May 25, 2021 • 38 mins
With the assistance of Poetter and his political ties, Anneewakee receives it’s license as a medical facility and begins accepting third party payments from insurance companies. We take a look at one of the worst experiences of Anneewakee, evaluation and observation.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Camp Hell Anawaki is a production of I Heart Radio.
The views and opinions expressing this podcast are solely those
of the author and participants and do not necessarily represent
those of I Heart Media or its employees. Due to
discussion of traumatic, sexual and violent content, listeners, discussion is advised.
That was the biggest disappointment of our lives. The committee
(00:25):
decided that, yeah, these things are happening. We believe you partially,
and so what we're gonna do is try to do
some kind of compromise here, because they didn't want to
close the camp down. The deal was, well, Louisa Kennet,
boys at your home anymore, you really shouldn't do that.
We're going to make you a different title, but otherwise
(00:46):
we're gonna leave you alone. And so they said you
can continue to be the director, that you can't be
on the campus, and you can't even do with the kids,
and otherwise nothing changed. Two weeks later, we understand and
he was back out there. Over a year after Roger
Brenn and Robert Dacastino had reported the abuse at Anawaki,
(01:08):
a deal had been made. No criminal charges were filed,
not even an official investigation by law enforcement was had
Louis Petter had been cleared of all charges under the
stipulation that he had no future contact with the boys
at Anawaki, the center would continue with little to no
(01:28):
change in its operation. It was emotionally painful to me
to see the lack of concern and reaction by the
authorities who had the duty to do something about this.
I couldn't even mention the name Louis Petter for ten years.
My experienced an Awake was so disillusioning. I just wanted
(01:51):
to put into my past. I never did volunteer work
after that in my life. Never ever, was the end
of that. Shortly after the hearing, Dagastino received a troubling
call from the Assistant Attorney General who had represented the state,
John Hinchy. He told me he was calling me from
(02:14):
outside his office a public film. He was afraid to
make the call from his office, and he said, look,
they've stopped the hearing. He said, yes, they're making a
deal and they're going to get you if they can. That.
They have decided that they're going to try and stop
you from taking the George Bar. They're going to go
(02:35):
after you hammer and tongue. They're getting a court order
to seal the hearing documents, and that court orders in process. Now,
if you can get a copy of the hearing and
gave me the name of the printer and addressed the
printer you've got a copy of that, This will protect you.
So I said, I had no money. I mean I
(02:59):
was working for next to nothing, was paying tuition, I
was paying rent sometimes I could, didn't have enough mind
to eat. I ran a tab at a local restaurant
because they trusted me that every time I get a paycheck,
got even them up. So I called a friend of
mine from Columbia College where I graduated, named Jerry Miller,
who was trust baby, and he had lots of money.
(03:21):
And I said, Jerry, I need five dollars and I
need it now. And I explayed the situation and Jerry said,
give me your wiring instructures to your bank, which I had,
and he said, I'm going to my bank now and
I will do the wire now. He went, he wired me,
the money, went into my account, took it out, gave
(03:43):
it to Rose Higbee, one of my fellow students. So
Rose was able to get it. So I have it here.
It is the copy of the transcript. Of course, there
are all sorts of other things that happened. Over the
past several weeks. We have received a number of very
serious allegations concerning both the facility out there in a
(04:06):
number of individuals involved with him. It was just a
form of their therapy. They were told to do it,
and at the time he was fourteen and a half,
fifteen years old, they didn't know any better. I asked him,
why are you letting this happen? Why are you covering
up for Louis Patter. He had no answer to that question,
involved having in this situation paid it host little could
(04:30):
be such a destricable place, and did do absolutely the
contrary of what they should have done. I'm disturbed a
little the fact of something its stealed. Water on it,
Anna Wicked. I'm Josh Stein and this is camp hell.
In a week around the time of the hearing, Rennan
(04:55):
Dagastino had moved into an apartment together. One night, sometime
after the hearing had concluded, they received an unexpected visit
from a patient at Anna Waki, one of the boys
who was working with Louie Petter. He came from my
apartment and Rose Higbee was there and Roger rent, and
(05:15):
he started telling me all the things that we're gonna
do to me. One of the kids came in and
said Dr Petter and his family are going to hurt you.
And I said, what are you talking about? And they said, well,
they're gonna hurt you. And I said, you're talking about physically,
what other way? In every way? And we're gonna have
(05:38):
sworn testimony that I abused the boys. Well, I got
a little bit angry. The guy came in and said,
I lied about you, and Bob rand him out of
the house. Bob has a temper. I've only seen it once.
There was a couch between him and I. I jumped
over the couch to try and grab him, be to
(06:00):
crap out of him, and he went right through the
screen door. Have you ever seen a rocket take off?
If this was faster than a rocket, I'd never seen
anymo operate. Bob has a lot of physical skills my
own body. He was there, and although he didn't hurt
the kid, I'm amazed that he didn't. He did run
him out of the house. So we were both scared,
(06:22):
and I was very concerned. Anytime I left the home,
I would turn the light on outside at night, and
then I'd watched and wait for about ten minutes. I
was scared. Sometimes I went out the back door and
went around the house to see if somebody was hiding there.
I felt paranoid on occasions I thought somebody was out
to get me. Well, we found out, of course, that
(06:43):
somebody was out to get us, and it was them,
and they were talking about what they were gonna do
to us. According to the kids, this unwanted visit was
not the last rend and Dagostino would see for Manawaki.
Dagostino would later learn that someone had attempted to frame
(07:03):
him for drug possession. There was some testimony that Peter
had ordered drugs to be planted in my car. At
that time. The car I had was a land Rover.
So the land Rover was somehow locked, which is something
I never did because I was hoping someone would steal
the damn thing because it was such a bad car.
(07:25):
But anyway, for one reason or another, it was locked
and they couldn't get into the car, so they put
the drugs in the wheel well. I went off roading
that weekend afterwards and was bumpy road and so someplace
in the North Georgia Mountains. There's this packet of drugs
that fell out my wheel. Well, we understood that someone
had placed in Bob's land rover some cocaine in the
(07:49):
spare tire, and that we were about to be rated
for pushing drugs. And of course that scared the dickens
out of me when I heard that show. Really, after
this incident, authorities showed up at the apartment looking for Dagostino.
The authorities had been tipped off and the threat to
get Dagastino arrested proved true. Well, we had a couple
(08:13):
of police officers come to the house looking for him,
and we couldn't figure out what was going on. It
was very unusual. They then swad a warrant from my arrest,
so I was arrested for a soul. I said, I'm
just sorry I didn't quite get to do the battery.
Bob recalls his day in court and how the judge
reacted to his ordeal. I told him some of the backstory,
(08:37):
but what he was accused me of doing. They didn't
show up anyway, judge says. Kate dismissed Anna wake he
had managed to slip through the cracks of the Georgia
legal system. Following their hearing, in Petter, having stepped down
as director, was replaced by a Mr. Charles Rampley. With
(08:57):
Petter not in this role, there was nothing that could
be charged against the Innawaki Foundation. In a letter from
Chairman Donald Howe to the panel following the hearing, he states, quote,
the Board will of course scrutinize carefully and frequently the
activities of this establishment, so that it seems to me
this situation has been resolved in a satisfactory manner. Shortly
(09:21):
after this deal was made to keep Petter off campus grounds,
a new license was issued allowing in Awaki to continue
as a child caring institution. Journalist Albert Edgin says this
oversight and lack of investigation into child abuse was a
sign of the times back then. It's fair to say
that the ideas about victims and treatment and the whole
(09:46):
panoplay were I wouldn't say primitive, but they certainly weren't
as developed as they are today. Not at the time,
there was a tendency to not believe victims. Much much
more acute than it is now, and it can be
acute now, but the best way to describe it is
(10:09):
that in the nineteen sixties there was abuse going on,
and people knew there was abuse going on. Somehow they
turned their heads to it. But when it finally was
litigated by the state in a administrative way, what happened
was it the victims, the targets of the abuse, were questioned,
(10:32):
their backgrounds were brought out against them. These were children
who were being treated for emotional troubles, and yet when
they made these accusations, their emotional troubles were used as
evidence that they were lying. The difference between then and
now is that it was almost as if the assumption
was that they were lying and they had to prove it.
(10:53):
There was no or very very little wiggle room, given
very little accommodation, very little thought about the idea that
they may be telling the truth. Albert says that during
this time, it would be hard for an administrator to
even wrap their heads around the idea that this type
of abuse between a man and children was even capable
(11:14):
of happening. So think about now, children who are being
supervised by somebody who is just an abusive guy who's
having relationships sexual relationships with young boys. In the minds
of an administrator of a health department in Georgia. He
(11:36):
can't comprehend that he wants to not believe that because
he's so confused about the question of homosexuality in the
first place, that that doesn't compute with that guy. So
you have a hearing, and you have troubled kids and
this has happened to them, and the guy who has
(11:58):
been accused says, hey, come on, these kids are liars,
their pathological liars. I've got the evidence of it right
here in my psychiatric files. That's the end of that.
(12:29):
It's hard to understand how something as serious as sexual
abuse of miners could have slipped by local government in
the nineteen seventies. To give some context as to what
led to this massive oversight, you have to look at
what was going on in Georgia politics at the time.
In seventy, the same year of the Anawaki hearing, Jimmy
(12:49):
Carter made the shift from state senator to governor of Georgia.
Petter's confidant, Jim Parham, who had served as the director
for de Facts for a number of years, would go
on to play an integral role in Jimmy Carter's cabinet.
This career opportunity for parm would greatly affect the future
of Anawaki. Jimmy Carter ran for governor at Georgia on
(13:12):
the idea that he was going to reorganize government, and
when he did when he got into the governor's office,
the biggest part of that job, that promise, was to
take all the health facilities, state health facilities and to
get him under one big organized umbrella. In order to
do that, he appointed param to figure it out. Parum
(13:34):
did figure it out. He did a good job and
figuring it out, but it had to do with stepping
on a lot of toes along the way. Every legislator,
every member of the House, every member the Senate had
a stake in it because their health departments in every county,
their hospitals. During Carter's time as Georgia governor, the number
of government agencies dropped from over three hundred to a
(13:56):
consolidated two overall departments, with the heads of each reporting
directly to the governor. While this may have streamlined the
local government bureaucracy, it may have also left an opening
for lack of oversight. One of the most controversial of
these consolidations was the newly formed Department of Human Resources.
(14:18):
It is under this department that every health and welfare
organization in the state was lumped together. Shortly after the
hearing regarding Anawaki's license, Jim Parm was put in charge
as the director of the Department of Family and Children's
Services or Defacts, the same department which held said hearing.
A year later, the department would be absorbed into the
(14:41):
aforementioned Department of Human Resources, with Parm serving as its
deputy commissioner. As second in command for this expansive department,
Parum would have sway over a key factor, what organizations
could qualify as a licensed medical facility. Harm had been
(15:01):
instrumental in helping Petter get Anawake he accredited as a
psychiatric hospital. That was pivotal for Antawaki because when they
were accredited as a hospital, they became eligible for third
party insurance payments, and that made an Awake a gold mine.
(15:22):
The first correspondence regarding accrediting an Awake as a licensed
hospital appears to be a letter from the Comptroller General
of Georgia to Lewis Petter from two In it, Comptroller
General Johnny Calledwell refers to a meeting with the staff
of an Awake in review of the treatment center Calledwell
provides a list of violations of the building which go
(15:44):
against the requirements of the Safety Code for Hospitals. In
the trip reports sheets sent to the then director of Anawaki,
James Henry Evans, it states the purpose of this visit
was to determine whether or not this treatment center can
be licensed as a psyche patric hospital. It appears doubtful
that this can be done under current criteria for psychiatric hospitals.
(16:07):
There is not a building at the site which in
any way resembles a psychiatric institution. It appears to this
organization maybe serving a very useful purpose in rehabilitating wayward,
delinquent or emotionally disturbed boys, but it is done in
a completely an institutionalized setting, in the relaxed atmosphere of
a summer camp. This rejection would not be the end
(16:29):
of Petter's attempt at getting this license. In a string
of memos provided from the Georgia State Archives, we see
Petter once again using his friends in high places to
help move red tape. The documentation that I found that
showed the relationship between Petter and Parham The most troubling
(16:53):
of that documentation had to do with memos that param
had written to other administrat administrators that worked for him
at the Department of Human Resources at the time, basically
pushing them to grant this hospital license. They had questions
about it, and he wrote that basically without saying so,
(17:14):
and they never do this in bureaucratic documents, but it
was clear that the purpose of the document was to
tell them grant this guy this license. The string of
memos to which Albert is referring to begins innocently enough
with a letter from a concerned teacher dating from November
of nine. This would begin a domino effect that would
(17:35):
forever change the future of Annawaki. In the letter, she
writes of a mentally handicapped student of hers who had
trouble adapting to normal school environments but expressed an interest
in outdoors and camping, whom she believed would be a
perfect fit for Annawaki. The problem was the ever growing
cost of enrollment in the program. The student's family could
(17:59):
simply not afford it. Over the next months would follow
it back and forth of letters between the administration of
an Awaki and a number of people from different health
organizations the state offered to pay the required rate for
aid to families with dependent children. Administrator of Annawaki, James
Evans response would be that the rate was so inadequate
(18:21):
that the institution should not be included among any list
of programs for whom these rates were established. In other words,
it wasn't enough money. This was just the opportunity had
or needed to finally license an Awake as a medical facility,
and he would call on his friend Jim Para to
help make it happen. In a letter from ninety three,
(18:44):
PARAM inquired at the Division of Mental Health would recommend
that Anawaki be granted a provisional license as a special
psychiatric hospital and if so, what steps would be required
to obtain said license. Their superior he was a deputy
director of the division of the department. He had written
(19:05):
this to three bureaucrats who were his underlinks this parallel
documentation that was in the state archives that shows that
Peder was pressuring part to accelerate the process. In a
reply to one of param's inquiries, director of the Legal
(19:28):
Services Unit Rights, assuming the facility can convince the various
units making recommendations to the Quality Control Unit. The department
presently has the legal authority to license the facility without
any additional legislation. Anawaki was soon fast tracked to receive
their license to operate in the State of Georgia as
(19:48):
a psychiatric hospital. In a memo regarding this matter, it
has stated the quote, if consideration is given to licensing
this center, we believe it will be necessary to waigh
physical plant requirements and let the program of services be
the determining factor. Basically, if the State of Georgia was
going to give Anawaki a license, a special exemption would
(20:12):
have to be made around any building requirements. Shortly after this,
the Division of Mental Health wrote a glowing review of
an Awaki to the Chief of the Standards and Licensing Unit,
the department in charge of granting licenses. In March of
seventy four, Annawake was granted a six month provisional license
(20:33):
to operate as a state mental hospital. The special provision
was made which ignored any violations of the building requirements
of a medical hospital. Jim Parum followed up with a
letter to Louis Petter. It read, Dear Lewis, just a
quick note to thank you for the tour. I was
greatly impressed with your program and the attitudes of boys
(20:54):
with whom I spoke. You and the staff deserve great
credit for the job you were doing. If I could
send more state kids, I certainly would. They all seem
to be doing well again. Thanks, keep up the good
work as ever, Jim. Not five years after Louis Petter
and Anna Wake were put on trial, Jim Parum was
(21:17):
singing their praises. Harms influence would help keep Anna Wake
in good standing and would later lead to a permanent
license as a medical facility in the state of Georgia.
Now and Awake could collect third party payments from any
of their patients medical insurance, essentially opening the floodgates to
increased premiums through which the Petter family stood to make millions.
(21:41):
Parm in the meantime, would continue working his way up
the chain of government bodies, ultimately leading to his highest
ranking government he would take just a few years later.
When Carter ran for president, he said he was going
to reorganize the federal government, and he was gonna do
it in the same way that he had reorganized the
state government, which he said had been so successful. And
(22:03):
when he became president, he appointed Parham to oversee that effort. Harum,
who was a poor boy who grew up in a
cotton mill village in the city of Atlanta, went all
away from the cotton mill villages of Atlanta to Washington
with Jimmy Carter. Anna Wake had received their medical license
(22:24):
and now had one of its biggest proponents in the
White House. Serving under Jimmy Carter's cabinet, it seemed nothing
was shut down the facility. By most accounts, Petter felt
he was untouchable by the law, and at this point
he may as well have been. As the seventies progressed
(22:59):
in a Waky became more ingrained in Georgia and neighboring
state's way of dealing with troubled youth, wards of the
state were now being sent there, and the program continued
to devolve into something much harsher than when it initially began.
One of the main structures on the Innawaki campus mentioned
in the State Archives licensing documents is the E and
(23:21):
O Building. This was mentioned in an earlier episode as
it was formerly known among patients as the Quiet Room,
a form of solitary confinement which was meant to break
down patients upon their arrival or for punishment when acting out.
Evaluation and observation had progressed to being one of the
cruelest aspects of an awaki, one that every patient would
(23:44):
be met with immediately upon arrival. Here's Mark Sublett, an
Anawaki survivor. Your first arrival, you would go in and
meet with a case worker lady, and then that's when
things kind of started turning a different way. They told
(24:04):
me you would have to be processed and evaluation, so
you would go to a place called the E. N
O Unit. So you'd first be led into this little
room eight by eight. Anyway, they take in and tell
you you're gonna have to take off all your clothes
and they're gonna have to evaluate you and observe you
to make sure you're not gonna harm yourself or do anything.
(24:27):
For twenty four hours, you're removed of your clothes and
you're giving a green robe just like at the hospital,
a little bit more concealing, but not much. And then
you're put into a room and you're locked up for
forty eight hours. And that's how you're initially brought into
(24:47):
the anawaking system. Here's another survivor Chris McKnight. The gentleman
buzzed the door, and they buzzed you in, and you
walk into a small fourier with two chi airs and
a really small round table. The room is about ten
ft by eight ft. Two doors, both locked, the glass
(25:09):
top plexiglass top part of the door. So you go
in there, and the first thing you do is they
tell you to strip. I had just turned nine ten
days before this. I looked more like I was seven.
I was really confused, and I sat down and said no.
(25:31):
And so the gentleman leaned over and in a much
harsher voice, said, you need to strip naked now, or
I'm going to do it for you. So I started
to get pretty scared. I was a very small child.
So what did I do. I started to take off
my clothes. I'm naked, and they rolled up my clothes
and they buzzed me through the other door with the
(25:54):
group leader. And I looked to my left and there's
a day room and there's about fifteen teenage boys with
their clothes on, and a couple other older gentleman group
leaders as it turned out, and they're all looking at me,
and I'm standing there naked, and I just start to cry.
(26:18):
I felt alone many times in my life, but this
was like I felt like on my own alone. This
was like a whole another kind of level of being
scared and frightened. So they walk you through the day room,
which is room about forty by forty ft and you
(26:41):
walk through it, and you go through another door, and
immediately to your left is a bathroom and they tell
you have a one minute to take a shower, and
you take a quick shower, and then they give you
a robe, a green robe, tell you to put it on.
You walk out of the bathroom. To your immediate left
(27:05):
is a room. They put you in its room about
twelve ft by a eight ft with a mattress, a blanket,
a pillow, and a bible and that was it. High
ceilings with a big plexiglass window at the top, and
then they locked the door. And there you spend twenty
(27:27):
four hours and they bring you your meals. You are
in the room by yourself. It's very degrading. I mean,
I understand kind of like they want to break you
down to build you up, but this was your humiliation.
This wasn't breaking you down to get to the root
of maybe your problems or your issues, or what's going
on in your life. This was just straight up humiliation.
(27:50):
There was no need to parade kids through a day
room naked to enter a program like this. After the
initial forty eight hours of solitary confinement, patients were then
put in a room that would be shared with anywhere
from four to six other boys. Talking was still not
(28:10):
permitted at any time, and exercise was very limited. The
rest of the days were spent in silence, and patients
had to ask permission for any type of movement like
going to the restroom. If allowed, you were to follow
a yellow line painted on the floor and not permitted
to stray from it. Mark Butler says that like the
(28:30):
rest of the Innawiki program, every basic rite, even wearing clothes,
had to be earned. It takes you while to earn
the privileges of being able to wear regular clothes. So
I don't remember how long that was in the road flo,
I think a couple of weeks. Then they allowed me
to have clothes and pretty much the whole day be clean.
(28:59):
If you're a real good you got to go outside
to this little it was like a little triangular, a
little courtroom, half the size of this room that you
can get a little bit of sign and if you're good,
every couple of days and let you go out there
like ten or fifteen minutes. The amount of time a
patient would stay in I and OH could vary from
(29:20):
weeks to months for some patients. Here's Stephen, he attended
an awake in the mid seventies. I was probably in
the n O for a couple of months, which was
fairly standard. I might have been in a hair longer,
but I think they wanted to get me outside, you
(29:42):
know that. I don't think they wanted to hold me
much longer. There's Chris McKnight again. So ian O for
me turned out to be I want to say, close
to two and a half months. Other kids were in
their shorter other kids were in their long or It
really depended on you accepting your problems. And I finally
(30:06):
realized that I was just gonna have to go along
and say what they wanted to hear to get out
of the You know, I had never been in any
sort of lock up. I mean I had heard from
other kids about juvenile hall and that was like jail
to me, and I felt like I was in jail.
Putting a child in solitary confinement could wear on them mentally,
(30:27):
sometimes causing mental breakdowns. I had long fingernail shoot my
fingernails down to like a saw a pattern. It was
trying to scratch through my veins and my arm. I
just I literally wanted to die. My whole life had
been taken from me. They don't really tell you when
(30:47):
you get there and how the program works, when you're
gonna get to go outside, when you're gonna see other people.
It was just a day to day, stay behind us line,
don't ask questions, and do your word. It was pretty intense.
It's a big shock when you first leave home, and
(31:07):
of course I was only thirteen, so you kind of
start dawning on what's gonna go on, you know, like
I'm not going back home, and kind of start I
break down. You have your own moments, did you start realizing,
start figuring out what's happening. I remember this one kid
who went crazy in that twenty four hour confinement and
(31:31):
I want to punching out the little glass window on
the door and really messing up his hand pretty bad,
and they had to restrain him. My second stay at
Anniwaki happened to another kid. I witnessed the kid just
went crazy, but he had been an EO for months.
And then I found out that he had been in
email for months after that, and they wound up shipping
(31:52):
the box to another hospital. He never left the you know,
and he was an ANNI waking for like nine months
or so. Catherine Perkins is a psychology professor who was
studied emotionally disturbed behavior in children extensively. She says this
type of treatment can make a situation with a troubled
team go from bad to worse. Kids or kids, and
(32:16):
most kids need engagement, they need human contact, they need more.
If you are already vulnerable for emotional and mental health illness,
if you already have that level of vulnerability and then
you're subjected to further abuse, you're just exacerbating a problem
(32:37):
that was already there by no means is anything good
going to come out of that. I mean, you're just
taking a bad situation and making it worse. Fred Knox
was only a small child when he was admitted to
an AWAKE. It was during this initial processing that he
realized the type of abuse that was about to take place.
(32:58):
My number was K twelve twenty. I was there from
August to November one. I was eleven. I was made
to take off all my clothes and I was told
to put on this blue, kind of greenish type robe.
(33:18):
I couldn't wear any underwear. I couldn't do anything, and
I was having people yell fresh meat seeing me crying.
Tears were just falling out of my eyes. I didn't
know what I was doing. I was made to squat.
I didn't know if I was going into jail or what.
(33:38):
I had no idea it was. It was a building
called the en O. It basically had about four different units.
The men the boys were on one side that were
kind of split up with the bathroom, the offices in
the middle, the rooms on the side, and the middle
was kind of cafeteria, two little tiny courtyard, the infirmary
(34:02):
or clinic, I guess as they called it was connected
to that. You know, you had to go through about
two or three doors to get to the infirmary. There
were locked doors almost like every no phone to call
anybody for Fred. The abusive antawaki was coming from the
(34:22):
patients as well. I was sexually molested by a student.
They would do it when other people were supposedly sleeping.
I mean, you know, it was almost kind of like
if a counselor group later turned his cheek or turned
his head the other way. You know, Hey, what can
I get away with? I had that. I guess that
thought process, that that was a normal way of life.
(34:48):
Fred remembers another patient who he experienced E and O with,
who would later make national news. He might have heard
his name mentioned, but his name was Stephen Anthony Mobley.
I guess an Awaky messed him up pretty bad. He
killed a Domino's Pizza manager and shot him in the
(35:08):
back of the head, execution style. Arrested in in Gainesville, Georgia,
Stephen Anthony Mobley became known in the crime world as
the first defendant to use predisposition of genes as a
defense for murder. He was executed on death Row by
lethal injection. Thinking two thousand five, it was Annawak's program
(35:35):
was becoming psychologically traumatizing for patients. The E and O
was now the first experience of anyone in the program,
setting the bar for what would come later. Since Anna
Wake now had its medical license, it was free to
expand its program. They would soon begin a girl's treatment
center and move into other states, even other countries. Anna
(35:58):
Wake was now accepting patients each year by the hundreds
and making a fortune doing so, and without any real
oversight the damage being done to these patients would only
get worse next time. On Camp hell in a Week
(36:19):
and Awake, he had been established for sixty years, but
by nineteen the numbers were up above six hundreds. It's
like two different worlds, you know. There was a Aniwaki
outside and the competitor inside. At that time they sent
(36:40):
the toughest of the students to Florida. There was another
guy that got bit by a rattlesnake when we were
cutting out some and trails. I think the air lifted
them to Tallahassee. I saw other kids be abused by
their peer group, and I saw a lot of kids
being abused by group leaders. I mean terribly so. Camp
(37:12):
hell an Awake was created and hosted by Josh Thane,
with producer Miranda Hawkins and executive producers Alex Williams and
Matt Frederick. The soundtrack was written and performed by Josh
Thane and Adrian Barry. Archival footage provided by ws B
and CBS News find us on Instagram at camp hell
pod that's c A M p h E L l
(37:36):
p O D educate yourself about the issue of child
abuse and things that you should look for at the
Darkness to Light website D two ll dot org. That's
D the number two l dot org. Camp hell an
Awake is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
(37:56):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Camp Hell Anawaki is a production of I Heart Radio.
The views and opinions expressing this podcast are solely those
of the author and participants and do not necessarily represent
those of I Heart Media or its employees. Due to
discussion of traumatic, sexual and violent content, listeners, discussion is advised.
That was the biggest disappointment of our lives. The committee
(00:25):
decided that, yeah, these things are happening. We believe you partially,
and so what we're gonna do is try to do
some kind of compromise here, because they didn't want to
close the camp down. The deal was, well, Louisa Kennet,
boys at your home anymore, you really shouldn't do that.
We're going to make you a different title, but otherwise
(00:46):
we're gonna leave you alone. And so they said you
can continue to be the director, that you can't be
on the campus, and you can't even do with the kids,
and otherwise nothing changed. Two weeks later, we understand and
he was back out there. Over a year after Roger
Brenn and Robert Dacastino had reported the abuse at Anawaki,
(01:08):
a deal had been made. No criminal charges were filed,
not even an official investigation by law enforcement was had
Louis Petter had been cleared of all charges under the
stipulation that he had no future contact with the boys
at Anawaki, the center would continue with little to no
(01:28):
change in its operation. It was emotionally painful to me
to see the lack of concern and reaction by the
authorities who had the duty to do something about this.
I couldn't even mention the name Louis Petter for ten years.
My experienced an Awake was so disillusioning. I just wanted
(01:51):
to put into my past. I never did volunteer work
after that in my life. Never ever, was the end
of that. Shortly after the hearing, Dagastino received a troubling
call from the Assistant Attorney General who had represented the state,
John Hinchy. He told me he was calling me from
(02:14):
outside his office a public film. He was afraid to
make the call from his office, and he said, look,
they've stopped the hearing. He said, yes, they're making a
deal and they're going to get you if they can. That.
They have decided that they're going to try and stop
you from taking the George Bar. They're going to go
(02:35):
after you hammer and tongue. They're getting a court order
to seal the hearing documents, and that court orders in process. Now,
if you can get a copy of the hearing and
gave me the name of the printer and addressed the
printer you've got a copy of that, This will protect you.
So I said, I had no money. I mean I
(02:59):
was working for next to nothing, was paying tuition, I
was paying rent sometimes I could, didn't have enough mind
to eat. I ran a tab at a local restaurant
because they trusted me that every time I get a paycheck,
got even them up. So I called a friend of
mine from Columbia College where I graduated, named Jerry Miller,
who was trust baby, and he had lots of money.
(03:21):
And I said, Jerry, I need five dollars and I
need it now. And I explayed the situation and Jerry said,
give me your wiring instructures to your bank, which I had,
and he said, I'm going to my bank now and
I will do the wire now. He went, he wired me,
the money, went into my account, took it out, gave
(03:43):
it to Rose Higbee, one of my fellow students. So
Rose was able to get it. So I have it here.
It is the copy of the transcript. Of course, there
are all sorts of other things that happened. Over the
past several weeks. We have received a number of very
serious allegations concerning both the facility out there in a
(04:06):
number of individuals involved with him. It was just a
form of their therapy. They were told to do it,
and at the time he was fourteen and a half,
fifteen years old, they didn't know any better. I asked him,
why are you letting this happen? Why are you covering
up for Louis Patter. He had no answer to that question,
involved having in this situation paid it host little could
(04:30):
be such a destricable place, and did do absolutely the
contrary of what they should have done. I'm disturbed a
little the fact of something its stealed. Water on it,
Anna Wicked. I'm Josh Stein and this is camp hell.
In a week around the time of the hearing, Rennan
(04:55):
Dagastino had moved into an apartment together. One night, sometime
after the hearing had concluded, they received an unexpected visit
from a patient at Anna Waki, one of the boys
who was working with Louie Petter. He came from my
apartment and Rose Higbee was there and Roger rent, and
(05:15):
he started telling me all the things that we're gonna
do to me. One of the kids came in and
said Dr Petter and his family are going to hurt you.
And I said, what are you talking about? And they said, well,
they're gonna hurt you. And I said, you're talking about physically,
what other way? In every way? And we're gonna have
(05:38):
sworn testimony that I abused the boys. Well, I got
a little bit angry. The guy came in and said,
I lied about you, and Bob rand him out of
the house. Bob has a temper. I've only seen it once.
There was a couch between him and I. I jumped
over the couch to try and grab him, be to
(06:00):
crap out of him, and he went right through the
screen door. Have you ever seen a rocket take off?
If this was faster than a rocket, I'd never seen
anymo operate. Bob has a lot of physical skills my
own body. He was there, and although he didn't hurt
the kid, I'm amazed that he didn't. He did run
him out of the house. So we were both scared,
(06:22):
and I was very concerned. Anytime I left the home,
I would turn the light on outside at night, and
then I'd watched and wait for about ten minutes. I
was scared. Sometimes I went out the back door and
went around the house to see if somebody was hiding there.
I felt paranoid on occasions I thought somebody was out
to get me. Well, we found out, of course, that
(06:43):
somebody was out to get us, and it was them,
and they were talking about what they were gonna do
to us. According to the kids, this unwanted visit was
not the last rend and Dagostino would see for Manawaki.
Dagostino would later learn that someone had attempted to frame
(07:03):
him for drug possession. There was some testimony that Peter
had ordered drugs to be planted in my car. At
that time. The car I had was a land Rover.
So the land Rover was somehow locked, which is something
I never did because I was hoping someone would steal
the damn thing because it was such a bad car.
(07:25):
But anyway, for one reason or another, it was locked
and they couldn't get into the car, so they put
the drugs in the wheel well. I went off roading
that weekend afterwards and was bumpy road and so someplace
in the North Georgia Mountains. There's this packet of drugs
that fell out my wheel. Well, we understood that someone
had placed in Bob's land rover some cocaine in the
(07:49):
spare tire, and that we were about to be rated
for pushing drugs. And of course that scared the dickens
out of me when I heard that show. Really, after
this incident, authorities showed up at the apartment looking for Dagostino.
The authorities had been tipped off and the threat to
get Dagastino arrested proved true. Well, we had a couple
(08:13):
of police officers come to the house looking for him,
and we couldn't figure out what was going on. It
was very unusual. They then swad a warrant from my arrest,
so I was arrested for a soul. I said, I'm
just sorry I didn't quite get to do the battery.
Bob recalls his day in court and how the judge
reacted to his ordeal. I told him some of the backstory,
(08:37):
but what he was accused me of doing. They didn't
show up anyway, judge says. Kate dismissed Anna wake he
had managed to slip through the cracks of the Georgia
legal system. Following their hearing, in Petter, having stepped down
as director, was replaced by a Mr. Charles Rampley. With
(08:57):
Petter not in this role, there was nothing that could
be charged against the Innawaki Foundation. In a letter from
Chairman Donald Howe to the panel following the hearing, he states, quote,
the Board will of course scrutinize carefully and frequently the
activities of this establishment, so that it seems to me
this situation has been resolved in a satisfactory manner. Shortly
(09:21):
after this deal was made to keep Petter off campus grounds,
a new license was issued allowing in Awaki to continue
as a child caring institution. Journalist Albert Edgin says this
oversight and lack of investigation into child abuse was a
sign of the times back then. It's fair to say
that the ideas about victims and treatment and the whole
(09:46):
panoplay were I wouldn't say primitive, but they certainly weren't
as developed as they are today. Not at the time,
there was a tendency to not believe victims. Much much
more acute than it is now, and it can be
acute now, but the best way to describe it is
(10:09):
that in the nineteen sixties there was abuse going on,
and people knew there was abuse going on. Somehow they
turned their heads to it. But when it finally was
litigated by the state in a administrative way, what happened
was it the victims, the targets of the abuse, were questioned,
(10:32):
their backgrounds were brought out against them. These were children
who were being treated for emotional troubles, and yet when
they made these accusations, their emotional troubles were used as
evidence that they were lying. The difference between then and
now is that it was almost as if the assumption
was that they were lying and they had to prove it.
(10:53):
There was no or very very little wiggle room, given
very little accommodation, very little thought about the idea that
they may be telling the truth. Albert says that during
this time, it would be hard for an administrator to
even wrap their heads around the idea that this type
of abuse between a man and children was even capable
(11:14):
of happening. So think about now, children who are being
supervised by somebody who is just an abusive guy who's
having relationships sexual relationships with young boys. In the minds
of an administrator of a health department in Georgia. He
(11:36):
can't comprehend that he wants to not believe that because
he's so confused about the question of homosexuality in the
first place, that that doesn't compute with that guy. So
you have a hearing, and you have troubled kids and
this has happened to them, and the guy who has
(11:58):
been accused says, hey, come on, these kids are liars,
their pathological liars. I've got the evidence of it right
here in my psychiatric files. That's the end of that.
(12:29):
It's hard to understand how something as serious as sexual
abuse of miners could have slipped by local government in
the nineteen seventies. To give some context as to what
led to this massive oversight, you have to look at
what was going on in Georgia politics at the time.
In seventy, the same year of the Anawaki hearing, Jimmy
(12:49):
Carter made the shift from state senator to governor of Georgia.
Petter's confidant, Jim Parham, who had served as the director
for de Facts for a number of years, would go
on to play an integral role in Jimmy Carter's cabinet.
This career opportunity for parm would greatly affect the future
of Anawaki. Jimmy Carter ran for governor at Georgia on
(13:12):
the idea that he was going to reorganize government, and
when he did when he got into the governor's office,
the biggest part of that job, that promise, was to
take all the health facilities, state health facilities and to
get him under one big organized umbrella. In order to
do that, he appointed param to figure it out. Parum
(13:34):
did figure it out. He did a good job and
figuring it out, but it had to do with stepping
on a lot of toes along the way. Every legislator,
every member of the House, every member the Senate had
a stake in it because their health departments in every county,
their hospitals. During Carter's time as Georgia governor, the number
of government agencies dropped from over three hundred to a
(13:56):
consolidated two overall departments, with the heads of each reporting
directly to the governor. While this may have streamlined the
local government bureaucracy, it may have also left an opening
for lack of oversight. One of the most controversial of
these consolidations was the newly formed Department of Human Resources.
(14:18):
It is under this department that every health and welfare
organization in the state was lumped together. Shortly after the
hearing regarding Anawaki's license, Jim Parm was put in charge
as the director of the Department of Family and Children's
Services or Defacts, the same department which held said hearing.
A year later, the department would be absorbed into the
(14:41):
aforementioned Department of Human Resources, with Parm serving as its
deputy commissioner. As second in command for this expansive department,
Parum would have sway over a key factor, what organizations
could qualify as a licensed medical facility. Harm had been
(15:01):
instrumental in helping Petter get Anawake he accredited as a
psychiatric hospital. That was pivotal for Antawaki because when they
were accredited as a hospital, they became eligible for third
party insurance payments, and that made an Awake a gold mine.
(15:22):
The first correspondence regarding accrediting an Awake as a licensed
hospital appears to be a letter from the Comptroller General
of Georgia to Lewis Petter from two In it, Comptroller
General Johnny Calledwell refers to a meeting with the staff
of an Awake in review of the treatment center Calledwell
provides a list of violations of the building which go
(15:44):
against the requirements of the Safety Code for Hospitals. In
the trip reports sheets sent to the then director of Anawaki,
James Henry Evans, it states the purpose of this visit
was to determine whether or not this treatment center can
be licensed as a psyche patric hospital. It appears doubtful
that this can be done under current criteria for psychiatric hospitals.
(16:07):
There is not a building at the site which in
any way resembles a psychiatric institution. It appears to this
organization maybe serving a very useful purpose in rehabilitating wayward,
delinquent or emotionally disturbed boys, but it is done in
a completely an institutionalized setting, in the relaxed atmosphere of
a summer camp. This rejection would not be the end
(16:29):
of Petter's attempt at getting this license. In a string
of memos provided from the Georgia State Archives, we see
Petter once again using his friends in high places to
help move red tape. The documentation that I found that
showed the relationship between Petter and Parham The most troubling
(16:53):
of that documentation had to do with memos that param
had written to other administrat administrators that worked for him
at the Department of Human Resources at the time, basically
pushing them to grant this hospital license. They had questions
about it, and he wrote that basically without saying so,
(17:14):
and they never do this in bureaucratic documents, but it
was clear that the purpose of the document was to
tell them grant this guy this license. The string of
memos to which Albert is referring to begins innocently enough
with a letter from a concerned teacher dating from November
of nine. This would begin a domino effect that would
(17:35):
forever change the future of Annawaki. In the letter, she
writes of a mentally handicapped student of hers who had
trouble adapting to normal school environments but expressed an interest
in outdoors and camping, whom she believed would be a
perfect fit for Annawaki. The problem was the ever growing
cost of enrollment in the program. The student's family could
(17:59):
simply not afford it. Over the next months would follow
it back and forth of letters between the administration of
an Awaki and a number of people from different health
organizations the state offered to pay the required rate for
aid to families with dependent children. Administrator of Annawaki, James
Evans response would be that the rate was so inadequate
(18:21):
that the institution should not be included among any list
of programs for whom these rates were established. In other words,
it wasn't enough money. This was just the opportunity had
or needed to finally license an Awake as a medical facility,
and he would call on his friend Jim Para to
help make it happen. In a letter from ninety three,
(18:44):
PARAM inquired at the Division of Mental Health would recommend
that Anawaki be granted a provisional license as a special
psychiatric hospital and if so, what steps would be required
to obtain said license. Their superior he was a deputy
director of the division of the department. He had written
(19:05):
this to three bureaucrats who were his underlinks this parallel
documentation that was in the state archives that shows that
Peder was pressuring part to accelerate the process. In a
reply to one of param's inquiries, director of the Legal
(19:28):
Services Unit Rights, assuming the facility can convince the various
units making recommendations to the Quality Control Unit. The department
presently has the legal authority to license the facility without
any additional legislation. Anawaki was soon fast tracked to receive
their license to operate in the State of Georgia as
(19:48):
a psychiatric hospital. In a memo regarding this matter, it
has stated the quote, if consideration is given to licensing
this center, we believe it will be necessary to waigh
physical plant requirements and let the program of services be
the determining factor. Basically, if the State of Georgia was
going to give Anawaki a license, a special exemption would
(20:12):
have to be made around any building requirements. Shortly after this,
the Division of Mental Health wrote a glowing review of
an Awaki to the Chief of the Standards and Licensing Unit,
the department in charge of granting licenses. In March of
seventy four, Annawake was granted a six month provisional license
(20:33):
to operate as a state mental hospital. The special provision
was made which ignored any violations of the building requirements
of a medical hospital. Jim Parum followed up with a
letter to Louis Petter. It read, Dear Lewis, just a
quick note to thank you for the tour. I was
greatly impressed with your program and the attitudes of boys
(20:54):
with whom I spoke. You and the staff deserve great
credit for the job you were doing. If I could
send more state kids, I certainly would. They all seem
to be doing well again. Thanks, keep up the good
work as ever, Jim. Not five years after Louis Petter
and Anna Wake were put on trial, Jim Parum was
(21:17):
singing their praises. Harms influence would help keep Anna Wake
in good standing and would later lead to a permanent
license as a medical facility in the state of Georgia.
Now and Awake could collect third party payments from any
of their patients medical insurance, essentially opening the floodgates to
increased premiums through which the Petter family stood to make millions.
(21:41):
Parm in the meantime, would continue working his way up
the chain of government bodies, ultimately leading to his highest
ranking government he would take just a few years later.
When Carter ran for president, he said he was going
to reorganize the federal government, and he was gonna do
it in the same way that he had reorganized the
state government, which he said had been so successful. And
(22:03):
when he became president, he appointed Parham to oversee that effort. Harum,
who was a poor boy who grew up in a
cotton mill village in the city of Atlanta, went all
away from the cotton mill villages of Atlanta to Washington
with Jimmy Carter. Anna Wake had received their medical license
(22:24):
and now had one of its biggest proponents in the
White House. Serving under Jimmy Carter's cabinet, it seemed nothing
was shut down the facility. By most accounts, Petter felt
he was untouchable by the law, and at this point
he may as well have been. As the seventies progressed
(22:59):
in a Waky became more ingrained in Georgia and neighboring
state's way of dealing with troubled youth, wards of the
state were now being sent there, and the program continued
to devolve into something much harsher than when it initially began.
One of the main structures on the Innawaki campus mentioned
in the State Archives licensing documents is the E and
(23:21):
O Building. This was mentioned in an earlier episode as
it was formerly known among patients as the Quiet Room,
a form of solitary confinement which was meant to break
down patients upon their arrival or for punishment when acting out.
Evaluation and observation had progressed to being one of the
cruelest aspects of an awaki, one that every patient would
(23:44):
be met with immediately upon arrival. Here's Mark Sublett, an
Anawaki survivor. Your first arrival, you would go in and
meet with a case worker lady, and then that's when
things kind of started turning a different way. They told
(24:04):
me you would have to be processed and evaluation, so
you would go to a place called the E. N
O Unit. So you'd first be led into this little
room eight by eight. Anyway, they take in and tell
you you're gonna have to take off all your clothes
and they're gonna have to evaluate you and observe you
to make sure you're not gonna harm yourself or do anything.
(24:27):
For twenty four hours, you're removed of your clothes and
you're giving a green robe just like at the hospital,
a little bit more concealing, but not much. And then
you're put into a room and you're locked up for
forty eight hours. And that's how you're initially brought into
(24:47):
the anawaking system. Here's another survivor Chris McKnight. The gentleman
buzzed the door, and they buzzed you in, and you
walk into a small fourier with two chi airs and
a really small round table. The room is about ten
ft by eight ft. Two doors, both locked, the glass
(25:09):
top plexiglass top part of the door. So you go
in there, and the first thing you do is they
tell you to strip. I had just turned nine ten
days before this. I looked more like I was seven.
I was really confused, and I sat down and said no.
(25:31):
And so the gentleman leaned over and in a much
harsher voice, said, you need to strip naked now, or
I'm going to do it for you. So I started
to get pretty scared. I was a very small child.
So what did I do. I started to take off
my clothes. I'm naked, and they rolled up my clothes
and they buzzed me through the other door with the
(25:54):
group leader. And I looked to my left and there's
a day room and there's about fifteen teenage boys with
their clothes on, and a couple other older gentleman group
leaders as it turned out, and they're all looking at me,
and I'm standing there naked, and I just start to cry.
(26:18):
I felt alone many times in my life, but this
was like I felt like on my own alone. This
was like a whole another kind of level of being
scared and frightened. So they walk you through the day room,
which is room about forty by forty ft and you
(26:41):
walk through it, and you go through another door, and
immediately to your left is a bathroom and they tell
you have a one minute to take a shower, and
you take a quick shower, and then they give you
a robe, a green robe, tell you to put it on.
You walk out of the bathroom. To your immediate left
(27:05):
is a room. They put you in its room about
twelve ft by a eight ft with a mattress, a blanket,
a pillow, and a bible and that was it. High
ceilings with a big plexiglass window at the top, and
then they locked the door. And there you spend twenty
(27:27):
four hours and they bring you your meals. You are
in the room by yourself. It's very degrading. I mean,
I understand kind of like they want to break you
down to build you up, but this was your humiliation.
This wasn't breaking you down to get to the root
of maybe your problems or your issues, or what's going
on in your life. This was just straight up humiliation.
(27:50):
There was no need to parade kids through a day
room naked to enter a program like this. After the
initial forty eight hours of solitary confinement, patients were then
put in a room that would be shared with anywhere
from four to six other boys. Talking was still not
(28:10):
permitted at any time, and exercise was very limited. The
rest of the days were spent in silence, and patients
had to ask permission for any type of movement like
going to the restroom. If allowed, you were to follow
a yellow line painted on the floor and not permitted
to stray from it. Mark Butler says that like the
(28:30):
rest of the Innawiki program, every basic rite, even wearing clothes,
had to be earned. It takes you while to earn
the privileges of being able to wear regular clothes. So
I don't remember how long that was in the road flo,
I think a couple of weeks. Then they allowed me
to have clothes and pretty much the whole day be clean.
(28:59):
If you're a real good you got to go outside
to this little it was like a little triangular, a
little courtroom, half the size of this room that you
can get a little bit of sign and if you're good,
every couple of days and let you go out there
like ten or fifteen minutes. The amount of time a
patient would stay in I and OH could vary from
(29:20):
weeks to months for some patients. Here's Stephen, he attended
an awake in the mid seventies. I was probably in
the n O for a couple of months, which was
fairly standard. I might have been in a hair longer,
but I think they wanted to get me outside, you
(29:42):
know that. I don't think they wanted to hold me
much longer. There's Chris McKnight again. So ian O for
me turned out to be I want to say, close
to two and a half months. Other kids were in
their shorter other kids were in their long or It
really depended on you accepting your problems. And I finally
(30:06):
realized that I was just gonna have to go along
and say what they wanted to hear to get out
of the You know, I had never been in any
sort of lock up. I mean I had heard from
other kids about juvenile hall and that was like jail
to me, and I felt like I was in jail.
Putting a child in solitary confinement could wear on them mentally,
(30:27):
sometimes causing mental breakdowns. I had long fingernail shoot my
fingernails down to like a saw a pattern. It was
trying to scratch through my veins and my arm. I
just I literally wanted to die. My whole life had
been taken from me. They don't really tell you when
(30:47):
you get there and how the program works, when you're
gonna get to go outside, when you're gonna see other people.
It was just a day to day, stay behind us line,
don't ask questions, and do your word. It was pretty intense.
It's a big shock when you first leave home, and
(31:07):
of course I was only thirteen, so you kind of
start dawning on what's gonna go on, you know, like
I'm not going back home, and kind of start I
break down. You have your own moments, did you start realizing,
start figuring out what's happening. I remember this one kid
who went crazy in that twenty four hour confinement and
(31:31):
I want to punching out the little glass window on
the door and really messing up his hand pretty bad,
and they had to restrain him. My second stay at
Anniwaki happened to another kid. I witnessed the kid just
went crazy, but he had been an EO for months.
And then I found out that he had been in
email for months after that, and they wound up shipping
(31:52):
the box to another hospital. He never left the you know,
and he was an ANNI waking for like nine months
or so. Catherine Perkins is a psychology professor who was
studied emotionally disturbed behavior in children extensively. She says this
type of treatment can make a situation with a troubled
team go from bad to worse. Kids or kids, and
(32:16):
most kids need engagement, they need human contact, they need more.
If you are already vulnerable for emotional and mental health illness,
if you already have that level of vulnerability and then
you're subjected to further abuse, you're just exacerbating a problem
(32:37):
that was already there by no means is anything good
going to come out of that. I mean, you're just
taking a bad situation and making it worse. Fred Knox
was only a small child when he was admitted to
an AWAKE. It was during this initial processing that he
realized the type of abuse that was about to take place.
(32:58):
My number was K twelve twenty. I was there from
August to November one. I was eleven. I was made
to take off all my clothes and I was told
to put on this blue, kind of greenish type robe.
(33:18):
I couldn't wear any underwear. I couldn't do anything, and
I was having people yell fresh meat seeing me crying.
Tears were just falling out of my eyes. I didn't
know what I was doing. I was made to squat.
I didn't know if I was going into jail or what.
(33:38):
I had no idea it was. It was a building
called the en O. It basically had about four different units.
The men the boys were on one side that were
kind of split up with the bathroom, the offices in
the middle, the rooms on the side, and the middle
was kind of cafeteria, two little tiny courtyard, the infirmary
(34:02):
or clinic, I guess as they called it was connected
to that. You know, you had to go through about
two or three doors to get to the infirmary. There
were locked doors almost like every no phone to call
anybody for Fred. The abusive antawaki was coming from the
(34:22):
patients as well. I was sexually molested by a student.
They would do it when other people were supposedly sleeping.
I mean, you know, it was almost kind of like
if a counselor group later turned his cheek or turned
his head the other way. You know, Hey, what can
I get away with? I had that. I guess that
thought process, that that was a normal way of life.
(34:48):
Fred remembers another patient who he experienced E and O with,
who would later make national news. He might have heard
his name mentioned, but his name was Stephen Anthony Mobley.
I guess an Awaky messed him up pretty bad. He
killed a Domino's Pizza manager and shot him in the
(35:08):
back of the head, execution style. Arrested in in Gainesville, Georgia,
Stephen Anthony Mobley became known in the crime world as
the first defendant to use predisposition of genes as a
defense for murder. He was executed on death Row by
lethal injection. Thinking two thousand five, it was Annawak's program
(35:35):
was becoming psychologically traumatizing for patients. The E and O
was now the first experience of anyone in the program,
setting the bar for what would come later. Since Anna
Wake now had its medical license, it was free to
expand its program. They would soon begin a girl's treatment
center and move into other states, even other countries. Anna
(35:58):
Wake was now accepting patients each year by the hundreds
and making a fortune doing so, and without any real
oversight the damage being done to these patients would only
get worse next time. On Camp hell in a Week
(36:19):
and Awake, he had been established for sixty years, but
by nineteen the numbers were up above six hundreds. It's
like two different worlds, you know. There was a Aniwaki
outside and the competitor inside. At that time they sent
(36:40):
the toughest of the students to Florida. There was another
guy that got bit by a rattlesnake when we were
cutting out some and trails. I think the air lifted
them to Tallahassee. I saw other kids be abused by
their peer group, and I saw a lot of kids
being abused by group leaders. I mean terribly so. Camp
(37:12):
hell an Awake was created and hosted by Josh Thane,
with producer Miranda Hawkins and executive producers Alex Williams and
Matt Frederick. The soundtrack was written and performed by Josh
Thane and Adrian Barry. Archival footage provided by ws B
and CBS News find us on Instagram at camp hell
pod that's c A M p h E L l
(37:36):
p O D educate yourself about the issue of child
abuse and things that you should look for at the
Darkness to Light website D two ll dot org. That's
D the number two l dot org. Camp hell an
Awake is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
(37:56):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Ridiculous History
History is beautiful, brutal and, often, ridiculous. Join Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown as they dive into some of the weirdest stories from across the span of human civilization in Ridiculous History, a podcast by iHeartRadio.