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September 2007

Mount Carmel Youth Ranch - Troubled place for troubled kids?

CLARK -- Along the well-traveled highway between Cody and Billings, Mont., a wooden sign at a gravel turnoff pointing east into starkly beautiful high desert says, "Mount Carmel Youth Ranch 3 miles."

Few take the turnoff, and indeed few people know much about the youth ranch and what it does.

What most people may know about Mount Carmel Youth Ranch comes from news stories about an assault in September 2005 in which three boys used shovels to brutally beat a sleeping counselor.

That incident -- in which John O'Brien, just nine days on the job, suffered severe, permanent head injuries -- was neither the first nor the last serious occurrence at the ranch.

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Top Utah money man leaves Romney campaign

WASHINGTON - A top Utah fund-raiser for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign - who has links to an organization facing a civil lawsuit alleging child abuse - is no longer part of Romney's state finance team.

Robert Lichfield of La Verkin, who founded the umbrella group called the Worldwide Association of Specialty Schools, brought in some $300,000 earlier this year for Romney during a single Utah event and has donated tens of thousands to the former Massachusetts governor and other Republicans in recent years.

Lichfield is named in a federal lawsuit charging that students of the "behavior modification" schools with ties to WWASPS were subjected to "physical abuse, emotional abuse and sexual abuse." The suit had 140 defendants at last count.

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Randall Hinton, Sweetheart of WWASPS, GUILTY of Abusing Kids

After a six-hour deliberation, a six-person jury found Randall Hinton — the project manager and co-founder of the Royal Gorge Academy boarding school — guilty of one count each of third-degree assault and false imprisonment.

However, jurors felt there was enough reasonable doubt to find the defendant not guilty of four other counts of third-degree assault and one count of false imprisonment as the week-long trial ended late Friday evening.

In a trial that featured references to everything from red ants, feminine hygiene products, swastikas, "The Da Vinci Code," and the Columbine Massacre, it was no surprise that a Jack Nicholson movie character was too referenced.

In his closing argument to jurors, Fremont County Deputy District Attorney Thom LeDoux attempted to paint Randall Hinton in the same light as Col. Nathan Jessep — the marine, played by Nicholson, who stood trial in the 1992 film, "A Few Good Men," who was court-martialed in the movie. Like Jessep, LeDoux said Hinton tried to excuse his actions at the school as a man who was "just doing his job."

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KidsPeace disciplined over injuries
North Whitehall, Salisbury centers can't take in new residents.

The state has ordered KidsPeace centers in North Whitehall and Salisbury townships to stop accepting residents because the staffs' restraining techniques have caused a "pattern of serious injuries" to children.

The Department of Public Welfare also is making more unannounced visits to the campuses and moving to end the use of physical restraints at the organization's centers for troubled youth and facilities elsewhere in Pennsylvania.

In a letter last Friday, the welfare department said these seven injuries occurred between March 13 and Aug. 18: a left arm fracture, a fracture to a right arm in the elbow area, a right ankle fracture, a displaced right upper arm, a lower leg fracture, a fracture of the left upper arm and a fracture to the right collarbone.

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