A few of Aangirfan's previous posts on the subject:
The most recent, and
another British case,
here in France and Britain, Ireland and the US.
Maybe I've simply been not paying attention, but I've not read recently of conspired abuse of boys and girls taking place in the USA... until now, that is.
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| 'Break 'em down to build them back as killers' |
Alexandra Zayas and Katherine Flynn have spent a year researching and writing In God's Name, a series for the Tampa Bay Times that focuses on boarding schools and military camps for children, which in Florida are exempted from licensing provided they are 'religious' in nature.
Now, while I have little faith in the State's ability to shield children from the monsters who would abuse them, the fact that any man or woman can open such a home and then, with a veneer of religion, operate that home without any sort of oversight seems to be a recipe for disaster for those children entrusted to their care. As the series states: "Today, virtually anyone can claim a list of religious ideals, take in children and subject them to punishment and isolation that verge on torture — so long as they quote chapter and verse to justify it.
About 85% of the series is provided below, though should one wish to read it in its entirety or view photos associated with the series, it is recommended you follow the link and read the series on the Tampa Bay Times website.
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| Fatigues and judeochristianity... train the young to follow figures of Authority |
"... nearly a dozen have been hounded by allegations of abuse. A review of thousands of pages of investigative files and interviews with dozens of former residents found:
• State authorities have responded to at least 165 allegations of abuse and neglect in the past decade, but homes have remained open even after the state found evidence of sex abuse and physical injury.
• The religious exemption has for decades allowed homes to avoid state restrictions on corporal punishment. Homes have pinned children to the ground for hours, confined them in seclusion for days, made them stand until they wet themselves and exercised them until they vomited.
• Children have been bruised, bloodied and choked to unconsciousness in the name of Christian discipline. A few barely escaped with their lives. In addition, in two settled lawsuits, a mother said her son was forced to hike on broken feet; a father said his son was handcuffed, bound at the feet, locked away for three days and struck by other boys at the instruction of the home.
• Adults have ordered children to participate in the punishment, requiring them to act as jailers, to bully troublemakers or to chase, tackle and sit on their peers.
• Teens have been denounced as sinners, called "faggots" and "whores," and humiliated in front of their peers for menstrual stains and suspicions of masturbation.
• Parents share the blame. Some sign away their children for a year or more without first visiting a home or checking credentials. But state officials bear some responsibility because they have not warned the public about programs they believe are abusive.
• Florida taxpayers have supported some unlicensed homes with hundreds of thousands of dollars in McKay scholarships — a government program to help special needs students pay tuition at private schools.
In Florida, the vast majority of children's homes are regulated and inspected by the state Department of Children and Families. But under Florida law, a home can shield itself from that oversight by claiming a religious exemption.
Instead of state-trained child safety workers, these homes are regulated by the Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies, a private, nonprofit group run almost entirely by the same people who run the homes.
FACCCA executive director Buddy Morrow said his organization condemns extended isolation, humiliation and the shackling of children. He also said the association aggressively monitors homes for abusive practices, but he refused to provide copies of inspection reports and other documentation.
Morrow would not talk about specific homes, but he said his association has revoked or refused to renew accreditation for at least three homes since 2005. Some continued to operate — without a state license or a religious exemption — the Times found.
At least four religious homes are accepting children without any legally recognized credentials. Foster children in state care have been illegally placed in at least two of those homes, the Times discovered.
But in the nearly 30 years since Florida began allowing religious exemptions, state officials have never tallied up how much abuse was occurring at the homes they stopped regulating.
DCF alone has conducted at least 165 investigations into the mistreatment of children.
Its investigators found evidence to support allegations in more than a third of those cases — 63 incidents at 17 homes with a list of offenses that include physical injury, medical neglect, environmental hazards, threatened harm, bizarre punishment, inadequate supervision, mental injury, asphyxiation and sexual abuse.
Among the cases DCF "verified:" a 16-year-old girl in Orlando pressured to perform oral sex on a counselor she considered a father figure; a 15-year-old boy in Punta Gorda forced to lie facedown in the dirt for three hours as a 220-pound counselor lay on top of him; and a 16-year-old boy in Port St. Lucie, shackled for 12 days and berated by staff with racial slurs.
.... On the other side of the state, 16-year-old Cody Livingston found himself at Camp Tracey, a fundamentalist Baptist reform program on the rural outskirts of Jacksonville.
When Livingston got caught smoking cigarettes, they made him eat one. When he cursed, they made him swallow two spoonfuls of citrus-scented liquid soap, he said. "If I didn't do it, then I didn't get to eat that night."
But that paled in comparison to what he says happened when he got caught engaging in sexual activity with other boys in 2008.
They told him his mother didn't want him. They shaved his head. They made him carry two 5-gallon buckets of dirt everywhere he went, and at night, run laps around the dorm with a tire tied to his waist. They let him speak to no one but staff, and only if he was spoken to first, and they made him sleep on the floor of a mudroom for a week or more, giving him a bucket to use as a toilet.
.... The home's website in 2009 called Steven Blankenship executive director for "New Beginnings Girls Academy." On that site, Blankenship — now director at Marvelous Grace — said he found God "after years of living as a Satanist and a Witch."
.... Dozens sat in folding chairs outside the children's home and applauded their sons, once drug-addicted and defiant, as they marched in camouflage and recited in perfect unison this passage from Hebrews:
Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves.
... Anyone can run a program that houses troubled children in Florida. • Even Alan Weierman. • In the past decade, state officials have investigated an unlicensed military program run by the self-titled “colonel” 24 times and found evidence that kids were punched, kicked, slammed into hard objects and choked to unconsciousness. • They know about a boy who left Weierman’s home in 2004 on the verge of kidney failure. • And another boy who was shackled for 12 days in 2008 and called a “black monkey.” • They say Weierman, a Christian minister, has repeatedly crossed the line of abuse in his three decades running religious group homes in this state. Regulators have tried to shut him down. • The state license to operate his children’s home lasted only two years.
Eight years ago, he lost a religious exemption that had allowed him to keep his reform home open without government oversight.
So now he operates without any state-recognized accreditation at all.
He has even had to answer allegations of sexual abuse and of failing to report abuse alleged by a girl at his facility.
.... The Department of Children and Families can storm into licensed homes, order changes and remove children. But the department’s ultimate weapon — revoking a home’s license — is virtually meaningless.
Lose your state license and you can apply for a religious exemption. Lose that and you can register as a “boarding school.”
Each time, the process starts over. New regulators with different rules come to visit.
Each step down the regulatory ladder relaxes the standards required of a children’s home.
Or you can start out as a “boarding school” and skip the hassles of licensing and government oversight altogether.
... Southeastern Military Academy abuts Florida’s Turnpike on an unfenced property in Port St. Lucie where anyone can see boys sweat in a sand pit, counting exercises for a man in fatigues.
That man, 50-year-old Alan Weierman, is big and tall and wears his graying hair high and tight; “snow on top,” he calls the style.
Smiling, drinking coffee in his combat boots, he has been up for five hours when he greets visitors at 9 a.m. on a recent Wednesday. He hands them a business card emblazoned with a U.S. Army logo and the title “colonel.”
Weierman is not affiliated with any branch of the military. Nor has he ever been close to the rank of colonel. He says he tried to join the Army more than three decades ago but was dismissed after six weeks because he was allergic to bees.
“I’m not sorry where I’m at today,” he said. “It all comes around to where you still get to serve. Training young men is like being in the military. It’s like training soldiers all over again — kids with no respect for parents, no respect for police, or themselves.”
Weierman says he instills that respect in the dozen boys in his care.
He takes in “recruits” as young as 11, strips them of individuality, dictates rules and nitpicks for infractions. When they break and lose control, he says, he builds them back up.
“It doesn’t matter to me why he’s here. It doesn’t matter to me even what he thinks about being here,” Weierman said. “He understands there is compliance. He must understand there are rules.”
Weierman’s program is built around discipline that would never be allowed at a state licensed home.
Parents sign a contract allowing corporal punishment and giving up the right to sue, even if their child dies.
Weierman says he hasn’t had to shackle a boy in years, but reserves the right to do it when a boy presents a threat or tries to run away.
While the home has been accused by state child protection workers of abusive treatment, nothing has been proved to rise to criminal child abuse.
Moving to Florida
Weierman scoffs at the idea that the harsh discipline doled out at his group home amounts to child abuse. He says he knows real abuse.
“My dad shot me when I was 13 years old, trying to kill me,” he said. “I was ripped out of bed many nights and beaten bloody, simply because I failed to close a gate or shut a door.”
He grew up hard in Ohio in the 1970s. By 17, he said, he had racked up criminal charges, including armed robbery. A judge told him to choose between the military or jail.
Around that time, he met William Brink, a preacher who had an Ohio group home and ministered to delinquent youths. Brink invited Weierman to live at the religious home.
He showed up with long hair and a leather vest.
“I was just 12 ways of bad.”
But Weierman quickly gained Brink’s trust and at 19, he married the preacher’s daughter. They worked together at the children’s home in the early 1980s, when Ohio regulators required the home to stop using corporal punishment.
In 1984, Florida legislators passed a law that would allow religious homes to use corporal punishment if they could justify it with Scripture.
Weierman’s father-in-law was among the first to apply. In 1985, he opened Victory Children’s Home, a home for abused and abandoned children in Fort Pierce.
His son-in-law would soon work there.
But not before leaving behind an allegation in Ohio.
In 1986, a 16-year-old girl told police she had had sex with Weierman more than 30 times. The girl passed a lie-detector test and had kept a calendar of the sexual encounters, the local police chief told theAkron Beacon Journal at the time.
Weierman denied the allegations. And prosecutors declined to press charges, saying there wasn’t enough evidence.
Still, Brink and his home took criticism. After learning of the girl’s allegations months before the police, group home officials conducted their own investigation. They deemed the allegations false and never reported them to police.
Three years later, Weierman would find himself in a similar position. He investigated sex abuse claims against his new home’s director without informing police.
Police later arrested Weierman and accused him of tampering with a witness and failure to report child abuse. Although the charges were dropped, Weierman now says he should have called police as soon as he heard the girl’s allegation.
A few years later, his father-in-law was convicted in Ohio of sexual abuse involving a 14-year-old resident he took in as his daughter and a 16-year-old he made his wife.
Brink went to prison.
Weierman remained in charge of the Florida home, now split from the Ohio pastor.
A state license
Through the 1990s, Weierman would continue to have problems. State abuse investigators were called to his campus at least four times, finding evidence once that Victory Children’s Home was using excessive corporal punishment.
At the end of the decade, despite years of complaints, DCF granted Weierman a state license to run a foster home in Florida. The license meant more stringent rules and more state inspections, but it allowed Weierman’s home to accept children seized from parents by child protection workers.
Both sides soon had regrets.
In 2000 alone, DCF records show six child abuse allegations: a boy thrown by a staff member, one dragged and beaten by a peer then refused medical treatment, a boy abandoned in the parking lot of another youth shelter, and kids being hit with a belt and slammed against walls and the ground.
Reports show DCF investigators found credible evidence in four of the cases, including those involving asphyxiation and beatings.
Weierman denies all abuse allegations.
“If I said to you, ‘If you don’t straighten up, I’m going to kick the snot out of you,’ is that threatened harm? I don’t know,” he said. “Child abuse requires intent to commit harm. You have to intend to commit the harm.”
Weierman said he regrets getting a state license, saying the state’s requirement that his children have access to an abuse hotline led to a spate of false reports.
“If you’re a licensed facility, you have to make a phone available to any child,” Weierman said. “At times, I had eight investigators here at a time?…
“Children can lie.”
By the end of 2000, DCF had had enough.
On the day the agency was scheduled to present evidence to a judge to revoke Weierman’s license, he surrendered it.
But that wasn’t the end.
A second chance
When a group home that calls itself Christian can’t or won’t get a license, when it is chased out of another state for refusing oversight, or, like Weierman’s, when it fails to meet government standards, Florida provides a fallback:
FACCCA accreditation.
Florida is among a handful of states that legally recognize a religious exemption when it comes to licensing children’s homes.
By law, exempted facilities must register with the Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies, a nonprofit group that accredits homes. The association has long allowed homes to strike children with paddles, so long as they justify it with the Bible and pray with the child afterward.
Weierman surrendered his home’s state license on Feb. 12, 2001. The following month, DCF got a letter saying FACCCA had accredited his home.
Under FACCCA, Weierman was able to shut down direct access to the state’s child abuse hotline, which was created to dispatch authorities any time allegations are reported.
Longtime child advocate Jack Levine, who opposed the religious exemption when it was voted into law in 1984, says such safeguards exist for a reason. To complain that kids lie is just a way of avoiding scrutiny, he said.
“It’s so easy to find an excuse for doing the wrong thing,” he said. “You can blame the child. You can blame the system. You can sit around and make excuses for any kind of malfeasance, but that doesn’t make it right.”
Weierman’s home was accredited by FACCCA for three years. The complaints kept coming.
2002: The facility has been locking kids up in chains to keep them from running.
2002: Many of the children have current bruises or have had bruises in the past.
2003: Alan Weierman grabbed a child by the neck and slammed him against the wall with force.
2004: A staff member punched (a child) in the mouth and kneed him in the chest... As a result, his mouth was bleeding.
Investigating these cases, DCF found credible evidence of beatings, inappropriate or excessive restraints, bruises or welts and physical injury.
Michele Muccigrosso sued Weierman’s corporation, saying her 12-year-old son, Dillon, was made to hike on broken feet.
“Our insurance company settled,” Weierman said. “That’s the learning curve. ... We marched them a lot, younger guys, 10, 11, 12 years old. Plates are still growing in their feet. We cut back the marching.”
Muccigrosso said the home disregarded a doctor’s order that her son not hike.
“He was in a wheelchair for five months.”
FACCCA cut ties with Weierman in June 2004. Its executive director later told police it was because the religious home had become a boot camp.
FACCCA officials have declined to provide the Times records of inspections, complaints or investigations at any of the homes it has accredited. They said they do not accredit boot camps because they are “not appropriate.”
The last rung
After failing under two separate forms of oversight in less than four years, Weierman was not shut down.
Instead, he took advantage of a loophole in state law that allows children’s homes to skirt oversight by calling themselves “boarding schools.”
Department of Education officials keep a list of boarding schools, but do not police them. They do not inspect the campuses or establish discipline standards for the schools.
A state law passed in 2006 says boarding schools must be accredited by one of five scholastic organizations.
But those groups focus on academics. And no one has been checking to make sure the schools meet the requirement.
Weierman’s program has not been accredited under the boarding school rules since it registered as one, under the name Victory Forge, in 2004.
With the new name, came new complaints.
In July 2004, Weierman says, a boy left on the verge of kidney failure after being forced to endure what the colonel called an “extreme” amount of exercise.
Weierman said the boy’s kidneys were not functioning correctly and staff at the home made it worse by forcing him to drink a quart of water an hour.
“The more we did that, the more damage was caused by doing that,” Weierman said. “There was no way we could know.”
Weierman said a detective gave him “accolades” for catching the damage on time.
DCF made a “verified” finding of medical neglect.
Then, on April 6, 2008, Port St. Lucie police officers came upon the aftermath of a capture.
A runaway sat shirtless on a bench outside a middle school, cuffed at the hands, shackled at the ankles, surrounded by Weierman’s staff and the boys who had taken him down. He bore a 5-inch red mark on his neck.
“Please take me to jail,” 16-year-old Lochane Smith told the officers. “I don’t want to go back.”
When an officer questioned the home’s authority to shackle the student, Weierman cursed and yelled, police reports show. “If you had a black kid like that,” he told police, “you would put him in handcuffs also.”
The police took Smith to the station, where they got his story.
He said he had been shackled for 12 days, chained at the wrists even as he slept on his top bunk and released only to shower.
Employees had punched him, choked him, thrown him against the walls.
He ran when he got a chance, vaulting over the fence, darting across the highway.
The home sent a search party, including boys.
He told police a recruit named Tango ran toward him yelling “I’m going to get you, black boy,” then tackling him and choking him, until an employee told Tango, “You better stop, the police are coming.”
DCF interviewed the 15 other boys at the facility and determined all had been in some way mistreated — bruised, bloodied, choked, shackled, subjected to “cruel and unusual punishment.”
One had been called an “Iraqi” and a “rag head.”
Smith had been called a “black monkey.”
Soon after the incident, DCF called parents to take their boys home.
Police spoke to those same boys, who reported they saw Smith being pushed, dragged and “tossed around.” But the police determined none of his injuries rose to child abuse.
St. Lucie County Assistant State Attorney Jeff Hendriks wrote a letter saying no charges would be filed, in part, because parents had consented to corporal punishment.
In an interview from the jail where he landed years later on robbery charges, Smith, now 21, said the abuse was worse than that police report suggests.
He said staff slammed his head into the walls on the first day because he cried and pushed his face in the sand.
Smith said he was made to stand all day and allowed to urinate on himself.
“Some boot camps help people,” he said, “but Victory Forge made me worse.
“Look how I ended up.
“I pray nothing like what happened to me happens to someone else.”
‘Good faith effort’
In 2009, DCF tried to force Weierman to submit to oversight or shut down for good.
By then, he was calling his home Southeastern Military Academy and had registered it as a boarding school.
DCF sued, saying the registration and name changes were “evidence of his intent to circumvent and subvert” statute. The lawsuit summarized a history that included 35 prior child abuse allegations.
The staff at this facility, DCF wrote, continues to cross the line between acceptable discipline and abuse.
DCF attorneys argued that Weierman had no license or accreditation. Under state law, he should be considered a rogue foster home and be barred from accepting children.
But in a March 2011 order, St. Lucie Circuit Judge Dan L. Vaughn found that Weierman was making a “good faith effort” to get accredited and denied DCF’s request for an injunction.
A year later, Weierman is still trying to get accredited. He has applied with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, which accredits public and private schools. The process takes a couple of years. Weierman says his home is up for review in March.
“I’m hoping and I’m praying they don’t look at the politics of it,” he said.
Still in business
For now, Southeastern Military Academy continues its daily routine.
Weierman still doesn’t have a problem threatening to beat a kid into a “bloody mud puddle.”
He needs to let them know he’s in charge.
When they threaten to fight him, he threatens them back — “I’m going to hurt you,” “I’m going to send you to the hospital,” “With my dying breath, I’m going to take you with me.”
“It’s all bull,” he said. “It’s all just a facade.”
But that facade is how Weierman molds his rebellious young boys.
At the academy, every action is scrutinized. A wrinkle in a bedsheet, a boot misplaced by 2 inches — all are worthy of punishment, because, to Weierman, all indicate something inside the boy is still defiant. Throughout the day, recruits get lists of orders they must follow. But instructors switch up orders to cause confusion and create a reason to dole out punishment.
Any excuse is good enough. If a student asks permission to do something that’s already on his to-do list, he is punished.
Twenty-five push-ups here, 150 side-straddle hops there. Boys spend many hours in the “pit.”
They can also can get swats and lose family visits.
Michaela Mattox turned to Weierman to deal with the 14-year-old son she couldn’t control. He was defiant, running away, smoking marijuana.
She left him at the academy five months ago without touring the home and now has regrets. She doesn’t even know the names of the “captains” on the phone.
She has read about other boys’ allegations online.
And when she speaks to her son on the phone, with staff listening, he cries so hard, she can barely understand what he says.
Your son may complain to you about unbearable pain, crying that it’s too hard, says parent literature.DON’T BE FOOLED!
Among the most feared punishments is being sentenced to bowls of “stuff.”
Boys on “stuff” must down soggy bowls of vegetables, swimming in vinegar and designed not to go down easy.
They get “stuff” every meal, every day until they complete their sentence. Some go more than a week with nothing else to eat. If they don’t finish a bowl, it gets served up at the next meal.
Forcing kids to eat “stuff” may sound like juvenile hazing, but state child safety regulators have labeled it “bizarre punishment.”
Weierman doesn’t buy it.
“It’s mind over matter,” Weierman recently told a few boys, who had 15 minutes to shovel the peas and corn into their mouths.
“It’s just vegetables.”
They lifted their bowls to drink the acidic dregs.
One gagged.
Another vomited.
Yeah. That's 21st century America. Where even freedoms are judeafied. Sick bastards running 'military schools' and invoking Christ's name in their physical and mental abuse of young boys and girls.
Some of you new visitors may not understand how I could support my accusatory label of 'judeafied' when it comes to these religious warehouses for children. If that's the case for you, ask yourself: What appears to be Christ-like about the way in which these homes are operated? Is it the threats of physical abuse? The lying? The beatings and chaining? Was that Christ's overall message? "What I want y'all to do is really control shit, OK?" said Jesus. "Make the young wear uniforms and learn to march and follow orders and be good soldiers, cause we gotz ta kick some azz!! Humiliate all who fail to turn over their authority to you! Whips and Chains! That's my message!" Yet what 'race' of people tolerates systematic abuse of babies? What race allows for sex with children who've not reached puberty? What race was the dark force behind slavery in the Americas? If you really don't know, you need to continue reading this blog as well as the others I've conveniently provided for you to the right of this post.
One interesting point to make is this: there are not many accusations of sexual abuse in regards to the children documented in this series. The one thing they had going for them is the fact that they all had at least one parent looking out for (no matter how misguided they might be in entrusting their offspring to these 'Christian' ministers and 'colonels') their interests. They might be chained, beaten, and mentally abused, but at least they eventually pass thru these houses of horrors and are released into adulthood.
Pity the poor orphan without a father or mother or other blood relation in his or her life. These tend to be the children who, when placed into orphanages of this world, can vanish into the ether.
One interesting point to make is this: there are not many accusations of sexual abuse in regards to the children documented in this series. The one thing they had going for them is the fact that they all had at least one parent looking out for (no matter how misguided they might be in entrusting their offspring to these 'Christian' ministers and 'colonels') their interests. They might be chained, beaten, and mentally abused, but at least they eventually pass thru these houses of horrors and are released into adulthood.
Pity the poor orphan without a father or mother or other blood relation in his or her life. These tend to be the children who, when placed into orphanages of this world, can vanish into the ether.
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