She had waited all week to visit him. He was the youngest of her eight children. He had gotten into trouble, charged with theft by receiving and possession of marijuana, and was now in the state's custody.
But mothers love and mothers forgive.
She didn't mind traveling 30 minutes from Little Rock to visit him at the Alexander Youth Services Center in Saline County. But when she got there, the excitement of seeing her son abruptly ended.
His lip was swollen and split. Even more frightening was the fear she saw in her 16-year-old's eyes.
"What happened to you baby?" she asked as she hugged him. "You need stitches in that lip. I'm fixin' to go talk to somebody."
"No, Mama. Everything's OK," he whispered on that November 1997 day. "The staff hit me. But don't say anything. It will only make things worse. If you go and tell them, they ain't gonna let me out."
The boy had suffered "a pretty bad gash ... maybe an inch-and-a-half wide and deep. It was a chunk out of his lip," said nurse Susan Walker, who tended him the day after he was hit.
Walker told an investigator for the state Division of Youth Services that she left photographs of the boy's cut and bleeding lip and an abuse allegation report at the Alexander administration office to be forwarded to the DYS office in Little Rock.
Youth Services, which operates the six-cottage Alexander campus, is a part of the state Department of Human Services.
The children in DYS custody have been declared delinquent by a juvenile court and ordered incarcerated. During their confinement, they are supposed to attend school and receive counseling and psychiatric treatment.
Two staff members reported that the 16-year-old was injured during a scuffle when one worker tried to restrain him in the Mac Cottage, where he was staying while at Alexander. Their reports were included in the nurse's incident report on the injury.
But the incident report, with its pictures and statements from all involved, never made it to DYS headquarters as required by policy, and the incident was not reported to the Child Abuse Hot Line, as required by law. The incident report was still at Alexander two months later, when it was discovered in January by a DYS investigator.
DYS eventually verified the incident and classified it as abuse by the staff, records show.
The mother's voice still shakes with frustration when she talks about what happened to her son.
"He was afraid, and I was afraid for him," she told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. "It just hurt to my heart to see it. He was locked up, and I couldn't take him with me to the doctor.
"If you gonna do violence on kids, how you gonna teach them not to do violence?" she asks.
For a time at the Mac Cottage, reports indicate, violence was the constant companion of troubled boys whom nobody was going to believe -- and nobody was going to save.
Dozens of boys sent to the Alexander campus for rehabilitation were instead subjected to verbal, physical and emotional abuse.
DYS investigations revealed that at least four staff members tormented boys for months -- slapping them on their heads, kicking them in the buttocks and slugging them in the face with rings turned outward.
And despite seeing bruises and the boys breaking down and crying, other staff members insisted they did not know anything was wrong.
Fear was an invisible club that hovered constantly over the cottage.
One Mac Cottage employee warned the boys at a group meeting that if they got out of line, he would strangle them as they slept and dump their bodies in a pond behind the cottage -- and no one would ask questions.
One day in January, the Mac Cottage staff was told to stay away so an investigator could freely interview the boys. However, one worker showed up. He told the boys the investigator didn't care about them. The worker warned them he would find out if anyone "snitched" on the staff, reports state.
A year-long investigation by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has uncovered a state juvenile justice system in which children have been routinely degraded and verbally, physically and sexually abused.
Allegations of abuse, in many instances, were covered up or silently accepted by the staff.
In January, a DYS investigation verified abuse claims at the Alexander campus, including:
At Powerhouse Cottage:
Boys on the east end of the cottage were forced to wear only their underwear for several days and sleep in beds with little or no bedding. During that time, the air conditioning was ordered turned to a low setting.
At Mac Cottage:
A dozen boys were lined up in a hallway and told to go one by one into a bathroom where they were hit or slugged by a staff member. As the boys left the bathroom, another staff member slapped them again.
Boys who misbehaved were ordered to hold out their hands so staff members could strike their palms 30-40 times with a wooden stick. If the boys flinched, the count started over. DHS policy prohibits corporal punishment.
Boys were required to do push-ups as punishment. They said staff members used their knuckles to hit boys on the head each time the youngsters pushed their bodies up.
One boy was hit several times in the face by a staff member. The boy's face swelled and his nose bled. He said he was denied medical attention and was forced to stay in his room until the swelling subsided.
Boys in both cottages reported that they were frequently continually cursed by staff members.
The investigation into the abuses started in January, when Gary Staggs, an investigator with the DYS Internal Affairs Unit, saw an incident report about a boy breaking his collarbone at Powerhouse Cottage. The staff reported that the boy slipped and fell. The report made Staggs uneasy and he began to ask questions.
Staggs said he learned that the boy was injured in a fight with another boy -- and that the staff had been encouraging children to fight.
In the next few weeks, Staggs asked more questions and interviewed others at Alexander. He began to unravel a seemingly unending string of allegations at both Mac and Powerhouse cottages. He would come to believe that many of the stories were true.
The Alexander campus is on 90 acres in Saline County, not far from the Pulaski County line. It replaced the Pine Bluff Youth Services Center as a place to lock up juveniles who had committed serious offenses.
The Pine Bluff campus closed in 1993 after a federal lawsuit on alleged abuses was settled out of court.
The Alexander campus includes four cottages for low- to medium-risk offenders: Powerhouse, Mac, Phoenix and House of Hope. There are normally 30 kids in each cottage.
The fenced-in lockup, JUMP Cottage, holds about 25 serious-offender boys. The START Cottage holds up to 16 serious-offender girls and also is a lockup.
When Staggs began interviewing Powerhouse Cottage employees, they readily discussed problems at the facility.
The abuse allegations involved a case manager left in charge when the unit manager -- the supervisor of the cottage -- was off duty.
Conflicting stories of who did what to the boys reveal a fractured management system and a vicious battle to see which faction would control the cottage.
While at the facility asking about boys fighting each other, Staggs came across a Jan. 9 incident report that grabbed his attention.
The report said that the boys at the east end of the Powerhouse Cottage had been talking back to the staff and refusing to obey orders for several days. The boys were put on lock-down -- that is, ordered to stay in their rooms and denied all privileges.
The case manager directed two workers to take the boys' mattresses and sheets out of their rooms, according to other staff members. The boys became upset and rowdy. The case manager ordered male workers to make the boys strip down to their underwear.
Then, the staff turned up the air conditioning. "They had cut on the air on high. It was cold," one boy wrote.
The boys were told that if they behaved, they could get their privileges and their clothes back.
"Some boys had a mattress but no covers to put on it. Some had a sheet but no mattress," Staggs said.
When the Powerhouse Cottage unit manager arrived at work, she returned the boys' clothing and bedding, staff reported. But the unit manager was ill and did not stay on duty long.
When the case manager assumed command again, the boys' clothing and bedding were taken away again, the staff reported.
Employee Kenneth Williamson told Staggs: "When the time came for us to issue clothes, you know we couldn't do that. Until, you know, she felt like they deserved the clothes."
Staggs said the boys remained without clothes and bedding for at least two days.
The case manager denied doing anything to the boys. She told the Democrat-Gazette that the unit manager had taken away the boys' things and placed the youths in lock-down.
"I never did anything like that," she said. "I was there when she was pulling those kids' clothes. [Later] the staff called me and said, 'It's wrong.' I said, 'Give them their stuff back, but keep me out of it.' "
She said she didn't directly intervene because she didn't want the unit manager to think she was after her job.
The air-conditioning's thermostat was turned down, but not to punish the boys on the east end, she said.
"The [heating] ducts need to be fixed," she said. "The west end was burning up, so hot you couldn't breathe. The east end was cold. They had to turn the air conditioning on [in January] to even it out."
The unit manager denied taking the boys' clothes and bedding away.
"I wasn't even there during that time," she said. "I was on medical leave. I only worked two to three days in January. I came back March 9."
Williamson, the Mac Cottage employee, described another incident that Staggs concluded violated DYS policy.
Two boys were fighting in a conference room at Mac Cottage.
"I was already in there," he said. "She [the case manager] told me to leave them alone."
Youth services worker Rommie Moss also said the case manager stopped the staff from ending a fight between two boys.
"She stood here and blocked everybody from going back there to break up the fight," he said. "She wouldn't allow anybody to go back this way. She said, 'Let them deal with it.' "
But the case manager insists she was "set up" by the staff. She said workers poured bleach in her drinking water, put oil on her computer and chair, and scratched her car.
Those attacks, she said, were in retaliation for her reporting staff members for being drunk on duty or not coming to work and not calling in. She said other employees were jealous that she was in charge when the unit manager was away.
Staggs concluded that the case manager violated DYS policy by:
Endangering the safety and welfare of youths by allowing them to fight; by taking their clothing and bedding for an extended period of time; and by allowing the climate control to be placed at such a cold setting that the youths were uncomfortable and at risk of illness.
Abusing supervisory authority when she directed the staff to allow youths to fight and physically placed herself in the path of staff members to prevent them from stopping a fight.
Staggs also concluded that the case manager violated policy when she cursed at the youths, failed to report fights among them and refused to allow the boys to write incident reports about the days they spent without clothing or bedding.
The case manager was fired and has appealed to the Human Services Department's Office of Appeals and Hearings. The unit manager requested a different job, citing medical reasons, and accepted a lower-paying job.
But Staggs was not finished at the Alexander campus.
On Jan. 23, Lloyd Warford, assistant director for operations at DYS, was escorting a visitor from the governor's office around the Alexander campus.
A boy in the Mac Cottage whispered, "Mr. Warford, is it OK for staff to hit us?"
"I told him, 'No,' " Warford said. He asked the boy for details.
The boy said a staff member had disciplined the boys by hitting them with a stick.
Warford pulled two other boys aside. Separately, they too told him they and others had been hit with a stick.
Warford asked Staggs to investigate. Warford wanted the boys separated and questioned so there would be no opportunity for them to get together and concoct stories about the staff.
On Jan. 28, Staggs interviewed 28 boys. All but two said they had either been hit by staff members or had seen staff members hit other children with hands, fists, books, shoes and sticks.
Staggs later contacted five boys who had once been housed at Mac Cottage. All five described similar physical abuse involving the same staff. Two said they had been refused medical treatment for serious injuries.
"The statements were consistent with very few variations in explanations of incidents and the staff involved," Staggs wrote in his final report.
At least seven boys reported being hit with a stick that was about a foot long and rounded on the ends.
Following are portions of the transcripts of some of their statements:
Boy: Me and a couple of boys we had betted on a football game and he [a staff member] didn't like that, so he took us in the office and hit us with a stick.
Staggs: How many times did he hit you?
Boy: He hit me about 50, 60 times with it. My hands was bloody red when he got through.
Staggs: Did your hands hurt for quite a while or ...
Boy: Yes sir.
Another boy: He hit us a few times, and if you pulled your hand back, you get hit one more and if you keep bringing your hand back, he keeps hitting you until you don't bring your hand back anymore.
Staggs: Did he hit you hard enough to hurt you in any way?
Second boy: I was bruised between these two fingers, but it was only like that for a couple of days. Then it went down.
A mother who had visited her son a week before Staggs' arrival at Alexander said he and two other boys told her about staff members hitting them with a stick.
"My child is out there to serve his time. Not to be beat on and slapped in the face," she told Staggs. "The kids are scared. It's not right. It's wrong in the eyes of God, and I don't care who knows it."
Her son told Staggs he had been taken to the office:
"When Mr. [staff member] says 'no talking in front room' and we talk, he hits us in the hand with a stick. He hits us 30 times. And if we move, he says we will get an extra 30 times in the hand."
The staff member named by the boys denied ever using a stick to strike any boy. Staggs found four wooden sticks in the lower right-hand drawer of an office desk where the boys said the sticks were kept.
One staff member told the investigator, "If you look at those sticks and go back and look at the beds, those kids have taken sticks from their beds."
He said the sticks were confiscated from the boys after the boys sprayed the staff with a fire extinguisher and tried to hit workers with two of the sticks.
Later, that employee telephoned Staggs and said the sticks had come from wardrobe cabinets in the laundry room.
Staggs said he also heard about another kind of punishment, in which workers forced boys to do push-ups.
Staggs: How many times did you have to do push-ups?
Boy: Until he got tired of ... until he told us to quit.
Staggs: Was that part of a punishment if you did something wrong?
Boy: Yes sir.
Staggs: Did he do anything to you while you were doing push-ups?
Boy: He slapped your head, every time you go down and go back up, he'll slap your head.
Staggs: Did you ever report any of this stuff to staff or anybody?
Boy: If we told every time they do something, they go write it up in the book like we had did something wrong. ... You know we'll be on investigation and have to go to court and then we wouldn't be able to go home. That's why we didn't say nothing about it.
Similar stories were told by eight boys.
The boys also described how they had been injured by the employees.
Staggs interviewed one boy who had been released from Mac Cottage four months earlier. The boy said he had been hit with a set of keys.
Staggs: When did [the staff member] hit you with the keys?
Boy: About four months after I got there.
The boy said he was going into a room, and the staff member "hit me. He was behind the door and he turned, he swung his arm around the door and hit me with a set of keys in my eye."
Staggs: Did they do a mark sheet [a nurse's list of injuries]?
Boy: No.
Staggs: Did it touch your eye?
Boy: It made it swole up. It made a big old bruise around it sir.
Staggs: When the nurse came, do they not ask you why your eye was swelled up?
Boy: No. 'Cause I was on lock-down.
Staggs: So the nurse never saw you?
Boy: Right.
Another boy said he and his two cellmates had been noisy and were taken to the office just after lunch. A worker hit each of his cellmates in the face, he said. And then it was his turn.
Boy: He hit me in the face and hit me in the nose and bust my nose and told me that he didn't want me to do nothing else no more 'cause we had got in trouble. He just came over towards me and just started slapping me all across my face and my face [got] about this big and my nose got busted and started bleeding.
Staggs: Did you get to see the nurse?
Boy: No. They didn't let me see the nurse. They said they wasn't gonna let me see nobody. They just gave me some ice so it can go down so nobody would know.
The boy said another worker gave him ice for his face the next day but refused to let him see a nurse.
Staggs: How did she [the nurse making rounds] not get to see your face?
Boy: Because they kept me in a room. They put me on lock-down so I wouldn't be able to come out. So nobody won't be able to see me or nothing.
Another boy described what happened when his cellmate was accused of stealing cookies.
Staggs: Did he [the staff member] hit him hard enough to make him cry or hurt him?
Boy: Well, he didn't cry, but he hit him pretty hard because his head hit the door. He stumbled back.
Staggs: And why did [the staff member] hit your other roommate with a shoe?
Boy: He was standing up on his bed.
Staggs: How many times did he hit him?
Boy: About 15 or 16 times. ... He hurt his finger pretty bad. I think he bent it back. ... He was screaming.
This boy's cellmate told Staggs: "They said I stole some cookies. So, he punched me in the side with a ring [on his hand] and then said, 'Sometimes a kid got to get another charge [filed against him].' And he slapped me in my face and said I gotta get another charge. And he says he's gonna try to keep me from going home."
Eight boys described an incident that they said occurred one week before Staggs arrived. One boy was making noise by hitting a wall. No one would admit to doing it.
Two staff members took the boys from the east end of Powerhouse Cottage into the hallway, where they were then ordered to file into the bathroom. One worker hit the kids in the face as they entered the bathroom and the other employee hit them on their way out, the boys told Staggs.
One boy, who was in the bathroom but not involved in the punishment, described what he saw:
"So he lined them up in the hallway next to the bathroom. He would lock them in the bathroom and 'pop' slap them. When they would go out, [another staff member] would be right there and slap them in the back of the head."
Another boy said he was asleep when he was pulled out of bed and told to line up against the wall. He was third in line.
"The first person got slapped," the boy said. "Then the second person. Then he said for me to put my hands on the side. He slapped me. My whole face. Water came to my eyes. I didn't cry."
One of the accused employees told Staggs that he and another worker only made the kids sit in the hallway for a time-out. He said neither he nor the other employee hit the boys.
"They were in a chair ... blue-black chair. We have chairs lined up down the hallway,'' he said. " 'Cause it was about 10, maybe 12 kids. The whole end. We come in that evening, and they talking loud and wrestling and playing. It took two or three hours just to get them settled down."
The second worker contradicted his co-worker, saying he didn't remember kids from the entire east wing sitting out in the hallway, even though the incident had taken place one week earlier.
"No. Not as a group. I don't recall that,'' he said. "I've never seen any or witnessed anybody bringing out a whole group like that."
Staggs asked the man if the boys ever needed discipline.
"Everybody's well-mannered and behaves,'' he stated.
Eight boys described death threats by one staff member two weeks before Staggs arrived.
Boy: Mr. [staff member] told us that ... 'I'm going to come in here late at night and strangle you all and throw you all in the lake and tell them you all tried to AWOL.'
Staggs: When he told you that or since then, were you afraid or did you believe what he said?
Boy: Yes sir. He took off those glasses, and you know he's going to be serious.
Another boy: Mr. [staff member] said that if it came down to it, he would get us in our room at night while we were asleep. He would put us out back in that pond and if we tried to escape we would drown. ... He said that if it came down to us snitching and him losing his job, he would get back at us.
A third boy: [He said that] staff could put their hands on you if they wanted to and if we keep talkin' about it, we will come in this office and he showed us what he mean by his hands. And then he said: 'I'll come back to your room at 2 at night and strangle you to death. And I'll take you out to that pond right there. He said that he would call security and say we AWOL. And it would take them a while to find us in the pond.'
Staggs asked the employee accused of making threats if he had said anything like that to the boys.
"Yes, I made, jokingly I said, you never can tell [what] will happen," the employee answered. "But as far as me saying that I would strangle a kid or throw them in a pond -- No."
The man said he had seen bruises on the boys, but the injuries were not from beatings by staff:
"A lot of the time it's horseplaying. Some of them be self-inflicted wounds where they carving gang signs into their arms."
The boys told Staggs the abuse increased in the five days between the time Warford, the assistant director for operations at DYS, called for an investigation and when Staggs showed up at Mac Cottage to look into the complaints.
Staff members, the kids said, kicked them, slapped them, hit them with books and took away their privileges.
"Mr. Warford talked to one of my buddies. He did seem like he cared," one boy said.
"When Mr. [staff member] came to work, he said that nobody gives a damn. Those people called us and told us what you said. ... It seemed like we lost, so we didn't think anybody was coming back to do anything. He said if we want to play games, they can play games," he said.
On Jan. 28, when Staggs interviewed the boys, the staff was sent home for the day. But one worker came to Mac Cottage while Staggs was talking with one of the first boys to be interviewed. Other boys told Staggs that afternoon:
Boy: When Mr. [staff member] came in a while ago he said, 'Ain't nothing gonna change. Everything still gonna happen the way it been happening.'
Another boy: Mr. [staff member] was just talking about, 'It ain't gonna do no good ... 'cause they ain't gonna do nothing to us about it.'
And a third boy: He saw you all come in a while ago, and he told us if we keep on talking ... 'I'm going to get my stick, and you will see what it feels like lying on me.'
On Jan. 29, Staggs began interviewing 19 staff members from Mac Cottage.
"There were some points of inconsistency in the statements by staff and almost all staff denied any knowledge of abuse or maltreatment."
The entire staff denied ever hearing cursing or seeing any kind of abuse.
"I've had some say that I hit them on the head, when the facts proved that I was 10 feet away from them," a staff member said. "They are sometimes unbelievable and sometimes they are [believable]."
Staggs: So you've never seen any staff hit any of the kids at all. Have you heard any of the staff curse at the kids or call them names?
Staff member: No sir. Not calling the kids names. Now, we all, as humans, we all cuss every now and then. 'Cause you know the kids just have a way of getting on your nerves at certain points. But I've never heard anyone curse directly at the kids. You know, something like 'What's up with all this s***' but nothing directed at one individual child. Nothing like the curses they give us.'
Another staff member said he had been injured trying to restrain a child. "He hit me. He hit me. Oh man, I bled like a hog! Kids'll hurt ya if you give them a chance."
Staggs' final report cited eight Mac Cottage staff members for numerous policy violations.
Why did Staggs believe the boys and not the staff?
"The juveniles on the dorm were approached and interviewed in a manner that precluded collusion," he wrote. "The juveniles were under constant supervision prior to being interviewed and were placed in a separate area after the interview was conducted."
Staggs wrote that the staff involved in the physical abuse at Mac Cottage "made deliberate efforts to cover up these incidents and coerced the juveniles to keep them from reporting the incidents."
Staggs added, "State and/or federal laws may have been violated."
On Thursday, Paul Doramus, the new DYS director, took Staggs' report to Barbara Webb, the prosecuting attorney in Saline County.
Ultimately, three staff members were fired and are appealing their dismissals. One has been disciplined, but further information was unavailable from the Division of Youth Services.