$11M suit filed against Utah treatment center for sexual abuse | ksl.com

$11M suit filed against Utah treatment center for sexual abuse | ksl.com.

West Ridge Academy in the News Again over Sex Abuse Lawsuits

In the latest of media coverage surrounding West Ridge Academy(AKA Utah Boys Ranch, Mormon Gulag), the executives have chosen to place a current resident on camera instead of facing the camera themselves.  The apparently believe that one boy claiming his experience was positive, negates the decades of systematic physical and sexual abuse. Click the link below for the video clip of the Fox News segment.

http://www.fox13now.com/news/local/kstu-more-speak-out-over-west-ridge-acadamy-performance-claims-of-abuse-20120112,0,7150232.story

Child Sex Abuse Victims Announce Lawsuit Against West Ridge Academy in Los Angeles

January 11, 2012

A press conference was held in front of the Los Angeles County Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) building today,  to announce a lawsuit involving child sex abuse at West Ridge Academy (formerly known as the Utah Boys Ranch). Eric Norwood, a Los Angeles County resident, spoke to members of the press regarding the systematic sexual and physical abuse he witnessed and endured at West Ridge Academy (Utah Boys Ranch).

Victims speak to the press in Valencia, CA about sexual abuse

Eric Norwood was joined by Joelle Casteix, Western Regional Director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), attorney Michele Betti, and another abuse victim Danny Livingston. The press conference was held in front of the DCFS building to announce the lawsuit and to encourage more victims to come forward. L.A County taxpayers have a right to know their tax money is being spent on a Mormon-run, out-of-state facility with a history of sexual and physical violence and even deaths.

Mr. Norwood and Mr. Livingston, two of the victims that spoke at the press conference today about sexual abuse, physical abuse, and torture at the hands of West Ridge Academy staff, want other current and past victims who still suffer to stand up and bring the perpetrators to justice. They also urge the L.A County Department of Health Services to stop (or at the very least suspend their financial support, pending investigation) paying for California youth to be sent to West Ridge Academy / Utah Boys Ranch where they are likely to be physically, sexually or otherwise abused.

Orange County, CA spends 4.7 Million Tax Dollars on Out-of-State Residential Treatment Centers

by Eric Norwood

This nearly 5 million dollar budget is for a little more than one hundred Orange County youth to be placed in notoriously abusive, out-of-state facilities that operate in a way that – if located in California – would be illegal. One thing should also be clear: this is not for mandatory placement. The decision to actually send one of these 103 youth to one of these facilities, California’s expense, is made by the parents. In other words, we are not talking about mandated treatment, foster care, inpatient mental health services, or the juvenile justice system.

Programs funded by this Orange County “Master Agreement” include:

West Ridge Academy

Alpine Academy

Yellowstone Boys and Girls Ranch

Heritage Schools, Inc.

and 16 other private residential treatment facilities outside of the state of California.

From the staff report:

Participating providers are compensated at fixed daily rates, which are all-inclusive rates that provide reimbursement for individual, group and family therapy, medication evaluation and monitoring, and case management services.  The estimated FY 2011-12 costs for services to be provided under the Master Agreement are $4,700,000.  The funding level for the proposed Master Agreement is the same as FY 2010-11.

Orange County Board of Supervisors Agenda Staff Report 5/24/2011

Why is the Utah State Employees’ Charitable Fund Financing Child Abuse?

For some strange reason, the Utah State Employees’ Charitable Fund seems to consistently disburse, in seemingly arbitrary amounts, funds to West Ridge Academy / Utah Boys Ranch / Mormon Gulag.

The connection between the Utah State Employees Charitable Fund and West Ridge Academy is still unclear, but below are just some of the documented – and in very strange amounts – donations from the USECF.

We’ve reached out to the Utah State Employees’ Charitable Fund to ask why they choose to fund an institution that has such a sordid history of abusing children, and how much – exactly – they have contributed, but have yet to receive a response.

$222.56 from Beverly Jackson, President of USECF

A donation for, oddly, just $20 from the same Utah State Employees' Charitable Fund

Within months of another donation from the Utah State Employees' Charitable Fund, President Denise Beaudoin is thanked for a donation of $284.44

 

West Ridge Academy Sexual Abuse Lawsuit # 3

Eric Norwood v. Children and Youth Services Inc. et al

West Ridge Academy Sexual Abuse Lawsuit # 2

Doe et al v. West Ridge Academy

West Ridge Academy Sexual Abuse Lawsuit # 1

Elsey v. West Ridge Academy

Clearing Time: Fighting a Mormon Gulag

Footage for this short film was shot in 2009.

Watch the full short here:

The Scarecrow Festival

by Daniel Martin

Once a year, there was a massive coordinated week long function known as the Scarecrow Festival, which many of the others guys who had been unfortunate long term prisoners of the Ranch were all too familiar with. It was to be a two weeks of difficulty that, save for the warnings of the other boys, I was unprepared for. School was stopped for the entirety of two weeks and in its place we were used as forced labor to build a large city fair-like carnival. The whole process was a sadistic, self-perpetuating game in punishment and abuse. The festival was to be one of the largest sources of revenue for the Ranch and we were forced to construct it. We were being forced to be the very source of labor needed to bring in money that is used to keep the Ranch operating so we could go on bringing about more punishment on ourselves and future victims of West Ridge Academy. It was during my single stint during this slave labor for the building of the Scarecrow Festival where one of my only direct dealings with D. Chris Buttars occurred.

If I could speak to him now, I’d say that as a sixteen year old frightened youth I was terrified by his threats, but now as I have aged, studied and lived I can come to him now not with fear but with rage and pity. Rage for the lack justice’s ability to ensnare him and pity for how much of a disappointment to reason, tolerance and human kind he is.

I was held after the day’s slave labor the night before the festival was to begin. Daniel Martino, a young man from Dallas and new victim of the ranch simply because his elder cousin, Tannin Martino, was admitted mere months before he was, also was selected to stay behind. We were told, nay coached, on what was about to take place. The night before the Scarecrow Festival officially began, there was a type of fundraiser where, in attendance were, what I can only surmise were a group of wealthy elites capable of donating large sums of money towards the facility and D. Chris Buttars.

Several times we were told that we were speaking to a group of people that were very important. We were instructed to give a brief story of how the ranch has been a force for good in our lives and how much we have benefitted because of it. I’d gotten used to putting up a front for others long enough to be able to get through the previous situations I’d had to deal with back at the compound so my horror of public speaking was halted due mainly to practice at having to appear as something other than what I was or felt.

Minutes before I was called onto a stage under a large and well lit tent, one of the clinicians quickly asked the two of us where we were originally from. I was born in Houston and my fellow beside me was from Dallas. With expedience, we were told not to disclose that fact. Only immediately after did I realize why, but sufficed to say, image is everything and not having poster-boys specifically from the Utah area would seem a bit puzzling to a group of people being duped into giving money to an association whose main focus is on ‘correcting’ the youth of the surrounding area.

D. Chris Buttars, whom at this point I’d never spoken directly to, called for me to join him on stage. I gave my name and short, quick facts about myself to the crowd. My rhetoric what something of a formality since the things I was spewing forth were the same facts any other member of the Mormon gulag would have shared with folk who were ignorant of the reality there. How long I’d been there and why I was placed in the ranch were the main points I had been informed to convey. Buttars then proceeded with something I was not prepared for. He asked me a series of specific questions pertaining to my deviancy. I felt as an unholy spectacle at a display for a Ringling Bro.’s Barnum and Bailey show. He asked me exactly how much marijuana I had smoked on a day to day basis. I felt helpless in this situation. In front of me were a group of adults who would believe anything Buttars said, but he needed me to confirm it as if coming from the voice of another would affirm the lies he was spouting to them about how much of a ‘service’ the ranch provided in restoring me as a productive and obedient member of society. I couldn’t lift my head up to look at any of the multitude in the eye.  I told him the exact answer I knew he wanted to hear, which was a simultaneous exaggeration of the truth, as well as the best made up answer I could conjure at the time. I slowly uttered that I smoked marijuana out of a pipe at the rate of about five to six bowls a day. Turning to the crowd with his finger pointed directly downwards at my head, he stated to the mob that the amount of pot I was consuming meant that I would ‘not be in reality.’ Basically, he was shaming who I was and what I had done, something he knew nothing about, to a group of complete strangers. My head fell further as I slowly stepped backwards and began to feel more ashamed than I have at any other time in my life. Ashamed because I’d lied to Buttars, and a crowd he was coaxing money from, by putting myself on the cross and it was all for his, and more importantly the Ranch’s, benefit.

Before handing the floor back to me to give a final word he added a quick scare tactic towards the end of his rant to ensure that if there was any reason to donate money to a cause, then it was for troubled youth such as me. Never mind the fact that my future as a productive member of society was in serious jeopardy even if the things he was saying were true. The education at the ranch was a joke and their North Korean style of supervision crippled many a young man’s ability to correctly socialize in the real world. The only thing that mattered at that exact moment was being able to convince a group of well-to-do’s to write a blank check to Buttars, even if that meant falsely tugging on their sympathies or filling them with irrational fear.

The only words of what I said to finish things off for my portion of the presentation that I can recall were that ‘the most important things in my life are what they should be…the most important things.’  I wasn’t even given encouragement for the depths I went to for Buttar’s amusement and the self-deprivation I voluntarily went through just so the Ranch’s quarterly budget could look good on a balance sheet. I was put back in a van and bussed towards the ranch without anything to eat that night and a warning not to indulge the other boys about what I taken apart in, lest other’s get the idea that they may be able to score some points by being able to pretend well enough for other such crowds. After all, they didn’t want any insincere boys to be able to fall through the cracks.

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