I’ve been following this thread (and a few others), and have been finally motivated to make an account. So far I think the
request for a search warrant is the best source of information worth relying on, and though I don’t want to fixate on every little word choice (and acknowledge that the search warrant was written for a judge, not the public), there are a few things that are still standing out to me:
1) The description of the bunkhouse really threw me. “CJH would have to sleep on the floor of the bunk house, the base layer of it is a heavy duty plastic that is cut approximately 6 feet and tied on each end with a string...” To me, this reads like the flood of the bunk house
is the plastic, which would imply the bunk house is more like a shelter than a cabin.
I think this is just confusing writing. This video from the website (
0:15) shows a full cabin that fits the description in the warrant, and that Trails says is located at Winding Gap and is fully heated. The other option would be the “yurt” (also heated), which for this context seems negligibly different. I’m still confused about the plastic mat—what was it tied down to? Why was it there at all? It sounds like a camping groundsheet, and I can’t fathom why it would be needed.
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2) “on top of this is a sleeping Bivvy which is considered a small tent. One side is collapsed and the other side is held up by a flex pole.”
This description also seems weird. The video I linked (
0:31) shows what they call “tents” that I think would also fit the description of a “bivvy”. The ones pictured obviously has more than one flex pole involved, but it made me realize that the flex pole described in the warrant could be hooped by the head of the bivvy (where the entrance would be) instead of a single vertical pole like I had in my head.
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3) The 4 other boys in the cabin will surely be a huge source of information, once LE is able to speak to them.
I can’t imagine that they all slept from midnight to 7:45 am, nor that CJH and the counselors were quiet the whole time. 8 people in a single room. It also seems weird to me that this was a part of their protocol; placing a new “camper” in a cabin full of boys who get to sleep in their bunks while the newbie sleeps on the floor? New campers are often agitated and in distress, which is why they have a protocol and why there were 3 counselors monitoring, and surely this would be annoying to the existing residents. Why would a so-called therapy camp want to set up that sort of adversarial relationship for a newbie? What’s the perceived benefit?
4) It has been hypothesized here a few times that the foam found in CJH’s mouth could be a reaction to a drug.
Do we know if they are regularly prescribing anything? It’s one thing to be doling out already-prescribed medications, or providing run-of-the-mill medical care, but Trails is not advertised as a medical facility, and the doctor on staff is listed as a “consulting physician” and is not a full-timer (
Trails Carolina Staff Bio: Dr. Tony Fisher, MD - Trails Carolina). Based on the credentials of the staff they have listed, I wouldn’t expect them to be regularly administering any sort of psychiatric pharmaceuticals.
5) That CJH was undressed from the waist down is obviously concerning. I don’t think there is any “good” reason for that to have happened, but I think there are a lot of assumptions being made about it. It remains possible to me that CJH would have removed the pants and underpants himself, because I do not expect a child in that much distress to be acting rationally. We also don’t know anything about CJH that would give us any expectations about how he in particular would act/react in any situation. I could also see how someone (in this case a counselor) would not know that he had (been) undressed, as he was in a sleeping bag.
6) It’s also interesting that the body was found in a specific position (on his back, on a mat, knees pointed up, arms on his chest, half undressed, with clothes next to him), despite the expectation that he would sleep in the sleeping bag inside of the bivvy (which I’m guessing was on that same mat). Did they pull him out of there, already in rigor mortis and attempt to perform CPR? That is implausible to me, as the knees up would make it difficult to completely remove him from the sleeping bag, and I can’t see why they would need to. Or if they pulled him out or he got out while still alive, why did they wait so long to call for help?
I think the last point is the thing that needs the most explaining. Accidents happen (who knows if this was one), but when accidents happen, you have a duty to these kids to get help, you don’t wait a few hours.
www.wfae.org
drive.google.com
