State Moves to Close Van Nuys Group Home

State officials have moved to close a home for troubled teenagers, saying the staff could not control the youths who ran amok in a series of incidents and crimes that culminated in what police called a “mini-riot.”

The state’s action came Wednesday after the county had already removed the 68 teenagers from Pride House, a facility in the 15300 block of Saticoy Street for abused and neglected adolescents and petty criminals. The state Department of Social Services suspended the home’s license pending a full hearing.

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

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

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

Of the 655 youths reported missing in the LAPD’s Van Nuys Division in the first nine months of this year, 135--or 21%--came from Pride House, according to detectives who deal with juvenile cases.

“We’ve been dealing with problems there for a long time,” Det. Craig Rhudy said. “I have a stack of reports as big as a house.”

But missing youths represent only a fraction of the police reports generated 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 began a crescendo last month.

Police were called Oct. 7 after several residents of the gated facility in an industrial area of Van Nuys, also known as the Health Care Children’s Campus, allegedly attempted to steal liquor from a nearby convenience store and fought with the clerk, authorities said. Police returned the teens to the home, but officers were called back almost immediately and found chaos in the building.

“They had a mini-riot there,” Rhudy said.

“Kids were running around in hallways, jumping out of windows, assaulting staff members, challenging officers to fight. They were considering taking everybody out of there that night. It was a major incident, really bad.”

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

Just three days later, police again 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 greeted by obscenities and hurled objects when they responded to a prowler call near the home. The next day, four of the Pride House teens were arrested for loitering on the streets at 2:30 a.m., but staff workers at the facility did not return the Police Department’s calls about the incident, authorities said.

That same week, a teenager tripped the house’s sprinkler system, forcing the evacuation of the facility. Only three days later, a teenage girl fell from a second-story window and fractured a vertebra, police said.

One 14-year-old boy who was removed from Pride House last week--and returned to the mother who had been accused of abusing him--said in an interview that he was relieved to be home.

“I feel great that I am out,” said the youth, who asked not to be named. “That place has done more bad than good.”

He marveled to hear that the operators of the home received $3,245 a month for each child like him that they cared for. “As far as clothes or food, I didn’t see it,” he said. “I didn’t see any of it, anywhere.”

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

The 11-page accusation says the home had filthy rooms, plugged toilets, broken showers and dirty food service areas.

The state accusation described several incidents in which staff employees allegedly failed to manage the teenagers. In September, one worker left the area 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 youth was left with bruises following a beating by other teens, the accusation says.

Another youth left the facility without proper supervision on two occasions and returned with marijuana, it 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.”

Several alleged problems at the facility were not reported to state or county authorities, as required, the state alleged, including a 1995 accusation that a staff member had sexually abused one of the youths.

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

That operation, known as Lions Gate, was a short-term shelter for abused and neglected adolescents, a place they could live while social workers found them more permanent foster homes. County officials had once billed Lions Gate as a promising opportunity to serve troubled teens of the San Fernando Valley and to relieve overcrowding at the county’s lone emergency shelter for children, the MacLaren Children’s Center in El Monte.

Instead, the county pulled all of its foster children out of Lions Gate last November, citing complaints about lack of supervision and out-of-control residents, similar to those that have now forced the shutdown of Pride House.

Said Rhudy: “It’s sad because these kids need a home. If it’s not a home atmosphere, then you’re just breeding criminal behavior.”