Ex-Detainee Tells of Time in Padded Room

Testifying in a soft voice and occasionally weeping, an 18-year-old woman described Thursday how she was carried, kicking and screaming, into a padded room at Juvenile Hall during an angry outburst there three years ago.

The young woman, identified in court only as Letycia H., was the first former Juvenile Hall detainee to take the stand in a class-action lawsuit challenging a host of procedures there, including putting adolescents in “rubber rooms” and tying their arms and legs to a bed with soft cloth restraints when they are deemed to be out of control.

Letycia said her August, 1987, outburst began after staff members discontinued a food-service job she held at Juvenile Hall--a benefit doled out to the few who “were good,” she said--and ordered her to move from her dormitory-style accommodation with other girls to a single room in another unit of the hall.

Angry, the 15-year-old insisted on an explanation and got none. When she refused to move out of her room, several staffers picked her up and carried her to her new room, Letycia said. She screamed and pounded the door with her fists and feet. No one tried to calm her down, she said. Instead, five minutes later, three or four staff members came in, handcuffed her and carried her, kicking and yelling, to the padded room, Letycia said.

“They took off my shoes and put me in the room, face down on the mattress on the floor,” she said. “They took off the handcuffs and told me I had to stay there until I calmed down. . . . I hit the walls and screamed. I was still upset.

“I didn’t feel I needed to be in there. It made me feel like I really did something wrong,” she said, crying softly.

Letycia, dressed in a blue and white suit with her black hair smoothed into a ponytail, testified that all she wanted was an explanation for why she was being taken off food-service duty and moved out of her room with the other girls.

When she asked to use the restroom, staffers responded “that there was a little drain in the floor somewhere,” Letycia said. She added that she was too embarrassed to use it.

Letycia, formerly of Garden Grove, said in an interview that she was in Juvenile Hall for several months in 1987 for giving a false name to a police officer and for leaving the facility before she was officially released. She had been there at least once before, for possessing a hypodermic needle.

On cross-examination, Kenneth Kasdan, an attorney for the county, portrayed her as a malcontent who filed flurries of grievances over her treatment at the hall.