Arkansas Online : Previous Features / Investigations

Tried to tell Huckabee about youth woes, 2 say
RAY PIERCE
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Two more Youth Services Division ex-employees told a legislative hearing Monday that they tried to contact Gov. Mike Huckabee about the divison's problems but got no response from him.
Marion Cronin said she saw abuse at the Observation and Assessment Center in North Little Rock.
She made several calls last year, some to Huckabee's office in the state Capitol and others to a state hot line set up for reporting abuse, she said.
The governor was in Puerto Rico at a Southern Governors Conference meeting Monday, but officials in his office disputed Cronin's account of the purpose for her calls to the office.
Cronin was a counselor and case manager for the division from April 1995 to November 1997.
She said she was one of the first people hired after the troubled observation and assessment center, a former city jail, opened. She told lawmakers Monday that she was chastised by other staff members for being "too motivated, and that in time, I would soon change my beliefs in how to deal with juveniles."
Most of the staff members, many of whom she believed were former employees at the old Pine Bluff Youth Services Center, "truly believed that it was OK to handle juveniles in any way they could, including force and intimidation," Cronin said.
In April, Huckabee ordered the observation and assessment center closed. He said he learned about the seriousness of the division's problems in April.
Cronin said she frequently saw observation and assessment staff members physically abuse, neglect or verbally intimidate children while she worked there. "I saw kids being picked up by the neck," she said. "I saw kids being hit on the head."
Many of her incident reports were ignored, and at times she was threatened by staff members, she said.
"It's my belief the governor knew about this mess," Cronin told the lawmakers.
She offered no evidence to support her belief that Huckabee knew.
Cronin said she called the governor's office at the state Capitol in November and December of 1997 to voice her concerns about the division.
She said she also called a special hot-line number set up in October 1997 to receive anonymous reports of suspected fraud and abuse in state government.
She couldn't remember who answered the governor's office telephone when she left her message, she said. "I have it written down somewhere." She didn't know if Huckabee received the message.
Huckabee spokesman Jim Harris said records show that Cronin called the governor's office several times, but the calls were not related to children or the division.
They were, he said, "about her personnel problem" in the division shortly after she resigned.
The other ex-employee, former division Director Ruth Whitney, told legislators that in April she tried to contact Huckabee at the Governor's Mansion out of her "own sense of responsibility."
"If he had not been communicated with by [former Human Services Department] Director [Lee] Frazier, I wanted him to avoid any embarrassment, to let him know what had been done, what I had done," she said.
Her message was not returned, she said.
Harris said he had no information about Whitney's call to the Governor's Mansion.
Whitney was transferred in February to another part of the Department of Human Services.
Cronin and Whitney testified before a joint meeting of the Senate Children and Youth Committee and the House Aging, Children and Youth, Legislative and Military Affairs Committee.
Committee members have held four hearings on who knew about the division's problems, when they learned after the problems, and who acted or failed to act on the problems.
In April, Huckabee called a news conference to say that he had learned about the specific nature of the problems within the division. He ordered that steps be taken to correct the problems. He announced then that Larance Johnson, who had been acting Youth Services Division director for six weeks, had been fired.
In June, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published a six-part series about problems within the division, including allegations of physical and sexual abuse.
Past witnesses' testimony and statements made to Arkansas State Police investigators have said that Huckabee's two liaisons to the department -- Sandra Winston and Larry Toller -- were told about "founded cases of abuse" and a rape allegation by Whitney and her former deputy, Lloyd Warford.
A written report by Winston was passed on to Huckabee in August 1997.
Department spokesman Joe Quinn spoke to Huckabee's former communications director and now campaign manager, Rex Nelson, about the Democrat-Gazette's investigation into the division's problems on three occasions last year, Whitney said.
They did not, however, discuss details of alleged abuses, both have said.
Warford testified last week that through memos and e-mails he tried to get help with the division's problems from Bud Cummins, who was the governor's former top legal counsel, months before Huckabee took action. Cummins resigned in March.
Whitney testified that she spoke with former FBI agent Bill Hardin, who was hired by Huckabee to review state contracts and oversee the governor's hot line. She talked to Hardin about abuse allegations at one of the state's serious-offender wilderness camps, she said.
Whitney, who took over as division director in 1995, met with Huckabee in September 1997 at Huckabee's request to talk about the new youth detention facility in Dermott, which is not part of the division. Whitney said she didn't use that occasion to raise her concerns with Huckabee.
Whitney began her testimony with a chronology of events beginning in November 1996 of who she told, what she told them and what actions she took.
She said that she and Warford briefed Frazier about the division in July 1997, days after he assumed the department's directorship. They gave him a preliminary state police report on the division, which he later gave back to Whitney.
"I thought that was very odd," she said of the returned report.
Frazier said after the meeting that she had asked for the report back since it was only preliminary. Frazier said that's an example of how people who have testified have not remembered things correctly. Frazier is to testify Sept. 14.
Whitney said she asked Frazier to be allowed to brief Huckabee on the situation but was turned down. She said she got along with Frazier and that they worked together as professionals even though they disagreed on policy issues.

Information for this article was contributed by The Associated Press.

This article was published on Tuesday, September 1, 1998

Copyright, permissions and privacy policy
Copyright © 2008, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.
This document may not be reprinted without the express written permission of Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc.