Life and Death in a Troubled Teen Boot Camp

When beatings alone didn’t work, the boys grew more inventive. They hung Bruce from the horse trailer from his handcuffs; lassoed him and dragged him across the dirt; and put him in a sleeping bag stuffed with cow shit and kneeled on his chest. The worst of it, one boy told me, was the day they hogtied him to a pole by his cuffs and shackles and paraded him around camp like a pig on a stick, while other boys beat him.

Eventually the boys decided the only way to end the ordeal was for one of them to die so authorities would shut down the camp. They drew lots to decide who would drink nightshade tea, derived from a poisonous plant, but staff discovered the plot before anyone could go through with it. Two weeks later, they met again. This time they decided they’d have to kill Bruce, but ultimately abandoned the plan.

And then one day a staffer found the wallet in a five-gallon bucket of electrical wires. While Bruce never confessed to putting the wallet there, Chandler says he has never doubted that Bruce did it. Not that it mattered to any of the boys. After six weeks, their trip to the Sacramento Mountains was finally over.

All the boys I talked to who participated in the beatings had trouble admitting what they had done to Bruce. “It’s something I have a really hard time forgiving myself over,” one former camper says. “I feel so guilty, not just for taking part in the beatings, but for wanting him to die. I still have nightmares from what we did to him.”

It’s hard to know how many programs like Tierra Blanca operate across the country, but conservative estimates put the number in the hundreds. Some are tough-love boot camps; others are wilderness-based programs whose philosophies can vary from meditation and yoga to the most extreme versions of fundamentalist Christianity. Many of the programs share an outright disdain for traditional therapy and try to fly under the radar of state regulators.