Handle With Care

“But they can keep moving because their extremity muscles are still working after their diaphragm gives out,” Miller says. “And uneducated restrainers think,‘Oh, well, they must be breathing because they’re moving.’ That’s not true.”So Chad staffers might not have realized that Harris had stopped breathing until it was too late, Miller says.

Before Levy even ruled that Harris died of natural causes, DCS—the department that, along with Tennessee’s Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities, was licensing Chad—stopped placing Tennessee children there. New York stopped too. “All we knew was that a child had died under unknown circumstances,” says DCS spokesman Rob Johnson. “The department already had some concerns, so they just elected to go ahead and pull the remaining children out.” Most of those concerns were about Chad’s use of restraint.

But Tennessee regulatory agencies did not revoke Chad’s license, which meant that other states—Kentucky and Pennsylvania, for example—continued sending children there. When asked why Tennessee regulators would keep Chad’s doors open when they wouldn’t even send the state’s own kids there, Johnson says it was simple: Chad met the state’s licensing standards.

“It’s somewhat akin to, does a restaurant pass standards for health inspections when they go in there?” Johnson says. “Yes, they may pass the standards, but it may be that the health inspector may not choose to take his own family there to dine. It’s somewhat analogous. Tennessee has its standards for how it wants its children to be treated when they’re in state custody.”

Chad is where DCS sent Sharon Pruett’s 16-year-old son, John Boy, for rehab in 2004. It’s where Pruett says her son became a broken boy after a counselor pushed him up against a wall, kneed him in the groin and strangled him until three staffers pried the man off of the teenager.

When Pruett moved her family from Chicago to rural Tennessee, she had grand visions of her two kids growing up in a small town in the friendly South, away from the hustle of big-city life. But even in the town of Hurricane Mills—home of Loretta Lynn’s Coal Miner’s Daughter Museum—Boy, a baseball player who did well in school, found trouble.

Before he was 16, Boy was addicted to methamphetamine. Pruett suspected that he was using drugs, and she says state officials told her that she could not get him into a treatment center unless she filed charges against him for being unruly. When she did, a judge ruled that Boy was a danger to his mother and younger sister and, against Pruett’s wishes, placed him in DCS custody. Soon after, Pruett says DCS put her son on house arrest for a 90-day, in-home treatment.

When Boy overdosed in September 2004, Pruett took him to the emergency room. DCS caseworkers soon followed to take a scared, sobbing Boy away to Chad in the wee hours of the morning. It was his first time away from home.

DCS officials told Pruett that her son would stay at Chad only temporarily—until they could place him in another drug treatment program. Pruett couldn’t understand why Boy would be living in a facility—and sharing a bedroom with—children those in the mental health world dub “level three” residents, kids who are a mere step away from being locked down in a detention center or placed in a full-on psychiatric ward. “My son was never arrested,” she says. “My son is not a bad boy. He did not burn houses. He did not hurt anybody. He was hurting himself with a drug problem. I questioned, I begged, I cried, I did everything [to keep him out of Chad].”

Less than three weeks into her son’s stay, Pruett got a call from her son and his therapist. “Mom, I was attacked last night,” Boy said over the therapist’s speakerphone.“You need to get me out of here.This man attacked me, and he broke my glasses.”

Pruett just began to cry. But Boy wouldn’t go into more detail, Pruett says, because he was scared it might happen again. He didn’t tell her that he hadn’t slept much since the attack the night before, which began after Boy called counselor Calvin Nelms a “fucking dick” when the man accused Boy of stealing another resident’s toiletries.

He didn’t say that Nelms had grabbed him by his shirt collar, pressed his hands against Boy’s throat, lifted him up off the floor and slammed him against the wall before throwing Boy down, kneeing him in the groin and strangling him until three employees intervened.

But Boy did tell his mother that his attacker was still working at Chad. Pruett says the facility acknowledged that they couldn’t fire Nelms because they were understaffed. Later, the family found out that Nelms, who admitted that he overreacted, had been placed on probation for his involvement in two or three similar incidents in the year-and-a-half he had worked at Chad, according to DCS files.