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| Buildings that house juveniles and operations on the grounds of Southwest Key Campbell, a shelter for children who've been separated from their parents in Phoenix, Arizona |
The allegations against the Southwest Key youth care
worker are the latest in a series of serious accusations of sexual abuse
inside the government’s immigrant youth shelters.
Aug. 2, 2018
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This story includes graphic details of alleged sexual violence against minors.
We obtained police reports and call logs
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A youth care worker for Southwest Key has been charged with 11 sex
offenses after authorities accused him of molesting at least eight
unaccompanied immigrant boys over nearly a year at one of the company’s
shelters in Mesa, Arizona, federal court records show.
The allegations against Levian D. Pacheco, who is HIV-positive,
include that he performed oral sex on two of the teenagers and tried to
force one of them to penetrate him anally. The other six teens — all
between 15 and 17 — said Pacheco had groped them through their clothing.
All of the incidents are alleged to have taken place between August
2016 and July 2017, according to a court filing last week that laid out
the government’s case.
The case, initially investigated by local police, is now proceeding
through U.S. District Court in Phoenix. Pacheco had worked at Southwest
Key’s Casa Kokopelli shelter, one of eight the company runs in Arizona,
since May 2016.
Casa Kokopelli was cited by the Arizona Department of Health Services
in 2017 for failing to complete background checks, including
fingerprinting, to ensure that employees hadn’t previously committed sex
offenses and other crimes, records show. Pacheco worked for nearly four
months without a complete background check, according to documents and
an agency official. Those records did not show any previous arrests or
convictions for sex offenses, they said.
Pacheco, 25, was indicted in August 2017 after an investigation by
local law enforcement and the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services inspector general’s office. The current charges include eight
counts of abusive sexual contact with a ward and three counts of sexual
acts with a ward. Pacheco, who is in U.S. Marshals’ custody, could not
be reached for comment, but he denied the charges in court documents.
His federal public defender, Benjamin Good, said, “We are looking
forward to defending Mr. Pacheco in court.”
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Read More
We obtained police reports and call logs
from more than two-thirds of the
shelters
housing immigrant children.
Here’s what they show.
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Trump administration officials have repeatedly asserted that the
shelters are safe, even fun, places for kids. But there has been
increasingly intense scrutiny of the federally funded, privately run
shelters after the administration separated some 3,000 children from
their parents at the border and sent them to shelters and foster homes
across the country. Last week, ProPublica reported that police
nationwide have responded to hundreds of calls reporting possible sex
crimes at shelters that serve immigrant children. One of those calls
resulted in the conviction of a Tucson shelter worker for molestation.
Now further documents have emerged describing alleged incidents in
Arizona involving Southwest Key, the largest operator of immigrant youth
shelters nationwide.
ProPublica only discovered Pacheco’s case while trying to find
additional information about a vague reference to a molestation case in
Arizona inspection records. Federal officials had known about the case
when answering questions from ProPublica last week and when describing
the conditions of the shelters before Congress, but did not mention it.
In addition to Pacheco, two other cases involving abuse at other Southwest Key shelters have recently surfaced.
On Tuesday, an employee at a Southwest Key facility in Phoenix,
Fernando Magaz Negrete, was arrested on allegations that he sexually
abused a 14-year-old girl by kissing her and rubbing her breast and
crotch, according to Phoenix news outlets. And The Nation reported
Friday that a 6-year-old girl who had been separated from her mother was
allegedly fondled by a boy at another Southwest Key facility in
Glendale, Arizona in June.
At other Southwest Key facilities, police reports and call logs from
the last five years detail inappropriate relationships with staff,
dozens of runaways, sexual contact among kids at the shelters and other
allegations of molestation by employees. In one case, ProPublica found, a
46-year-old youth care worker in Tucson was convicted of groping a
15-year-old boy who had just arrived in the United States five days
earlier.
In an email, HHS spokesman Kenneth Wolfe said the agency has issued a
stop placement order and removed all unaccompanied minors from the Casa
Kokopelli shelter. He declined to say when the stop placement order was
issued.
“These are vulnerable children in difficult circumstances, and
the Office of Refugee Resettlement at HHS’ Administration for Children
and Families treats our responsibility for each child with the utmost
care,” he said. “Any allegation of abuse or neglect is taken seriously.”
In response to questions from ProPublica, Jeff Eller, a spokesman for
Southwest Key, wrote in an email that he was unable to comment on
specific cases. When asked how Pacheco’s alleged actions could have
escaped detection for 11 months, Eller didn’t answer the question, but
said: “Any employee accused of abuse is immediately suspended and law
enforcement called. This is what we did in this case.” Eller said the
allegations were also reported to the federal Office of Refugee
Resettlement, which oversees the shelter system, and the appropriate
state agency.
In response to a question about how the company could assure the
public that children are safe in its facilities, Eller wrote: “We find
the premise of your question dishonorable.”
“We report these cases to law enforcement and state agencies when
they happen,” he said. “We educate every child in our care upon arrival
to the facility of their right to be free from abuse or neglect in this
program and this country. This message is repeated to the children
throughout the duration of their stay at our shelters.”
In the past five years, the Texas-based nonprofit has received more
than $1.3 billion in federal funds for the shelters and other
services—including more than $500 million so far this year.
This week, following numerous reports of problems at the federally
funded facilities, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Dianne
Feinstein, D-California, requested that the inspector general for the
U.S. Health and Human Services department investigate the allegations of
sexual and physical abuse at the shelters.
“These allegations demonstrate a long-term pattern of abuse
warranting a thorough investigation into the claims, including the
process and procedure by which any guards or contracted staff are hired,
trained, and vetted,” the senators wrote in a letter to the inspector
general.
HHS said Thursday that shelter operators reported 264 allegations of
sexual abuse to the FBI last year. While those can include anything from
“touching of the buttocks” to sexual assault, the agency said, 53
allegations involved an adult. The agency did not say how many of those
allegations were founded or how many constituted more serious assaults.
Federal court records show that officials at the Southwest Key
shelter in Mesa were unaware that Pacheco was abusing boys for months —
and that it wasn’t until one of the boys spoke up last summer that the
extent of the abuse allegations against Pacheco was uncovered.
Shelter officials first learned that Pacheco may have abused a
boy at the facility when a teen identified in court records as “John Doe
1” told a teacher that a staff member had entered his room in the early
morning hours of July 24, 2017 and touched his body, including his
penis, over his clothing. The teen then told his roommate about the
incident and that boy, known as “John Doe 2,” said the same staffer had
fondled him in a similar way.
The second teen initially denied the incident when he was approached
by staff members. Several hours later he told staffers that Pacheco had
come into his room early one morning, tickled him and touched his
“private parts.”
Pacheco was then removed from the facility and local law enforcement launched an investigation, records show.
The next day, July 25, a third teen told a shelter counselor that he
had heard about Pacheco’s dismissal for inappropriately touching other
boys. The teen told the counselor that Pacheco had also fondled him and
that he was aware of three other boys Pacheco had molested. That child
would later tell a “forensic interviewer” that Pacheco had groped him
twice.
Local law enforcement and shelter staff tracked down those three
teens and two others, who all said that Pacheco had molested them.
The fourth teen in the court records reported that Pacheco had
touched him over his pajama pants sometime in June or July of 2017.
A fifth boy, who had been moved from Casa Kokopelli to another
facility in Arizona, said he was brushing his teeth, and when he opened
the bathroom door, Pacheco was standing there holding toilet paper. The
boy said Pacheco then touched his penis over his clothing, the records
show.
A sixth teen reported that Pacheco opened the shower door while he
was bathing and stared at him but did not touch him. The boy later told
social workers that on another occasion, he was changing his clothes
after a soccer game when Pacheco walked into his room and said “My love,
I have arrived,” according to court records. Pacheco proceeded to grab
the boy’s penis, the teen said. Pacheco then laughed and told the child
he “had it big,” the records show.
The seventh teen, “John Doe 7,” is the same victim whose allegations
were briefly referenced in ProPublica’s story last week. The boy had
been at the Mesa facility and was transferred to Tucson, where he
revealed the molestation allegations to officials. The teen said he had
been recovering from surgery in early June of 2017 and was groggy from
pain medication when he awoke to find Pacheco in this room. Pacheco told
the boy that he had a “big one.” The teen said he could tell that
Pacheco had “ejaculated on himself,” according to court records.
On another occasion, the teen told officials, he was playing video
games when Pacheco entered the room and told the boy to take out his
penis. The boy refused and Pacheco grabbed the teen’s penis through his
pants, according to court records. During a third incident, the teen
said Pacheco pushed him down on a bed, pulled down his pants and
underwear and began to shake his penis. The boy said he attempted to
push Pacheco away, but was unable to because of his injury and surgery.
Pacheco put the boy’s penis in his mouth, the court records state.
The eighth boy alleged that Pacheco came into his room and woke him
by making noise with the blinds. Pacheco then told the boy he was going
to “suck his,” according to court records. The boy said Pacheco took
down his pants and put his mouth on the teen’s penis three times. The
boy describes a separate incident in which Pacheco entered his room
around midnight, took off his own pants and underwear and told the boy
he wanted the teen to put his penis in Pacheco’s “butt,” records state.
Pacheco then attempted to force the boy’s penis into his anus, but
the boy pushed him away and threatened to report him, according to the
records.
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Pacheco disclosed he was HIV positive when he was arrested, according
to court records. Officials with the Southwest Center for HIV/AIDS
educated the teenage boys about HIV and how it is transmitted and a
“couple” of the eight children sought testing, records state. It’s
unclear what the results were.
Five of the eight teenagers that Pacheco is accused of molesting
either denied or didn’t disclose the allegation when first approached by
interviewers and staff members.
Nayeli Chavez-Dueñas, a clinical psychologist who helped develop
shelter guidelines on behalf of the National Latina/o Psychological
Association, said she wasn’t surprised that alleged abuse went on for so
long “because a lot of the children are terrified.” Many of the
children have experienced sexual and physical violence, she said, and in
the shelters, they face a lot of uncertainty.
“So when you have adults that are taking care of these children that
are so vulnerable,” Chavez-Dueñas said, “they know that the children are
going to be so afraid for their safety that they are not likely to
report.”
Pacheco’s trial is scheduled to begin on August 28.
More stories from ProPublica, here
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