Love at Its Toughest

As the mother of a 15-year-old son, I cried after reading about Aaron Bacon (“A Death in the Desert,” by Joe Morgenstern, Jan. 15). What disturbed me most was the conduct of North Star Expeditions’ “counselors.” Why no one, including fellow students, risked standing up for Aaron or offered him any shred of help discouraged me greatly. Is that where “tough love” has taken us as a society?

Jennifer Danielson

Pacific Palisades

*

Carefully supervised outdoor expeditions can appropriately challenge teen-agers. But a sense of self-worth and accomplishment do not evolve where the malicious humiliation, suffering and neglect of a weaker person are not only condoned but encouraged. Aaron was subjected to an utterly treacherous and grotesquely irresponsible “Lord of the Flies” exercise--torture of the type that military personnel might suffer at the hands of a hostile enemy. The responsible members of the North Star staff should contemplate that lifetime lesson--in jail.

Caroline Maus-Hardy

Fullerton

*

Morgenstern’s one-sided report of the Aaron Bacon tragedy tells only part of the story of North Star, which has had hundreds of successes. My own son was sent there after other forms of treatment failed to stem his downward spiral into drug and alcohol abuse. The North Star directors had warned us of the severity of the program. We knew that our son would hate the first 30 days and hate us for having sent him there. But he’d been running away from school and home, and we were aware that he’d been scrounging for food and alcohol, using drugs with his friends, even sleeping on the floors of public bathrooms.

After the first month, his letters, as well as reports from the camp staff, began to show a change in his attitude. When we and other parents were reunited with our youngsters at the program’s end, it was as though our children had been reborn. Nineteen months after our son’s return, he has made new friends, performed in community theater and made the high school wrestling team. He has no interest in drugs, alcohol or running away and is talking about attending college.

Ron Freedman

Laguna Hills

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Our daughter was at North Star when the state of Utah interviewed and examined the program’s students in what seemed to be a one-sided investigation. North Star advised us that state examiners were coming, yet no one from the state either contacted us for permission to examine our daughter or chose to interview us.

Today, our daughter, who once couldn’t have cared less about life or or other living creatures, is a smiling, laughing, responsible youngster, making wise choices for a future that she believes in. We think we owe her life to the North Star program.

Joe and Claudia Wood

Laguna Niguel

*

In the last two paragraphs of the article, why does Morgenstern blunt its impact or even contradict its clear implications? There is no “solace” in Aaron’s “last testament,” and it is patently cynical to search for any. This boy obviously was fighting for his life with every step of what the author elsewhere characterizes more appropriately as a “Calvary.”

What is remarkable about this story is how leniently the law has treated Aaron’s persecutors, including his witless parents. For their betrayal of their son’s trust alone, they richly deserve their guilt.

Ezrha Jean Black

Los Angeles

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As one who has until recently worked in the field of children’s social services, I thought I’d heard and seen every form of abuse. However, the torture and death of Aaron Bacon was an outrageous new low. It proves to others what we professionals already know: how needy and problem children are dehumanized and abused by “well-meaning” parents and counselors.

How dare the Bacons not research more effectively this sadistic “camp” before sending their vulnerable son there? How dare they not exhaust every other avenue of hope before having two goons sent in to drag him off, terrified, to a living hell? Wasn’t the fact that their older son had straightened out on his own indicative that a different approach might have succeeded?

Jacqueline Forester

Brentwood

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So Aaron’s mother thought she was sending her son to a little “slice of heaven.” I read the brochures and talked at length with the staff before deciding to send my son to North Star for four months, and at no time was I led to believe that it would be heaven.

As for the “surprise” visit by the “obese, bearded and aggressively rough-hewn” North Star representatives, they were there at the parents’ behest to pick up a child who could no longer be dealt with at home. And why not by surprise? Warned of what was coming, would any such child hang around to be taken away?

My son says that the children arrive at camp angry, especially at their parents, and write lies in their journals in hope that someone will read them and let them come home. He ought to know, having done the same thing.

Athletes have died participating in sports, college freshmen have died in fraternity and sorority hazings and recruits have died in boot camp. Lessons are learned and safeguards are put in place, but the institutions are not shut down. The state of Utah is trying to close North Star permanently. If that happens, more kids will be lost to the streets, to drugs, to gangs and to whatever else can rob children of their lives and souls.

Marty Polino

Rialto

*

In my profession, I work daily with troubled children, teens and families. Never have I seen any individual get cured, get well or even improve through the process of degradation, humiliation, teasing, taunting, name-calling, starvation or being frozen. If such treatment were going on in someone’s home, it would be reported to authorities and the children would be removed.

Christina Hart

Los Angeles

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Because I felt I had no other recourse, I enrolled my son in a wilderness-therapy academy (not North Star). His letters to me told of sleeping outdoors in freezing weather, food being withheld to those who were unable to build their own fires, bleeding ears and constant sickness. Calls to the academy got me the same “he’s uncooperative” response that the Bacons received.

When I picked him up, he looked as if he had lost his mind. His eyes looked dead, as though he had been pushed too far and couldn’t find his way back. He is home now, 17, still a gang member, does not go to school and will become a father in March.

What will it take to shut these places down?

Kimberly Aplington

Los Angeles

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I was angered by Morgenstern’s analysis and reference to Aaron Bacon’s “great strength,” which enabled him to keep hiking until he collapsed and died. The boy was noble, no doubt, but he was also a victim of society’s “Don’t make trouble” myth. Had he refused to budge earlier or even run away to the other camp, I don’t believe they wouldn’t have beaten him to death. His desire not to be a problem pushed him onward.

We must teach children that this is America, where everyone has the right to question authority, regardless of age or where they are.

Donna Nooger

Hollywood