Deadly Discipline?
Some say unregulated wilderness schools are a threat to troubled teens' lives
Saturday, February 12, 2000
By Gordon Gregory, Correspondent, The Oregonian
BEND -- Utah officials who cracked down on wilderness schools in the 1990s following the deaths of three teen-agers say Oregon is courting trouble by allowing similar camps free rein.
"Is your situation ripe for abuse? Yes," said Ken Stettler, who helped draft standards and regulationsfor the wilderness programsin Utah. "By having no regulations, you are endangering the kids."
In Oregon, like in most Western states, anyone can set up a wilderness therapy business. Such businesses get permits and pay fees to operate on public land, but no agency oversees the quality of programs or the care offered children.
Four companies operate wilderness schools in Oregon. In 1999, the schools brought about 270 youths to the high desert of Central Oregon, according to the Bureau of Land Management, which issues land-use permits for the programs.
By their nature, wilderness therapy schools are hard to oversee. The teen-agers are led far out into the mountains or desert for weeks or months at a time. The regimen can be grueling, both physically and emotionally. Often the children are refused direct contact with parents or anyone from the outside.
The escape of two teen-agers from an Obsidian Trails Outdoors School camp in the desert near Christmas Valley in December put a spotlight on such programs in Oregon. The teen-agers robbed a ranch couple at knifepoint, stealing the family's car.
The incident provoked an outcry among ranchers in the area and prompted the BLM to suspend Obsidian's permit. But no one checked on the conditions at the camp, nor on the safety of the teen-agers who were moved to another remote wilderness location on federal land.
Gregory Bodenhamer, director of Obsidian Trails, said the robbery incident was much less serious than what occurs in public schools. "There is no relationship between the school and the crime," he said. "Thousands of teen-agers leave school without permission and commit crimes on a daily basis."
Links to Utah programs
Obsidian Trails' outdoor program apparently had no serious problems before the escape. However, until last week the program employed members of a family linked to wilderness camps in Utah that had serious problems. And until last summer, the program employed a man -- a member of the same family -- who was charged with child abuse and neglect in connection with the 1994 death of a student enrolled in the now-defunct North Star Expeditions school in Utah.
The former Obsidian employee, Eric Henry, 26, signed a Dec. 11, 1996, diversion agreement with Garfield County, Utah, authorities in which prosecution was deferred if he refrained from involvement in similar programs for pay and obeyed all laws for nine months. Yet, six months later -- in June 1997 -- he was at
Sage Walk, an Oregon wilderness school based in Bend. He was subsequently fired, according to the current co-owner of the school, then joined Obsidian Trails in 1998.
He left Obsidian Trails last summer, according to Bodenhamer.
Henry refused to comment.
Bodenhamer would not say why Henry was hired or why he left. He objected to The Oregonian's inquiries. He said it was unfair to tar his program because of something that happened in Utah years ago.
"It's guilt by association," he said.
Parents pay up to $17,000 Desperate parents anxious to help their troubled teen-agers have flocked to programs like Obsidian Trails' over the past decade -- often paying up to $17,000 for eight to 12 weeks of something like wilderness survival therapy. The children are often taken to the schools against their will, either by "escort services" or by parents who sometimes must deceive their children to make them attend.
One Bend outdoor school owner said he has had children show up with snowboards, thinking they were headed to a sports camp.
But wilderness therapy is hardly a vacation retreat.
The schools use harsh methods to teach responsibility. For centuries philosophers have seen nature as redemptive; wilderness therapy throws in a tough survivalist approach to aberrant teens, in an attempt to force them to understand the connection between actions and consequences. Months of forced survival living in the Oregon desert in winter are not unusual as the core of the schools' techniques for teens.
All four of the Oregon camps say that safety comes first, and there have been no reported serious injuries and no deaths.
Deaths prompt action in Utah
Utah's experience in the early 1990s proved to be the warning wail about troubles in wilderness therapy programs.
And the Henry family was smack in the middle of the problems. Eric Henry's father, William Henry, owner of North Star Expeditions, pleaded guilty to negligent homicide in the 1994 death and was given three years of probation. Bodenhamer was a contractor providing family workshops off site for North Star and another troubled Utah program.
Eric's mother, Pattie Henry, was not charged in the case. She worked for Obsidian Trails until Tuesday, when she resigned after the State Office for Services to Children and Families sent a letter instructing Bodenhamer that no member of the Henry family could be involved in his new residential school. Pattie Henry said Tuesday that her family was victimized in Utah, and that Obsidian Trails is a quality program.
"I don't understand the concern about us," she said. "I've devoted my life to kids and family. I've tried to be a good person my whole life, and to have this now keep me from doing the work I love makes me mad."
In December, Bodenhamer set up a companion residential school near the mountain town of Sisters to house troubled teen-agers, but he failed to get the required state license meant to ensure adequate supervision.
Dale Paulsen, licensing coordinator for the Oregon Department of Services to Children and Families, said Bodenhamer is in violation of state law, but that rather than close the school down, "I chose to try and work with the guy."
Director charges unfairness
Bodenhamer said it is unfair to single out his program because of something that happened in Utah years ago.
But a prosecutor who was involved in the Utah case said he was troubled to learn that the Henry family had moved to Oregon and that Pattie and Eric Henry had continued to work in the field.
"That is just scary to me," said Wallace A. Lee, county attorney for Garfield County, Utah.
He said he would have concerns with any program that hired any of the Henrys.
"I would worry about their involvement in a wilderness program because the attitude they had . . . would somehow bleed into any other program they're working with. And I fear that if they're there, that Bill Henry is having some influence into what's going on," he said.
Bodenhamer dismissed such worries as "silly." Bodenhamer said that William Henry, the co-founder of the Utah school and one of the people prosecutors say was most responsible for what happened there, has never worked for Obsidian.
"Bill did not work for us, does not work for us, will never work for us," he said.
Stettler, who regulates the camps in Utah, said that most wilderness therapy schools operating nationwide are probably safe, but reports of abuse and neglect are not unusual. Unregulated programs can be magnets for pedophiles and crooks, Stettler said.
"If I were a child molester and wanted to get in a situation where I have access to kids, this is perfect," he said.
With tuition of up to $350 or more a day per student, the industry can be attractive to charlatans. "You've got people who say, 'Hey, $15,000 per kid, if I just took four kids out for six weeks, that's $60,000. That's all I need to live off of for a year. I don't have to have any training. I don't have to have any background checks,' " Stettler said.
Obsidian earned $618,000 in gross revenues in 1999, according to BLM records.
The deaths at schools like North Star led Utah in the early 1990s to become the first Western state to adopt licensing standards and regulations for wilderness schools. Arizona soon followed suit, and California has some form of regulation. Idaho and Montana are looking into regulation. Other Western states, including New Mexico, Washington and Oregon, have no regulations, said Keith Russell, an assistant professor at the University of Idaho who studies outdoor therapy schools.
All agree regulations needed
Oregon state Rep. Ben Westlund, R-Bend, is drafting legislation that would require wilderness therapy schools to be licensed and meet state standards.
Bodenhamer said he welcomes state oversight of outdoor therapy schools.
"I think in the long run everyone will profit from that," Bodenhamer said.
Brett Merle, co-owner of Sage Walk, the Outdoor School, the Bend school that originally hired Eric and
Pattie Henry, also endorses state involvement. Merle was not an owner at the time either Henry was hired, he said.
"We don't have to answer to anybody, and that scares the hell out of me," Merle said. "Oregon needs some (regulation) before children die."
William and Pattie Henry have a history of involvement with troubled programs, said Lee, the Utah prosecutor. In 1990, the two were employed at the Challenger Foundation, where a 16-year-old girl died of hyperthermia and dehydration.
After Challenger folded following the unsuccessful prosecution of its owner, Steve Cartisano, William and
Pattie Henry co-founded North Star Expeditions, also of southern Utah.
Like Challenger, North Star adopted William Henry's tough approach to dealing with its students, Lee said.
"I think that Bill Henry . . . built an atmosphere where the kids were worthless and not to be trusted," he said.
And that, said Lee, was conducive to abuse.
Teen loses 23 pounds in a month
Lee said the 1996 prosecution of the Henrys and others involved in North Star was one of the most emotionally trying cases he'd ever been involved with.
In all, eight people were charged with felony child neglect and abuse in the death of Aaron Bacon, a 131-pound 16-year-old. Bacon died March 31, 1994, after almost a month of camping in the northern Arizona high desert. The youth, whose parents had sent him to the school because he had begun smoking marijuana and his grades had plummeted, lost about 23 pounds while at the camp. Prosecutors say he was deprived of food, forced to march when he was too weak to even lift his pack, made to sleep without a sleeping bag in below-freezing temperatures, and harassed and ridiculed by North Star employees.
His death brought a flurry of publicity to the wilderness therapy movement in the mid-1990s, then the attention faded away. Yet the programs continue to thrive.
Lee said William Henry not only set the tone for the treatment of Bacon, he was personally informed of and approved of the care Bacon was receiving. And that care, Lee said, was horrific. Bacon became so weak from an undiagnosed medical condition that he couldn't keep up with the group.
On the morning of Bacon's death, the field staff finally decided that the boy, who was too weak to stand, should be taken out of the field.
Eric Henry drove a truck to the camp to retrieve Bacon.
"When Eric did arrive, they put Aaron in the seat in back of the (club) cab, and then Eric just came around and shot the breeze with the other counselors there for about (15 to 20 minutes). I mean they left him in the truck, goofed around," Lee said. "And kind of poked fun of (Bacon) and accused him of faking again and told him how pathetic he looked. And when they got back to the truck, they noticed he was slumped over. That's when they noticed he wasn't breathing."
Eric Henry began CPR, but Bacon was either already dead or died shortly after.
An autopsy found that Bacon died of peritonitis from a perforated ulcer.
Pattie Henry said authorities grossly distorted the situation. She said no one suspected the boy was ill and he was not mistreated. She said her entire family has been devastated by the death.
"Our lives were destroyed; it was like losing a child of your own," she said. "That's how you feel about the kids."
Cathy Sutton's 15-year-old daughter died of dehydration in 1990 just seven days after she was enrolled in a Utah program called Summit Quest. Today, from her Ripon, Calif., home, Sutton runs a nonprofit foundation that tries to act as a watchdog for the industry.
Her daughter, Michelle Sutton, was simply hiked to death, she said. While an extreme case, it underlines the risks to students in these programs, she says.
Sutton said parents are almost powerless to assess such programs, particularly in states that provide no oversight. In unregulated states, she said, parents must rely on the information provided by the programs themselves.
She is now calling for national regulation of the industry. The reason: Some individuals who have problems in one state simply move to another state or country. She said that she was upset, but not surprised, when she learned that Eric and Pattie Henry were working in Oregon.
"Money is governing the industry," she said.
