till the day
I die, I won't believe that." Without any evidence, Strawn says that
Valerie must have jumped in an effort to run away or in hopes of
hurting herself so that she would be sent home. She landed on her
head instead of her feet, he thinks, because one foot got caught in
the balcony. "My feeling is that the majority of kids who talk about
suicide, they're not suicidal," Strawn said. "What they are is
manipulative."
LOUIS, JR. SAT
STRAIGHT UP IN HIS BED. He was surrounded by three strangers and his
parents. His chest was bare, and white acne medicine stood out
against the dark skin of his forehead. He grabbed his wire-rimmed
glasses from the bedside table and blinked a few times. The
basketball posters of Tracy McGrady and Kobe Bryant were still
there. His childhood teddy bear sat in a low-slung armchair by the
door.
"Do you have some
underwear on?" Louis's father said. "They're here to help us.
They're here to take you to a school."
Louis shook his
head to clear it.
"The only thing we
want you to know is that we love you very much," Boussard continued.
He and his wife stepped forward to hug Louis, but the gesture was
forced and none of them seemed to want the contact.
"Where am I going?
When am I coming home?"
Louis's parents
walked out the door.
Strawn broke the
silence that followed their exit. He launched into what he calls
"the scenario," a three-minute script that he instructs his
employees to memorize and deliver, right down to a required chuckle.
"Personally, I feel like I do it better than anyone else because I
designed it," Strawn had explained earlier. The scenario is the key
to a smooth escort, he believes. It gives teens time to cool off,
weigh their options, and realize that their best course of action is
to follow orders.
"I want you to know
that we are not here to be bad guys and bullies. We are not here to
lecture you, or right-or-wrong you to death," Strawn told Louis. "We
are here to get you safely to the school and we are going to do
that. But we'll absolutely give you as much respect as you allow us
to give you."
Louis stared at him
and drummed his leg against the bed.
"Quite frankly,
cuffs do not embarrass us," Strawn continued. "But if it goes there,
it will be 100 percent your choice." He concluded with the question
that the scenario is designed to set up. "I have an important
question for you. If you walk out of here cuffed, do you understand
that it's 100 percent your choice?"
"Uh-huh," Louis
said. He looked around the room. His mind was working but coming up
empty. He asked if he could grab his clothes. The answer was no.
Instead he was allowed to direct Dalton to hand him a gray t-shirt,
a black-and-gray Fubu jersey, and black mesh gym shorts.
"Am I coming home
today?" Louis was trying not to cry. He blinked rapidly behind the
smudged lenses of his glasses.
"I will not lie to
you," Strawn hedged. "I might not answer your questions . . . "
"So when am I
coming home?"
"I mean no
disrespect, but I learned a long time ago that I don't want to chase
you," Strawn plowed on, ignoring Louis's question. He explained that
he would handcuff Louis to Dalton. "And son, if you can drag this
ugly sucker far and fast enough to get away, well, God bless you,
you weren't meant to go." Strawn gave the scripted chuckle.
Louis was still
trying to buy time and find a way out. "Can I brush my teeth?" he
asked.
Strawn shook his
head, and cuffed Louis to Dalton. Strawn wrote his script to give
his charges the illusion of control, but he often cuffs the kids,
especially boys, no matter what they say. He hustled Louis to the
car, guiding him into the back seat along with Dalton, to whom he
was still cuffed. Taking the wheel, Strawn explained to his
passenger that he would stop talking—"I consider it disrespectful to
talk to you in the rearview mirror," he said—until he reached the
airport. At the mention of an airport, Louis said, "Oh, God."
When we arrived at
the Tampa airport half an hour later, Strawn took off Louis's
handcuffs. As we walked to catch our connecting flight to Atlanta,
Dalton grabbed the waistband of the boy's shorts, which rode low on
his hips and might have fallen off if Dalton hadn't held fast. The
teen rolled his eyes and cracked a piece of gum that Dalton had
given him. He was auditioning for the part of bad boy, but the role
didn't fit. He was too quick to say "Thank you" and too eager to
talk. He had spent the past year bottling those impulses around his
parents and chafing at the limits they had set for him. His
abduction struck him as the latest outrage. "I don't listen to them,
I don't like what they say," he said. "I don't listen to the curfew.
I'm not doing that. It's too early."
When his parents
bore down, Louis pushed back. He hung out with a crowd they didn't
like and he drank and smoked pot. "I came home high once. My father
said, 'I know you're high,' " Louis remembered. "Then I went to a
one-day boot camp last August. You exercise and they talk to you. I
came home high again and he sent me to this juvenile rehab thing
that lasted two and a half days. It was pointless."
THERE COMES A POINT
IN JUST ABOUT EVERY ONE OF STRAWN'S TRANSPORTS, whether he's
soothing a nervous parent or bonding with an upset teen, when he
will mention his six-month stint in 1997 at a halfway house for
alcoholics. "Seven years ago, I entered recovery. My drug of choice
was alcohol. You know far more about where you're going than I knew
about myself," he told the 14-year-old girl he escorted last
November to a WWASP school in South Carolina. "In my mind, I was
kicking and screaming. But the loveliest day of my life was when my
wife and mom dropped me off at that halfway house. I can tell you
now that it's the best thing that ever happened to me."
That's Strawn's
version of the story, which starts a generation earlier. Strawn
joined the Atlanta police force in 1973. He'd previously been in
sales, but he knew that being a cop would suit him better. "In
sales, the customer is always right," he explained. "But as a cop,
I'm always right." Strawn relished that authority. "It seems at
times he has to have the last word," one of his supervisors noted in
an evaluation early in his police career. That's a good thing in a
cop, and the reviews Strawn received during this period were
uniformly favorable.
Strawn worked many
different beats, including patrol, drug enforcement, and homicide.
He earned the respect of his colleagues for calming down
troublemakers. "They have to think that you might be the toughest
guy," he said of the suspects he arrested. "I was able to talk
people into doing what we wanted them to do."
Strawn was losing
control of his own life, however. He was drinking heavily and in
1992 he was briefly suspended for disappearing from work without
explanation. Strawn said that he stayed sober on the job, but the
smell of alcohol seeped from his pores. His colleagues complained.
Internal Affairs investigated. Strawn tested clean.
Four years earlier,
Strawn had married Susan Kyzer, a single mother with a young
daughter. Strawn didn't get along with the girl. She had
attention-deficit disorder and the Ritalin she took wore off by the
time she got home from school. "Her behavior was like a needle point
with Rick," Susan said. "He was of the view that kids should be seen
but not heard, and this kid was always heard."
In 1996, the
stepdaughter told a counselor that Strawn had molested her two years
earlier, when she was 12. She'd just gotten home from a school
football game, and she was still wearing her green-and-white
cheerleader's outfit. She fell asleep on the living-room floor while
watching TV with her stepfather. She said that she woke to the feel
of something hard against her vagina and ran out of the room. Strawn
was arrested for molestation. During the police investigation, he
claimed that he'd fallen asleep after drinking, and in his dreams
had confused his stepdaughter with his wife. But Susan told the
investigators that just after the incident, Strawn had told her that
"'it was just a weak moment.' . . . He got turned on by her laying
there with a short skirt on and all, and lay down beside her and
unzipped his pants against her." Strawn grew depressed and began
taking medication. He also admitted to detectives that a year
earlier he had fondled the breasts of his niece on two separate
occasions, when she was 12 or 13.
The Atlanta police
department suspended him for several months. But Strawn's
stepdaughter recanted her accusation, leaving prosecutors little
choice but to drop the molestation charge. Strawn was taken out of
the field, however, and assigned to do desk work. He was no longer
the go-to officer. "I was being tolerated," he said. "And for
someone with my personality, being tolerated is enough to make you
want to get drunk."
One night in
January 1997, Strawn went home drunk. After arguing with Susan, he
said he was going to shoot himself and he got his .38 revolver out
of the garage. "I've had all I can take," he told Susan, his
stepdaughter, and the couple's 8-year-old son, Jared. But his threat
was, to use his word, manipulation. He fired into the air and left.
When he returned home later that evening, he passed out.
The next day, Susan
confronted Strawn about his alcoholism, as she had many times in the
past. His stepdaughter chimed in that she had snapped a picture of
Strawn in his stupor the previous night so that he could see what
he'd looked like drunk. Strawn wanted to destroy the roll of film
but Susan and her daughter wouldn't let him, because it included a
photo of the family cat, which had since died. A struggle ensued,
and Strawn kicked the girl in the groin. He then grabbed his wife by
the throat, choking her while his stepdaughter called 911.
Strawn left the
house and drove to a nearby park, where he continued drinking. Susan
and her daughter found him there. Susan tried to calm her husband
down. Her daughter called the police. Strawn was arrested and
charged with family violence, reckless conduct, and four counts of
simple battery—misdemeanor charges that in Georgia together carry a
maximum sentence of six years. Less than a month later, he was
arrested again when he was found drunk and nearly passed out in his
car. He avoided jail by pleading guilty to reckless conduct and a
DUI charge.
Strawn likes to say
that his wife made him go to the Hickey House Recovery Community.
But a judge sent him there, as a condition of his probation. He
spent six months at the halfway house while his family stayed away.
Strawn hadn't prayed for some time, but he started going to a small
church nearby. The defensive stance that he'd adopted slipped away.
"Things started loosening up," Strawn said. He felt closer to God.
When he got home, Strawn set to work on mending his family. While he
was drinking, Susan had considered leaving him. Jared had withdrawn
into video games. Now Strawn reached out to them, and they
responded. Jared gave his father a cloth bracelet stenciled with the
letters WWJD, for "What Would Jesus Do?" Strawn never takes it off.
The Atlanta police
department was not as forgiving. In May 1998, it determined that
Strawn had "brought discredit" on himself as a police officer, on 11
different counts. His superiors decided to fire him. Strawn opted to
retire instead. He left the day before he was due to lose his job
after 25 years on the force.
Strawn doesn't try
to reconcile his past and his present, perhaps because he is afraid
to find that traces of his old self remain. It is safer for him to
credit God as the way he "got from there to here." The story of
redemption that Strawn spins persuades parents who don't know where
to turn that they can rely on him. Strawn was lost, just like the
kids he escorts, and it is both his reward and his punishment to
tell how he was found. "Working with these kids is like working a
12-step," he said before a recent transport. "Behavior is as
addictive as any drugs or alcohol. I plant the seed of recovery."
But Strawn knows
that if he is to be trusted to plant that seed, there is no room in
his history for criminal lapses of judgment. I spent hours talking
to Strawn, and he never mentioned the accusations involving his
stepdaughter and niece. Instead he told me about a 15-year-old girl
who was apparently discredited when she insinuated that he'd
molested her during a 26-hour drive from Indianapolis to a WWASP
school in Montana. Strawn said that an assistant was with him and
the girl for the entire transport, and that the assistant backed
Strawn up when he said he'd done nothing wrong. The school believed
them. "That was God watching over me," Strawn said. Otherwise, he
continued, "I would not be working in this profession. The cloud of
suspicion would have been there." As for his stepdaughter, when I
asked Strawn about her accusation, he said that she'd made up the
charge to get him help for his alcoholism. She is now 21 and, along
with Strawn's niece, works as an escort for Strawn Support Services.
But she will not team up with her stepfather.
"WE'VE GOT
SOMETHING DIFFERENT HERE," Strawn told the ticketing agent at the
checkout counter of Delta Airlines. "We've got someone here we're
escorting—not a prisoner, but he doesn't want to go with us." Louis
sat with Dalton off to the side, rummaging through the overnight bag
that his parents had packed for him. The agent didn't pause. "That's
fine," he said with a smile.
Strawn won't board
a plane with a kid who puts up too much of a fight—that's why he
ended up on that 26-hour drive. But when escorts do fly with
protesting kids, airport officials rarely ask questions. Amanda
Krassin was taken by plane from Washington to Oregon when she was
16. The escorts, who were from the California company Guiding Hands,
asked that she be detained in an airport security area and
handcuffed her on the plane. "Everyone ignored me at the airport,"
Krassin recalled. "I think they just thought I was a prisoner."
On the way to the
gate for our flight to Atlanta, Strawn skipped a long line by
flashing an auxiliary Coast Guard badge. (He's a member of the
group's volunteer squad.) Dalton took Louis to the bathroom. The
assistant, who is 25, is fairly new to the job. But Strawn likes to
show off Dalton to clients because he attended a WWASP school in
Western Samoa called Paradise Cove. The school shut down in 1998
after a State Department investigation into what it determined to be
"credible allegations" of abuse, but Strawn doesn't mention that.
"I'm going to make
two suggestions," he told Louis when the teen emerged from the
bathroom. "First, try to have an open mind. I know it's hard to have
an open mind when two ugly guys come and take you from your bedroom
at night to a school that you don't want to be at. Second, you've
got to be gut-level honest with yourself. The bad part of that is
it's a 100 percent inside job."
The world according
to Strawn is based on choices and consequences. The world according
to WWASP is designed to reinforce the same principle. Students enter
Casa by the Sea at the first of six levels. To advance, they have to
earn points through good behavior and schoolwork. Until they reach
level three, which takes an average of three months, they can
communicate with the outside world only through letters to their
parents, which the school monitors. After that, they can talk on the
phone to their parents but no one else.
Casa costs nearly
$30,000 for a year—as much as a year's tuition at Harvard—but offers
no traditional academic instruction. Instead the schoolwork is
self-paced; the students sit at tables with a workbook and take a
test on a section when they decide they're ready. They can retake
the same test as many times as necessary to achieve an 80 percent
passing grade. According to the Casa parent handbook, the school
does not ensure that "the student will even receive any credits" or
that the teachers who monitor the study sessions will have U.S.
credentials. The school does not track how many of its students go
on to high school or college. "You're not going to have a teacher
riding your back," Dalton told Louis. "It's all independent study. I
just read the module, and did the test. I finished class in a week.
That's how easy it is."
Students spend more
time studying themselves than any other subject. They write daily
reflections in response to self-help tapes and videos such as Tony
Robbins's Personal Power, You Can Choose, and Price Tag of Sex. They
answer questions like "What feelings/emotions did I experience today
and how did I choose to respond?"
Students also
attend, and eventually staff, self-help seminars. The entry-level
seminar, called Discovery, encourages participants to "learn to
interrupt unconscious mental and emotional cycles which tend to
sabotage results." Kelly Lauritsen participated in Discovery at Casa
in 2000 and said she was encouraged to hit the walls with rolled
towels to release her anger. The price of tuition includes versions
of these seminars for parents. Like Oprah on speed, sessions run
nonstop from morning until midnight. Many parents and kids say they
benefit from the self-analysis. "I didn't realize that I had so much
anger inside," the 14-year-old girl whom Strawn transported in
November wrote to her mother.
WWASP also pays for
Strawn and his employees to attend the seminars, and Strawn has done
Discovery. He enrolled in the seminar so that he could better sell
parents on hiring him, but its talk-until-you're-cured approach
forced him to confront buried wounds, such as his father's death a
decade earlier. "God had a reason to put me there and it had nothing
to do with the business," he said of the experience.
Strawn told Louis
that the hardest thing about Casa would be abiding by the school's
intricate system of discipline. "It's not the big rules that get
you. It's all the little rules," Strawn said. Casa docks students,
according to its handbook, for telling "war stories" about
inappropriate experiences, for being unkind to each other, and for
making "negative statements about the School, the staff, the
country, or other students."
"There's a whole
page of rules," said Shannon Eierman, who attended Casa last year.
"That page is divided into sections of categories, into different
codes, and a million subcategories. You could be there forever and
the next day and learn a new rule."
Students at Casa
who commit "Category 5 infractions" can be punished with an
"intervention," for example, which is defined as being left alone in
a room. Students say that the punishment can last for weeks, though
Casa insists that the maximum penalty is three days. "I had to sit
with crossed legs in a closet for three days," said Kaori Gutierrez,
who left Casa in 2001. Interventions may be used to punish
out-of-control behavior, drug use, and escape attempts. But they're
also the way the school handles "self-inflicted injuries," which can
range from cracked knuckles to self-mutilation with pens or paper
clips to an attempted suicide.
At the root of this
long list of punishable violations is "manipulation," which includes
lying or exaggerating. Strawn repeatedly uses the word to dismiss a
kid's behavior—it's the way he said Valerie Heron acted the day
before her suicide. In the WWASP universe that he inhabits,
manipulation is a term of art that refers to just about anything a
teen does or says that the staff doesn't like.
Still, the schools'
intensive monitoring has helped some students turn their lives
around. Richard King of Atlanta believes that going to Tranquility
Bay in 1997, when he was 17, taught him to be accountable for his
actions. The experience saved him from ending up "either dead or in
jail," he said. Before he went to the school, King drank, smoked
pot, and battled with his parents. When he returned, he could sit
down and talk to them.
CALIFORNIA IS THE
ONLY STATE WITH A SEMBLANCE OF OVERSIGHT FOR ESCORTS. In response to
news accounts in 1997 of a teenage boy from Oakland, Calif., who was
transported against his will to Tranquility Bay, the state's
legislature developed a bill to protect kids like him. The
legislation would have barred escorts from using restraints that
interfere with a child's "ability to see, hear, or move freely." By
the time it passed, however, the bill had been amended into a
toothless licensing scheme.
Nor are there
federal controls. In 1923, the Supreme Court announced that parents
have a "right of control" that allows them to direct their
children's upbringing and education. The court has not budged from
this stance since, and, for obvious reasons, it is not listening to
the voices of kids who rebel against their parents' dictates. Few
people want children—or, for that matter, anyone else—to have veto
power over the decisions that parents make. Even the states that
permit teenagers to be emancipated from their parents, allowing them
to be treated legally as adults, ordinarily mandate that the parents
must agree.
As many a
frustrated teen knows, the legal framework means that parents get to
call the shots. While teenagers can't be jailed by the state without
a judge's approval, parents can confine minors against their will
for reasons including their mental health. (It's harder to take away
the freedom of mentally ill adults.) The Constitution has been
interpreted to allow teens effectively to be imprisoned by private
companies like Strawn's and private schools like Casa by the Sea—as
long as their parents sign off. "If these were state schools or
state police, the children would have constitutional protections,"
said Barbara Bennett Woodhouse, the director of the Center on
Children & the Law at the University of Florida. "But because it is
parents who are delegating their own authority, it has been very
difficult to open the door to protection of the child."
It's even more
difficult to open that door once kids have been taken to foreign
schools like Casa by the Sea that lie beyond the reach of U.S.
courts. "The problem is that when Americans are in another country,
they are subject to the laws of that country," said Stewart Patt, a
spokesman for the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the State
Department. "Whether it's a violation of American law is not going
to matter to local authorities."
There is one limit
on parents: They cannot harm their children. Every state allows the
government to intervene if a child or teenager is at risk. The
agencies charged with protecting kids get involved if someone
reports that a child is being abused. Yet by the time friends and
relatives learn of a teen's disappearance and think to make a
report, the escort is gone. What matters is getting the kid back
from the school that's holding him. It's a nearly impossible task.
A few determined
do-gooders have managed it, however. In 1998, 17-year-old Justin
Goen was able to call his girlfriend before being taken by escorts
to Tranquility Bay. The girlfriend's parents then called the child
welfare agency in Justin's hometown of Worthington, Ohio. That set a
local judge named Yvette Brown in motion. She heard evidence in
juvenile court about spartan conditions, sleep deprivation, and
emotional abuse at the school—and ordered Justin home.
The Goens ignored
Brown's order, though, and the community cheered them on. "I hope
parents are horrified that a public agency can be so intrusive into
family life," one reader wrote in a letter to The Columbus Dispatch.
After weeks of negotiations, the parents agreed to transfer their
son to a WWASP school in Utah. Justin did not thank the state for
its troubles. He insisted that his most severe punishment at
Tranquility Bay was being told to write two 1,000-word essays.
Jonathan Tyler
Mitchell was also sprung from Tranquility Bay. Tyler (he goes by his
middle name) had lost his mother when he was young and had never
gotten along with his father, Bill Mitchell. In February 2002,
Mitchell married his girlfriend of eight months and Tyler moved in
with his brother. Mitchell soon asked Tyler to come over for dinner.
When the 12-year-old arrived, there were two strangers at the table.
They worked for Strawn. Later, they roused Tyler from bed and took
him to Jamaica.
What had Tyler done
to deserve this wake-up call? According to his father, he had been
disrespectful in class, kicked a school locker, talked about
suicide, and refused to go to counseling. Tyler's account was
different. "I suffer a lot of beatings from my dad," he told a
psychologist who evaluated him. "The future is not looking good for
me."
Tyler had several
relatives, however, who were not willing to leave the boy's future
in his father's hands. Gini Farmer Remines, an adult cousin on his
mother's side, petitioned a local juvenile court to order his
return. When the judge refused, Remines appealed her decision to a
circuit court.
At a hearing that
followed, three former Tranquility Bay students testified on Tyler's
behalf, and what they described was a Caribbean purgatory. The food,
they claimed, sometimes contained pubic hair and bugs. Raw sewage
spilled over into the boys' shower area and "visible layers of dirt,
grime, filth, mildew on the sides of the shower stalls" led to
outbreaks of scabies. Students who broke a rule against looking out
the window were placed in "observation placement"—forced to lie on
the floor, sometimes for weeks at a time, and allowed to sit up only
for food or a punitive round of 5,000 jumping jacks.
One of the
witnesses, Aaron Kravig, reported that he was at Tranquility Bay in
August 2001, the month Valerie Heron died, and that he'd been forced
to use a towel that had been used to clean up her remains. The
unwashed towel "had a spot of blood about, somewhere about the size
of a dinner plate," Kravig testified. "There was some of her hair on
it. They used it to pick her head up; I'm pretty sure. I told the
staff about it and nothing was done. . . . I had to dry off with
that towel for about three weeks."
Mitchell visited
the school with his wife after he sent Tyler there and testified
that he'd seen kids playing tennis and shooting hoops. But the judge
ordered Tyler home. Shortly after his return, the boys' relatives
heard that Mitchell had threatened to send Tyler back. Seven of them
filed for custody. Gini Remines said that Mitchell gave up and
turned Tyler over to her. "Tyler doesn't talk about what happened at
Tranquility Bay," Remines said recently. "All he'll say was that it
was a hellhole and he might have died in it."
"THE SCHOOL IS IN
MEXICO?" Louis said when he noticed the highway signs on our drive
south from San Diego. "I thought it was in California."
"I said we were
coming to California, not that the school was there," Strawn said.
"I was spoon-feeding you until we got here."
Louis fell silent.
Ten minutes later,
Strawn drove past a sign that looked like a middle-school art
project, with "Mexico" written in green, red, and white. It was now
nearly noon. A Mexican flag flapped over a ramshackle collection of
buildings, and a film of dust and grit seemed to cloud the bright
blue day. Like a tour guide on autopilot, Strawn kept up a running
commentary about the sights while his passenger stewed in the back
seat. "That's a serious fence," Strawn said, pointing to a
14-foot-high barrier of sheet metal topped with electrical wires
which marked the border. "The school is just north of a town called
Ensenada. That's your primary cruise destination."
On the dashboard of
the Buick LeSabre he had rented for this leg of the journey, Strawn
had installed a portable GPS system that Susan had given him for
Christmas. But it wasn't working. About a mile past the Mexican
border, Strawn missed the Scenic Road exit to Ensenada and drove
through Tijuana instead. We passed palm trees and squat bushes with
fire-red flowers. Strawn braked at a stop sign that read "Alto,"
muttering to himself as he tried to find his way back to the
highway.
We were back on
course and heading through a purple and yellow tollbooth by the time
Louis spoke.
"What's the name of
the school I'm going to?" he asked as the ocean crashed against the
shore near the passenger side of the car.
"Casa. Casa by the
Sea," Strawn answered, and hummed the lyrics "down by the sea," from
the song "Under the Boardwalk."
"Mi casa es su
casa," Dalton ad-libbed. Strawn told Louis that the Casa grounds
used to house a resort. "The nice thing about resorts," he mused,
"they usually have walls around them. They keep you from getting
involved with the nuts around here, and keep them from you."
A huge
half-finished bust of Jesus loomed on a mountain outside the car.
Dalton began reminiscing about his time at Paradise Cove. He
mentioned that he used to hunt for octopus in the ocean. Strawn
pointed to the beach and said that students at Casa hung out there.
Louis asked why it was empty.
Strawn answered by
changing the subject. "You ought to get there about lunchtime," he
said with determined cheer. "And I can tell you, those chubby
Mexican women can do a number on some Mexican food."
When a trip is
winding down and a kid has been scared into compliance, there is a
moment when Strawn likes to wax philosophical. He cribs liberally
from Stephen Covey, the author of the bestselling business guide
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He begins with a question:
"Have you heard of counting from one to ten if you're mad? Did that
ever make sense to you?" Whatever the teen's answer, Strawn says
that it didn't make sense to him—until he came across Covey's idea
that there is a "space" between stimulus and reaction. To Strawn,
that space is the difference between lashing out and maintaining
control. "I've learned to spend time in that space when I get mad,"
Strawn told Louis. "And in the last seven years, I haven't slapped
one person upside the head."
The talk works best
when Strawn has something tangible to move to—like the letters that
parents often give him for their children. The kids used to tear up
the letters. But they haven't since Strawn started telling them to
spend more time in Covey's "space" before doing anything rash.
The Boussards
hadn't written their son a letter, so Strawn did his best on his own
to bring Louis around to their way of seeing things. He told the boy
not to be angry with his folks. "It's absolutely a sign of love for
them to take the chance on what they believe will be the best for
you," said Strawn. "When you grow up and have your own family—you
have to excuse me—I hope you have the balls to do what your parents
are doing for you."
The off-white
stucco walls and red shutters of Casa came into view, and a Mexican
guard opened a red iron gate. A line of teenagers wearing khaki
pants and navy blue jackets walked across the courtyard in single
file. A few girls carried baskets full of laundry. The smell of
fried chicken wafted through the air. A man in a white turtleneck
pointed to Louis and said to Strawn, "This is the kid?" The man
directed Louis to grab his bag.
Strawn handed a
woman Louis's paperwork—his birth certificate, passport, and the
contract with Casa that his parents had signed. When Louis turned
and walked away with the man in the white turtleneck, Strawn didn't
say goodbye. Then I asked if it was time for us to go and he rushed
to catch up with the boy and gave him a hug. Louis looked taken
aback by the embrace and there was a moment of awkwardness. Then he
hugged back, hard. Strawn collects those hugs. They help him believe
that he is saving, not savaging, the kids he steals away with in the
night.
When we were back
in the car, Strawn put on his sunglasses and lit a cigar, as he
likes to do at the end of a trip. He leaned forward in anticipation
of the next stops along his journey—a Cuban cigar shop in Tijuana
and then a Mexican restaurant in San Diego. He blew out a ring of
smoke, and it was as if Louis had never been with us.
Nadya Labi is a
senior editor at Legal Affairs.
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