“On the Gulf””

ever really goes away from me. It's also not a part of my everyday life as far as my interactions with other people and things that I do. Stays in my thoughts less and less over time. My name is Carl Moore. I was m five sixty two. I went to an Awake and nineteen seven any six and left there in uh Carl served as a counselor for Anawaki and was the closest of anyone I spoke with to

Lewis Petter and his inner circle. By the time of Carl's entry to Antawaki in, Petter had still managed to keep contact with the boys on campus, even though he was not permitted to enter their campsites. Carl remembers his initial introduction to the program while visiting a close friend during one of Anawaki's fellowships, an annual fundraiser for the foundation which would show off the improvement of its patients

to their families. That's the fellowship. We would have the entire campus and all the families together in the Amphitheater area. We go through a program and awards would be given out, testimonials, kids would do skits. Yeah, everybody put on a good show, and then after the main ceremony, each group would go off to its own area and have lunch. It was pretty impressive, and for me, I just saw these people.

I said, that's what I want. I want to I want to be confident and strong and sure what I'm doing. Like all these people looked like they were I knew someone who was there, and I thought I'd never see again, and I thought they were just not gonna make it. Then I went out there and saw them at one of the fellowships, and I couldn't believe. You know, it's like they changed so much and it seems so positive. And my life was in disarray. I mean, I was depressed,

anxious at the end of my rope. I felt like then I saw this place where they had all these healthy people, and I thought, well, maybe that's something I should try. Carl remembers his first impression of Lewis Petter following this fellowship. He was not really a big person but physically but had a big presence. When he came into a room, he knew he was there. If he looked at you, you knew who was interested in you. He paid attention to people. Petter was God and antawaiki.

When I came to view it as being his, there was really no distinguishing in my mind him from the program. Carl says this first introduction to anna Waki came at one of the darkest times in his life, a time when he was desperate for some guidance and direction. I had gotten a girl pregnant and we had decided to get an abortion. I had had a lot of self hatred, I guess Carl decided that an awaki might be the answer to his problems. He set up an entry interview

with Louis Petter. It is here that he would meet him for the first time. I went for an interview and into his office and I told him about that, and I was pretty confused. He had a pitch that he would give two people about letting go of your feelings and ideas, and he actually kind of helped me to let go of some of that anger and hurt that I was feeling. Then he came over and had me close my eyes and hold my hand up. I

didn't know what it was about. And then he came over and he put his hand on my face and put his thumb against my lips and I opened my mouth and he put his thumb in my mouth. Now let him do it? Even how you say, how could I let him do that? And I was like, this guy's God. He's helped all these people, He's done these amazing things, and he must think I'm pretty special. From going to want to kill yourself to be in uh,

one of God's chosen was big step. I think at that point he said, well, you can come back and go into program. We'll see how it goes. Over the past several weeks, we have received 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 Packer. He had no answer to that question. Involved having the institution paid little place and absolutely of what they should have done. I'm disturbed the fact of something that can still going on any wicked. I'm Josh Stain and this is Camp hell An Awake. By the mid nineteen seventies and Away he had established itself as

a successful program for troubled youth in Georgia. The center had secured its medical license, which allowed the collection of third party payments from insurance companies, and was now having patients referred there from the court system as well as other learning centers. Louis Petter, supposedly restricted from making contact with any patients, was still keeping his office on campus grounds.

Any oversight at the time had slipped through the cracks of state government, and the enrollment of patients at Antawaki was growing exponentially. Carl moore Or was one of these patients. He was admitted in nineteen seventy seven after seeing the result of his brother's reform there. Carl's family had a

particular connection to Antawaki. His mother was involved in a number of schools in Atlanta that would often refer children to the program In Douglasville, Annawak's reputation had put the program at the top of the list for educators to send children who were beyond the scope of their help. Here's Chris McKnight, a former patient who was referred to Antawaki from the New School, a program headed by Carl's mother tweeting More. And my father pulled me out of

the school. I was going to edit me into tweeting More school the new school. I was there for a couple of months, and at the new school, I met a couple of people that I was at Annawaki with who were at her school post and awake. So it turns out tweeting More recommended Antawaki. It's not just me, but a lot of other kids. My feelings with Tweetie is I don't think she knew about the abuse of Annawaki. I've known Tweetie since I was a little kid. I mean,

she's she's pasted an hour rest her soul. A number of former patients I've interviewed said they were referred to an Awake from other schools in similar ways. Word had spread throughout learning centers in Georgia and neighboring states that Antawaki was a solution for troubled kids who didn't have a place elsewhere. Now that Anawaki was an officially licensed medical hospital, it was also receiving patients who were wards of the state of Georgia and other neighboring states like Alabama.

This all amounted to a large increase in the number of patients enrolling, and Antawaki was running out of room. It just seemed that things grew very rapidly while I was there. I'm Stephen mckinn and I was a patient and aniwag from July of nineteen seventy six through August

of nineteen eighty. My number was M five three and Awaki had been established for sixteen years, but by nineteen eighty the numbers were up above six hundred, so the population at least by laundry number, increased threefold in the time that I was there. Apparently, the Douglasville campus was not big enough for the amount of people that were coming in in a wiki would soon need to expand

their program outside of Douglasville. This would take form and what would later be known as the South Campus in Carrabelle, Florida, a small fishing town near Tallahassee on the Gulf of Mexico. Anawiki had taken biking and canoeing trips to this town dating back to some of its earliest years. In seventy one, article from the Tallahassee Democrat pictures a group of boys and two older men riding bikes single file down the highway.

The caption states Douglasville, Georgia utes and their leader on their annual bike excursion to Florida on their way to Daytona Beach via St. Augustine from Carabelle. Stephen says he was one of the first groups sent there to build what would become the South Campus. They looked among the people that they had in Douglasville that we're in vocational groups and chose a certain number of young men that were physically strong and he evil to go down and

produce work without a lot of guide us. We were told, y'all are going down here to build the campus, and for the most part, that's what we did. I was part of the first votational group that went down there. All we did was work for six days a week and went to church on Sunday and tried to go swimming or something like that on Sunday afternoons. It was hot, It was a lot of bugs, a lot of mosquitoes.

It was completely undeveloped, and when we first went down all there was was that power poll a well with water doct edders can ever in a Weekie's second campus in Carabelle consisted of two locations approximately five miles apart, often referred to as the bay Side and the land Side. The bayside house to former motel taken over and renovated by Inawaki patients. Five miles inward was Landside, once part

of World War two training camp Gordon Johnston. All that was left was four cement blocks from a former military radar station and untouched Gulf wilderness. This is where Stephen and his first group would begin building a second campus for word groups in Florida. We went down there and began building a lodge, a place for us to eat and meet. We slept on the old radar installations slab and also worked building the first camp site down there, which was called Shimidi. Landside was a few miles away

from Bayside. It was not on the coast. It was four or five miles inland. There was not any mixing of the academic groups and the vocational groups. We only came to Bayside to eat our meals and I finished my part of Carabelle. There were two groups at Bayside and three groups at Landside, so at that point it was rapidly approaching the size of the Douglas Bell campus. Stephen says the chosen location of Carabelle tied into the

educational aspect of an Awaki. For are to the building of the second campus, and Awake he could only offer a g D or prepare people for a g D. They were not an accredited at school. So they entered into some agreement with Carabell Public Schools and they had three academic groups in Caribell, where the members of those groups went to public school during the day and then came back to what we called Bayside or the old

hotel at night. This practice of utilizing the Florida public school system did not go unnoticed by the local government in Caribell. In a newspaper article from four the new superintendent of Franklin County mentions asking the inn a WEEKI Foundation to pay tuition for its students attending floor to public schools. In another article dated from and Awake is described as a quote college prep school where students could

earn college credit by attending the Florida public schools. Eventually, and Awake would be required to pay a tuition fee of fifty dollars a student, but plans were already under way to build their own school. Following the nine seventy hearing, some restrictions have been put into place regarding Lewis Petter's interaction with the boys at in Awake. The original stipulation the Petter have no contact with any of the boys had since been deluded to him not setting foot in

the sleeping quarters. By many accounts, this still meant Petter would often see the boys, even still having visitors in his house and maintaining his inner circle. Carl Moore, when we first heard at the top of the episode, would be next in line in a string of young men which Petter would manipulate and abuse. Carl says this first began in Carabelle. Everything about the way I went through

the program was different. I mean, looking back to me, it was clear that I was selected to be something special. I was assigned to group in Caravelle, Florida, which was the first group down there. Most of what I remember about that was was pretty positive. We had a couple of group leaders that were I think they're really good guys. They were the kind of people that's like, jeez, I want to grow up and be like that guy. I ended up in Carabelle, and then I think some of

the guys down there thought it was funny. You know, I hadn't been through the you know, at some point I ended up driving back and forth bringing supplies down from Douglasville. Kind of immediately set me apart from everyone else who couldn't go anywhere. I would say, yeah, Carl doesn't have his knife frillages, but he can drive the trucks back and forth. You know, there are already people there that he had relationships with. He had a trailer on the South campus. It was quite a privilege to

get invited to go to the trailer. He had another guy who was who was living at his house then who brought down there with him former patient. A couple other guys who were I don't know if there are patients or not at the time, but they all were. It had been, you know, so that was the kind of a special thing to get invited to come to dinner in there that it was a good cook. By the way, that was where I had really my my first sexual experience with him. He was big on uh,

trust and loyalty. The standard speech was something like, I'm gonna be your old elephant. He would say, I'm going to teach you the way, and you can only have one old elephant. Of course, everybody confided in him, and he expected that, and it was clear that, you know, he would expect that. I think he probably even addressed it directly and saying, you know, something like you can tell me everything or anything, but you can't do that

with everybody, and we did. Carl says that this type of abuse was something that was felt out that not all of the boys were subjected to, but only the ones that were susceptible to it. So here's the slide of hand that kind of happens with that. You're gonna be open with me, You're gonna trust me absolutely, and you're gonna do away with all the taboos and all this crap that you've been taught that makes you feel so bad, and then I've put my hands on you

and say how does that feel? Say, well, you don't say it feels weird. Yeah, I mean some some guys would punch him out. He would know who those guys were. It's just like what we learned on the Serengetti in Africa. When the tigers or the lions are approaching a herd of animals, they look for the weak ones that are at the edge of the herd and they try to pick them off. My name is Chris Newland, and I am the executive director at the National Children's Advocacy Center.

We were actually the first child advocacy center in the world. At Children's Advocacy Centers, what we do is coordinate the multidisciplinary response to child abuse in our communities, and this model includes partnerships and collaborations with law enforcement, child protective services, medical providers, mental health professionals, prosecutors, victim advocates, so all

of us working in a coordinated manner. What's really insidious in this is the fact that in child sexual abuse, in many situations, the child ends up being sexually abused by someone who they consider their friend, someone who they like. Oftentimes, the term grooming is used to describe the actions that happen leading up to sexual abuse with children by their abuser. Chris says that this is an inaccurate term to use. Why do we use a word grooming to describe what

an individual may do to sexual abuse a child? Why do we use a word that is in every other context pro social. What they're doing is manipulating. They're taking advantage of someone whom they can they can deceive for their own personal advantage and gain without any concern for that individual. There's multiple levels of manipulation that occur. First, an individual manipulate the broader environment by having a good reputation and you know, being well respected in their community, like, oh,

Chris could never do something like that. I've known Chris for twenty six years and I've only known him to be x. Those are about creating this environment where I'm manipulating everybody to think I'm a really good guy, to hide the things that maybe I'm doing secretly. Another level of manipulation that happens is the manipulation of caregivers or trusted others. So let's say the individual wants to have

sexual contact with the child. Their first step really is to win over the parents or caregivers of that child, because they until they can have that individual access with the child, they're not gonna have the opportunity to sexually abuse them. It was part of the show, you know, they had a program that did change live. Being in

the inside, I was kind of isolated. Really. Anybody that was close to Petter was It's like two different worlds, you know, there was a Aniwoki outside and the Petter inside. He would definitely pick and choose whoever he was going to be close to or spend time with. I think that any group leader that had come through the program was certainly going to be on that list of people that would likely have had a relationship with better. It's

not an accusations, just just the way it is. The last is the child, and it's not just a random approach where I'm just gonna try to hit on every child. Necessarily, that's not the case. Individuals may have particular interests and who they're interested in or who they may have a desire to be in contact with. They may also will almost always look at is this a child who I

think I can manipulate or not. If you have a child who always tells on everybody for every transgression, that's not who you're going after, right because that that individual is gonna, you know, tell. Shortly after Karl's stay at the Carabell campus, he was promoted to group counselor and put on an aweki's payroll, which brought him even closer to Petter and his home. So I left the group in Florida after pretty much after the ninety days, and I got my crest. We were starting down that road.

And you know, some time after that, I went to work with a group and it just kind of evolved into a group leader. It wasn't like there was any kind of formal process to it. I was just put with a group. It's like, try this out. And at some point I started getting a check for it, paycheck. I was just following the program. Really, I wasn't the first one to go through this. I needed a place

to go when I was off. Petter had a couple of beds in the basement of his house and there was another guy living there who had been through the program. And to then we were part of the family. The offender in this scenario is making the kids like them where they are an important part of their life, because it makes it harder for you to tell on someone

you really like. It's easy for any of us to tell on someone we hate when they've done something wrong, right like, oh hey, this person, I hate them, they did this, But when it's someone we like, we're less likely to the manipulation of You get to do something that other people don't get to do, You get to have access to something that other people don't get to have access to, makes it where they You know, this confusing notion of okay, but I'm special now that some

of this stuff feels weird, but I get all these extra privileges or opportunities that other people don't get. I'm special. And especially for someone who may be at a wilderness camp, who hasn't maybe oftentimes felt special in their life or been important to someone else, that can be very powerful for them, not in a sexual away, but just to feel respected, to feel wanted, to feel a part of something. I don't think you could be in Petter's inner circle

without a great deal of denial. I mean I was living with his family, and I would say, you know, it's clear to me that at some level they knew the drill. I think that, like a lot of people in my position, they were essentially making sacrifices for the greater good kind of thing. You know that Anna Waki was so important and so good, you know we had to keep it going. It's hard to describe what happens something like that. You don't think about it, You think

about other things. Once you kind of compartmentalize that one little objectionable thing, then you try to do things to make your life worth while. I think everybody who is near Petter did that in some way or another. Chris says the not always, but sometimes this type of abuse can continue downward from the abused to others. Now, in the situation with Anna Waki, these behaviors were nurtured by people in positions of influence, and we see this from

time to time. Individuals who were abused become involved in that and they have developing some level of enjoyment, and they are they're encouraged to engage in this behavior with other individuals. The other thing it does is it empowers the offender. Like if let's say so, I I'm sexually abusing this child and now I'm encouraging this childhood gates in sexual contact. I can then go to that child and say, if you ever talked about what happened, they're

going to find about about what you've done. You'll be in trouble too. Now I've made my victim even more vulnerable to me and more able to be manipulated because you have these other people that are kind of this pond the scheme of sexual abuse. People would confide in him, and uh, he kind of kept an inventory of people. He would have something to say about everybody, and he kind of manipulated people with that information in a really

kind of clever, discreet way. Sometimes he would have confrontations with people and they would they would not come out ahead on it, and I think that's why. I think people were afraid to confront him for that reason. I think he was one of these people who had the ability to turn people's own situations against them pretty easily. He had told me once that he he had been in the Scouts, the boy Scouts, and the Scout master had taught them that male relationship with the older man

was important or healthy thing. The unusual thing was that Petter saw it as this guy was right, and this idea of these necessary and healthy sexual relationships with men. I mean, clearly Petter saw things that way children can be manipulated and manipulating them. It's also part of the offender's mentality, like if other people are doing this, it's more socially acceptable. In our inner circle, it's acceptable for

us to do that. I serve as a role model for them so they can engage other kids in this activity. It almost is gonna make it harder to believe. But in the group that I'm hanging out with, the people who I'm associating with, this is more commonplace and it becomes a norm. I think I rationalized as long as I could that I was doing the right thing. At some point I couldn't accept that myself, but I really had nowhere to go about it. It was almost like

I had stopped growing when I got there. In a lot of ways, there was always the upside of it, but the downside of it was that, yeah, I could and keep living like that. I didn't know how to get out. I think for probably the last two years it's almost a blur. I didn't I wasn't functioning and really any capacity. I just was depressed. I was suicidal. It's probably by the narrowest of margins that I didn't just kill myself. I I came really close. Yeah, I

just I had nowhere to go with it. The more sincere you are about wanting to get help, the more trusting you are, the more vulnerable will you become. Professional therapists are trained about this stuff. It's it's not an easy thing and I've learned quite a bit about it their situations. Where anybody can lose their objectivity, there's training and integrity and some mechanisms for therapists to deal with that. There's not many mechanisms for patients to deal with it,

and that's unfortunate. Petter wasn't if he was trying to that. He completely did the opposite, took the vulnerability and uh and exploited it on a really huge scale. But it's a cruel thing, you know, the more innocent you are, the worst you are subject to getting hurt. That way, the more trusting you are, the more you try to do the right thing, the worst you get hurt. And that's just that's the heart break of it. While Louis

Petter continued his methods of abuse and manipulation. The construction of Antiwaki's Carabell campus was escalating this work. Building on untouched Gulf wilderness proved even harder on the patients than what was being done in Douglasville. He is a former patient, Chris McKnight. Douglasville was very hilly and a really big campus, right, lots of trees, so there could be a group a hundred feet over there doing something and you couldn't even

see them. Caramell wasn't like that. You could see clear across campus for half a mile barely obstructed. It was kind of like laid out, sort of a circle of buildings. Then there was an old quad building that was the foundations for a huge tower when it was now rebased, and they built buildings on the four foundations that held the tower. There were small buildings, but most of the buildings were kind of like in an outer part of

the cleared campus. So if you're working on campus and Caribell, somebody could see if you're just sitting not working, clear across the campus or something. So it seemed like it was a lot more. I felt like we were always watched more in Carabell at that time, they sent the toughest of the students to Florida. This is Stephen, a former patient be in Awaking. He was also a part of one of the first work groups in Carabelle. They formulated a group to start an entire new group in carabell.

So while I'm in the en oh, and while they're formulating this group, there's this intimidation factor that you know you're being hauled off to the to the roughest of the rough, and and these guys are going to straighten me out. For sure. South Campus was smaller than Central, and then about a year after being there, we built the big athletic building, which was full of school rooms in the weight room and the training room and right

next to the football field all the students built. At the very first campsite I went to was an island surrounded by a lake infested by alligators and rattlesnakes and and whatnot. But we built a barge to pull ourselves across over to the island and we lived in tps over there. Well, I got bent by a rattlesnake, but I had my boots on, so I was all right. We did have one guy that beats an alligator to death of a baseball bat. Yeah, the alligators were kind

of a problem. Chris McKnight attended Carebelle after the new campus had been built. He says the work would continue almost pointlessly if there was nothing to build. It seemed as though they ran out of stuff to do a carabell. They purchased forty acres and we just cleared brush. This went on for like nearly two years of just clearing brush for no ends, just like go anywhere, find a place, and to start clearing brush. You never hauled it away.

It was never concerted effort to clear from this section to that section, and it got to the point they finally led us torch it and then after that we never had to go to the North forty again. It was just completely useless worker project. It just seemed that like they went out of the way to find stuff for us to do that just never went to any means. I remember once we dug a ditch from one creek to a swampy area and they said it was drainage, but nothing ever drained, and it was just to keep

us busy. It was just for no reason. Here's former patient Mark Barbourn. We worked on the Florida trail. We've done a lot of cutting down of all metados, and we built the baseball field. I actually laid the center blocks for the dugouts for the baseball field. There was another guy that got bit by a rattlesnake when we were cutting out some some trails. I think the air lifted him to Tallahassee, and you know, he was back

within a couple of days. This crushing labor would also lead to physical abuse by the hands of group leaders and fellow patients. There were injuries. There were injuries all the time. I was injured quite a bit, especially my first six months, but mostly that was abuse from other kids. I was pushed, punched, beaten up by peers quite a bit, especially that first six six nine months, and I just figured that just was the way it was. You know. It was like the hierarchy of just being in a

really terrible situation, you know what I mean. I didn't know any better, or no one told me that there that there was another way, or that this is just the way you're gonna expect to be beaten up or abused, you know, I mean, it was kind of Lord of the Flies. You just kind of figure it out where you were just gonna be in a lot of a lot of pain, an Awaki. There was a lot of fear, fear from the staff, fear from your peers. I was

physically afraid. I mean it was I saw other kids to be abused by their peer group, and I saw a lot of kids being abused by group leaders, I mean terribly. So I saw it once it turned over. Literally it seemed over backwards. And I know from that day on had back trouble for the rest of his life. And yet it was being a smartass. We're having a fire building contest and everyone had to build their own fire, and said something to the fact that, hey, we build

a fire every night for for group meeting. Why don't we just do it then in time, everyone, we're just wasting wood here and came over and just kind of folded him in half, kind of put his left arm on his neck and just pushed him like over his knee, and then he kind of just threw him up against a tree and kind of collected himself and and said, well, are we gonna do this fire building contest or not? And I don't even remember crying so much. Is just kind of like whimpering in pain and his face just

being so red. I think just I don't know. It just affected me tremendously seeing a kid hurt like that. I mean, I had been beaten up by peer group, and I've been beaten up by my mother, but I had never seen another kid beaaten up by an adult. That just scares the hell out of you. Mark Barber recalls another incident which stuck with him over the years. One still kind of haunts me. There was a guy, Mr. Phillips, who was the head of security. There was a guy

in my group, our vocational group, who ran off. We called him Splitters, but he was a runner. He took off in the middle of the night. He was gone. They caught him, and I remember going to the lodge to eat the next morning and they had him behind the lodge and you could see it. They were taking him back there and his arm was hanging for some reason, his arm didn't looked right. And I told the other or something. We were walking in line. I said, did

you see you know such and such as arm? He goes, yeah, it was broken, And I said that's why it looked the way it did. He goes, yeah, he goes as you could tell how Mr Phillips was holding it. A couple of days later, it's in a cast and that's in a sling and the guy's kind of drugged up. I don't know if it's pain meds. I don't know what it was. It's pretty traumatic, you know, to see an arm going the wrong way. With all the work being done in Carabell, the reasons for the build out

we're not always clear. One project the patients would later work on was the build out of a new hotel in marina in the heart of Carabelle. This hotel in Marina was not a resource for in Awaki, but destined for public use. Scott Hole is a former Inawaki patient. He worked on helping build the marina in Carabell. And the kind of manual labor that we would do would either be working on the grounds of the facility itself, but then there were also public things that we did,

like the marina. When we were building this marina, we actually were you know, laying the posts that build the boat slips. Something that's like telephone pole and it's coated with a chemical called creosote. But we would carry those

big poles to take two of us. You know, it's probably eight foot long like a telephone pole, not quite as thick though, and you know, we would have chemical burns all over our neck and shoulders from carrying that creosote over and putting them into the end of the water. We take a big hose and get it down, down, down, until it was level and that kind of thing. But it was very very large marina where we were actually, you know, sinking the creosote post for the boat slips

and all that kind of thing. Doing fifteen year old kids doing this really hard manual labor building this marina that I don't know who got the money from, but it certainly wasn't us. I mean, our parents were paying for the privilege for us to build this marina for these other people. Chris McKnight remembers working on the renovation to the adjoining restaurant attached to the marina. We completely like leveled the whole marina, rebuilt some of the buildings,

re landscaped everything. They had, bought some boats that we never really got to use, some sailboats, and they also bought the restaurant that was there in the marina, which we gutted and they never really did much with it. I don't know who the marina was owned by beforehand. I think they bought the marina and I want to stay nineteen eighty and it was set dormant and they finished out the lease with the restaurant and then they closed the restaurant down and I don't know what their

intentions were. So I remember one of the first work projects was scraping off the old tile in the downstairs part of the restaurant and uh and like on the other side of the room, they had already ripped out most of the petition walls and stuff, and it was just kind of like one big coward's room and there was guys in the other end rip it out in insulation. And it was hot, you know, it was on the

end of May, but it was still floorida. It's hot, humid, and you could just see particles kind of floating around. There's like one door open and where I went in just scraping this tile from probably like the fifties or forties. Mark Barber remembers one particular incident while working on the marina. We were at the marina and we were bolting together a whole bunch of covert pipe, and that covert pipe was covered with creosote to keep it from rusting, you know,

from the salt water. And one of the guys had gotten creosote burnt really bad. It was like a third degree sunburn on his arms and between his legs to where we were straddling and bolting it together. I was helping him. I got burnt a little bit, but not bad enough to even even really mentioned, but he got tore up pretty bad. Mark Sublett was one patient who suffered these types of burns. We were building the athletic building for Airbell and we were pouring the foundations for it.

The foundations were getting off We're supposed to pour down to a graded steak, a grade steak. A couple of us jumped in the asphalt or the concrete. I'm sorry, and started having You have to brake it back and get it to the right level. That stuff burns your skin real bad. And I guess I didn't know it or didn't feel it, but it burned about sevent the skin off my legs, so I was laid up. They took me out of my group. I could not go

anywhere my skin was gone. Had to go through a bunch of painful stuff as you get third degree chemical burns,

so it could not work. So I'd hanging the clinic and all this stuff, and that was kind of a respite because you get some TV and some radio in the clinic, so you kind of hang out, but still kind of shitty because of course sitting there are burned legs and very painful as I'm sitting in the clinic at the Quadrangle down in Florida, out hobbling around on crutches, and apparently my parents had come down for a parent teacher meeting and go, hey, there's my son out there

on crutches, and so they go, oh, we forgot to tell you your son hurt your legs. Okay, oh no, you know what he does. Oh he's getting full on, will take care of everything. Don't worry, He'll be just fine. And of course to what they told him was afterward, hey, you're not gonna have to pay us. We're gonna comp

your son to go here. I think part of the reason they did that because at the time my father ran to cab General Hospital from six four, so they kind of knew that pretty big hospital, you know, the head administrator and all that stuff. So they sent him, you know, the you know, you don't know any more money. This marina and hotel would come to appreciate him value greatly in the years ahead. Here's journalist Albert Edgin. At that time, Florida was exploding and Caramel that area down there.

He was smart to go there, very smart, because it's just around the coast from Panama City. Panama City is a place where people from Chicago go, you know, the Midwest, their families in the Midwest that they don't go to Miami. They go to Panama City, for God's sake. And so caramells right around the curve from that. So when you think about it, yeah, you can start a thing in Carrabelle where you've got especialty is treating kids. But man,

that's a real estate bonanza. Antawaki South Campus would come to be known as Anawaki on the Gulf, described in local papers at the time as a private, nonprofit college prep school with an Awake looking to expand their program into other states. It would soon set up another corporation to handle all of its real estate endeavors. Anawaki Estates. This corporation would be run and owned by Petter's three daughters, Marcia, Rita,

and Dana. With the success of in Awaki on the Gulf in a corporation to hold all of their property in a wake, he would soon look to international travel and even a possible expansion into other countries next time on Camp Help and Awaki, I think that he figured out people were onto him, and so there became a chosen group to accompanying them to Mexico. It was supposed to be this big privileged trip. So the Mexico trips most years they took us to a house of ill

repew house, prostitution, whatever you wanna call it. If you didn't know him, you would think he had a kind He would have a kind heart. They'd you want to help you, and you in a weird way he would. It was a church going guy who claimed to be. But they kept on telling me that I tried to commit suicide and that's what had happened to me. And I was trying to tell another of the staff members in E and L, No, that's not what happened to me.

This happened to me. Camp Hell Anna Waki 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 l dot org. That's d the number two l dot org. Camp hell Anawaki is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.