REEL SOUTH

- [Bridget] Hi, mom.

Hi, dad.

- I'll have to do this.

- [Bridget] I don't trust people like I once did.

- I made it!

- [Bridget] Oh, your boy's gonna be safe there.

You believe things like that.

- Clearly, things went wrong.

- [Gabryell] I call it solitary confinement, they might not, but when you get one hour a day, that's solitary confinement.

- I don't know if I would ever let go of him.

[ambient music] - [male announcer]: Support for Reel South is provided by: Additional funding for this program is provided by: [birds calling] [contemplative music] - [Announcer] It's hard to make sense of what happened at the Ware Youth Center last month.

Two teens being held at the detention center hang themselves to death within 72 hours back in February.

Jordan Bachman was 17 years old and Solan Peterson had just turned 13.

- [Bridget] My kid didn't deserve to die because he set he set a fire to a roll of toilet paper in a school.

- [Speaker] They need to close that facility down.

They need to close it down.

- Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong in this situation.

[serious orchestral music] [people chattering] - Hey, you gotta quit moving so I can tie your skate.

- [indistinct] like dancing.

- [Bridget] I know you like dancing.

- Daddy said I can do 10 laps.

- Okay.

After Solan passed away, I thought being on the ice would be hard, but that's where I feel the closest to him.

There's a lot of emotions there, but because of Sammy, I put on a mask.

Ooh, don't do that.

You're gonna make me fall.

Her forever friend and playmate is no longer here, but it's not always on her mind like it is like me.

And that's a good thing.

She needs to still be a kid.

- You come.

- Chicken little, chicken little.

It's time to get up.

It's time to wake up for school.

Are you gonna be a sleepyhead this morning?

Come on.

Hey.

We gotta get up and go to school.

All right, ready?

Nope, I'm just gonna do it.

Stand up, stand up.

I've always thought about adoption.

There's always kids out there that might not have parents.

Open wide.

Spit.

Good job.

My husband Ronnie and I, we got Solan when he was six and a half.

And then Sammy came to us and she completed our family.

See what Santa Claus brought you.

- We're going to Great Wolf Lodge, Sammy!

- [Sammy] We will?

- Yeah, we're gonna go to a waterpark.

You wanna go swimming?

- We met Solan on a Wednesday back in 2012 and he's spent almost his entire life at that point in foster care.

The kid has big personality and you saw it from the minute he bursted into the house.

Hi, mom.

Hi, dad.

- I'll have to do this [indistinct].

I made it!

- When we got Solan, we didn't know a ton about his past.

His parents had issues with drugs and alcoholism.

He moved around from house to house.

To know that this is what he went through before he got us and all's it took was finding the right thing and being a little patient to see him blossom.

Jump off, spread out, have lots of fun Hot dog, hot dog, hot diggity - On the morning that Solan got arrested, I got a phone call from the school saying that Solan had set fire to a roll of toilet paper in the boys' bathroom.

Didn't know if it was a medicine thing that might've caused this or him trying to be funny.

- [Solan] Leave me alone.

- Solan being on anxiety medicine and being on ADHD medicine, we just started him on a third medicine trying to figure out some behavioral issues.

One of the things that just came out through counseling is that he was scared of being taken away in the middle of the night.

He would start sleeping on the floor.

I got to the school.

They told us that he was being arrested, where they were gonna take him.

They were taking him to Ware.

One of the things I do remember asking was, "Is my kid gonna be safe there?"

I was assured that that's one of the safest facilities around and that's where he was going.

[engine whirring] - There are many, many ways that the system could have handled Solan's case differently that do not involve putting him in jail.

In particular, Solan had just turned 13.

He was only two weeks past his 13th birthday, but I think it's just very broadly accepted that that is the way we respond when children are charged with crimes, even if the crimes are similar to normal adolescent behavior that a lot of us engaged in as children.

But that doesn't take into consideration the seriousness of the risks that are facing the child if you put that child in jail.

- You was a lawyer.

You was a lawyer.

[faint speaking] - [Speaker] Oh, you just look different.

- Ladarian, tell us why you were placed in Ware in the first place.

- They was trying to say we did something, but come to find out that boy had the wrong people.

- [Dianne] I have a form when your charges were dismissed.

So you spent all that time there for false charges?

- Yes, ma'am.

- [Dianne] When you said he slammed you on your head, what was he doing?

Slamming where, with his hand?

- Yeah, with his hand like this.

He came from behind me like by around my waist and he slammed me, boom, on top of my head.

- [Dianne] Slammed you where, against the wall?

- On the floor.

- [Dianne] Okay.

- With concrete under there.

- Okay, was that the only thing that was injured?

- [Ladarian] Yeah, my head and my neck.

- He was telling me his eyes were blue.

- Essentially, what I got was a statement saying that there was an altercation and they assisted him to the floor.

So that's about as much.

They denied, of course, they denied everything else.

[dogs barking] - The guards were too aggressive.

They'll just throw you in the cell any kind of way.

He gave me a towel from around the stopped up toilet that had a leak.

And he got mad 'cause I walked and got my own towel.

And he would get on the phone, talking to a female that he talked to, talking about just slammed me a little [censored] on his head, like bragging about it.

[contemplative ambient music] [contemplative orchestral music] - Monday at eight o'clock, we didn't get to see him until they brought him into the courtroom.

We were requesting a psych evaluation to be done.

We told the judge that this is what his doctors wanted from the beginning and judge agreed that he needed a mental evaluation, but he needed to remain at Ware until one could be determined.

Tuesday, we knew he needed a refill on his ADHD medicine so we made a plan to go take his medication to him.

So we got off work early and we drove down there.

When we got down there, we were told he picked his lock sometime around 11:00 or midnight.

He was in solitary confinement.

You were only allowed to see him through a little tiny window and the only thing he had in his cell was a little green mat.

They took the most outgoing kid and put him in a cell, and kept him there from Monday night, all day Tuesday, all day Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then Sunday morning is when we got the phone call.

- One of the reasons that it's so concerning that Solan may have been in isolation is because we know the impact that that can have on mental health issues.

And if he already had mental health issues and in fact was being detained to receive a psychological evaluation, that should immediately raise concerns that his mental health would only deteriorate in that kind of situation.

- Ronnie's phone rang at 2:00 a.m. Who would be calling at 2:00 in the morning?

Something's wrong somewhere.

I heard him start crying.

I heard him say, "What do you mean, he's dead?"

And I knew.

I remember screaming that my boy was gone.

[contemplative orchestral music] - 3 Investigates is getting answers after two teenagers took their own lives in the same juvenile detention center less than 72 hours apart.

- [Announcer] The incidents took place Thursday, February 7th and Saturday, February 9th at the Ware Youth Center in Coushatta.

Jordan Bachman was 17 years old and Solan Peterson had just turned 13.

The Red River Sheriff's Office took the lead on that investigation.

- The Department of Child and Family Services has standards that they monitor the detention centers against.

It allowed DCFS to go in right away and do an inspection.

What we found through the investigation by the state, there were structural problems with the cells that the children were held in that allowed them to attach a bed sheet and use it as a method of hanging themselves.

And we also found that the proper checks had not been made on the children even though they were recorded that they were made.

But the video footage showed that the staff person did not actually walk down the hall and look into the room.

- According to the death certificate, it took 15 minutes for him to pass away.

If they were checking every 15 minutes, they might have been able to at least get there and maybe restart his heart if they did CPR, but.

- Clearly, things went wrong in the situation in Ware and the detention center standards were not doing what they needed to do to make sure that this didn't happen.

But because DCFS has the threat of being able to take away their license, those problems were corrected.

I mean, I know the structural problems were corrected, but we need to do more after a suicide to prevent a second one, or God forbid, more than that.

[contemplative ambient music] [faint speaking] Okay, great.

Okay, so why don't we dive in then to our conversation about Ware.

I think everyone was in the last meeting.

In 2017, we decided to create a task force.

The idea was to have the task force come up with a plan for how to create some system of oversight.

I will just say that as we shared with everyone, we submitted a request to DCFS for the documents related to the suicides in the detention center at Ware.

It certainly raised some concerns for me about the overall management of the facility.

I think that what happened at Ware all begged the question of whether there are larger issues at Ware, but I can accept if there's a different time and place for that conversation.

- Well, and I just want us to point that out.

I think we've all made, I think we all had reactions to that as agencies and went in and looked at certain things, and didn't find concern.

So if there is something of concern or if there was concern, we clarified it and went through.

- Based on the fact that there have been three suicides in the facility as a whole over the past few years, I worry that the state, they're not making a choice based on what's best for the children, but what's available to them.

We need to come to some agreement on the letter that needs to be submitted to the legislature, the governor's office, and OJJ.

- Under room confinement, where y'all put at least one of the children had been in room confinement for an extended period of time.

I think that's, I don't know that we should put that in there.

- [Rachel] Okay.

- That was gleaned, I think, from the information y'all received on the public records request.

- [Rachel] And reports from the family, yeah.

- And if you want to put that in there that it was a report from the family.

- [Rachel] Okay.

- Because I don't think that's a fact.

[contemplative ambient music] - They ran this facility a certain way that I didn't feel comfortable in, so it was best for me to find another job.

They kept the kids confined long.

The kids really didn't get a chance to come out of their cells.

Most of the time, the kids was on lockdown.

- We were locked in cells basically all day and let out for an hour for a shower.

- They just isolate you in the cell that you in.

- [Gabryell] I call it solitary confinement, they might not, but when you get one hour a day, that's solitary confinement.

- [Interviewer] Was that typical for facilities you'd worked in before or was that unusual?

- No, ma'am.

That was unusual and that was my main concern when I got down there.

- Ware was just one of those places.

These people don't care, they don't care.

They let you know that they don't care.

It's not like they're trying to hide it.

- It was just a big swamp.

They would hire cousins, nieces, whoever in Coushatta that they knew.

The staff was not properly trained and some of the staff should have never even been allowed to work with kids.

- When certain staff would work at night and I'm on lockdown, I would be scared that they would do something.

The male guards would come in and they would rough us up.

Busted lips, busted nose hurt.

Yeah, he said, "I see why I had to choke you out."

- [Interviewer] Was there an incident where he tripped you?

- Yeah, plenty of times.

Plenty of times.

[birds calling] [downbeat rock music] - I have bad headaches.

My anxiety start messing with me more too 'cause I already be having anxiety bad.

Like I'll be repeating the same thing over and it'll scare me.

- Mines were fortunate enough to come out of there alive.

Other kids weren't fortunate enough to come out of there alive.

The world need to know, world need to know how they're running it over there.

- I'm 25 now, I've been there when I was 13.

Like all these years have passed and it's still the same thing.

And nobody has done anything.

- [Eleanor] Ware is not being held accountable for the staff that they hire, for the lack of training that they give to their staff, and the safety of the kids.

Something should be done.

[downbeat rock music] - You been out here a while?

- About 15 minutes.

- 15 minutes.

- Been about 15.

That place needs to be closed down.

I won't be happy until that place is closed down.

- I don't- - Hell, being happy is a relative term now these days, but shut the place down.

They wouldn't listen to what two doctors and parents were saying.

If they would've listened to those four people, my kid would still be here.

- Well, you know what?

We have resources and you have your mother.

[rainfall pattering] - Grace, is she okay?

- Mm-hmm.

- I've always been a worrier.

I'm even more of a worrier.

I don't trust people like I once did.

Oh, your boy's gonna be safe there.

You believe things like that.

[downbeat rock music] If I could have one more conversation with him, I don't know if I would ever like go of him.

He would be wrapped up in my arms in a bear hug and I would tell him I love him, and that I'm proud of him, and I miss him and I miss him being on the ice.

- All right, one lap.

- And that all of the family love him and that we're super, super proud of who he was.

[downbeat rock music]