State Acts to Shut Down Home for Troubled Teens

State officials have moved to close a home for troubled teenagers in Van Nuys, saying the staff could not control the nearly 70 residents, who ran amok in a series of incidents that culminated last month in what police called a “mini-riot.”

The state’s action came Wednesday, after the county had already removed dozens of teenagers from Pride House, a facility for abused and neglected adolescents and petty criminals, who had become infamous in the neighborhood around Saticoy Street for incorrigible behavior.

The group home’s state license has been suspended by the state Department of Social Services pending a full hearing into the matter. In its formal accusation, the state depicts a facility beset by an unruly and reckless clientele that Pride House staff members increasingly failed to keep under control.

Pride House teenagers in recent weeks allegedly robbed a local merchant, repeatedly appeared drunk in public, flooded the home by setting off a sprinkler system, pelted police with debris and beat a fellow foster child who had “ratted” about the misbehavior of a staff member, according to the accusation.

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Clemente Sainten, president of the parent company that oversees Pride House, said he will vigorously contest the state’s attempt to close the facility. He declined to discuss specific accusations.

“It’s sad because these kids need a home. If it’s not a home atmosphere, then you’re just breeding criminal behavior,” said Det. Craig Rhudy of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Van Nuys station. “We’ve been dealing with problems there for a long time.”

Of the 655 reports of youths missing in the LAPD’s Van Nuys division the first nine months of this year, 135, or 21%, involved youths from Pride House, according to detectives who deal with juvenile cases. And missing persons reports represent only a fraction of the police action related by the home, whose residents have also been accused of assaults, vandalism, shoplifting and burglary, police said.

Officials at the state Department of Social Services said the complaints about the facility--including “the prevalence of sex and drugs and the lack of structural supervised programs and activities for clients”--date back to 1994. But the problems reached a peak in October.

Police were called on Oct. 7 after several residents of the gated facility, also known as the Health Care Children’s Campus, allegedly attempted to steal liquor from a convenience store and fought with the clerk, authorities said. The teenagers were returned to the group home but police were called back almost immediately and found chaos.

“Kids were running around in hallways, jumping out of windows, assaulting staff members, challenging officers to fight,” Rhudy said. “They were considering taking everybody out of there that night.

“It was a major incident,” Rhudy said. “Really bad.”

Four teenagers were arrested that night, two for being drunk, one for challenging a police officer and the other for vandalism.

Just three days later, police arrested Pride House residents for allegedly stealing liquor and striking a store clerk who attempted to stop them. A few days after that, police were met with obscenities and hurled objects when they responded to a prowler call near the home.

The next day, four of the Pride House teenagers were arrested for loitering on the streets at 2:30 a.m., but staffers at the facility did not return the Police Department’s calls about the incident. That same week, a teenager tripped the house’s sprinkler system, forcing evacuation of the facility. Three days later, a teenage girl fell from a second-story window and fractured a vertebra.

“Many people have described the place to us as out of control,” said Alice Jackson-Wright, a senior staff attorney for the Department of Social Services, who filed the state’s accusation.

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The state accusation goes on to depict a staff that was at times oblivious or unresponsive to its charges. In September, one worker left the area after after seeing a fight between two teenage boys and did not return until the fight was over, the accusation says. In the same month, staffers took no action after a resident was left bruised in a beating by other teenagers, the accusation says. Another resident left the facility without proper supervision on two occasions and returned with marijuana, the accusation says.

“I’ve never thought they were staffed adequately,” said Rhudy. “They’d have an assault on a kid by another kid and no staff member would witness it. If there’s a confrontation between two kids and no staff member saw it, my contention is that there aren’t enough staff.”

The 11-page accusation says that the gated facility in a mostly industrial section of Van Nuys was substandard, with filthy rooms, plugged toilets, broken showers and dirty food-service areas.

The Health Care Children’s Campus is two years behind in payments on a state-guaranteed loan of more than $8 million that it used to buy the facility, said Jackson-Wright, the state lawyer. The financial problem is worrisome because it might indicate that the operator does not have enough money to pay for services for the children, Jackson-Wright said.

The county and state actions against the facility come about a year after authorities moved to shut down another program that was operated at the same site by many of the same administrators.

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That operation, known as Lions Gate, was designed to be a short-term shelter for abused and neglected adolescents until social workers could find them a more permanent foster home. County officials had once billed Lions Gate as a promising opportunity to serve troubled teenagers of the San Fernando Valley while relieving the burden on the county’s lone emergency shelter for children, the overloaded MacLaren Children’s Center in El Monte.

Instead, the county pulled all of its foster children out of Lions Gate in November 1995, citing complaints about lack of supervision and out-of-control clients similar to those forcing the shutdown of Pride House.