St. Jude Mired in Controversy

The campus of St. Jude's Ranch for Children in Boulder City exudes a reassuring calmness. Fruit and nut trees, lush grass, roses in full bloom and a panoramic view of Lake Mead create a pastoral oasis, a place apart for the youngsters who come here to mend their tattered lives.

Amid the mosaic of tranquility, however, a storm of controversy has blown in and buffeted St. Jude's, a nonprofit residential facility for abused and neglected children.

First came the April 28 arrest of Larry M. Wisenbaker, 34, a house supervisor at St. Jude's, on charges that he molested children at the facility. Wisenbaker was arraigned Thursday in Justice Court on 18 felony counts, including eight charges of sexual assault of a minor. He also faces two gross misdemeanor charges of open and gross lewdness.

Less than two weeks after Wisenbaker's arrest, with St. Jude's officials still reeling, a 16-year-old boy who lives at the center was involved in a traffic accident that killed Boulder City resident Nicholas Lynn Quinn, 15.

The Nevada Highway Patrol said the 16-year-old, who was one of two boys who borrowed a car from a 16-year-old girl during a party Sunday in Boulder City. Quinn was killed when the 1999 Saturn, traveling on U.S. 95 in Henderson at about 4 a.m., hit the center median and flipped.

The 16-year-old boy, who lacks a driver's license and has denied that he drove the car, remains in custody at the Clark County Juvenile Detention Center on a manslaughter charge. Authorities also have charged Boulder City resident Lisa Anderson, 44, with contributing to the delinquency of a minor in connection with the accident. Anderson's home was the site of the party at which alcohol was served, police said this week.

The incidents have left St. Jude's staff members and administrators grasping for answers, and prompted them to form a task force that met earlier this week to review the organization's hiring policies.

The task force, comprised of law enforcement, county and state officials, concluded that St. Jude's has dutifully followed Nevada law in its screening of prospective employees. In an interview Thursday, task force member Kirby Burgess, director of the Clark County Department of Family and Youth Services, described St. Jude's as a "very stable organization."

"What we find, to be honest with you, is that they're doing a pretty good job of screening employees," Burgess said. He added that the car accident "was just an aberration that just happened and had a very tragic result."

Despite the vote of confidence, St. Jude's officials admit the double dose of controversy has hit hard. The Rev. Herbert Ward, the charity's president and CEO, worries the news reports of the past couple of weeks will obscure three decades of hard work.

"The good name that has been here for 30 years is besmirched by this alleged incident," Ward said, referring to the charges against Wisenbaker. But, he noted, "We're not going to be deflected from our original mission to take care of our kids."

Stewart Gibbons, chairman of the St. Jude's national board of trustees, added that word of the allegations against Wisenbaker stunned both workers and children. The facility has set up special counseling for kids to talk about the alleged abuse.

"There's a sadness that perhaps kids would be exposed to the very thing we're trying to protect them from. The reason we're involved is to prevent (child abuse) and we just hate to think that might've happened," Gibbons said.

St. Jude's, founded in 1967 as a haven for abused and neglected children, is licensed to house up to 54 kids in its eight homelike cottages. Most of the children are wards of the state, although some are placed by families or legal guardians.

About 80 percent of the charity's operating budget comes from individual and corporate donations, with the state chipping in the other 20 percent. In addition to the Boulder City campus, which doubles as the organization's national headquarters, St. Jude's has a facility near San Antonio and is planning another outside of Philadelphia.

State law stipulates that residential placement facilities conduct a series of background checks on potential employees. How the system works: An applicant's name is turned over to the local police department, which then searches the person's criminal history in Nevada and taps into a nationwide FBI database. In Clark County an applicant also must obtain a sheriff's work card, a process that requires another background check.

Boulder City Police Detective Kristine Smallwood said St. Jude's fully complied with the law in hiring the 6-foot-2, 430-pound Wisenbaker. The organization contacted police after several children told workers about the alleged abuse, she said.

Smallwood said the ongoing investigation of Wisenbaker has produced allegations of more than 200 incidents of sexual assault, child abuse, coercion and lewdness. The alleged abuse involves 19 boys ages 10 to 16 and dates back to last May, when Wisenbaker was hired after arriving in Nevada from Texas, she said. Some of the alleged victims do not live at St. Jude's but elsewhere in Clark County, Smallwood added.

Wisenbaker faces a preliminary hearing in District Court June 8, and a grand jury may be convened prior to that date.

Beyond state regulations, St. Jude's officials called each of Wisenbaker's references and previous employers listed on his job application, campus director Elaine Herman said. Believing that she knew Wisenbaker "fairly well," Herman said the accusations against him left her speechless.

"'Betrayed' is the word you look at if it's true," she said. "You are in disbelief. But as professionals, we are resolved to get through this."

Ward said there have been no previous allegations of child abuse against an employee. State records show no substantiated reports of abuse by a St. Jude's worker, said Sylvia Junius, a supervisor with the Nevada Division of Child and Family Services. Of the five substantiated complaints of abuse in out-of-home children's facilities in Clark County last year, none involved St. Jude's, Burgess said.

Still, there is more than a trace of exasperation in Ward's voice as he talks about the possibility that a worker abused children.

"We got the FBI background check, we got the Boulder City police report, we got the Clark County sheriff's card, we called the other places of employment. We did the research, we have a good track record," Ward said. "But even with all of that, if this did happen, it's a case of something slipping through the cracks. And so we have to redouble our efforts."

Task force members considered several ideas that could help St. Jude's and other residential placement centers guard against hiring and retaining the wrong person. Among the suggestions: psychological testing of applicants and confidential, anonymous evaluations of employees by children living at the facility.

Yet even with additional safeguards, local and national child-care experts agree there is no surefire way to prevent abuse from happening inside placement facilities. One problem is that background checks typically show only whether a person has been convicted of a crime, not if the individual has simply faced charges, according to Kevin Kirkpatrick, spokesman for the Chicago-based nonprofit advocacy center Prevent Child Abuse America.

"There's only so much you can do. There's nothing you can do to guarantee that any procedure is foolproof. Someone who is determined to perpetrate abuse against children is someone who would think nothing of getting around any kind of barrier -- of lying on an application -- to have contact with children," he said.

Boys Town of Nevada, a center for abused and neglected children in Las Vegas, already asks kids staying there to fill out confidential evaluations of employees every six months, site director Thomas Waite said.

"But after all the background checks, the only thing you're left with is your gut to (tell you) that there might be something suspicious about this person," Waite said.

In similar fashion, running a placement facility as an open campus -- allowing children to travel off the center's grounds without worker supervision -- is a judgment call. Both St. Jude's and Boys Town send children to public schools, for example, and let them leave campus to visit family and friends or to go to work.

St. Jude's imposes a curfew on children while they are on campus, and each trip away from the facility requires staff permission and assurances that the child will have adult supervision, Herman said. She declined to discuss the details of what the off-campus arrangement was for the 16-year-old involved in the accident, citing the police investigation.

In the wake of Quinn's death, questions have arisen about the wisdom of granting children the freedom to leave the facility.

Ward contends that the open-campus philosophy is essential to rebuilding the self-confidence of abused children, who often blame themselves for the cruelty they have endured. Housing kids in a lock-down facility only would reinforce the notion that they have done something wrong, Ward said, and harm their chances of reassimilating into the mainstream.

"We want to integrate them into the community," he said. "We don't want to raise hothouse plants."

Waite said the most crucial aspect of the open-campus approach is making a reasonable assumption about the child's maturity and whether he or she can handle the responsibility of departing the grounds. "The goal is that you want them to eventually transition back to living with their families, if that's possible," he said.

And while a facility takes some risk in allowing children to leave campus, Kirkpatrick noted, there is no parent who can keep track of a teenager every minute of the day.

"A 16-year-old who wants to go out and drive without a driver's license is going to get around any procedure you might have -- whether you're a residential facility or a parent," he said. "These kids are not in prison."

"The good name that has been here for 30 years is besmirched by this alleged incident (sexual molestation charge). We're not going to be deflected from our original mission to take care of our kids."The Rev. Herbert Ward,ST. JUDE'S RANCH FOR CHILDREN PRESIDENT

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