A state inspection report offers new details on the hours leading up to a 12-year-old’s death at Trails Carolina, a camp for troubled adolescents.
Staff at a North Carolina wilderness therapy camp failed to check that a 12-year-old boy was breathing during his first night at the facility, a state report released Tuesday found.
The boy, who has been identified in law enforcement records only by his initials, CJH, was found unresponsive around 7:45 a.m. on Feb. 3 at Trails Carolina, a camp for troubled adolescents in the western part of the state.
What the actual fuck? There is so much to unpack from this article. I googled a bivy; it’s basically an enclosed sleeping bag. Before bivys, they would put a tarp over the zipped-up sleeping bag. Why? What’s the point in enclosing a child on their first night? Maybe to break their spirit? Show them you mean business? I can’t think of anything positive that could come from doing that to them.
And the “counselors”… they should be equally held liable. They heard things they were unsure of, but never thought to go check them out? That’s negligence.
I’m pissed. Beyond pissed. Everyone in that organization needs to go to jail. I pray that NC does the right thing and closes this torture factory down.
Every “camp for troubled youth” I’ve ever heard of turned out to be a fucking concentration camp for kids full of physical, mental, and sexual torture and religious indoctrination. I wonder if this one also kidnaps kids in the middle of the night.
The entire idea should be made illegal.
Yup, also one that does the middle of the night kidnaps for maximum trauma infliction.
Shockingly, the treatment guidelines for panic disorder also don’t inlude zipping people into small bags all night:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6478076/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6354045/
They should be shut down permanently, and those responsible for these policies held criminally liable.
Hey! Mine didn’t sexually torture me.
He wasn’t just in the bivy.
Asphyxia anyone???
And since the zipper was broken, they secured him in it with zip-ties.
And when they noticed his shallow breathing, they didn’t check on him because they couldn’t see through the bivy and were too fucking lazy to untie him to see if he was okay.
That’s not manslaughter. That’s depraved-indifference murder.
“If they survive, they’re a witch.”
That part of the state is known for deep religion. Think venomous snakes and arsenic Sundays.
This sounds like a bivy style tent… a bivy sack is just a waterproof layer your can put your sleeping bag inside of to stay warm and dry.
A bivy tent is kind of just a smaller one person tent that is not usually big enough to sit up in like a regular two man style tent.
That said, it sounds like on the past they used the tarps as a waterproof layer but switched to the bivy tents.
One weird thing is they put alarms on the zippers of the tent to go off if anyone tried to get out of their tent which seems odd to me.
Obviously he suffocated so it’s some kind of equipment failure, but in general bivy tents and bivy sacks are really good lightweight gear that can shelter you from the elements. If you don’t have one you generally need a tarp or a regular tent to protect from rain or other water leaking in from the ground.
I just mean to say their doesn’t sound like anything nefarious in just letting kids sleep in a bivy sack or bivy tent. Locking them in though seems kind of weird. If adults are sleeping nearby you would hear any zippers in the middle of the night etc.
just a regular bivy set up wrong, or gotten into wrong like if you really misunderstood the instructions and went head first could create those conditions.
More likely guess would be hypothermia from it being set up wrong.
It’s also not entirely clear to me this was a proper bivy. plenty of camps like this just throw the poor tortured child a tarp and tell them to figure it out. That’s why my guess goes to hypothermia.
Thank you for the explanation and differentiation. That makes me feel slightly better.
I want a bivy sack or a bivy style tent myself but they are a little out of my budget at the moment.
Locking the kids in the sack or the tent is the questionable action in my opinion.
So I’ve worked at out door facilities (none that did this kind of work) and have had colleagues that worked these kinds of camps.
Basically, you get thrown a minimum of supplies and told figure it out. Not usually a tent but a tarp you are expected to construct into a tent. I knew of one outfit in Utah where kids would get sent in the middle of the winter. I consider it abuse, but if their parents sign the waivers… keep in mind that children are a form of property (for most intents and purposes).
I refused to ever work those kinds of camps and threw shade at my friends who did.
Yes, people like this consider their children to be chattel. It’s why you should ignore anything that someone who uses the words “parental rights” says.
Shade - now that’s praxis!