TRANSYLVANIA COUNTY, N.C. (WGHP) — Just a week after a boy from New York died within 24 hours of arriving at the North Carolina “wilderness therapy” camp Trails Carolina, a former camper is suing the camp over allegations of sexual assault.
Trails Carolina is a wilderness camp located in Lake Toxaway, North Carolina, that works with children ages 10 to 17. It describes itself as “dedicated to helping teens work through behavioral or emotional difficulties, build trusting relationships with their family and peers, and achieve academic success.” The camp charges up to $715 a day in tuition and a $4,900 fee for children to enroll.
The lawsuit, filed on Saturday, alleges that a female camper, who was 12 years old, was sexually assaulted at Trails Carolina in 2016.
“Trails Carolina, by its corporate policies and practices, acts, failures, condonations and omissions, and [counselor] were directly responsible for, and created an environment that enabled Gertie’s abuse and neglect, as well as the abuse and neglect of other girls who are too victimized and afraid to allow their voice to be publicly heard,” according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit says the 12-year-old girl was “gooned” from her home in Vermont around May 5, 2016, when a man and woman who she didn’t know took her “by force” and brought her to the North Carolina camp. She was in the legal custody of the camp until near the end of July.
Within a week of arriving, the lawsuit alleges, the girl had been sexually assaulted.
When she told “field staff” of the assault, camp officials did not separate the perpetrator, identified only as Jane Doe, according to the lawsuit. Rather than moving the assailant to a different bunk, the counselor in charge of the victim reportedly dismissed the concerns, “took away all of the children’s tent ‘privileges’ and made them all sleep in a line under a
tarp instead,” forcing the victim to sleep next to her assailant.
A second girl was allegedly assaulted by the same camper and was removed from the girl’s group for “manipulative behavior” after reporting it.
The counselor named in the suit was informed and, after the camp intercepted a private letter from the victim to her parents about the assault, dismissed her claims to the girl’s parents, reportedly saying “I have no legitimate concerns about any of [victim’s] reports.”
The victim also alleges the campers developed pinworms from unclean water and that the girl got staph infections and a UTI from the conditions, lost a significant amount of weight due to a lack of food provided to campers and was deprived a shower for over a week when she arrived.
“Despite the façade of providing a safe and therapeutic residential treatment center for children, Trails Carolina has failed to screen and assess the children in its legal custody and creates an environment where troubled children have and do sexually assault other children within Trail Carolina’s custody and care,” the lawsuit said. “Further, Trails Carolina has failed to provide adequate medical care, food, and shelter for the children in its custody.”
More broadly, the lawsuit accuses Trails Carolina of failing to adhere to North Carolina’s mandatory reporting laws and hiding incidents from parents who send their children to the camp.
“Trails Carolina conceals incidents of physical neglect, child deprivation, injury, and sexual assault and battery between children from the public, including Plaintiff and her family, for the deceptive purpose of lulling parents into a false sense of security when entrusting their children to Trails Carolina’s exclusive custody and care.”
Describing the culture at the camp, the lawsuit says “Trails Carolina conditions the children to adhere to the practice of strict obedience of its employees, and encourages an environment of ‘breaking down’ the children, creating an environment of fear and silence, which creates an environment that fails to protect children from those with aggressive sexual urges.”
The lawsuit requests a jury trial for Trails Carolina and the accused counselor.
The death
The Transylvania County Sheriff’s Office says they are investigating the death of a 12-year-old boy, who was found dead at Trails Carolina on Feb. 3.
The sheriff’s office says that the boy was “transported per parents by two men from New York to Trails Carolina Camp at 500 Winding Gap Rd, Lake Toxaway, N.C.” on Feb. 2. He was assigned a cabin with other children as well as four adults.
Warrants obtained by TCSO, shared by WBTV, state that the child slept in a sleeping bag inside a bivvy that had an alarm attached to the zipper, which would alert staff if he tried to exit it. Bivvy bags, or bivouac sacks, are a cross between a single-person tent and a sleeping bag, developed for campers who want ultralight emergency shelter.
While the staff member that law enforcement spoke with said that the boy could exit the bivvy if he wanted to, they noted that the staff member “kept stating that ‘we’ would open or close the bivvy.”
The child had what staff described as a panic attack around midnight, and he was checked on every few hours until he was found dead at 7:45 a.m., “cold to the touch and stiff.” The last check was reportedly at 6 a.m.
Then, just after 8 a.m. on Feb. 3, a call to emergency services reported that the boy was not breathing.
“Upon arrival, rescue efforts were initiated and then stopped as the child appeared to be deceased for some time,” the sheriff’s office said. “The child was sent for autopsy to Winston-Salem as his death appeared suspicious since he had arrived at the camp less than 24 hours prior to his death. An autopsy was conducted on 02/06/2024 and the forensic pathologist conducting it stated to investigators that death appeared to not be natural but the manner and cause of death is still pending.”
The staff members at the child’s cabin were put on leave, and the children were moved to other cabins, but the sheriff’s office noted in their initial release that “Trails Carolina Camp has not completely cooperated with the investigation.”
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services has ordered the camp to stop admitting children, in a document obtained by WLOS, accusing the camp of denying the Department of Social Services access to the children for days, ordering them to “discontinue use of bivy bags for any purpose for all children or adults at the camp through the conclusion of all investigations in this matter.”
Trails Carolina denied law enforcement access to the other children who had been sleeping in the same bunk.
Additional issues
This was not the first death in Trails Carolina history.
A child, Alec Lansing, died in 2014. According to his autopsy report, Lansing broke his hip and succumbed to hypothermia. A report made at the time by Blue Ridge Now stated that he had left the trail around 2:30 p.m. and had been reported missing later that evening.
NCDHHS has a history of disciplinary measures against the camp with five “Statements of Deficiencies” issued between 2019 and 2023, the most recent issued in June, stating that multiple children at the camp were physically restrained.
“Based on observation, interview and record review, the facility failed to ensure training on alternatives to restrictive interventions,” NCDHHS wrote in part.
They spoke with several children who described being restrained by camp employees.
“I just tried to run. … I was like 5 to 10 feet away from them (staff). … I wanted space,” one child reported.
“I went out of camp boundaries. … I wanted space and didn’t want people watching me,” another described, saying that staff forced them to the ground with their arms pinned to their sides.
Another camper showed officials a large bruise and said that they were restrained by a staff member who held her arms up in different directions.
NCDHHS notes in their paperwork, “Seclusion, physical restraint and isolation time-out may be employed only by staff who have been trained and have demonstrated competence in the proper use of and alternatives to these procedures. Facilities shall ensure that staff authorized to employ and terminate these procedures are retrained and have demonstrated competence at least annually.”
In the missive sent to Trail Carolina after the child’s death, NCDHHS wrote, “Further, we want to remind you that the use of restrictive interventions must be reported as outlined in the IRIS manual for which Trails Carolina is subject and must adhere to.”
Troubled Teen Industry
Trails Carolina appears to follow the model of “wilderness therapy camps” that are part of the larger “troubled teen industry.” This industry has long been at the center of controversy due to questions about efficacy, methodology and the loose regulations around them in some states.
In a report written for the University of New Hampshire in 2021, the researcher writes, “Adolescents are sent to these facilities for a myriad of reasons, ranging from severe mental health symptoms to more mundane forms of misbehavior (e.g., truancy). Parents are often manipulated through fear tactics into believing their children desperately need this type of facility, and are then manipulated to not believe their children if they say anything bad about the facility.”
“Survivors report physical abuse, exploitation (human trafficking), and several types of psychological torment, including harsh discrimination and LGBTQ+ conversion therapy.”
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People who have attended these camps in the past also spoke to The Guardian about the experience, with one young woman describing how she was painfully restrained for self-harming behaviors and covering her sleeping bag with a tarp that was pinned to the floor with heavy jugs to prevent her from running away in the night.
The misuse of restraints, according to The Guardian, is prevalent in these kinds of facilities and was one of the things that Trails Carolina was cited for by NCDHHS.
FOX8 has reached out to Trails Carolina about the lawsuit and the child’s death.