CEDAR CITY — Journalists from three news organizations dive deep into Utah’s youth treatment programs, reporting on death, abuse allegations and staff facing criminal charges in “Sent Away,” an investigative podcast that seeks to answer the question, “How did this happen?”

The seven-episode podcast tells the story of Cedar City’s Integrity House, a residential treatment program for teen girls, through the voices of state officials, and the program’s former owners, staff and residents.

“Some 20,000 teenagers facing depression, delinquency and other problems have been sent (to Utah) from every state in the country over the last six years,” the Google Podcast description states. “‘Sent Away’ investigates how the government failed to keep all those kids safe — through the voices and stories of the teens who lived it.”

Riot serves as a catalyst for collaborative reporting

David Fuchs started reporting with KUER 90.1 in 2019, just after the riot at Red Rock Canyon School, during which 25 students were injured.

Fuchs said the riot repeatedly came up in conversation while he was getting to know St. George locals and it piqued his interest in Utah’s youth treatment industry.

“Then, when I was trying to get a better understanding of what happened there … I realized that there were a lot of programs around me in southwest Utah and became increasingly fascinated with it because it stood out to me as something unusual to have that degree of concentration of that particular industry in a place where I was living and working,” Fuchs said.

While reporting on the industry, Fuchs said he learned that the Salt Lake Tribune’s Jessica Miller and APM Reports’ Curtis Gilbert had been doing similar work, and eventually they decided to team up.

The team wanted to offer listeners a “deeper perspective,” and creating a podcast allowed them to create something distinct and powerful, Fuchs said.

Gilbert said that even though a collaboration among news organizations could have been difficult, the team worked well together, partly because everyone was invested in the project.

“It’s like, ‘No, we’re all on the same side. You’re on the side of the truth and we’re on the side of shining the light into dark places,'” he said. “‘And so, why don’t we just like join forces and work together?'”

Investigating the teen treatment industry

In Episode 5 of “Sent Away,” Fuchs said after the riot, Miller became interested in understanding what youth treatment programs and Utah’s government were doing to prevent riots, abuse and other problems going forward.

“That’s the kind of stuff I’m interested in looking at is, what is the state doing to hold these places accountable? Because they’re the ones who hold the power to let them stay open,” Miller said in the episode.

Miller submitted a request through the Government Records Access and Management Act, eventually receiving a trove of documents during their initial investigation. The team ultimately collected over a thousand documents through GRAMA, court records, county clerks and other sources. In their collection were inspection and critical incident reports from every youth treatment program in Utah over a five-year period, Fuchs said.

While analyzing the documents, they discovered a report describing how an equine therapist at Havenwood Academy zip-tied a resident’s wrists before placing her in a horse trough, Fuchs said. The facility’s clinical director reportedly said the program had been putting girls in horse troughs and soaking them as a therapeutic discipline for the previous three years, Fuchs added.

Cedar City News reached out to Havenwood Academy CEO Dr. Ken Huey who said the program’s leadership was as “appalled as anyone” when they learned of the incident. He also disputed that the facility had used similar practices as therapeutic disciplines, saying the clinical director’s comments were taken out of context.

“We immediately reported our contractor and ourselves to the state and the police when we found out about the incident,” Huey said. “Bad programs hide mistakes. We correct them, voluntarily.”

Huey said they received a plan of correction they agreed with and followed. He said no similar incidents had occurred at Havenwood Academy since 2018.

Integrity House

Reports of the incident at Havenwood Academy prompted the “Sent Away” team to dig into the industry’s history, leading them to Integrity House, Fuchs said.

“When we were looking at the timeline in its entirety, we realized there was a story of, more or less, like a single facility that came to the state’s attention again, again and again over the years and we thought that would be an effective kind of example or case study for illustrating the state’s approach to regulation over decades,” he said.

Gilbert said the story would have been harder to follow had it been set in multiple facilities.

“And there were all of these punch points where the story of Integrity House had come into contact with the state,” he said. “And when we started reporting, we didn’t know all the details but we knew one thing, which was that it had continued on in spite of that.”

Gilbert added that the story of Integrity House had also given the team a focus.

“Reporting is almost always driven by a question,” he said. “It’s like, ‘well, how did that happen? How do they seem to get chance after chance after chance?’ Right? And so, that was kind of the driving force of the reporting.”

Former residents inspired by Paris Hilton

Fuchs said that making contact with state officials, Integrity House staff and former residents was like setting up interviews for a daily story multiplied by 200.

“When you work on a project of this scale, you know, we’ve talked to a lot more people than you’ll ever hear the podcast,” he said. “But having that breadth of reporting is what allows us to make collective statements that I think are probably what makes the podcast powerful.”

Gilbert said he was surprised by the team’s level of access because of the project’s sensitive nature. Many of the residents’ names were also redacted in documents in accordance with state privacy laws. However, the teen treatment industry in Utah had reached an “inflection point,” in no small part, thanks to Paris Hilton, he said.

“We talked to lots of former residents; they were very aware that Paris Hilton had been telling her story and going public and I think that gave them the courage to tell their stories and kind of inspired them in a very interesting way that I would not have expected,” said Gilbert said, adding that one of the podcast’s goals was to raise awareness and understanding of the industry and how state regulations work.

“I didn’t understand it that well before and there’s nothing like a story to help you understand how a policy actually works in the real world,” he said.

He said he also feels that real, human stories will help listeners better understand the teen treatment industry.

“The other big thing was to give these former residents who haven’t had much of a voice … a chance to tell their stories,” he said. “And I don’t know, I hope we will open some eyes about just like, what kinds of things have happened in these treatment programs so that hopefully we can make the system work better.”

Bloomington Cave

“Sent Away’s” first episode features Fuchs and a guide entering Bloomington Cave, where 17-year-old Kiley Jaquays fell 90 feet to her death during an Integrity House field trip in 2002. He said the experience gave him more empathy for what the girls and staff went through.

“It was really important for getting the kinds of details that you don’t quite fully grasp just by reading a report or hearing about it secondhand – that sense of scale,” Fuchs said. “For example, what the air feels like on your skin, what the ground feels like beneath your feet, the intensity of the darkness, how big a 90-foot cliff is … I would say it was really important for that reason.”

Those interested can listen to “Sent Away” on Google, Apple and Spotify. New episodes are released each Tuesday.

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