More than two dozen men and women claimed to have suffered physical, sexual and emotional abuse as children in a juvenile detention center in the state of New Hampshire over a period of three decades, according to lawyers who filed a class action lawsuit on their behalf.
The lawsuit was filed on Saturday before the Superior Court of Merrimack County, six months after two ex-advisors were accused of repeatedly raping a teenager at the Youth Development Center in Manchester in the late 1990s. The victim In that case he is now the main plaintiff in the lawsuit filed by lawyers representing another 35 people who said they suffered abuse between 1982 and 2014.
The lawsuit alleges that probably hundreds of minors were assaulted, pointing to the records of the inmates of the center over the years and at the time the alleged aggressors were employed there.
“This lawsuit seeks to demand responsibility from the state of New Hampshire and others for the lives they destroyed forever, and bring a systemic change so that this cannot happen again to another child in New Hampshire,” said the text of the lawsuit.
The victims they have reported were between 11 and 17 years old at the time of the abuse and the aggressors were both men and women, lawyer Rus Rilee told The Associated Press. Of the 36, about 30 reported sexual, physical and emotional abuse, which was deprived of an education and held in isolation, while the others meet one or more of those categories, Rilee said. They were terrified to keep them quiet and even those who sought help when they had bruised eyes, swollen face or bleeding genitals were told that the abuses had not occurred, according to the lawsuit.
“Those boys and girls were held and then beaten, raped and tortured by state employees whose sole duty was to protect them,” Rilee said. “The people who were in command knew what was happening, and they covered it up”.
The Associated Press does not usually identify victims of sexual assault, but David Meehan, now 38, said he wanted to publicly denounce after realizing that he and others had not suffered only at the hands of specific employees, but a whole system.
“They didn’t do anything they were supposed to do to protect me as a person or none of my rights as a human being,” Meehan said. “The juvenile justice system needs some kind of supervision. I understand the need for privacy to protect children, but they have put so much opacity on everything that we don’t know if the children are safe.”
The lawsuit lists a dozen defendants, including the state, the detention center and the agencies that supervise it. He also mentions the two ex-advisors who face criminal charges – Jeffrey Buskey and Stephen Murphy – and four other men who worked at the center. The institution houses minors whose detention has been ordered in the juvenile justice system.
The Department of Health and Human Services does not comment on pending cases and referred the questions to the office of the secretary of Justice, who in July announced an extensive criminal investigation into the center. A spokeswoman for that office did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday, as did Buskey and Murphy’s lawyers.
Meehan, who was in the detention center between December 1995 and January 1999, declined to comment on his stay there because the criminal case is open. But the lawsuit describes years of alleged abuses that began around a year after their arrival. Buskey is accused of earning Meehan’s trust with candy, assigning him coveted jobs and getting him a spot on the basketball team of a local high school. But in early 1998, he and Murphy allegedly began raping and hitting him almost daily.
The lawsuit also alleges that a third employee raped Meehan once while another employee stood guard. Another worker is accused of holding Meehan during the attacks and a supervisor denying him help. According to the lawsuit, the supervisor saw Meehan crying, with a black eye and a broken lip, but when Meehan said he had been hit and raped, he interrupted him and said “Look boy, that just doesn’t happen.” At the same time, a nurse who saw Meehan crying, with a bruised face and a broken nose, told him that his injuries seemed self-inflicted, according to the lawsuit.
In a post on a website to raise funds that seemed written in August, Buskey, 53, of Boston, said he was innocent and described himself as “a devoted grandfather, a caring father and a kind person.”
Murphy, 50, who lives in Danvers, Massachusetts, worked until July as an assistant at the club for the Boston Red Sox, who suspended him without pay. His lawyer said he did not know the victim and denied all charges.
Meehan said he ended up in the detention center after fleeing a home where he suffered physical aggressions and joining what he described as a band of motorcyclists who stole. After an arrest, he said he was being transferred back to a pre-trial detention center when another teenager who was already in the center told him he was raping and beating. Meehan said they convinced the police officer that he was going with them to stop and go to the service and then escaped, still handcuffed. They were two fugitive weeks until they were arrested
“This was an older brother taking care of me,” he said. “He was telling me he wouldn’t let me fall for that.”
Since his release, Meehan has been married and raised three children, and for years he had a homebuilding and roof repair company. But he has also been arrested for drunk driving and robberies, which he said he committed to pay for a heroin addiction that sometimes cost $ 500 a day. Alcohol and drugs allowed him to avoid thinking about his past, he said. His wife, Erin Meehan, with whom he started dating, said he knew nothing about the abuse until 2017, when he said “They raped me.”
In a long interview, sometimes in tears, David Meehan said he was determined to face other victims.
“It’s about people being accountable for their actions,” he said. “I have to face trials for things I did wrong, which seems pretty petty compared to what these guys did. Why should any of the survivors continue to bear the burden of their dirty secret?”
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