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Fired youth services officials say reports on abuse at center one-sided
RAY PIERCE
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

The two former Youth Services Division officials fired last week in the wake of allegations of abuse against youths in state custody said Tuesday that only one side of the story has come out.
Gary Rogers of Little Rock, former director of the Observation and Assessment Center in North Little Rock, said there have been a lot of untruths circulating about his actions at the center.
"I am appalled," he said. "It seems the media is going with only one side of the story. There are more things to be told."
Percy Nash of Little Rock, the former program support manager at the center, said his firing was based solely on the testimony of one person -- Gary Staggs, the former security chief at the soon-to-be-closed North Little Rock center.
"It's really been a one-sided story," Nash said. "The people really affected by this haven't had a chance to tell their side of the story."
Interim Department of Human Services Director Richard Weiss fired Nash and Rogers last week. Weiss said he took the action on the basis of what he had read in Arkansas State Police investigative reports.
Allegations have been raised against Nash and Rogers that they worked to cover up reports of abuse of youths at the center to the point of discouraging employees at the center from making reports.
Letters notifying the two men that they had been fired were sent out the same day that Staggs testified to a joint House and Senate Children and Youth Committee. The panel was investigating abuse allegations and who was in a position to know about the allegations. Staggs, now an internal investigator with the department, said he personally raised concerns about abuse at the center and told Nash and his supervisor, Rogers, about other allegations.
Those concerns often were met with resistance, Staggs testified.
Rogers said he didn't want to talk much about the situation until he had had time to confer with a lawyer. Nash was not so inhibited.
"This has all been blown out of proportion," Nash said. "I've been painted as a villain, and it's not true."
Staggs testified that Nash had asked Staggs to amend a report in which Staggs had made a child-abuse allegation. Nash agreed that he made such a request. He said he did so because Staggs' report was inaccurate. The report said an employee choked a youth who was in the state's custody. Nash denied that the worker choked the boy. Nash said that when he spoke to Staggs about it, Staggs said the worker had the youth by the collar.
"I said, 'But Gary, you said he was choking him,' " Nash said Tuesday. "He just threw up his hands."
Nash said he did recommend the termination of the Youth Services Division worker. Staggs testified that the worker was fired, but he said it wasn't because of that incident but because his time as a temporary worker was up.
On another issue, Nash didn't deny an allegation in a state police report that he had thrown a boy against a wall. But Nash said he had good reason. He said he was trying to break up a fight between boys in rival gangs.
"But this came up as me being abusive," Nash said. "When you've got gang wars going on, what are you going to do, say, 'Now y'all stop that fighting?' You can't do that."
Nash insisted that any time an abuse allegation was reported at the center, Rogers or his secretary reported it to the state child abuse hot line. "If the hot line accepted it, it was investigated," he said.
Nash said that in every allegation of abuse that could be supported, he recommended the worker be fired.
"If people will check the record, they'll see that every time I did," he said.
Nash suggested that there may have been some biased motivations behind the negative accounts coming out of the center.
Although he wouldn't go into detail, Nash said that most of the abuse allegations came from a few white employees at the center. Nearly all of the Youth Services Division workers at the center were black.
Nash said that he has been portrayed incorrectly as the No. 2 man in charge at the center. He said that position belonged to Don Nehus, a white man. Nash suggested that Nehus has avoided any allegations against him because he is white.
Nehus supervised the clinical operations at the center.
Department spokesman Joe Quinn said that at the Observation and Assessment Center during Rogers' tenure, there was no clear-cut "No. 2" man. He said Nash, Staggs and Nehus were "direct reports" to Rogers, meaning there was no one in between their positions and the center director.
Quinn said, however, that Nehus became acting director of the center whenever Rogers went on vacation. "But that should not be construed to say that Nehus was the No. 2 out there," he said.
Nash also suggested political motivations were behind the way the story of abuse has been told to reporters, trying to protect those higher up in the chain of command.
"There are some people who are trying to protect [Gov. Mike] Huckabee," he said.
Huckabee has maintained that he was not aware of the specific nature of the abuse until he was told about what Arkansas Democrat-Gazette associate editor Mary Hargrove had uncovered during a year-long investigation of Youth Services.
Although Huckabee's liaison to the Human Services Department had written in a report to the governor in August 1997 of "founded cases of abuse" at the center and an alleged rape at the center, Huckabee said it wasn't until April 1998 that he learned of the specifics.
State Sen. Mike Beebe, D-Searcy, said last week that he didn't believe that people like Nash and Rogers should bear the brunt of the blame.
"I think the blame will go up the chain," he said after last week's committee meeting, without mentioning any names. "It certainly wouldn't stop at the officials at the Observation and Assessment facility."
In July 1997, Nash admitted to "serious mistakes" without admitting any of the specific allegations that were made against him in a administrative review report. In that proceeding, he accepted reassignment to the Alexander Youth Services Center. He said he was placed in charge of the center's teachers and medical staff and also supervised the managers of the four cottages at the center.
It was in March 1998, at his request, that he was transferred to the division's central office in Little Rock and placed in charge of the maintenance operations and the warehouse, he said.
"That was my choice, though, because I wanted to get out of direct care," he said.
Nash said he began working with youth in trouble in 1975 at the old Wrightsville training school. He said his early experiences with children like that taught him some valuable lessons about how the boys can work the system.
He said he tried to establish a strong rapport with the boys, but he knew he wasn't dealing with "choir boys."
"We tried to stay on top of situations," he said. "We didn't just come in to whip kids."
Sen. Bill Lewellen, D-Marianna, has asked that Nash be placed on the witness list for the Children and Youth Committee meeting Aug. 24. An agenda showing who is to testify at that meeting has not been released.
"The truth of all this will come out," Nash said.

This article was published on Wednesday, August 5, 1998

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