KY juvenile justice guards laughed as they pranked mentally ill boy with a flushing toilet
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Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice
The Herald-Leader has reported on serious problems inside the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice for more than four years.
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The mentally ill teen boy, locked in an isolation cell for 24 hours at one of Kentucky’s juvenile detention centers on April 26, believed his toilet was possessed by a ghost.
The toilet kept flushing on its own for nearly a half-hour while the agitated boy kicked and yelled at it, according to documents obtained by the Herald-Leader under the Kentucky Open Records Act. The boy had “multiple psychiatric disorders,” developmental delays and anger control issues, a nurse said later.
Aggravating the situation, Correctional Officer James Crowe walked down the hall to tell the boy through the window of the cell door: “Hey, quit flushing your toilet like that.” If the boy didn’t knock it off, Crowe warned, he would have to restart his 24 hours in isolation.
The boy pointed to the toilet and insisted it was acting “by itself, on its own.”
“Naw, they said you’re doing it,” Crowe responded, according to a transcript of security video.
Speaking into his hand-held radio, the officer said loudly enough for the boy to hear, “Restart his iso.”
Upset, the boy shouted out the window as Crowe walked away. He banged on the door and pointed at the toilet.
In fact, as Crowe knew, the toilet wasn’t flushing on its own. The boy was being pranked.
In the control room of the Warren Regional Juvenile Detention Center, in Bowling Green, laughing guards were using a computer to remotely flush the boy’s toilet over and over for 26 minutes as they watched his emotional outbursts on security video, according to a report issued in June by internal investigators with the Kentucky Justice and Public Safety Cabinet.
The report does not provide the boy’s name or age.
When the lieutenant in command of the shift asked what all the commotion was about, the guards told her, “We are getting him worked up,” according to her summary of events later.
The lieutenant claimed she told them, “That’s f-cked up, dayshift.” A half-dozen people were present in the control room at one point or another, she said.
“This is sadistic behavior,” said Rebecca DiLoreto, a longtime Kentucky children’s advocacy attorney who has dealt with the state Department of Juvenile Justice for decades.
DiLoreto reviewed the investigative report at the Herald-Leader’s request.
“And this is at the very same time the governor, in his news briefings, is telling us he thinks that they’re solving the problem at DJJ by bringing in corrections staff from the state prisons to supervise these youths, including mentally ill youths,” DiLoreto said.
“Not only are they not solving the problems in the juvenile detention centers, they’ve brought in bullies,” she said.
The guard who did most of the remote flushing, Correctional Sgt. John Washer, told the Herald-Leader in a phone interview that he hadn’t intended to bully the boy.
Washer said he wanted to redirect the boy’s attention in order to stop him from throwing a noisy tantrum that was upsetting other youths in the same part of the building. Getting the boy to wonder why his toilet was flushing on its own was supposed to distract him, not upset him, Washer said.
“We were laughing because he said out loud, ‘There’s a ghost in my room!’ That’s what was funny,” explained Washer, who lost his job over the incident after working at the Department of Juvenile Justice for four years.
“There was no bullying, there was no harassing, nothing,” Washer said. “I just don’t know why it escalated to the point it did, truly.”
Three fired, three suspended
The U.S. Department of Justice announced in May that it’s conducting a civil rights investigation of Kentucky’s juvenile detention centers to look into reports of widespread abuse and neglect.
The toilet incident is one of several problems the Herald-Leader has uncovered in recent months at the Bowling Green facility, including a contraband smuggling scheme that led to felony charges against three employees and the unjustifiable pepper spraying of an asthmatic teen who was left in pain, gasping for breath, in his hot, steamy cell for the next hour.
Juvenile Justice Commissioner Randy White, a former state prison warden who started his job in April after his controversial predecessor resigned, told the Herald-Leader that the toilet flushing episode was unacceptable.
It took six days for internal investigators at the Justice and Public Safety Cabinet to learn about the incident, and that was only after they received an anonymous note from an employee inside the facility.
“I can’t explain what the staff were or were not thinking,” White said in a recent interview at the state Capitol Annex in Frankfort.
“What I can tell you is that any type of behavior like that, where we’re tolerating that sort of behavior amongst our staff, I’m going to hold them accountable,” White said. “I believe that discipline is teaching, and it serves a purpose.”
Three employees were fired or resigned after the toilet incident, including Washer. Three more were suspended.
Facility manager Kevin Foster was demoted in August to the job of youth service program supervisor, in part because of the toilet incident and his failure to report it up the chain of command, according to his disciplinary letter. Foster already had been suspended for one day in April for poor work performance.
Changing the culture in Kentucky’s juvenile detention centers won’t happen overnight, White said. He said he’s sending a newly hired advisor, a former state and federal prisons official named John Fowler, into the detention centers for scheduled and surprise inspections to see what’s happening on the ground.
“It’s not an easy job. It’s not going to be a simple or a quick fix. It’s going to take time,” White said. “But we just have to stay at it.”
‘Bullying these kids’
The anonymous note arrived May 2 in Frankfort for internal investigators at the Justice and Public Safety Cabinet, which oversees the Department of Juvenile Justice.
The note said that on April 26, guards at the Warren Regional Juvenile Detention Center antagonized a teen boy in isolation by using a computer in the control room to flush his toilet over and over while telling him that he would be punished with more time in isolation unless he stopped flushing his toilet.
The guards also were “popping” the speaker in the boy’s cell, making noises on his speaker loud enough to be heard from other rooms in the building, the note said.
“How are we supposed to help kids in the facility when our staff are bullying these kids and creating trauma for them or even triggering them just for fun?” the note asked.
Investigators drove to Bowling Green to pull security video from the facility and interview employees.
They discovered their anonymous tipster was Lt. LeAnn Kratzer, who was in command the day of the incident as shift supervisor.
Kratzer told investigators she believed the guards in the control room mistreated the boy, but she didn’t think they respected her authority enough to stop on her orders. So she sent her unsigned note instead of interceding or filing an official incident report.
Kratzer, faulted for failing to provide appropriate supervision, was fired.
Sara Dobbins, a nurse who treated the boy at the facility but who had nothing to do with the incident, told investigators he suffers from a number of psychiatric and developmental problems. He is easily angered and overstimulated, Dobbins told investigators.
Washer, the guard behind most of the flushing, told investigators the boy had been shouting and cursing as he threw a tantrum in his cell. Remotely operating the boy’s toilet was meant to be a form of “misdirection” that other guards in the detention center successfully have used to distract misbehaving youths, Washer said.
“I flushed his toilet to confuse him, and he looked in his toilet,” Washer told the Herald-Leader. “And every time he went back to cussing and screaming at everybody in the pod, which was getting everybody agitated, I’d flush the toilet again.”
He added: “If somebody would have went down there and tried to confront the kid and tried to get him to calm down and sit on his bed, it would have made it a lot worse. I’ve seen other people try this in the past where they flushed the toilet, and it works.”
However, Washer added, Crowe never should have walked down the hall to the boy’s cell and told him that his 24 hours in isolation would be restarted unless he stopped flushing his toilet. That was bullying, Washer said.
“I cannot control James Crowe,” Washer said. “I told (the internal investigators), James Crowe is going to do whatever he’s going to do.”
Crowe, who lost his job after 17 months with the department, could not be reached for comment for this story.
Crowe told investigators that he didn’t understand why the boy’s toilet was being remotely flushed from the control room. He acknowledged that he told the boy he was restarting his time in isolation, but he said he didn’t really do that once he got back to the control room.
Washer said he’s hired a lawyer to represent him in possible legal action over his firing.
“I don’t want to go back,” he added.
He said the detention center was riddled with nepotism, incompetence and poor training that puts staff and youths at risk. “It’s a very toxic place to work.”
Washer said he’s not the villain in this story.
“Go down there and ask the kids,” Washer said.
“I was the only one who would ever get them out of their rooms and take them to the gym or wherever,” he said.
“They would leave the kids in their rooms for the majority of the day, and that sh-t ain’t right. And then they wonder why the kids start going crazy. I mean, if you were locked inside a box 16 hours of the day, you’d start going crazy, too.”
This story was originally published October 7, 2024 at 8:09 AM.
