"I pulled it, and it went click," Robert told the officer. "If you're so determined to kill yourself," Knott said, "you should put the gun next to your head and pull the trigger." So after days in solitary confinement, they dragged him from the isolation room to Knott's bedroom, where Knott handed the boy a. Knott and the school's founder, John David Young Jr., the pastor of Solid Rock Ministries in Mobile, were frustrated by Robert's "poor" attitude and persistent depression while in solitary confinement and they were determined to change his behavior. The result: Abuse isn't reported until long after it was committed, which makes prosecutions nearly impossible.Īs Kennedy continued checking on Robert, the boy eventually told him about his stay in isolation. He also knew these institutions bar the young people they control from unmonitored communication with family and outsiders-and most states, including Alabama, don't even protect workers who report child abuse from being fired. But the police officer knew what he'd just seen wasn't illegal in Alabama if it took place over a relatively short time span. The United Nations considers the use of solitary confinement as punishment to be torture. So for the next week or so, he periodically returned to RYA, which is how he found himself with Knott, asking about the naked boy named Robert in the isolation room. Kennedy wanted to protect the cadets from abuse, but he also knew he lacked the hard evidence needed to make an arrest. ( Newsweek has either provided anonymity to the minors in the program or changed their names to protect their privacy.) On his first day in the program, one boy claimed, Knott crouched down next to him, and, after yanking his head up by his hair, started pounding his skull against the floor while shouting, "You will exercise until I get tired!" Another told Kennedy he had been held upside down in shackles and hit with a belt, an allegation later supported by an eyewitness letter by another teen. Drill instructors, including Knott, frequently punched them, choked them and body-slammed them as they worked out. All of them were subjected to a brutal, daily regimen of exercises, sometimes stark naked-pushups, jumping jacks and running in place. The boys, for instance, told him they were often grabbed out their beds in the middle of the night and forced to fight one another until one was beaten to a pulp. But those who did left Kennedy with the impression that he had stumbled across something terrible. As he investigated, he found that many of the school's "cadets" were afraid to talk. That's when he learned firsthand about the teenagers' accusations of abuse. Afterward, he had allowed Kennedy to speak alone with one of the boys whose mother had called him. Knott had provided a tour of an empty classroom inside interconnected mobile homes and an adjoining cafeteria filled with quiet, unsmiling children. He'd come after hearing from two mothers who were alarmed that their kids had been facing severe punishment. Newsweek Illustrationīut what Kennedy had found behind the school's forbidding metal gates disturbed him. The Saving Youth Foundation, like the Restoration Youth Academy before it, portrayed the organization as deeply religious and a final hope for parents with troubled teens, but victims of the center say it was mostly sadistic torture and caused many to suffer from PTSD.
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