By Natalia Martinez
Published: May. 16, 2024 at 8:58 PM EDT|Updated: 22 hours ago
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WAVE) - It’s one of the most serious cases of a civil rights investigation by the federal government.
While Kentucky’s Department of Juvenile Justice, or DJJ, was under investigation by the feds in the late 1990s, it appears the lessons have not been learned.
Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced their formal opening of a case into DJJ to look at their use of isolation, punishments, and protection from physical and sexual abuse among other things.
But how did we get here again?
On August 27, 2022, WAVE News Troubleshooters got a tip from a concerned police officer asking us to investigate the state-run youth facility in Lyndon.
It was not long after when our newsroom received a tip about a riot that had broken out at the facility. It was not the first nor the last that occurred in a short amount of time.
“We do have them out of control trying to get out of the facility,” the 911 dispatcher said over the radio.
“No one at this point is in control,” she later said.
“We have an escapee,” another officer relayed.
The teens had managed to get free from their cells, started a fire, broken windows, and ran amok according to the tapes. One firefighter was approached by a teen wielding a metal bar as others tried to find the teen who had made it past the nearby railroad tracks.
Yet DJJ was already on the defense, contradicting our news coverage’s description of a riot.
In an email, they wrote, “No, there was not a riot. There was a problem with the locks at the facility which caused a situation with youth refusing to return to their rooms and as a precautionary measure law enforcement was contacted.”
Two whistleblowers who worked at the Lyndon facility at the time told us it was a game of semantics.
“Why do you think that they are making that distinction?” we asked.
“They don’t want to take accountability for what’s happening,” one of the whistleblowers responded.
“Was it a riot?” we continued.
“It is very much so a riot,” the employee emphasized.
“How dangerous do you think that situation is?” a former supervisor at the Lyndon facility Mike Ross was asked.
“Very dangerous,” he replied.
Ross and whistleblowers told Troubleshooters of instances where there were one or two employees working the entire facility, violating the required, federal ratios of staff to youth. They reported kids not being let out of cells, assaults, teens having sex and incident reports were altered or destroyed.
“No record, didn’t exist,” one whistleblower said.
Two months after that story aired, KY Representative Jason Nemus got involved and brought along the Legislative Oversight and Investigations Committee which began its own independent case.
However less than 10 days later, a riot broke out at the youth facility in Adair County. An officer was sent to ICU and a teen girl was allegedly raped by four male inmates.
Shortly after on November 16, 2022, viewers were introduced to three nurses who worked at Adair but quit because of the things they witnessed such as kids being isolated for weeks, not allowed showers, not given schooling or mental counseling and being deprived of food as a form of punishment.
“I actually heard someone say to him, ‘And we won’t feed you until you learn how to stand down,’” Beth Johnson recalled.
Joanne Alvarado, Nina Burton and Beth Johnson all shared similar stories, including not being allowed to provide medical care, among other problems.
“What kinds of things would you consider abuse?” the nurses were asked.
“They physically put hands on this youth,” Joanne Alvarado added. “Some of these kids weren’t even fighting back, they were behind a door and they were assaulted.”
Johnson spoke about supervisors deliberately changing the narratives of certain incidents if they were recorded at all.
“Let’s get the story straight before it goes down on paper,” Johnson said.
Anger spread among legislators who started calling for reform and accountability.
Governor Andy Beshear held strong in his support for the Justice Cabinet’s Secretary over DJJ, Kerry Harvey.
“I believe that Secretary Kerry Harvey is a dedicated Kentuckian,” Beshear said when asked about his confidence in Harvey’s leadership.
Beshear also continued to support DJJ’s Director, Vickie Reed at the time. In fact, Reed was a keynote speaker at a convention held in Louisville about running successful youth detention centers.
In December, Beshear announced a number of changes to DJJ such as the separation of inmates by their level of violence, arming officers at the facilities with pepper spray and the effort to increase employee salaries.
He also announced the transfer of all female inmates, who were previously housed along with teen males, to the youth facility in Campbell County. That turned out to be the place Troubleshooters would focus on next, after learning of allegations of the sexual abuse of teenage girls at the hands of a corrections officer named Neil Moorman.
The allegations came along with the failure to report them to law enforcement.
Troubleshooters interviewed one of the alleged victim’s moms months after the allegations surfaced.
“That he’s kissed her though, that she did tell me and I pray to God that that’s all that’s happened,” Jane Doe’s mother told us.
At the time of the WAVE News interview, her daughter had still not been contacted by Kentucky State Police.
In fact, WAVE News Troubleshooters spoke to a public information officer with KSP who told us their investigation into Moorman was already closed and that we should contact the FBI for further comment. We verified with Jane Doe‘s mom and the alleged victim herself, that they still had not gotten a statement from her prior to the case being closed.
When Troubleshooters asked for a copy of the closed investigation through open records requests and told them we’d be reporting on its closure without one of the victim’s statements, we received a letter stating the investigation was in fact still open.
Troubleshooter received hundreds of pages through open records requests and found proof several supervisors knew of inappropriate alleged behavior by Moorman weeks before he was fired or reported.
We uncovered emails with more than a dozen people dated May 17 in which they talked about finding romantic letters in the teens’ rooms.
During legislative committee hearings, the state’s Internal Investigations Bureau, or IIB, testified they didn’t know of the allegations against Moorman until May 31.
That proved to be false.
Troubleshooters found emails in which a nurse at Campbell County urged her supervisors to make sure Moorman was being reported. The nurse goes into further detail telling them another employee had heard Moorman making kissing sounds while leaning into a teen.
Her supervisor forwarded the emails to the state’s ombudsman on May 19.
DJJ later confirmed that the ombudsman did forward the information to IIB but that they did not hear any further details about the case.
Moorman was not fired until May 31 when a tape was pulled showing Moorman and a teen’s shadow possibly kissing. Around the same time, the superintendent of the facility, Kraig McWhorter was fired for letting a child sign as her parent to leave the youth detention center and for being drunk on the job, his termination letters stated. An occurrence, Troubleshooters found had happened more than once without him being disciplined.
The most recent blow to DJJ was the scathing report by the state’s auditor. That report confirmed many of the problems described by the whistleblowers and the thousands of pages of open records requests. They added new information such as pepper spray having been used as a form of punishment and the song, Baby Shark looped and played for hours on end as a form of torture.
The DOJ said they are approaching their investigation objectively and fairly but stressed the violation of the constitutional rights of children is something they take very seriously.
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