Handle With Care

The Chad Youth Enhancement Center is a privately owned residential treatment facility nestled in the rolling hills off of a winding, two-lane road just southeast of Clarksville. Barns fashioned out of untreated wood and horses tucked behind white fences dot the pristine grazing land that leads to the facility’s 20 tree-lined acres.Just a few yards from an empty pasture marked by a few intermittent hay bales, Chad’s gym, school building and three dormitories sit, looking clinical and quite unremarkable. Chad is a place where kids—some criminals or drug addicts, or with serious emotional and behavioral disorders—go to get help. All are between the tender ages of 7 and 17, and most have problems so severe that other facilities will not admit them. It’s what Chad prides itself on: taking the most troubled and disadvantaged children “to overcome those obstacles that may be hindering their healthy emotional growth.”

Chad is also a place where two teens have died in two years. And where allegations of excessive use of force, and verbal and physical abuse at the hands of the facility’s staff have slowly piled up in the offices of Tennessee state regulators for nearly a decade.

In 2005 medics arrived at Chad to find the body of Linda Harris, a 14-year-old resident from Amityville, N.Y., limp on the floor of the hallway outside of her room.

According to a brief police office report, Harris had“become unruly by not staying in bed and was flashing the boys”when Chad staff pulled the girl’s arms behind her back and escorted her to a time-out room. It was at this point that Harris “became limp and fell on the floor”and the Chad staffers sat down next to her and held her arms behind her back as she lay on her stomach.

After approximately 30 seconds, according to the report, staff let her go as Harris remained belly down and appeared to be crying. A few minutes later, the Chad employees noticed that her breathing had slowed, so they rolled her over and called 911. While an ambulance was en route, Harris stopped breathing. She was pronounced dead after arrival at Gateway Medical Center in Clarksville.

But law enforcement told a different story: a local sheriff’s official said their office received a call that night saying that Harris had stopped breathing after being physically restrained by a male Chad staffer who fell to the floor with the girl while redirecting her to the time-out room.

Either way, Harris died only a few days after a New York judge sent her to Chad for emotional problems that had become too much for her father, a single dad, to handle. And either way, Tennessee medical examiner Dr. Bruce Levy ruled Harris’ death “natural.” After all, she was morbidly obese: Harris carried an estimated 400 pounds on her 5-foot-6-inch frame. Plus she was asthmatic.

While the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office investigated Harris’ death, they didn’t bring any charges against the Chad staffers who restrained her. Levy ruled that her death was a result of cardiac hypertrophy—an enlarged heart because of her chronic bronchial asthma. Harris’ weight was a contributory cause of her death, Levy found.

So life at Chad moved along.

In a November 2005 visit to the center, Department of Children’s Services (DCS) licensing consultant Linda McLeskey noted that more Chad residents felt unsafe at the facility than at other programs DCS had encountered. Less than one month had passed since Harris met her death at the hands of the very people enlisted to help her. And the effect it had on the resident psyche was lasting. “When asked why they felt unsafe, [residents] often reported they were afraid to be restrained because they didn’t want to be hurt,” McLeskey wrote.

Sue Marshall—not her real name—worked as a licensed practical nurse at Chad for roughly one year and recalls the effect that Harris’ death had on residents. “A lot of girls were having nightmares at night after that because probably none of them had seen another person die,” Marshall says. “And you know, of course the first thing they are going to assume is that the staff was at fault.”

According to one expert on restraint asphyxia, those girls may have been right. After reviewing Levy’s autopsy report and police files on Harris’ death, paramedic and author Charly Miller concludes, “It doesn’t fly that her death was natural.”

Though Levy says he stands by his original findings, he tells the Scene that “to some extent that we can’t quantify,” Harris’ death was caused by “the stress of the situation she was in.”

Miller says it’s quite possible that it was the restraint that killed Harris, especially because Chad staff held her on the floor—belly down. Miller says patients with abdominal fat have an increased risk of restraint asphyxia for one simple reason: when an obese person is forced to lay on their belly, the excess stomach fat pushes up into the lungs, making it difficult to breathe until finally, the lungs give.