A residential treatment center in Fort Worth is halting its adolescent programs after being cited by state regulators for dozens of violations this year.
The shut down also comes after a Fort Worth Star-Telegram investigation uncovered allegations of abuse and neglect at Fort Behavioral Health Center.
Star-Telegram reporter Emily Brindley spoke with KERA's Bekah Morr about what her investigation uncovered.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you start by telling us what kind of services are offered at Fort Behavioral Health Center and who their typical clientele would be?
Yes, so Fort Behavioral Health is a private facility. It's called a residential treatment center. On the adolescent side, they have programs for children and teens with autism, as well as children and teens with substance use disorders. And for a while, they also were housing foster kids from the state of Texas.
Now, your investigation looked into misconduct in the center's treatment of young people, like you said. What did you uncover in your reporting?
I talked to a variety of sources — I talked to a number of people who used to work at the center, I talked to people who used to be patients there as well as their families, and I sorted through about 5000 pages of state documents. All together what I found is that there was really pretty common understaffing at the facility, as well as what some staff members described as a culture of underreporting issues.
And then in addition, there were also a number of instances where children were either put at risk or where children actually sustained injuries or other types of trauma. So there were children who were running away fairly frequently, children who were harming themselves and fighting with each other, and then there was also at least one staff member, according to state documents, who was sexually abusing a child at the facility.
What did some of the patients you talk to say was going on at the facility?
Some of these patients are quite young, so not all of them are able to to speak with me. But the people that I did talk to, they described being quite frightened.
There's this one boy in particular who I talked to who was at the facility in 2022. He said that he felt very unsafe. A lot of that was because of other children who were at the facility who had a tendency toward violence or fighting. So he didn't necessarily feel that the staff themselves posed a risk to him, but that if anything were to happen, there were enough staff there to really step in and keep him safe. And his mom told me that she felt that he came out of the facility more traumatized than when he went in.
Have you heard anything about efforts to deal with this understaffing issue or to combat any of the neglect issues that you reported on, or possibly reopening the adolescent program at the center?
What we do know is that about two weeks after the Star-Telegram published the investigation, the facility decided to close down its adolescent programs. We don't have a good understanding, at this point, of exactly why it is that they decided to close down those programs. But as of October 11th, all of the children had to be out of the facility. So among some former staff members, there is a hope that that will mean that some of those children are safe now from whatever risks may have been posed to them at the facility. But going forward, it's not clear how long the facility might stay closed or if they will reopen. At this point, the future of the facility is murky.
And this isn't the first time the adolescent program has been shut down, right? Can you tell us what happened in January the last time it was closed down?
Fort Behavioral Health first came on my radar at the end of January of this year — that's when the state shut down the facility. They mandated a shutdown for 30 days. At the time, what they said is that there was an immediate threat to children's safety, but they didn't really say more about exactly what was going on or why children were unsafe at the facility.
So I looked at the two years prior to that shutdown to try to figure out whether children were safe at the facility. And then, of course, I found quite a number of issues with safety and also with staffing.
That shutdown was mandated by the state, and the state has said that for this shutdown. After our investigation came out that they did not mandate any closure. So it appears to have been the facility's choice. We don't have a sense of why they made that choice at this point, but it is something that we'll keep looking into.
Got a tip? Email Rebekah Morr at rmorr@kera.org. You can follow her on Twitter @bekah_morr.
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