A 15-year-old Scappoose boy dies while being restrained at a high desert wilderness school

Thursday, September 21, 2000

By Peter Sleeth of The Oregonian staff

 

A 15-year-old Scappoose boy died while being "restrained" at a wilderness school in the Oregon high desert on Monday night after he exhibited "defiant behavior."

 

A camp counselor with Bend-based Obsidian Trails has been charged with criminally negligent homicide in the death. It occurred at a remote location in Lake County in south Central Oregon.

 

It was the first known death in Oregon within the controversial wilderness schools. They focus on putting children in the outdoors under harsh survival conditions to teach them discipline and responsibility. 

 

Last winter, an investigation of Obsidian Trails by The Oregonian found that it was employing family members connected with another death in Utah in a similar program, and that this industry is completely unregulated by Oregon authorities.

 

William H. Edward Lee, 15, was pronounced dead Monday night at St. Charles Medical Center in Bend, said David A. Schutt, the Lake County district attorney.

 

The boy ". . . was standing and taken to the ground by the counselors," Schutt said, for defiant and disruptive behavior. "He was physically restrained. The person arrested was on his back."

 

A second counselor, a woman, also held Lee for the five- to 15-minute struggle. When the boy stopped resisting, Schutt said, the woman counselor noticed he had stopped breathing.

 

"Chances are, for all intents and purposes, he was dead at the scene," Schutt said. Additional charges could be filed against other adults involved with the death, he said.

 

The three counselors had four children with them in the desert. Lee had been out in the wild for 10 days.

 

When the counselors called 9-1-1, Schutt said, they asked for help in how to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation to the boy. An Air Life helicopter was dispatched and waved into the site using flares. Autopsy results were pending, he said.

 

On Tuesday, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management banished the group from its lands in Central Oregon until a criminal investigation is resolved, said Lisa Swinney, a BLM spokeswoman. It is the second time Obsidian has had its BLM permit revoked in the last year.

 

But Obsidian President Gregory Bodenhamer said he had two more groups high in the Cascades on Wednesday. He said he is confident his staff followed correct procedures in the incident.

 

"We have talked to our staff, and we're satisfied they followed procedure and protocol," he said.

 

Obsidian employee Charles Matthew Sharp, 22, of Bend was lodged in the Lake County Jail, Schutt said. Bodenhamer said he paid Sharp's bail Wednesday. The case remains under investigation and will be presented to a grand jury, Schutt said.

 

Programs hard to oversee

By their nature, wilderness therapy schools are hard to oversee. The teen-agers are led far out into the mountains or desert for weeks or months at a time. The regimen can be grueling, both physically and emotionally. Often the children are refused direct contact with parents or

anyone else. 

 

During the past decade, desperate parents anxious to help their troubled teen-agers have flocked to programs such as the one run by Obsidian Trails -- often paying as much as $17,000 or more for eight to 12 weeks of something like wilderness survival therapy.

 

The children often are taken to the schools against their will, either by "escort services" or by parents who sometimes must deceive their children to make them attend. Last winter, one Bend outdoor school owner said he has had children show up with snowboards, thinking they were headed to a sports camp. But wilderness therapy is hardly a vacation retreat.

Schutt said the only shelter found at the camp was a tarp for all seven people.

 

"They were packed in pretty tight," he said. The children said they were fed cold oats in the morning, no lunch and then a moderate dinner. Months of forced survival living in the Oregon desert in winter are not unusual as the core of the schools' techniques for teens. Two teen-agers escaped from an Obsidian Trails camp in the desert near Christmas Valley

in December 1999, then robbed a ranch couple at knifepoint, stealing the family's car.

 

Obsidian Trails' outdoor program apparently had no serious problems before the escape and robbery last year.

 

However, until February the program employed members of a family linked to wilderness camps in Utah that had serious problems. And until last summer, the program employed a man -- a member of the same family -- who was charged with child abuse and neglect in connection with the 1994 death of a student enrolled in the now-defunct North Star Expeditions school in

Utah.

 

The former Obsidian employee, Eric Henry, 26, signed a Dec. 11, 1996, diversion agreement with Garfield County, Utah, authorities in which prosecution was deferred if he refrained from involvement in similar programs for pay and obeyed all laws for nine months.

 

Yet, six months later, in June 1997, he was at SageWalk, an Oregon wilderness school based in Bend. He subsequently was fired, according to the current co-owner of the school, then joined Obsidian Trails in 1998. He left Obsidian Trails last summer, according to Bodenhamer.

 

Henry refused to comment when The Oregonian contacted him last winter. Bodenhamer said Wednesday that no member of the Henry family works for Obsidian to this day.

 

Four firms use BLM land 

Four companies operate wilderness schools on BLM land in Oregon. In 1999, the schools brought about 270 youths to the high desert of Central Oregon, according to the Bureau of Land Management, which issues land-use permits for the programs.

 

In Oregon, as in most Western states, anyone can set up a wilderness therapy business. Such businesses get permits and pay fees to operate on public land, but no agency oversees the quality of programs or the care offered children.

 

Bodenhamer said Wednesday he has had about 50 to 60 clients this year in his programs. The two groups in the mountains now, he said, total no more than nine children per group.

 

At Scappoose High School Wednesday, Principal Connie Whitlock said counselors were on hand for any students who wanted to talk about Lee's death. He was to return to Scappoose High for the second semester, which starts in early February.

 

Bodenhamer said the death, although tragic, was not symptomatic of his programs. One of the children who was with the group where Lee died, Bodenhamer said, was returned by his parents to Obsidian Trail and is back out in the wilderness.

 

"It certainly sounds self-serving in the face of a death, but I believe we run the best program in the country of its type," Bodenhamer said.

 

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