1: Second Chances

Before we get started, a quick warning. This show contains swearing and the subject matter isn't appropriate for young children.

I mean if you were to know me now you would completely be amazed by this, but I was not the best teenager ever. In fact, I was horrified. Megan Kreider lives in a small town in the world. She's married, with four kids, and she works as a real estate agent. But in two thousand two, Megan was fifteen and she was out of control. Honestly, th I was just a little shit, man. I mean, I was so like, I just wanna do what I wanna do and I don't wanna have anybody tell me I can't.

Megan was sneaking out of the house, sneaking boys in, mouthing off to her parents. And then one day she got caught with drugs at school. Yeah. They called my dad. to come pick me up and I just lost it on my dad. I s my mom just cried, just cried. They sent her away, a thousand miles from her home in the Dallas suburbs. To a town out west. It was a little suburban looking neighborhood. Surrounded by sagebrush and red mountains. Just like a normal house.

But what would happen to her there over the next nine months was anything but normal. I'm Jessica Miller. I'm a reporter with the Salt Lake Tribune. And this is Sent Away. It's an investigative podcast from our newspaper, APM Reports, and KUE R. And I'm Curtis Gilbert. I work with APM Report. Based at American Public Media. Megan is just one of the thousands and thousands of kids who've been sent to Utah for help over the past fifty years.

Some are from wealthy families. Some are kids in foster care or on juvenile probation. Some struggle with drug abuse. Some kids are depressed, others are defiant, some cut themselves or attempt suicide. And more kids like that have been sent to Utah for help than to any other state. nowhere else even comes close.

This podcast is about what happens to some of them once they get here. And it's about something bigger too. Over the next seven episodes, we'll investigate whether the state of Utah has done its job. Whether the government is living up to its responsibility to keep all those kids safe. Episode one Second Chances

That normal house on that normal street in Utah, just a year or two earlier, it had been a rental project. College students lived there. And then one day, a man named Daniel Taylor walked through the door. He was there to visit a friend, but he struck up a conversation with another guy who happened to swing by. I was started asking him, who owns this place? And 'Cause it was set up each bedroom had their bathroom and showers and stuff in it. And he said, Oh my dad does.

Daniel reached out to the property owner. Turns out, the guy was actually related to Daniel's wife. I told him what I wanted to do and he says, Okay, sounds great. What Daniel had been wanting to do was open up a treatment center for troubled teenagers. He'd worked at a bunch of them during his early twenties.

Then he went back to school, got his bachelor's degree, and now, with the building in hand, all he needed to do was design a program, hire a staff, and get the state's approval to start treating kids there. How long did it take from like the idea this would be a good place to make a facility to the doors are open, the license is in place, kids are coming. Probably about five months. Just five months.

One of Daniel's older brothers would handle the business end. One of his younger brothers would work as a supervisor. His wife worked there too. And Daniel would run the place day to day. And just like that, Integrity House was born. It was an all-girls program. It accepted teenagers struggling with all kinds of problems, drugs, depression, anger, delinquency, and it filled up quickly.

By the time Megan Kreider arrived a year later, almost all of the beds in that thirty five hundred square foot house were occupied. The biggest bedroom in the house had one, two, three, four, five, six, and a bed that came out straight like this. So it held seven kids just on its own. In total, the house had 16 beds, and there were girls from all over the country there: Minnesota, New Jersey, California, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, Hawaii, even a girl from Canada.

And Meghan says they all had one thing in common. Nobody liked it there, okay? I'm telling you right now. Life at Integrity House was strictly regimented. No swearing, no talking back. Girls had to walk through the building in silence, single file, hands behind their backs, eyes forward. You need a permission just to walk into a room.

I mean, I'm not gonna lie to you. I had a I had a hard time when I got there because, you know, some of the rules were like you can't touch another one of these kids, you can't hug them. You know, I'm one of those people that like when you're sad or you're hurting, I want to comfort you. You couldn't do that. I got in trouble probably more for things like that than I did anything. In spite of that, Megan made friends there. She was especially close to Kylie Jakways.

And she had this kind of although she was very Sweet. She kinda had this don't fuck with me attitude. And there was something about that that just kind of drew me to her. She was very real, very down to earth, very um she was funny. She was funny, and she even made the staff laugh. I I just liked the shit out of her, you know?

Kylie was from Illinois, southwest of Chicago, from a well-to-do family, just like Megan. She was adopted, her dad was a lawyer, and Megan says you'd never guess she was a troubled kid. Сі собої лайк. If I had met her at home, I would have thought she was just like a a dork or something like that. Two shoes in the photos. Exactly, thank you. At all. I mean that girl would have given me a run for my She was like on drugs. She was partying her butt all. That was back in Illinois.

She also ran away from home. It's how she ended up at Integrity House. I mean I thought I was a little badass, but she had done some things. Even though Megan was miserable a lot of the time at Integrity House, she has some great memories of her. With Kylie. We would play football on Thanksgiving. God, it was so beautiful there. Like it was gorgeous. I'd never really been around that much snow. It was awesome. I mean we would go do all kinds of things. Have a lot of fun.

On Christmas Eve in 2002, about five months after Megan arrived, the staff at Integrity House organized one of those special outings. But this one was different, and it's one Megan and the other girls would always remember.

Kira Crenshaw was there then too, and Personally, I had started getting a really bad feeling about something that was gonna happen that month. You know, those kinds of feelings. Unfortunately, when you tell people that something's bad's gonna happen and you're in a crazy house Nobody's really gonna believe you because that's the first thing they're gonna think is you're a little loopy. And then the staff announced that we were going somewhere.

That's another former resident. She asked us not to use her name because of the stigma associated with residential treatment. She, Megan, and Kira all told us about that Christmas Eve when the staff at Integrity House decided to take them on a field trip. For me, it just felt like something fun to do. To a cave in the desert. That sounds like fun. It sounded cool, kinda scary, but cool. And so we went to the adventure. Everyone was excited to get out and have fun.

We got in the van and we just went. We went for this drive that felt like forever. It felt like a really long time. It always felt like it took us hours to get anywhere. Desert. Anywhere. Now how long it really took us, I don't know. They get there and split into groups. And we were all grouped in a line. So s each staff has so many kids. A staffer in front, followed by three or four girls, then another staffer, another group of girls.

The cave doesn't look like much from the outside, just a hole in the ground. It's so small they have to crouch down and crawl in one by one. We went into the cave. But once they're in, the cave goes on for over a mile, twisting and turning into a maze, hundreds of feet underground. And then we're squeezing through the Parts of it are just barely big enough for a person to wiggle through, and then all of a sudden they emerge into a massive cavern. And then there was a big open area.

And and I remember when we walked into this space, there were girls that were behind me were like, I don't want to do this. This is like they were scared. Hold hands so we don't let go of each other. They're holding hands, so they don't get lost in the dark. Yeah, so we're trying to hang on to each other at the same time we're trying to climb down. And even Kylie was scared, and I don't remember that girl getting scared that much. Megan is right next to Kylie. Like she was scared.

Kylie was one of the gals that was either second or third in line. I'm holding her hand. Like she is right there next to me. They can barely see what's in front of them. They're feeling their way forward with I'm thinking I'm doing the right thing by saying, you know, it's okay. Come on, just hold on to me. I got this. We'll get through this.

And I hope my memory serves me correctly, but it seems like there was lots of things. Some kind of opening a little bit. And this ledge went off to the left. And then I heard a lot of people screaming. Terrifying. It was horrific. Megan is the only one who was close enough to see what happened. Honest to God, I cannot remember what was said or what happened to make me let go of Kylie for a second.

But I'm telling you, the second that I let go of her hand and I turned around, she's gone. She's gone. And I could not see Kylie anywhere. Like she had gone so far down. And it happened. I swear to you it happened. I remember the call coming in and Mark Hansen was a paramedic at the time. He was in the local ambulance station. They're having some holiday treats because it's Christmas Eve, and the alarm starts blaring. Cảm ơn các bạn đã theo dõi và hẹn gặp lại

kind of a klaxon, just woah woah woah woah. Then the voice of the dispatcher comes over, something to the effect there'd been an accident at the Blooming Cave, CPR in progress. Hadrenaline spot. CPR means it's serious. Our minds were full of contingencies and what ifs because the complicated factors are endless in a cave. The cave is remote, down winding dirt roads. It takes about half an hour just to get there.

We're running towards the entrance of the cave'cause every second at that point is going to count. Mark and his partner squeeze through the same tight spaces and shimmy down the same steep slopes the girls have. They have to climb down about a hundred feet to get to Kylie. But it's too late. She was obviously dead. There was no chance that we could save her, which breaks my heart. If there'd been any chance at all, we would have moved heaven and earth to get her out of there.

Mark is retired now. He responded to thousands of emergencies over decades on ambulance crews. But Kylie still sticks with him. What could have been a an amazing, wonderful adventure for these kids to go down deep into the earth? What caused this to go wrong? Somebody died because of something. We know it was a fall. Why the fall happened, how it happened. I would love to know the answer to these questions, but unfortunately I never did.

It is bad. For I mean, not not only for myself, my family, the students, their families and stuff like that. It w it was a bad time. Daniel Taylor, the guy who ran Integrity House, was the one who had to tell Kylie's family what happened. Her dad was a pretty top notch attorney out of Chicago. And it tore him apart. When we talked to Daniel about Kylie's death, he was quick to add that he didn't think his treatment center was responsible for what happened.

One of the main things I remember about it is when the officer, the detective, um, after he got the autopsy and everything back, I guess the coroner or whoever did the autopsy said to him, to the police, that this girl would have died at home, in bed, or Thank you. Standing here on the stairs or whatever. Is that she had a heart attack? No, not a heart attack. I I I thought she slept unfound. Uh it wasn't how she died. Some people say that, but if

Official report from the Sheriff's Office said. It said the medical examiner determined Kylie died from lacerations of the liver and blunt. It was the fall that killed her, not some sudden cardiac arrest.

So why did the fall happen? In a moment, we go looking for answers. The Bloomington Cave is still open for exploration. But these days, there's a rusty metal gate, and you need a permit from the Federal Bureau of Land Management to go through it. They put all that in place a few years after Kylie died. David Fox is a reporter with KUE R. They're the big public radio station in Utah, and he's the brave one on our team.

I wasn't going in by myself though. I found a local guide named Isaac Taylor, no relation to the family that ran Integrity House, as far as he knows, and he agreed to take me in. Alright, so we're gonna put on a harness. If we brought along a bunch of gear. And then we've got a extension sling so we can extend your rappel.

As well as some gloves to make it a little easier. We've got a helmet and a headlamp on top of that helmet. And not just one headlamp. Three extra headlamps and four sets of batteries for any given headlamp that we have. So if somehow all of our headlamps break, I mean

I couldn't have planned I I couldn't have gotten any more. Three headlamps each. And that's not just Isaac being cautious. It's what the caving experts at the National Speleological Society recommend. The Bureau of Land Management, too. But Kylie, Megan, and the other girls from Integrity House? I don't remember if we had flashlights or There wasn't a headlamp for every girl. So I didn't have a lamp. The girls I was with didn't have a headlamp.

The report from the sheriff's office says the four adults leading the girls into the cave all had flashlights. Like a the staff had one. But only three of the girls got a light. That would mean seven flashlights for 19 people. That's why the girls had such a hard time seeing. And once you crawl into the cave,

Okay, in I go. You can immediately see why that was so dangerous. Holy crap, this is no joke. And that's with the proper equipment. Yeah, we'll shut our lights off for a second. Keeping Careful distance from the edge. Oh man. This is some of the darkest dark I've ever experienced. The cave has no natural light. None. You know when you look at the sun for too long and you get like those little black dots?

Yeah. I feel like I always get them when I'm in darkness like this, but they're like little white flashes because it's like my eyes are like desperately trying to like find the light. Right. I've heard that expression of you can't see your hand in front of your face, but I literally cannot see my hand in front of my face and I'm basically touching my nose. With the lights back on.

We carefully make our way deeper into the cave. The stone ceiling is covered in delicate little stalactites that look like dripping candle wax. Yeah, it's just kind of slick. Yeah, that's the moisture. And then when Oh you can see it, it looks wet. Yeah, when limestone gets wet like this, it doesn't really like absorb water. It just turns into like this weird like mush. Caves aren't just dark. They can be slippery too.

And when you see it for yourself, it's obvious how easy it would be to take one wrong step. This is uh and lose your footing. What is the ledge? And this is where we're going to be able to do that Occurred. Oh my god. I mean it wouldn't take much, right? Like you fall here and if you don't catch yourself. Which is very possible to not if you

Can't see anything. Right. And how would you know what to grab for or each other? Yeah, or how would you like if I turn my light off and you're in front of me, how do I even know that I'm gonna hit a ledge right there, you know? Right. Like I would have no idea that What is down there is 120 foot. You see any good size rock? So if you wanna know what it sounds like for something to fall from where Kylie did, this is what it sounds like. Right! Holy crap man. That's... That is quite a fall. Yeah.

Again, into complete darkness. Like just tumbling. Because they didn't have the lights. Right. Oh my god. They must have been so scared. The part of the cave the girls were going through when Kylie fell, they were just holding hands to stay together. Isaac and I had ropes and harnesses. I could see wanting to bring the kids down here because it is really cool. But everything beforehand clearly was not.

Well prepared, you know? Because you can do this safely even without a rope. People make it down here. Do I think it's extremely dangerous? Absolutely. I think it's dangerous. I think you should use a rope. So yeah, it's kind of gonna be. Flying out a few more things before you just send a bunch of people down.

So we know that the fall was what killed Kylie. It wasn't some freak cool. Like Daniel Taylor said. And we know that the girls could not see very well in the cave. Staff didn't bring nearly enough flashlights. And it all happened at a treatment center for vulnerable kids that had a seal of approval from the state of Utah. It's very sad to me that something like this can happen. For years after the accident, Megan Kreider kept a picture of Kylie on her TV stand. Very sad.

She's a mother now herself, and looking back on it all, she can't believe there wasn't someone in authority, making sure programs like Integrity House were operating safely. I think if they were more Policed, maybe. I don't know the right word. I think maybe if there was somebody watching over it better to hold them responsible for the things they say they're gonna do and things like that. I mean, holy

How? Like how could it get any worse? I mean, why is nobody stepping up and saying There needs to be some protocol, some regulations, some What what the hell? And believe it or not. Our investigation uncovered about Integrity House. Podcast. We're gonna tell you about all of it. The harsh punishments, the allegations of abuse, the criminal charges, the dueling lawsuits alleging trickery and betrayal, and the state regulators who gave that business chance after chance after chance.

Just how lax the oversight of these treatment programs has been. Kylie wasn't the first teenager who'd been sent to Utah for help and wound up dead. There had been five others during the 1990s and early 2000s. The state licenses more than one hundred country. Yeah. Integrity House, sprawling horse ranches, big boarding schools, wilderness therapy, and the water. Some twenty thousand. off for treatment. No other state even comes close. They bring hundreds of millions of dollars flowing away.

States economy every year. It's an industry in Europe. somewhere else. And back in two thousand two, the guy who was in charge of regulating the was Ken Stettler. Thanks so much for agreeing to sit down with me. I really appreciate all the time that you've taken. When a teenager died in one of those programs, it was Stettler's job to figure out what to do about it.

The law enforcement investigation ruled the death an accident, which of course it was. But Steller told me it was obvious to him the whole cave outing was poorly planned. They just weren't prepared. Unfortunately it was uh Stellarthought Integrity House probably deserve to be shut down over that. But Utah law makes revoking a treatment program's license harder than you'd think. The business owners have the right to due process, they can appeal, it can take months, and it's not a slam dunk.

And even though Stettler believed that Integrity House had made mistakes that could have contributed to Kylie's death, he wasn't sure he'd be able to make a case stick. 'Cause I expected the administration would have appealed. We would go to court, we'd end up having a hearing. I expected we would probably not prevail. Did that happen where you had tried to revoke a program's license and gone to a hearing and and lost? Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Steller was right to be worried about the possibility of a legal challenge. Integrity House had lawyered up. After Daniel Taylor was interrogated by the sheriff's office, he hired an attorney named Blaine Hoffling, and Hoffling went on the attack. He accused the state of unacceptable egregiousness in its dealings with his clients. And he claimed inspectors had improperly divulged confidential information about integrity house and other treatment programs.

So Integrity House wasn't going down without a fight. And Stettler knew that even if he won in court and succeeded in revoking their license, there was nothing in Utah law to stop the Taylor family from just turning around and opening a new treatment program under a new name.

So Stettler met with their lawyer and gave him an ultimatum. If Integrity House wanted to stay open, it was going to need to completely overhaul its operations, more training, new policies, strict oversight of all field trips, and a new organizational structure. I gave them so many requirements I think they didn't think they'd ever have any. and the ability to meet those. You know, I gave them 30 days. Yeah, thirty days. Otherwise we'll go forward with the revocation.

Stettler figured that if he set up enough hoops for Integrity House to jump through, it would probably just give up and shut down on its own. He'd get his way, and he wouldn't have to risk losing in court. It's a strategy that had worked for him in the past. But this time was different. The lawyer Blaine Hoffling took the state's ultimatum and turned it into a roadmap for how to keep Daniel Taylor in business.

responded. The attorney was the one that really took the bull by the horns and did the work. Hoffling went from writing angry letters to managing the overhaul of Integrity House. He jumped through every hoop Stettler set up for him. In fact, the program's new policies and procedures were copyrighted not just by Daniel Taylor, but also by Hoffling's law firm.

Blaine Hoffling declined our interview request. He said he couldn't answer questions about his work for Integrity House due to confidentiality. But this won't be the last you hear about him in this series. The case never went to a hearing. See that as a failure. But he really doesn't. To Ken Stettler, it's an example of government regulation working as it deeply tied to how he sees the world. The public might think well it's a rotation. and close him down on the spot. Well it's not.

in a country where there's due process. Rightfully so. Pulls you over on the side of the road. Nice too. That's what we're talking about. They're both enforcing the law. That's just my own personality, philosophy, and approach. You attract more bees with honey, right? Instead of beating a dead horse let's let's help him get up. Ken Stettler gave Integrity House a second chance, thanks in no small part to the shrewd lawyering of Blaine Hoffman.

And the Taylor family keep taking in girls from all over the country. And they went on to operate. Yeah at home. In episode two, we'll look at how well they actually operated, what integrity house did with its second.

And what that meant for the girls who lived there. He said to me Or we can do this the hard way, but you're coming with me. But is the seriously like But I know so many people who deserved of the kids and they needed help. I think there's definitely a culture of guilt associated with And connection. Sailors. their horses watching cattle run by. Could or No, I don't think I lifted a finger. You can hear our second episode right now.

Just search for Sent Away in your favorite podcast app and write a review to tell us what you think of it. For more reporting on the teen treatment. Utah, check out our website. It's Sentaway.org. Sentaway is produced by APM Reports, KUER, and the SELIC Tribune. It's reported by David Fox, Curtis Gilbert, and me, Jessica Miller. Data reporting by Will Craft. Kate Cahan is our editor. She had help from Elaine Clark. Matt Cannum. Fact checking by Betsy Towner Levine. Our web editor is Andy Cruz.

Michael Al Sesser is the managing producer. Scoring in production by Nancy Rose. Engineering by David Childs Original Music by Roddy Nickpoor. We also had help from our great intern, Hannah Eccromedy. Support for Sentaway was provided by Arnold Ventures, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Hollyhawk Foundation. Hey, it's Francis Lamb, host of the Splendid Table Podcast. Every week on our show we celebrate the intersection of food and life, and this month

we're highlighting some of the most iconic people in the food world. It's a new collection called Culinary Masters, and we revisit interviews with some of the people who have really changed how many of us cook and think about food. People like Martin Yan, When I was so small in the first few years, I can only work and help out to wash vegetable, to cut up something, and uh help to bone the chicken. So that's why now I can bone a chicken in eighteen seconds.

Harris. Well, you know, I now know that it was neither the iron pots nor the wooden spoons but there were um multiple unspoken and as yet still unheralded and in many cases unknown gifts that Africa gave to the Cooking of not only this hemisphere but the world. And Claudia Roden, to name a few years. Why is this dish here? Who was here before? What kind of life did the peasants have? That's why this dish is the way it is.

Search for the Splendid Table in your podcast app to listen to the series now.