It took too long for the authorities in Mexico to close Casa by the Sea down. Many teenagers got their future derailed. Instead of partying and celebrate life before it became a life filled with commitments like we adults live every single day, they got locked up.
Short to say they also were put through a system which left most of them with a need to fight post-traumatic stress disorder for the rest of their lives. Many lost the college fund, family had set up for them, leaving them with a future working in unskilled jobs for low pay because the people running the schools did not care much about the teenagers. They just wanted the money.
Casa by the Sea is a product of the 1980’s and 1990’s, the world would have been better of with if it had never existed. The war against drugs were a failure. Instead of focusing on where it was produced which could have been dealt with by invading countries where the narcotics were produced and regulating the medical industry very tight so doctors do not over-medicate their patients just because they are sponsored to it by the firms who produce the medication, they attacked those who were caught in substance abuse.
Substance abuse is an illness. Illness you treat professional and with care for the patients. At Casa by the Sea there was no care, no love for the patients. They were punished even more severe than street muggers.
Lives were destroyed at Casa by the Sea. No question about that. But does that mean that the spirits of those who died after their stay have returned to the buildings?
It is not the first time a former student from Paradise Cove has been involved in a murder. This time two elderly people died when the former student killed them. They were both grandparents to the former student. The former student was sentenced to 100 years.
Some of the comments in the article spoke of the death sentence and how costly it would be if he lived to serve 100 years. It is clear these posters don’t know the cost of the legal system with its tons of appeals nor the emotional toll it must take for the relatives of the victims to read about the appeals in the newspapers.
This family made a terrible mistake decades before. Instead of trusting the public system with its juvenile halls which can house 1 out of 10 students nationwide and give them street credit, they sent the grandson to Samoa to a residential treatment center which since its closure is known to have been among the most cruelest facilities in the world.
Untrained employees hired for their ability to fight, use of isolation boxes like it was a Japanese prison camp is just one of the many things this camp was known for. It is not hard to understand that there is an increased risk of boosting a mental illness which could have been discovered and treated in civilized setting. Instead the mental illness got time to settle inside the mind of some of the students making them a “time bomb”.
Could it be that this former student spent years to find out who paid for his ordeal and then decided to kill? Or did the treatment itself lay a mental basis for the former student suddenly to snap one day with terrible result?
We don’t know for now.
What we do know it that Paradise Cove was shut down when it was investigated.
What we also know is that former students of Paradise Cove has been convicted of murders or ordering them.
What we do know that there are still open schools out there who were owned by WWASP or used their curriculum.
Before you decide to use a residential treatment program then you should consider that they remain able to communicate to the world. Otherwise you or your family might suffer the consequences decades later.
It is with extreme sadness that I have learned that a young woman in Florida is no more.
Her entire life has been a struggle. If life was supposed to be fair her story should have had a happy ending but real life doesn’t promise a Hollywood ending. Her only comfort was that she near her end was surrounded by people who loved her.
Child tied down inside the High Impact boot camp in Tecate, Mexico
Born into this life with a brain injury she faced challenged from the very start. Advised by so-called professionals who claimed to have found perfect residential programs which could improve her life, she was sent to Cross Creek programs in La Verkin, Utah. When the amateurs who ran this asylum couldn’t handle her they sent her to High Impact – a program so abusive that the government in Mexico closed it down as soon they found out it existed.
Her story is the story of an approach to treatment which could only exist because there were very poor sources for those who wanted to turn every rock on the treatment program they would send their child to. Conmen knew that. Just to make sure they found isolated small cities where they could be the large employers and let everyone know that a closure of their business could impact the economy of the entire community severely. So despite how abusive the program was and regardless of how involved workers became in the abuse none dared to blow the whistle out of fear that they not only endangered their own job but also the job of their neighbors, friends and family living in the same town.
Cross Creek Programs in La Verkin, Utah. The windows are only for show and cannot be opened.
I doubt that her parents visited Cross Creek wandering freely around the campus speaking to staff and their daughter unmonitored just after she was enrolled in the treatment center. I doubt that they ever visited her in the boot camp in Mexico. If they weren’t allowed to see every place their daughter went to, how could they protect her adopted daughter?
That is the difference between the situation in the late 1990’s and early years after year 2000 and now. Today we have the internet. Every residential program today is held accountable by their former patients the very day the residents can leave the treatment program and testify online. This possibility alone has saved lives. It has closed programs – entire business corporations employing thousands of people have been closed down.
WWASP is gone. CEDU is gone. Aspen Education Group is crippled thanks to brave former patients who spoke about their experiences. Unimaginable destinies detailing abuse on a level were even the show trials in the eastern part of Europe cleansing the political environment of all opposition to communism seemed conducted on a dilettante level compared to the methods used in programs under the WWASP umbrella.
Brainwashing would actually be a nice word for the actions which took place at Cross Creek programs and High Impact. Criminal prosecution has been impossible because people voting for sheriffs and judges still are thankful for the jobs they had before the truth came out. Numerous lawsuits have been killed in courts on state level. If the former patients ever should be given some kind of peace and end only a federal investigation could do the job.
There are many adults living with the same emotional scars as she had to live with because she went to Cross Creek. There are also a lot of adult who are so blessed with a brain which protect them from remembering the most abusive experiences during their stay in these programs. Unfortunately she wasn’t so lucky. She remembered what she was exposed to. The burden combined with psychical issues which tormented her in the proved too much to overcome.
She did not struggle through life without impacting other people. Her testimony could prove to be a savior for teenagers in the next generations belonging to families seeking residential treatment. Now parents know that they have to demand access to their child from the very first day. They know that they have to visit every department the program have and listen to gossip in town. They know that they have to do the same for sub-contractors the treatment program use. They know that they have to be very careful sending their children abroad to countries where treatment programs are allowed to cut corners.
Every program from previous decades has their memorial site where former patients have opted out on life long before it was their time. Straight Inc. – the huge rehab program from the 1980’s and 1990’s have almost endless lists of former patients who have died in their 20s or 30s. The programs WWASP and Aspen Education Group established a decade later has lists of former patients dying young so they will unfortunately soon catch up. The emotional scars have proven too severe to live with and the programs have cleaned both college and retirement funds up so there are no money left for aftercare and treatment of the emotional scars. The result is often death.
Are there still programs around which could endanger future generations of teenagers? Yes. They have found safe haven in states like Missouri and Utah where they hide behind their religious status. Humanitarian organizations are watching them. Sometime they are able to stress a facility to close or move but it is a long and hard struggle. On improved legislation can protect children and the work is in progress. Hopefully we in the future would be able to put a stop to such programs.
For now we can only offer our prayers to her relatives and friends left behind and offer our promises that we will continue our work to wipe out programs function like Cross Creek and High Impact did. May she find peace where she is now.
Now and then I get a newsletter from Domestic Prisoners of Conscience. The latest one speak of a reputation war going on between former students from Cross Creek programs, which was a therapeutic boarding school in Gt. George in Utah.
The question is: Was this boarding school an abusive place? Was High Impact, which was a boot camp in Mexico Cross Creek and other therapeutic boarding schools used as punishment for students they could not control abusive also?
High Impact
(There is a sequence about High Impact 1:05 into the video)
High Impact was not in operation for very long – only a year or two before the government in Mexico decided to close it down. If you google High Impact you will find YouTube videos and photos of teenagers tied on hands and feet lying on the ground in dog cages. While offensive for parents in Europe and most families in the States it was a normal boot camp of its kind as they are found both in the Middle East, Missouri where they can operate due to relaxed laws allowing basically everything going on as long as it is done with a religious purpose. And of course also in Mexico where the central government since the days of Porfirio Diaz has not been in control of anything going on outside the capital.
Is it abusive to tie teenagers down on the ground for hours? Is it abusive to force the teenagers to do number one in the pants while they are running laps as punishment because the point system would punish them for using the toilet more than once per day?
You can find statements about how the camp was operated from people who never went to Cross Creek because the camp also took teenagers in directly from the parents who the parents felt would benefit from a shock treatment.
Personally I believe that the High Impact component was abusive. I know that the management of WWASP who ran the chain of boarding schools and residential treatment centers, Cross Creek belonged to has stated that they had no idea of what took place at High Impact. The problem is that they visited the camp. Unless they were blind they knew what went on back then.
Cross Creek programs
(A former student defending the school)
Then there is the question about Cross Creek. Remember the students were not sent there because they had broken the laws. It was not a court decision. It was a parental decision. There are many parents out there who are angry at the school for the use of false marketing. One of the students who supports the boarding school are right when she states that the parents could have investigated the place before they enrolled their child at the school. She is right. Do never trust anything you read on the Internet about how fine the school is. Do also never trust parents who tell that the school was wonderful for their child because they can earn a free month on the school if they come with a customer.
You have to visit the school yourself. You have to look between the lines. You cannot trust the students if you are allowed to talk with them. They will most likely have been promised an extra home-visit or advancement in the program if they act fine.
What you can do is to refuse periods of isolation when you child start at the school. Demand weekly unmonitored talks and agree on a code-word with your child so you will know when your child is subjected to censoring.
One of the students who speak out for Cross Creek states that addicts and prostitutes need punishment. She cannot be more wrong. To treat a teenage addict or prostitute you have to know what took this teenager on this path. Torture and other kind of pressure don’t work. We know that from the recent report regarding method used on terrorists. Information achieved by the use of torture was of no better quality than information achieved by the use of ordinary police work. If pressure and torture don’t work on terrorists why should work on young addicts.
You have to gain trust to cure an addict. In Denmark we have a very successful program for addicts called U-turn. The teenagers come willingly. Most to get their abuse under control and continue to use, but they realize somewhere in the process that drugs are of such a poor quality that they cannot do that and their lives would be better off if they quit drug-use all together.
(Another former student defending the school)
Some states that Cross Creek and similar schools were the product of Clinton’s 3-strike laws. They could very well be right. No parent want their child to end up in prison serving life and if life and decades of prison are given for other crimes than murder you have a population of parents placed in permanent fear because teenagers are supposed to act out. Otherwise they will be a huge risk of suffering from depression.
Look at Denmark: Young Danes can drink alcohol when they are 16. They can have sex when they are 15. They can watch all the porn they like. Still the youth have become less criminal and teenage pregnancies are rare. The present generation of teenagers is the most law-abetting sober citizens’ maybe ever, but they are also the most depressive generation ever. They focus on high grades and record pace through the education system well-knowing that they might never reach the pension-age which has been sky-rocketing meaning that they will live a life without fun! To realize that you will live a life to service and die only will cause depression.
No society can bear that the next generation will face no future. At some point the teenagers will stop and rebel. Then the society must offer other alternatives than life in prison. Otherwise boarding schools like Cross Creek will occur again even despite the fact that they did their job so poorly that they ran out of customers and closed.
Fact is that Cross Creek closed not because the times changed. Cross Creek closed because they didn’t do a good job. There was nobody who was saved by Cross Creek. The students who did better after a stay just matured just as good as if they had been sent to normal juvenile prison. Cross Creek was a prison disguised as a boarding school.
The so-called emotional growth program was a joke. 60 years of research in Denmark have shown us that the social heritage more than hard effort and good grades decide whether a student ha success or not. In Denmark the students are paid to attend universities. It doesn’t result in a massive number of students with foreign heritage or working class background attends the universities. The students who make it to the universities are students from homes where the parents have academically background; Families who knows the drill and know how to prioritize the time in elementary and high schools.
You cannot instill success in people. Human resource consists basically 5 minutes of talk every year and a beer after work every Friday. People are born to be kings and queens or ordinary working class people. It you push young people into being someone they are not, the result can be disastrous. A massive number of suicides are found among the graduates from Cross Creek and similar programs. The tragedies cover young adults who found it difficult to adapt the life they found inside the boarding school to something useful on the outside.
So you have this school doing all the wrong things making young people believe that they can achieve in life what they reach out for regardless of their social background.
You have this school using force against the students to achieve what they believe is right.
You have this school which failed to subject their sub-contractors like High Impact to any kind of supervision.
Was Cross Creek programs abusive? What is your answer?
A 15 year old girl ran away not far from here. She has been away for 14 days and now both the police and the social services know where she is. She had met a boy on a social network and
They will try to negociate her back to her family.
It was then I came to think of how wise we are here in Denmark. They don’t want to use ressources on getting her back to her family and then wait for her to take off once more.
So there it has to be couseling until they reach an agreement and she WANTS to live back home again.
See there is a explanation of why it is decades since we saw a kid killing her or his parents. There are no reason for creating tragedies like we saw in the cases of Valessa Robinson and Erin Caffey.
I learned of those stories when I finished a not so well written story called Rattlesnake Romeo.
It is the story of a girl who discovers that her mom wants to jail her at a farm called Steppin’Stone for a full year without contacts to her peers or other side of her family. It seems that there was some kind of divorce of her parents and she Valessa had problems with the house rules. What kind of teenagers don’t?
I have looked at the farm and it looks at extreme as our Evangelista or Faderhus. If I was in the shoes of the teen, I would fear for my life, but I would not kill my parents. I would have run away and chosen to live in a shelter instead.
But we have to remember that Valessa was a teenager. She must have learned of the horror stories from other teenagers, who were in Straight Inc. or at WWASP facilities. Some may remember how teenagers were placed in dog cages down at a private Mexican Boot Camp. The Police in Mexico shut several programs down in 2004 and 2005. All of them had problems with medication, VISA’s and punishment rooms.
Erin Caffeys case was different. She was home-schooled and not properly prepared for a social life in such a degree that she was out of touch with reality. In Denmark we know how important it is for kids to socialize. That why our alcohol laws are relaxed.
Now they are using 30 or more years to jail her. By doing that they acknowledge that homeschooling is a failure.
So parents:
1) Let your parents find their partneres of their own.
2) Dont’t monitor them very much once they are confirmed.
3) If their grades are poor, don’t worry. The grade system is ill. A lot of young people graduated High School in Denmark this year, but now they have to take summer classes because of an error in the department of education.
Maybe by following thid advices, you as a parent will stay alive
Banished Teens contains links to all kinds of news about parenting the so-called "Gifts of God" (Teenagers who explore the world too fast for their own good)
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