“Licensed”

decided that, yeah, these things are happening. We believe you partially, and so what we're gonna do is try to do some kind of compromise here, because they didn't want to close the camp down. The deal was, well, Louisa Kennet, boys at your home anymore, you really shouldn't do that. We're going to make you a different title, but otherwise we're gonna leave you alone. And so they said you can continue to be the director, that you can't be on the campus, and you can't even do with the kids,

and otherwise nothing changed. Two weeks later, we understand and he was back out there. Over a year after Roger Brenn and Robert Dacastino had reported the abuse at Anawaki, a deal had been made. No criminal charges were filed, not even an official investigation by law enforcement was had Louis Petter had been cleared of all charges under the stipulation that he had no future contact with the boys at Anawaki, the center would continue with little to no

change in its operation. It was emotionally painful to me to see the lack of concern and reaction by the authorities who had the duty to do something about this. I couldn't even mention the name Louis Petter for ten years. My experienced an Awake was so disillusioning. I just wanted to put into my past. I never did volunteer work after that in my life. Never ever, was the end

of that. Shortly after the hearing, Dagastino received a troubling call from the Assistant Attorney General who had represented the state, John Hinchy. He told me he was calling me from outside his office a public film. He was afraid to make the call from his office, and he said, look, they've stopped the hearing. He said, yes, they're making a deal and they're going to get you if they can. That. They have decided that they're going to try and stop

you from taking the George Bar. They're going to go after you hammer and tongue. They're getting a court order to seal the hearing documents, and that court orders in process. Now, if you can get a copy of the hearing and gave me the name of the printer and addressed the printer you've got a copy of that, This will protect you. So I said, I had no money. I mean I was working for next to nothing, was paying tuition, I was paying rent sometimes I could, didn't have enough mind

to eat. I ran a tab at a local restaurant because they trusted me that every time I get a paycheck, got even them up. So I called a friend of mine from Columbia College where I graduated, named Jerry Miller, who was trust baby, and he had lots of money. And I said, Jerry, I need five dollars and I need it now. And I explayed the situation and Jerry said, give me your wiring instructures to your bank, which I had, and he said, I'm going to my bank now and

I will do the wire now. He went, he wired me, the money, went into my account, took it out, gave it to Rose Higbee, one of my fellow students. So Rose was able to get it. So I have it here. It is the copy of the transcript. Of course, there are all sorts of other things that happened. Over the past several weeks. We have received a number of very serious allegations concerning both the facility out there in a number of individuals involved with him. It was just a

form of their therapy. They were told to do it, and at the time he was fourteen and a half, fifteen years old, they didn't know any better. I asked him, why are you letting this happen? Why are you covering up for Louis Patter. He had no answer to that question, involved having in this situation paid it host little could be such a destricable place, and did do absolutely the contrary of what they should have done. I'm disturbed a little the fact of something its stealed. Water on it,

Anna Wicked. I'm Josh Stein and this is camp hell. In a week around the time of the hearing, Rennan Dagastino had moved into an apartment together. One night, sometime after the hearing had concluded, they received an unexpected visit from a patient at Anna Waki, one of the boys who was working with Louie Petter. He came from my apartment and Rose Higbee was there and Roger rent, and he started telling me all the things that we're gonna

do to me. One of the kids came in and said Dr Petter and his family are going to hurt you. And I said, what are you talking about? And they said, well, they're gonna hurt you. And I said, you're talking about physically, what other way? In every way? And we're gonna have sworn testimony that I abused the boys. Well, I got a little bit angry. The guy came in and said, I lied about you, and Bob rand him out of the house. Bob has a temper. I've only seen it once.

There was a couch between him and I. I jumped over the couch to try and grab him, be to crap out of him, and he went right through the screen door. Have you ever seen a rocket take off? If this was faster than a rocket, I'd never seen anymo operate. Bob has a lot of physical skills my own body. He was there, and although he didn't hurt the kid, I'm amazed that he didn't. He did run him out of the house. So we were both scared,

and I was very concerned. Anytime I left the home, I would turn the light on outside at night, and then I'd watched and wait for about ten minutes. I was scared. Sometimes I went out the back door and went around the house to see if somebody was hiding there. I felt paranoid on occasions I thought somebody was out to get me. Well, we found out, of course, that somebody was out to get us, and it was them, and they were talking about what they were gonna do

to us. According to the kids, this unwanted visit was not the last rend and Dagostino would see for Manawaki. Dagostino would later learn that someone had attempted to frame him for drug possession. There was some testimony that Peter had ordered drugs to be planted in my car. At that time. The car I had was a land Rover. So the land Rover was somehow locked, which is something I never did because I was hoping someone would steal the damn thing because it was such a bad car.

But anyway, for one reason or another, it was locked and they couldn't get into the car, so they put the drugs in the wheel well. I went off roading that weekend afterwards and was bumpy road and so someplace in the North Georgia Mountains. There's this packet of drugs that fell out my wheel. Well, we understood that someone had placed in Bob's land rover some cocaine in the spare tire, and that we were about to be rated for pushing drugs. And of course that scared the dickens

out of me when I heard that show. Really, after this incident, authorities showed up at the apartment looking for Dagostino. The authorities had been tipped off and the threat to get Dagastino arrested proved true. Well, we had a couple of police officers come to the house looking for him, and we couldn't figure out what was going on. It was very unusual. They then swad a warrant from my arrest, so I was arrested for a soul. I said, I'm just sorry I didn't quite get to do the battery.

Bob recalls his day in court and how the judge reacted to his ordeal. I told him some of the backstory, but what he was accused me of doing. They didn't show up anyway, judge says. Kate dismissed Anna wake he had managed to slip through the cracks of the Georgia legal system. Following their hearing, in Petter, having stepped down as director, was replaced by a Mr. Charles Rampley. With Petter not in this role, there was nothing that could

be charged against the Innawaki Foundation. In a letter from Chairman Donald Howe to the panel following the hearing, he states, quote, the Board will of course scrutinize carefully and frequently the activities of this establishment, so that it seems to me this situation has been resolved in a satisfactory manner. Shortly after this deal was made to keep Petter off campus grounds, a new license was issued allowing in Awaki to continue

as a child caring institution. Journalist Albert Edgin says this oversight and lack of investigation into child abuse was a sign of the times back then. It's fair to say that the ideas about victims and treatment and the whole panoplay were I wouldn't say primitive, but they certainly weren't as developed as they are today. Not at the time,

there was a tendency to not believe victims. Much much more acute than it is now, and it can be acute now, but the best way to describe it is that in the nineteen sixties there was abuse going on, and people knew there was abuse going on. Somehow they turned their heads to it. But when it finally was litigated by the state in a administrative way, what happened was it the victims, the targets of the abuse, were questioned,

their backgrounds were brought out against them. These were children who were being treated for emotional troubles, and yet when they made these accusations, their emotional troubles were used as evidence that they were lying. The difference between then and now is that it was almost as if the assumption was that they were lying and they had to prove it. There was no or very very little wiggle room, given very little accommodation, very little thought about the idea that

they may be telling the truth. Albert says that during this time, it would be hard for an administrator to even wrap their heads around the idea that this type of abuse between a man and children was even capable of happening. So think about now, children who are being supervised by somebody who is just an abusive guy who's having relationships sexual relationships with young boys. In the minds

of an administrator of a health department in Georgia. He can't comprehend that he wants to not believe that because he's so confused about the question of homosexuality in the first place, that that doesn't compute with that guy. So you have a hearing, and you have troubled kids and this has happened to them, and the guy who has been accused says, hey, come on, these kids are liars, their pathological liars. I've got the evidence of it right here in my psychiatric files. That's the end of that.

It's hard to understand how something as serious as sexual abuse of miners could have slipped by local government in the nineteen seventies. To give some context as to what led to this massive oversight, you have to look at what was going on in Georgia politics at the time. In seventy, the same year of the Anawaki hearing, Jimmy Carter made the shift from state senator to governor of Georgia.

Petter's confidant, Jim Parham, who had served as the director for de Facts for a number of years, would go on to play an integral role in Jimmy Carter's cabinet. This career opportunity for parm would greatly affect the future

of Anawaki. Jimmy Carter ran for governor at Georgia on the idea that he was going to reorganize government, and when he did when he got into the governor's office, the biggest part of that job, that promise, was to take all the health facilities, state health facilities and to get him under one big organized umbrella. In order to do that, he appointed param to figure it out. Parum did figure it out. He did a good job and figuring it out, but it had to do with stepping

on a lot of toes along the way. Every legislator, every member of the House, every member the Senate had a stake in it because their health departments in every county, their hospitals. During Carter's time as Georgia governor, the number of government agencies dropped from over three hundred to a consolidated two overall departments, with the heads of each reporting directly to the governor. While this may have streamlined the local government bureaucracy, it may have also left an opening

for lack of oversight. One of the most controversial of these consolidations was the newly formed Department of Human Resources. It is under this department that every health and welfare organization in the state was lumped together. Shortly after the hearing regarding Anawaki's license, Jim Parm was put in charge as the director of the Department of Family and Children's Services or Defacts, the same department which held said hearing.

A year later, the department would be absorbed into the aforementioned Department of Human Resources, with Parm serving as its deputy commissioner. As second in command for this expansive department, Parum would have sway over a key factor, what organizations could qualify as a licensed medical facility. Harm had been instrumental in helping Petter get Anawake he accredited as a

psychiatric hospital. That was pivotal for Antawaki because when they were accredited as a hospital, they became eligible for third party insurance payments, and that made an Awake a gold mine.

The first correspondence regarding accrediting an Awake as a licensed hospital appears to be a letter from the Comptroller General of Georgia to Lewis Petter from two In it, Comptroller General Johnny Calledwell refers to a meeting with the staff of an Awake in review of the treatment center Calledwell provides a list of violations of the building which go

against the requirements of the Safety Code for Hospitals. In the trip reports sheets sent to the then director of Anawaki, James Henry Evans, it states the purpose of this visit was to determine whether or not this treatment center can be licensed as a psyche patric hospital. It appears doubtful that this can be done under current criteria for psychiatric hospitals. There is not a building at the site which in

any way resembles a psychiatric institution. It appears to this organization maybe serving a very useful purpose in rehabilitating wayward, delinquent or emotionally disturbed boys, but it is done in a completely an institutionalized setting, in the relaxed atmosphere of a summer camp. This rejection would not be the end of Petter's attempt at getting this license. In a string of memos provided from the Georgia State Archives, we see Petter once again using his friends in high places to

help move red tape. The documentation that I found that showed the relationship between Petter and Parham The most troubling of that documentation had to do with memos that param had written to other administrat administrators that worked for him at the Department of Human Resources at the time, basically

pushing them to grant this hospital license. They had questions about it, and he wrote that basically without saying so, and they never do this in bureaucratic documents, but it was clear that the purpose of the document was to tell them grant this guy this license. The string of memos to which Albert is referring to begins innocently enough with a letter from a concerned teacher dating from November of nine. This would begin a domino effect that would

forever change the future of Annawaki. In the letter, she writes of a mentally handicapped student of hers who had trouble adapting to normal school environments but expressed an interest in outdoors and camping, whom she believed would be a perfect fit for Annawaki. The problem was the ever growing cost of enrollment in the program. The student's family could

simply not afford it. Over the next months would follow it back and forth of letters between the administration of an Awaki and a number of people from different health organizations the state offered to pay the required rate for aid to families with dependent children. Administrator of Annawaki, James Evans response would be that the rate was so inadequate that the institution should not be included among any list of programs for whom these rates were established. In other words,

it wasn't enough money. This was just the opportunity had or needed to finally license an Awake as a medical facility, and he would call on his friend Jim Para to help make it happen. In a letter from ninety three, PARAM inquired at the Division of Mental Health would recommend that Anawaki be granted a provisional license as a special psychiatric hospital and if so, what steps would be required to obtain said license. Their superior he was a deputy

director of the division of the department. He had written this to three bureaucrats who were his underlinks this parallel documentation that was in the state archives that shows that Peder was pressuring part to accelerate the process. In a reply to one of param's inquiries, director of the Legal Services Unit Rights, assuming the facility can convince the various

units making recommendations to the Quality Control Unit. The department presently has the legal authority to license the facility without any additional legislation. Anawaki was soon fast tracked to receive their license to operate in the State of Georgia as a psychiatric hospital. In a memo regarding this matter, it has stated the quote, if consideration is given to licensing this center, we believe it will be necessary to waigh physical plant requirements and let the program of services be

the determining factor. Basically, if the State of Georgia was going to give Anawaki a license, a special exemption would have to be made around any building requirements. Shortly after this, the Division of Mental Health wrote a glowing review of an Awaki to the Chief of the Standards and Licensing Unit, the department in charge of granting licenses. In March of seventy four, Annawake was granted a six month provisional license

to operate as a state mental hospital. The special provision was made which ignored any violations of the building requirements of a medical hospital. Jim Parum followed up with a letter to Louis Petter. It read, Dear Lewis, just a quick note to thank you for the tour. I was greatly impressed with your program and the attitudes of boys with whom I spoke. You and the staff deserve great credit for the job you were doing. If I could send more state kids, I certainly would. They all seem

to be doing well again. Thanks, keep up the good work as ever, Jim. Not five years after Louis Petter and Anna Wake were put on trial, Jim Parum was singing their praises. Harms influence would help keep Anna Wake in good standing and would later lead to a permanent license as a medical facility in the state of Georgia.

Now and Awake could collect third party payments from any of their patients medical insurance, essentially opening the floodgates to increased premiums through which the Petter family stood to make millions. Parm in the meantime, would continue working his way up the chain of government bodies, ultimately leading to his highest ranking government he would take just a few years later.

When Carter ran for president, he said he was going to reorganize the federal government, and he was gonna do it in the same way that he had reorganized the state government, which he said had been so successful. And when he became president, he appointed Parham to oversee that effort. Harum, who was a poor boy who grew up in a cotton mill village in the city of Atlanta, went all away from the cotton mill villages of Atlanta to Washington

with Jimmy Carter. Anna Wake had received their medical license and now had one of its biggest proponents in the White House. Serving under Jimmy Carter's cabinet, it seemed nothing was shut down the facility. By most accounts, Petter felt he was untouchable by the law, and at this point

he may as well have been. As the seventies progressed in a Waky became more ingrained in Georgia and neighboring state's way of dealing with troubled youth, wards of the state were now being sent there, and the program continued to devolve into something much harsher than when it initially began. One of the main structures on the Innawaki campus mentioned in the State Archives licensing documents is the E and

O Building. This was mentioned in an earlier episode as it was formerly known among patients as the Quiet Room, a form of solitary confinement which was meant to break down patients upon their arrival or for punishment when acting out. Evaluation and observation had progressed to being one of the cruelest aspects of an awaki, one that every patient would be met with immediately upon arrival. Here's Mark Sublett, an

Anawaki survivor. Your first arrival, you would go in and meet with a case worker lady, and then that's when things kind of started turning a different way. They told me you would have to be processed and evaluation, so you would go to a place called the E. N O Unit. So you'd first be led into this little

room eight by eight. Anyway, they take in and tell you you're gonna have to take off all your clothes and they're gonna have to evaluate you and observe you to make sure you're not gonna harm yourself or do anything. For twenty four hours, you're removed of your clothes and you're giving a green robe just like at the hospital, a little bit more concealing, but not much. And then you're put into a room and you're locked up for forty eight hours. And that's how you're initially brought into

the anawaking system. Here's another survivor Chris McKnight. The gentleman buzzed the door, and they buzzed you in, and you walk into a small fourier with two chi airs and a really small round table. The room is about ten ft by eight ft. Two doors, both locked, the glass top plexiglass top part of the door. So you go in there, and the first thing you do is they tell you to strip. I had just turned nine ten days before this. I looked more like I was seven.

I was really confused, and I sat down and said no. And so the gentleman leaned over and in a much harsher voice, said, you need to strip naked now, or I'm going to do it for you. So I started to get pretty scared. I was a very small child. So what did I do. I started to take off my clothes. I'm naked, and they rolled up my clothes and they buzzed me through the other door with the

group leader. And I looked to my left and there's a day room and there's about fifteen teenage boys with their clothes on, and a couple other older gentleman group leaders as it turned out, and they're all looking at me, and I'm standing there naked, and I just start to cry. I felt alone many times in my life, but this was like I felt like on my own alone. This was like a whole another kind of level of being

scared and frightened. So they walk you through the day room, which is room about forty by forty ft and you walk through it, and you go through another door, and immediately to your left is a bathroom and they tell you have a one minute to take a shower, and you take a quick shower, and then they give you a robe, a green robe, tell you to put it on. You walk out of the bathroom. To your immediate left is a room. They put you in its room about twelve ft by a eight ft with a mattress, a blanket,

a pillow, and a bible and that was it. High ceilings with a big plexiglass window at the top, and then they locked the door. And there you spend twenty four hours and they bring you your meals. You are in the room by yourself. It's very degrading. I mean, I understand kind of like they want to break you down to build you up, but this was your humiliation. This wasn't breaking you down to get to the root of maybe your problems or your issues, or what's going

on in your life. This was just straight up humiliation. There was no need to parade kids through a day room naked to enter a program like this. After the initial forty eight hours of solitary confinement, patients were then put in a room that would be shared with anywhere from four to six other boys. Talking was still not permitted at any time, and exercise was very limited. The rest of the days were spent in silence, and patients had to ask permission for any type of movement like

going to the restroom. If allowed, you were to follow a yellow line painted on the floor and not permitted to stray from it. Mark Butler says that like the rest of the Innawiki program, every basic rite, even wearing clothes, had to be earned. It takes you while to earn the privileges of being able to wear regular clothes. So I don't remember how long that was in the road flo, I think a couple of weeks. Then they allowed me to have clothes and pretty much the whole day be clean.

If you're a real good you got to go outside to this little it was like a little triangular, a little courtroom, half the size of this room that you can get a little bit of sign and if you're good, every couple of days and let you go out there like ten or fifteen minutes. The amount of time a patient would stay in I and OH could vary from weeks to months for some patients. Here's Stephen, he attended an awake in the mid seventies. I was probably in the n O for a couple of months, which was

fairly standard. I might have been in a hair longer, but I think they wanted to get me outside, you know that. I don't think they wanted to hold me much longer. There's Chris McKnight again. So ian O for me turned out to be I want to say, close to two and a half months. Other kids were in their shorter other kids were in their long or It

really depended on you accepting your problems. And I finally realized that I was just gonna have to go along and say what they wanted to hear to get out of the You know, I had never been in any sort of lock up. I mean I had heard from other kids about juvenile hall and that was like jail to me, and I felt like I was in jail. Putting a child in solitary confinement could wear on them mentally, sometimes causing mental breakdowns. I had long fingernail shoot my

fingernails down to like a saw a pattern. It was trying to scratch through my veins and my arm. I just I literally wanted to die. My whole life had been taken from me. They don't really tell you when you get there and how the program works, when you're gonna get to go outside, when you're gonna see other people. It was just a day to day, stay behind us line, don't ask questions, and do your word. It was pretty intense.

It's a big shock when you first leave home, and of course I was only thirteen, so you kind of start dawning on what's gonna go on, you know, like I'm not going back home, and kind of start I break down. You have your own moments, did you start realizing, start figuring out what's happening. I remember this one kid who went crazy in that twenty four hour confinement and I want to punching out the little glass window on the door and really messing up his hand pretty bad,

and they had to restrain him. My second stay at Anniwaki happened to another kid. I witnessed the kid just went crazy, but he had been an EO for months. And then I found out that he had been in email for months after that, and they wound up shipping the box to another hospital. He never left the you know, and he was an ANNI waking for like nine months or so. Catherine Perkins is a psychology professor who was

studied emotionally disturbed behavior in children extensively. She says this type of treatment can make a situation with a troubled team go from bad to worse. Kids or kids, and most kids need engagement, they need human contact, they need more. If you are already vulnerable for emotional and mental health illness, if you already have that level of vulnerability and then you're subjected to further abuse, you're just exacerbating a problem that was already there by no means is anything good

going to come out of that. I mean, you're just taking a bad situation and making it worse. Fred Knox was only a small child when he was admitted to an AWAKE. It was during this initial processing that he realized the type of abuse that was about to take place. My number was K twelve twenty. I was there from August to November one. I was eleven. I was made to take off all my clothes and I was told to put on this blue, kind of greenish type robe.

I couldn't wear any underwear. I couldn't do anything, and I was having people yell fresh meat seeing me crying. Tears were just falling out of my eyes. I didn't know what I was doing. I was made to squat. I didn't know if I was going into jail or what. I had no idea it was. It was a building called the en O. It basically had about four different units.

The men the boys were on one side that were kind of split up with the bathroom, the offices in the middle, the rooms on the side, and the middle was kind of cafeteria, two little tiny courtyard, the infirmary or clinic, I guess as they called it was connected to that. You know, you had to go through about two or three doors to get to the infirmary. There were locked doors almost like every no phone to call anybody for Fred. The abusive antawaki was coming from the

patients as well. I was sexually molested by a student. They would do it when other people were supposedly sleeping. I mean, you know, it was almost kind of like if a counselor group later turned his cheek or turned his head the other way. You know, Hey, what can I get away with? I had that. I guess that thought process, that that was a normal way of life. Fred remembers another patient who he experienced E and O with,

who would later make national news. He might have heard his name mentioned, but his name was Stephen Anthony Mobley. I guess an Awaky messed him up pretty bad. He killed a Domino's Pizza manager and shot him in the back of the head, execution style. Arrested in in Gainesville, Georgia, Stephen Anthony Mobley became known in the crime world as the first defendant to use predisposition of genes as a defense for murder. He was executed on death Row by

lethal injection. Thinking two thousand five, it was Annawak's program was becoming psychologically traumatizing for patients. The E and O was now the first experience of anyone in the program, setting the bar for what would come later. Since Anna Wake now had its medical license, it was free to expand its program. They would soon begin a girl's treatment

center and move into other states, even other countries. Anna Wake was now accepting patients each year by the hundreds and making a fortune doing so, and without any real oversight the damage being done to these patients would only get worse next time. On Camp hell in a Week and Awake, he had been established for sixty years, but by nineteen the numbers were up above six hundreds. It's like two different worlds, you know. There was a Aniwaki

outside and the competitor inside. At that time they sent the toughest of the students to Florida. There was another guy that got bit by a rattlesnake when we were cutting out some and trails. I think the air lifted them to Tallahassee. I saw other kids be abused by their peer group, and I saw a lot of kids being abused by group leaders. I mean terribly so. Camp hell an Awake was created and hosted by Josh Thane, with producer Miranda Hawkins and executive producers Alex Williams and

Matt Frederick. The soundtrack was written and performed by Josh Thane and Adrian Barry. Archival footage provided by ws B and CBS News find us on Instagram at camp hell pod that's c A M p h E L l p O D educate yourself about the issue of child abuse and things that you should look for at the Darkness to Light website D two ll dot org. That's D the number two l dot org. Camp hell an

Awake is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.