Oregon Governor to Probe Handling of Ecclesia Complaints

The Ecclesia Athletic Assn.’s neighbors in Oregon, who last year complained repeatedly that the Watts-based group was mistreating children, have persuaded that state’s governor to hear their concerns.

Gov. Neil Goldschmidt has arranged for top Oregon officials to meet next week with the residents of rural Sandy, who contend that proper investigation of their complaints could have prevented the death of one Ecclesia child and the alleged physical abuse of more than 40 others.

The residents wrote the governor last week, asking for an investigation of how their complaints were handled.

The letter said that during the summer of 1987, when as many as 100 Ecclesia members were living at a farmhouse in Sandy, neighbors complained to numerous officials, including Clackamas County juvenile authorities, law enforcement authorities, health officials, planners, commissioners, the Oregon Department of Health and the state attorney general.

Sought Help

“We went through a lot of agencies last year and it didn’t stop what happened,” neighbor Linda Zade said.

“What’s done is done and there’s no going back. There’s a child dead. But for future reference, so that other children don’t have to die, what can a person do? . . . What are the legalities of how far an agency can or can’t go before they do something?”

Said neighbor Lee Provolt: “We’re obviously frustrated. I would like to see some government agencies do something for a change.”

In a written reply, Goldschmidt acknowledged that the issues surrounding the Ecclesia case “raise policy and assessment questions which deserve to be answered.”

He said the meeting next week would be “the beginning of a process to help us identify ways we can better respond to the needs of abused and neglected children.”

Local authorities have said they responded to the neighbors’ complaints last year by checking on the children, and they never found evidence of abuse.

They said they thought that the group had left town at the end of the summer of 1987, after Eldridge Broussard Jr., founder of Ecclesia, said the organization was disbanding due to community pressure. Authorities said they had received no further complaints, and did not even know the group was back in town until Oct. 14, when Broussard’s daughter, 8-year-old Dayna, was beaten to death.

4 Held in Death

Four Ecclesia members are charged with manslaughter in Dayna’s death. Fifty-three children who were under Ecclesia’s care are now in protective custody in Oregon, and another two are in state custody in Los Angeles.

Oregon authorities say children who violated the group’s rules were subjected to “systematic beatings”--as many as 800 strokes at a time--with paddles and electrical cords, while their peers were forced to watch and keep count of the lashes.

When Ecclesia moved into a four-bedroom farmhouse in Sandy in the summer of 1987, Broussard told neighbors that the group was there to train for the Olympics. The neighbors initially welcomed the group, which had maintained another farmhouse in nearby Clackamas the previous summer.

But the Sandy neighbors became “increasingly alarmed,” according to their letter, “as more and more people arrived, setting up tents and bringing outdoor showers and portable outhouses on to the property. The more we heard and witnessed, the more our concerns grew.”

The neighbors complained that too many people were living on what was intended as a single-family property, and that the children were forced to work long hours picking berries in silence, to stand for hours at attention, to perform calisthenics in the hot sun and jog in the rain, to sleep in uncomfortable tents and live under unsanitary conditions.

“We have many unanswered questions,” they wrote Goldschmidt. “We are looking to you for the answers.”