"The Wake"

In the introduction to Camp Hell: Anneewakee, we give a summary of what Anneewakee was supposed to be and what it became. We hear from some of the very first patients of Anneewakee as well as other survivors and victims of abuse.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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, listener discretion is advised.

(00:24):
In the outskirts of Atlanta, just twenty miles west is
the town of Douglasville. It is here that lies what
was once the largest medical facility in the state of Georgia,
and all but forgotten organization that you've probably never heard of,
the Anaweki Treatment Center for emotionally disturbed Youth. At its core,

(00:46):
it was meant to help children with emotional behavior issues.
He says, he enjoys it. They've got a football team
and they sponsored. He says. A counseling helps him a lot.
He is making almost all a he's now. He's very
productive in school, very productive at home. It helped our
whole family pretty much brought us all back together. For

(01:09):
some this is a place where they grew up and
learned how to work and live off of the land.
It taught me a lot for the future. It taught
me a lot. I think you learned responsibilit Yeah, I
think you learned how to be an adult. For others,
it represents some of the darkest times of their lives.

(01:30):
I still when I drive Interstate twenty and I get
around Chapel Hill Road or Highway five or ninety two
or anything there, my anxiety still goes up. This organization
would help its founder, Lewis Petter, become one of the
most wealthy and powerful people in the region, with a
reach that would go far beyond the state of Georgia.

(01:52):
If you've got the church, and you've got the bureaucrats,
and you've got the cops, you know, you can pretty
much get things done for decades. This facility would exploit
its patients, literally building its massive infrastructure off its patients
backs and leaving a trail of shattered lives behind. It

(02:12):
was kind of like a kind of like an outdoor
summer camp where you would, you know, live in some
cabins and uh, you know, do outdoor things and tike
and go through the woods and all that kind of stuff.
That's really how it is explained. They always seemed to
leave out the building of the buildings and the slave
labor board as they called it. Vocational therapy. They would

(02:42):
have us bend over and they would put a bag
of cement on our back, which weighed four pounds, and
we were to hold that position and carry that bag
bent over up a mountain in order to make the
footings for the cabins. I would just like to know

(03:04):
why we had to go through what we went through,
why everything was so covered up, Why I was lied to,
why I was cheated. Those are questions that still pop
up in my head all the time. Annawaki was able
to expand continuously over two decades, all the while funneling

(03:26):
millions of dollars to the upper management of its organization.
This can only be attributed to its many ties to
people in power, some of which would extend all the
way to the White House. He was a player who's
a political player, and he'd made sure that he maintained
those kinds of contacts that would benefit him later. You

(03:48):
would see the names of the board members and there
was a lot of ex Georgia State politicians. He said, well,
I don't think you realize how powerful Petter is. A
lot of powerful people were involved with kind Awaking. What
you are about to hear is a largely unknown and

(04:11):
dark chapter in Georgia's history, one in which thousands of
children experienced and many never recovered from. This is a
story a systemic abuse in the most literal sense, with
an empire, real estate built upon the backs of its patients,
and a system that, instead of helping children, exposed them

(04:33):
to some of the worst horrors imaginable. Before Jeffrey Epstein,
there was Lewis Petter and the network of people that
allowed his exploitive actions. This is the story of an
awaking I'm gonna passed several weeks. We have received number

(05:01):
of very serious allegations concerning both the facility out there
in a 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 Batter. He had no

(05:21):
answer to that question. Involved having a insitution paid its
little could be that shock destrick place and did do
absolutely the contrary of what they should have done. I'm
disturbable the fact of something I can still going on

(05:42):
it Ana Wicky. I'm Josh Stein and this is camp
Hell in Awaki. I've often been asked while conducting interviews
for this podcast, how did you find out about in Awaki?
My name is Josh Stein. I'm in podcast producer. Much
of what I work on are many true crime documentary

(06:05):
style podcasts, some of which you may have heard. In
the summer of two nineteen, I was on a vacation
for my wife's birthday, visiting Disney World and staying in
neighboring Clearwater, Florida. During one of our drives, my wife's
friend Julia, knowing I had been working in true crime lately,
suggested something I'll never forget. You should do a podcast

(06:26):
on Anawaki. Anawaki? What does that even mean? What language
is it? Initially I found very little regarding an Awaki.
There is currently only a two paragraph article on the
Wikipedia page for it. I continued digging and eventually found
a rabbit hole of information, one that will continue to

(06:48):
surprise me with the depths of its scandal and those involved.
So how is my friend aware of this seemingly forgotten
dar piece of history. Well, it starts with the story
of a donkey George was quite a character. He lived

(07:09):
with my parents on the horse farm that we had
in Douglas County. He was a very interesting donkey. This
is Julia's friend, Georgia. She's a close family friend and
has known Julia mostly all her life. I grew up
in Douglasville. Moved to Douglasville when I was approximately six

(07:29):
years old with my parents from Tennessee, and grew up
there my whole life. I'm from Douglasville all the way
through in n one when we moved there, I twenty
westbound ended at Highway five in Douglasville. It did not
go any farther than that. It was kind of a sleepy,

(07:49):
sleepy little town and you know, close enough to Atlanta,
but get far enough. White, kind of a little bedroom community.
I guess that's George's mother. I'm Pat Kirkland. I currently
live in Grace and Georgia. When Georgia was a child,
the Kirklands adopted a donkey from Anna Waki. He came

(08:10):
to be a bit of a local celebrity. He did
palm Sunday at Sacred Heart Church. The Sacred Heart Church
is a massive Catholic church in Atlanta, it's towering steeple
can be seen off of alter. Boys would lead him
around and palm leaves on his back. After the first year,

(08:30):
it went over so big. I mean, the media was
there and everything. I mean, George was on TV on
the evening news, on Palm Sunday services for a long
long time. There was one Sunday he got loose and
he's running down Peachtree Street and I guess the news
did an article on it, and you know, loose donkey
in the street. He was a character who he definitely was.

(08:55):
How a donkey would come to be involved in this
story was a mystery to me. Georgia explain means. My
father was an Atlanta police officer for the mount of
Patrol and he had a good friend named Tony Morris,
who was a priest at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. Tony
used to visit the boys home to basically talk to

(09:16):
the boys see how things were going with them, and
while he was there, he noticed some abuse to this
little donkey that they had. So he came back to
my father and he said, I think that the church
might need a donkey. And my father said, Okay, where
are you going to keep it? And he said, look,

(09:37):
where's at your place? So long story short, George the
donkey came to live with us, and he came from
the Annawiki Boys Home. Georgia was still just a child
while all of this was happening. She remembers seeing George
for the first time. He said, they don't have a
place for him anymore, so we're going to keep him

(10:00):
here at our place. And I thought it was cool, thought, oh, great,
you know, a little donkey's gonna be so cute and stuff.
And then when they unloading him from the trailer, I
remember seeing his ears and I said, Dad, what's wrong
with his ears? Why aren't they so burnt? Well? I mean, what,
what are all those marks on him? And why is
he so skittish? And he's so well, that's that's a

(10:22):
story for another day. He had been abused, He had
cigarette burns on him, He had been sexually abused. I
didn't understand it at the time. This was in nineteen
seventy eight. He went through a lot while he was there,
so I can understand why he was like he was

(10:47):
poor George. Oh, poor George had cigarette burns in his ears,
on his back. It was very, very apparent that that
animal had been abused. I mean, I just can't even
amad Witchen, even with her parents trying to protect her
from what they knew was about situation. Georgia remembers how

(11:07):
she viewed an awake as a child, especially in the summertimes.
I was home with my sister and we would just
get on our horses. It was our way of entertainment,
and we would get out and stay gone all day,
and we would go past an awake, you know, riding
up but it was less than, you know, maybe five
miles from where we lived. I didn't even want to

(11:29):
ride the horse past there because it almost seemed like
just a cold dungeon. It seemed almost Pollyanna, everything's happy
on the outside, but it seemed to me on the
inside it was there was a lot of darkness in there.
I heard rumors that the boys were being abused sexually, physically,

(11:55):
and to hear. Even at my young age at the time,
and I was probably the age of some of the
boys there, I just remember feeling a lot of sadness
for them. People were pretty quiet about it. As the
years progressed, it it came out more and more. There
was just you know a lot of talk about it,

(12:18):
and it wasn't good. And I've heard this said many
many times. Those poor boys are much worse off there
than they would have been had they, you know, state
in the situation that they were in. It was a
place where they could be abused physically, sexually, mentally abused,

(12:38):
and nobody said anything about it. You know, nobody really
cared who is in charge of this place that would
let something like that go on? And I heard that
more than once. I mean, I don't know why wasn't
the law involved in it. I think that there was
a lot of money in that place, and I think

(12:59):
people just didn't want to rock the boat. I remember thinking, Wow,
how sad that must be for these people that ended
up there. They're there with people that should care about
them and care about their well being. It was almost
if you were there, you never came out, or if

(13:22):
you came out, they came out a different person. And
then it started to all make sense why this little
donkey was how he was, and that story for another
time that my father talked about, it all started to
make sense. I began to understand maybe it was offset

(13:44):
or displaced aggression that they took out on this little donkey.
I do believe animals remember, they remember good times, they
remember pain. It's my opinion that those boys were doing
to George what had been done to them, or it
was being done to them. And if that's the case,
that is awful. Makes me sick to my stomach. How

(14:09):
many people's lives, not only the boys that were there,
but the parents and everyone else. How many lives were
totally destroyed because of that. My thought when I closed
my eyes and everything is that I see that poor animal.
That that's what I see. And yes, human life is
certainly much more worthy than animal life is. But you know,

(14:34):
if it had that kind of effect on an animal,
what kind of effect did it have on those children?
You know, an animal is a living, breathing being that
was created by God, just like I was. And if
he could remember those things that stayed with those boys

(14:55):
all of their life. Even some of them may not
even still be living now, but if they are, I
can assure you that that still has an impact on
their life, their relationship with others and trust issues. You
can't ever erase that. How can you look yourself in

(15:17):
the mirror know and that you had a part of
that that you had a part of destroying and I'm
talking about totally destroying another human being. How can you
look yourself in the mirror. I don't get it. And

(15:52):
after hearing George's story, I had to find out more
about in Awaki. I started coming through newspaper articles from
through the nineties and couldn't believe how many stories there were.
It seemed at one point that Anna Waki was in
the paper almost every day. I kept finding the same
name covering this story. I'm Albert Auchen. I am a

(16:13):
producer now for CBS News in Washington. I was a
newspaper reporter for about fifteen years and began in my
hometown of Savannah, Georgia, went to Richmond, and finally to Tallahassee, Florida.
And from Tallahassee, after doing a lot of stories about
the Annawaki situation, I was hired as a consultant for

(16:34):
sixty minutes. Annawaki would come to be the story that
launched Albert's career into the mainstream. It was the main
focus of my journalism from late nine until mid n
It was the main story I was working on. There
were weeks and weeks where it was all I did.
I would spend a lot of overtime. I lived near

(16:57):
the newspaper and was back and forth, you know, at night,
keeping up with things. And of course I had to
pick up the Atlanta paper every day and see what
they had, and that could change my agenda for the day.
So it was a lot of time. Originally, the story
involved a small investigation that was taking place in Carabelle,
Florida at the time, one of three locations in a
week he would come to have. It would soon take

(17:19):
on a life of its own and become a bigger
story than they ever expected. We had a stringer, a
part timer who was covering Franklin County, anything that went
on in Franklin County, which is in the circulation area
of Tallahassee. It's west of Tallahassee in the Panhandle of Florida.
And he was a part timer and a very good journalist,

(17:41):
and he came across the story first and did a
few pieces about the situation in Carrabelle, Florida. And then
we began watching that just curiously in the newsroom, and
it was exploding at the same time up in the
Atlanta papers. So we learned about the Douglasville Facility, and
at a certain point the story grew enough where the
managing editor asked me to keep an eye on it

(18:05):
and to start doing the fundamental reporting because he wanted
a regular staff never doing it. It became a bigger
story for us than just an occasional piece from the stringer.
But after a while it became important to understand how
the system was being manipulated. So in order to understand that,
we needed to understand more about what the system was.

(18:27):
It's important here to note how in Awake he was
perceived by many of the parents who sent their children there.
Learning disabilities like a d h D and others are
now well known ailments with understood treatments of how to
deal with them. However, in the nineties sixties, parents and
teachers alike were in the dark on how to address
these issues. Enter and Awaki. It is a place where

(18:52):
the upper middle class of Atlanta sends their troubled kids. Initially,
it was supposed to be the kinds of children that
went there were very, very troubled people who had severe
debilitating not necessarily mental illness in the sense of you know,
severe pathologies, severe psychological problems that could be diagnosed medically,

(19:17):
but emotional issues which caused behavioral problems, and the behavioral
problems that they were dealing with were the kinds of
things that in those days in the sixties, conventional institutions
like schools and churches were not capable of dealing with.
When the place was established in the early sixties, they

(19:38):
may have only been taking very troubled kids, but it
seemed to me that by the time I knew anything
about it, that it had partly devolved into this place
where if you had a kid who was obstreprous and
you were financially in good shape, you could send kids
there and they would take care of them for you.

(20:03):
The Aniwaki program was based on what is called wilderness therapy.
Since the nineteen forties, wilderness therapy has proven to be
truly helpful, with many programs still practicing it today and
Awake he managed to take that and twisted into something
that would allow counselors and others to run wild with abuse.
Fundamental idea behind it was not unlike the fundamental idea

(20:26):
behind the Marine Corps. You take somebody, in this case
troubled children, and for lack of a better term, you
break them down. The goal is to make them, in
this case, self reliant. It's not like the Marines. It's
not to make them do what you tell them to do.
It's to make them learn to do what they think

(20:46):
they should be doing, to learn a set of values
and to learn a way to be self reliant. It
was innovative, but it was also subject for severe abuse.
At the top of the hierarchy was Lewis Petter, or
Doc Petter as he was known, the founder and president
of an Awake. Not a doctor in any actual degree,

(21:10):
he and his family would rule over an Awake and
its profits, taking whatever they wanted along the way. He
had innovative thoughts about child treatment and that was revolutionary
in Georgia. That was very, very commendable and got him
a lot of attention and a lot of respect. But
he had his own personal troubles in his own fundamental

(21:33):
corruption that went across the whole myriad of things. To
truly understand and Awake, I had to go back to
the beginning to see how this treatment center devolved into
what it became. The land of the friendly People. That
is said to be what the word and awake he

(21:54):
means in Cherokee, one of many Native American names which
would be used on its grounds. The irony is not lost.
The beginning of the Nawaki School for Troubled Boys is
a mysterious one. What we do know is that a
plot of land was bought in nineteen sixty two by
Lewis Petter and his wife Mabel, along with a co
worker from Petter's Jason Savannah, Georgia, named Brett Baxley or

(22:18):
Mr B. I spoke with one of the very first
patients who attended. Hey, I'm Dale Strickland. I grew up
here in Atlanta, been here since I was knee how
to goat? Grew up here a seminar euclid. Haven't you hear?
A little? Five points? And raising raised myself over on Cleveland?
Have you after that? And then went on out into
the world and started digging in. Every patient who attended

(22:41):
an awake was given a number upon entry. This was
referred to as their laundry number, as it was written
on every piece of clothing or personal item they owned.
These numbers were given chronologically, corresponding to when the patient
attended an awake. Over the course of this podcast, I
spoke with people who had numbers in the fifties into

(23:01):
the thousands. My number was seventy four. One of the
first times to years I was in the testing phase
the years in an awaken. I'm a little bit fuzzy
on sometime back in the early sixties, I was young.
I'm gonna stay around twic over thirteen somewhere, maybe eleven.
You know, it was before I started high school. I
know that because I started high school while I was there.

(23:23):
Dale says he, like many other survivors of an Awaki,
was sent for acting up in school arts Ley, in
part to his A d h D. Yeah, I was
way out of control. I was never diagnosed with the
A d D and a d h D because they
didn't know anything about it at the time. When they
did learn about it, I was long out of an Awaki,
but I went there for a d D and a
d h D. A lot a lot of lines, stealing,

(23:45):
you know, talking back and getting in a lot of
trouble and just you know, pretty much normal kids stuff.
But you know, hearing it too extremes, mostly because of
my A d D and D. Dale remembers first meeting
Louis Petder before attending in Awaki. At this point in time,
pet Or did not yet have an office on campus
and was using a professional building in downtown Atlanta to
conduct his business. We were taking down to the King

(24:08):
Professional Building. I was and my parents walked in Dr
Petter's office and I was allowed to meet Dr Petter
and he, you know, shook hands with me, and we
talked for a long time there, and then my parents
left the room, and then I spoke with Doc by myself.
And after that, and I would say about three months later,

(24:28):
I was in an Awaken. When first entering in Awaki,
residents were cut off from any contact with their family. Well,
you first have to go out there, and you've got
three months that you can't visit with your parents anything.
I said, that's probably about the worst part of it,
you know, waiting those three months. You're trying to adjust,
you know, and and get everything together. I mean you

(24:50):
can write letters and stuff and and send them mail
on everything, but you weren't allowed to view them for
ninety days. Being one of the first attendees of an Awaki,
Dell was the first to be subjected to what was
referred to at the time as the quiet Room. This
room would serve as the equivalent of solitary confinement, and
would go on to be an essential part of the

(25:10):
entry process to anawaki. This would later be called and
oh or evaluation and observation. I'm the only one that
went there at this time. I was the only one
in there. I had gotten a fight with somebody, can't
remember who it was, and they just snatched my butt
up and put me in what we called the quiet room.
It was a stainless steel mesh with hard edges around it,

(25:34):
like a channel line, you know. And I was in there,
I want to say, for maybe about three or four week.
Oh yeah, like a month. I really have nobody to
talk to you about yourself. Nobody come by and visit you.
They're bringing your food when it's time to have that now.
And other than that, that was it like a regular
jail cell. It was solite confoment. I got my first

(25:56):
taste at thirteen. Yeah. Dale remembers what the day to

(26:17):
day schedule was like for the first patience of an awake.
You start out in the morning and you get up
and you had to bake your beds up. Okay, you're
responsible for waking yourself up, and then somebody run around
the campit and say all right, let's go, come on
when I got five minutes. If you don't get up
like you're supposed to, the first place you go to
is the reality Partner. That's for you buddies. I'll pick

(26:39):
you up on your blanket and walk you down to
the creek and didn't chuck you. But an't it. That's
called the reality part Okay, one time that happened to me.
That's only one time. Everybody would all meet down by
the Reality upon it and then we leave from there
and you walk around the lake and go over to
the lodge and you would sit out there. Your group
goes in and certain time, and then after you have

(26:59):
your meal, you'd come back out and you would go
down by the toolship, which is the ways down. And
when you get down by the toolshed, you stop down
there and you check out the tools that you plan
to work on whatever project for that day, and you
check them out, and you've been go overy and go
to work. If it was cutting down a tree, you
cut down a tree. If it was putting moaning up
in the cabin, you was put moaning up in a cabin.

(27:21):
Whatever project deemed necessary, to be done that week is
what she was working on. It's hard to imagine groups
of children no older than ten or eleven being able
to handle some of the work which Dale describes. This
would be hard physical labor for a grown man, much
less an untrained child. One common thing I would continue
to see in my interviews is the long term effects

(27:43):
this work would have on the bodies of the survivors.
We does a porter potty. We've cut down trees and
split logs and shaved them all down where they were
smoothed enough to sit on. We put moating up in
the cabins. We fixed wiring in the cabins then and
people were put up their pants or build a frame
cabins over there, and build a buildings and once the

(28:06):
block was up, we're going in, said all the trust is,
and run the roof out on it and everything. And
then we did all of it. I learned the first
patients of an Awaki were actually helping build the campus
for the place which they were supposed to be attending,
including Doc's office, clear up to the time that that
we built the a building out there on the campus,

(28:26):
and then that's when he moved his office out there.
And the layout for the building out there for him
to be in was party laid out land that we
just had to build it. This construction done by the
early patients would become the inner structure from which all
other in Awaki business would be done over the years.
It would also serve as a template or how to
further expand. In a week, He's reach, building the a

(28:50):
building was one of the biggest things that we've done.
Then they went and built the lodge. After that, the
new lodge and some more campuses got built. Everything was
still the same. You're still owning, you're still putting stuff up.
When you got through, you could go, man, did you
see that? You know? We did. Look what we did,
you know, and we were proud to show it off,
you know, just like any normal person would be proud.

(29:14):
I asked Dale if he considers the work he was
doing at such a young age as a form of
child labor. No, because we were we were learning to
be responsible on adults. It taught me a lot for
the future. It taught me a lot. We learned how
to do stuff, We learned how to be the better
or the best. I guess by knowing before we even
got to the project. You know, we knew what to do,

(29:36):
what tools to use, uh, how to get it done,
what you could and couldn't do. I think you learned responsibility.
I think you learned how to be an adult. We
built that awaking. We were proud of what we've done.
You know, not only was an awake he getting their
labor for free from its patients, it also came at
a cost to the parents involved. Even in the seventies,

(29:59):
this was not cheap, and it only became more expensive.
My mother sold her three bedroom too bad at home
my granddaddy Belcher up at Lately and Near and bade
him over ninety thousand dollars. That's back in the seventies,
so that's a lot of money. She shouldn't have lost
that on me then, but she'd made it. Dale remembers
Lewis Petter, the founder van Awak, fondly. The guy was very,

(30:24):
very likable, very likable. You know, I didn't think I
had to throw an old you know, I how you
throw you all night defenses up. Never like I had
to do that. You know, I didn't never feel like
I had to protect myself or hide anything from him.
And he just pointed looking at you and asked you
a question, and you just answered it. I felt very comfortable.
Roundy Dale stands by his statement that he was never

(30:45):
abused while at in awake and never saw any abuse happen.
For him, it was a learning experience that he feels
helped him in life. I asked him if he thought
there could have been an inappropriate behavior, even if he
himself did not see it. You know, you have to
ask the question, okay, because these young guys would would

(31:08):
go on the weekends to spend the night with dock
docks house or whatever. Nobody ever really claimed him to
be homosexual things, but it was thought of that way
by a couple of people. But the ones that went
were all very perfectly willing to go. I'm not saying
it's not possible. I'm not even saying it's It's problem

(31:30):
was that we don't know, because we really wasn't there.
Dale claims that any time something inappropriate happened, it was
dealt with swiftly. In his time, it an'tawaki deal were calls.
One counselor that was removed from the staff. He's his
name is George Lemmo. He lived down here somewhere I
don't know where now, but by now he's got to
be Will in his seventies or eighties is kind of

(31:52):
be he just hitting up on time to get him
to play with him at all, you know, And any
time that was brought up, all we know is that
come on missing the next day. It's just it's yeah,
it's disgusting. It shouldn't be going on. Deal was a
young child during his time at an Awaki, and his
experiences stayed with him his whole life. When the inn

(32:14):
Awaki scandal would later come to light, Deal visited Doc
himself to see if he believed Petter could be capable
of what he had heard. I know it's hard for
people to understand, but when you find somebody good in
your life that you feel like I did something for
you in your life, you're gonna protect him at all cost.
It's what you do. I wanted to know the truth,

(32:37):
and I could look at him when he told me,
and he knew I knew it. So walked up to him,
hugged his neck and hug Mabel's neck and say, I'm
the kitchen with him, and they started explaining to him,
and I said, you know what, it don't matter to me.
What you say. My time for you were this, okay,

(32:57):
you're two of the most special people in my life
ever had being and what other people say, don't make
this ship to me and it didn't, you know, as
you want to happen. That's what he's gonna say. He
didn't do it, and that's where it's at. He said
he didn't do it. He must not have done it.
But once again, I'll read the bullshit real well, believed in. No. Now,

(33:22):
I can't talk like that. That'd be bad. Dale's story
is one of many I've heard in the past year
regarding people's experience at Aintawaki, each one different, many of
them heartbreaking. When I first began looking into this story,
I had no idea where it would take me. It
seemed at each turn, when I thought I knew the
whole story, another fact would emerge that would turn it

(33:44):
on its head again. In the past year, I've interviewed
dozens of an AWAKEI survivors, government and state officials who
were involved, and even some former counselors. They all seem
to have one thing in common, and that was that
nobody truly knew with the whole story. This season on

(34:07):
Camp Hell in a week, Think and awake he and
you see Dr Lewis Petta. Dr Petta, who's not a
doctor and yet lorded over his youthful patients as though
by a background in training he was properly prepared to
help them. It was a big deal. Nothing happened at
the sheriff's office. We went to the stage child Welfare program.

(34:30):
They didn't want to hear it. We went to the newspaper,
to the Atlanta Journal. We went to an attorney all
by ourselves, and we went in and he didn't want
any part of it. We tried everything we could. Department
of Family and Children's Services actually placed boys in that camp,
even though they knew about what he did in Savannah.

(34:51):
I can't say that we dropped the ball, but I
also can't tell you that we did not. If an
agency does not report any reports that they might have
of alleged child abuse, it is very difficult for us
to pick that up. It's certainly the biggest case I
was involved in, from how many people were affected and

(35:11):
many people were hurt, how much time was involved, how
much resources were involved. The g b I is also
considering sending agents to Mexico, where Mr Petter owns property
as it broadens its investigation into the Anawaki operation. This
could be a good place, This could be a wonderful place,
but it's not an awake he founder. Lewis Petter's bond

(35:34):
has not been set at one million dollars. Mr Petter,
do you have any comment about the charges against except
that he's innocently Up until recently, charges a sexual misconduct
had nothing leveled against the Aniwaki Facility for girls here
in rock Mark. Now it too has come under fire
with former female patients alleging they were victims of sexual abuse.

(35:59):
Many of us are already deceased and we're only in
our early to late diftease. And it hurts me real
bad to hear people saying that my father cheated them.
My father has cheated no one there dn't awake. You
testify to that these like cons of things Louis Petter

(36:21):
will do. Louis Petter cras islas to do go the
tricks on people to try to help them. He thinks
they're hurting him. And I spent three months in the
hospital remember the name out of wicked and the months

(36:42):
years to come. It may stand for a story, the
tragic half of which has yet to be told. Camp
how Anna Wake was created and hosted by Josh Thane,

(37:03):
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 p

(37:23):
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 l dot org. That's d
the number two l dot org. Camp hell Ana Wake
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,

(37:43):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.