S24 Ep14: Horror Movie

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My childhood was tough.

I didn't grow up in a warm, supportive home.

So the trauma I went through led to something called toxic stress.

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Something Was Wrong is intended for mature audiences and discusses upsetting topics.

Season 24 survivors discuss violence that they endured as children, which may be triggering for some listeners.

As always, please consume with care.

For a full content warning, sources, and resources for each episode, please visit the episode notes.

Opinions shared by the guests of the show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of broken psychomedia.

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Today, survivor Ed bravely shares about his experiences at the Academy at Ivy Ridge.

Heartbreakingly, like many survivors we've spoken with this season, Ed's parents hired a youth transport company to take him from his bed to the program.

These so-called youth transport services, which are also often referred to as secure transport or teen escorts, are one of the most controversial elements of the so-called troubled teen industry and for good reason.

Many survivors and parents we spoke with reported that youth transport services were recommended by an education consultant or the programs themselves.

Based off of our research and interviews this season, A typical transport service includes transporters arriving at a family home in the middle of the night, waking the child abruptly to catch them off guard, which survivors often reported as the most harmful or traumatic piece about their time in the program.

The trauma typically includes two or more strangers, typically contracted escorts, who enter the child's bedroom, announce that the child is going to a program, and take them into their custody.

Parents are usually instructed to not inform the child ahead of time, time, intervene or speak during the process, often leaving the child feeling abandoned and terrified.

If children resist, escorts may use handcuffs, zip ties, or restraint belts.

Survivors of these services may be denied shoes, jackets, or personal belongings to reduce escape attempts during transport.

Survivors often reported not being told where they were going, how long the trip would be, or when they would see their family again.

They also shared transporters frequently refusing to let them call their parents or lawyers during the transportation from home to the institution they were being escorted to against their will.

Survivors often compared the experience to kidnapping, citing long-lasting PTSD, nightmares, and distrust of parents or authority figures.

Many describe a hypervigilance at home, especially at nighttime, due to CPTSD.

The lack of oversight of these services increases vulnerability to those subjected to it, as these services operate in a legal gray area in the U.S.

and internationally.

In most U.S.

states, no professional license or training is required.

Depending on the company's policies, escorts may have criminal records, little to no background in child psychology, or any crisis intervention experience.

Adding to complications, these transports frequently cross state lines, making jurisdiction murky.

Public lawsuits and survivor testimonies describe verbal abuse, physical assault, sexual harassment, and neglect during transport, with some teens reporting to have been injured or traumatized during attempted escapes.

I'm Tiffany Reese, and this is something was Was Wrong.

Hey, my name is Ed.

I'm a survivor from Academy of Ivy Ridge.

I was there from October 3rd, 2002 to July 4th, 2003.

We consider it a warehouse of neglect and we intend to get the rest of them shut down.

I grew up in a small family.

It was just my mom, my dad, my sister, and me.

My sister was older than me.

She was more of the introvert type.

I was as well.

Even my dad was.

My mom was the extrovert.

We weren't very close to the other people in Howard family, like my aunts and uncles, we saw maybe once every two years.

We had moved to Delaware from New Jersey.

Kindergarten was a Catholic kindergarten.

Then I went to a public school.

And then I went to a Catholic fifth and sixth grade school.

And then to a public seventh and eighth grade school, and then a whole different public school for high school.

And they were all within an eight-mile radius of each other.

I was a good student.

It's just my parents felt it was best that I get shifted around everywhere.

We were an affluent family in the community.

My father was an attorney.

Mom didn't work much.

My dad was pretty well known around town.

He had high hopes at one point, I believe, to become a family court judge.

So he would have essentially dominion over making decisions for other teens, specifically troubled teens.

I think the fear was at some point I might get arrested and that would then tarnish the family name name and possibly his chance at career advancement.

It was always kind of walking on eggshells.

I was always busy with sports, so I was never really in the household, thankfully.

I was getting good grades in school and lettered in many sports for varsity, even as a freshman, and played for the Olympic development team for soccer and the state of Delaware.

I was definitely a good kid, but I had some, hey, I want to be a kid tendencies, and that was too much for them to handle.

I was a go-with-the-flow kid, unbreakable spirit.

I was a competitor, pretty well liked, I feel like, amongst my peers.

I was 17 at the time.

I was dating a girl who was a freshman in a college that was nearby.

So I would be at her apartment most of the times.

Parents loved her.

Everybody loved her.

During the week, I would always be doing sports until about 8 o'clock at night.

So if I did come home, instead of staying at my girlfriend's house, it would be just a shower and sleep.

I was home because my birthday was about a week before I got shipped out and my mom wanted to spend some time and so we're sitting around and she puts a Dr.

Phil episode on.

My mom watched Dr.

Phil every day.

So it wasn't like something out of the blue.

And the Dr.

Phil episode is about troubled teens and they're being sent to a camp in Mexico.

Castle by the Sea.

Yep.

Fucking Dr.

Phil.

They They were showing metal cages, and the kids were in there pacing all day.

She was like, what would you do if you went to one of these?

And I said, I'm just going to sit there till I'm 18 and then I'll leave.

Yeah, I would just act a fool on the plane and I would take whatever federal charges and go to federal prison for six months if I need to.

Instead of going to walk into a cage like that, I had planned to stay at my girlfriend's house.

My mom was like, no, wait till the weekend.

Seems weird, but okay.

It must have been 3 a.m.

The lights come on in my room.

I sit up and there's two guys in the room, neither of whom I had ever seen.

One's probably 45,

the other's about 20.

I said, who the hell are you?

And they said, you're coming with us.

You need to get up and get out of bed.

I said, fuck if I'm coming with anybody.

My mom pops around and she says, you're going.

So just do what they say.

Next thing I know, I'm being dragged from the bed.

I'm awake maybe 17 seconds at this point.

So they stand me up.

I'm like a limp noodle.

I can't stand up straight.

And they said, hey, you better stop doing that.

Otherwise, we're going to do this the hard way.

And I was like, well, what's the easy way?

And they said, you can come down the stairs on your own.

And I was like, okay, well, what's the hard way?

They said, we're going to throw you down them stairs.

They're carpeted stairs.

There's a landing in the middle.

I was contemplating the go ahead and throw me down the stairs.

But I had already known that I was going to run.

I start yelling in the hallway as these guys are holding me, yelling for my dad, yelling for my mom, who's actually behind me in the bathroom, yelling for my sister, but she's locked in her room with the dogs.

My mom's crying.

She's not saying anything.

My dad's nowhere to be found.

And I keep telling him I'm not going anywhere without my shoes.

Are you not taking me anywhere?

My mom looks to the older kidnapper and says, if I give him shoes, he's gonna run from you guys.

He looked at her and said, we'll chase him and we'll get him and we'll make sure he doesn't run again.

She agrees to give me shoes at the bottom step.

She puts shoes on my feet.

They're like, say goodbye to your parents.

That was not gonna happen.

We step out of the front door and my parents have a landing that's about four feet off the ground.

As soon as we step out onto it, I push them both off the landing and I take off into the neighborhood and it's like a freaking horror movie.

It felt like I was running from Michael Myers.

I made it maybe 350 yards before I tripped and fell on the one hill in the neighborhood.

I try to make excuses for myself for not getting away because if I could change anything in my life today, it would be fighting harder to get away.

But something in my mind just told me not to do it.

And now I wish I had done it.

I watch these horror movies and I'm like, oh, well, they're going to fall.

Running from the killer.

I know how that happens now.

Your body is so overwhelmed with everything going on.

You just can't concentrate on your feet moving forward.

Did you have to fly or did you drive?

They knew I wasn't getting on an airplane.

I think if my parents could have gotten me on an airplane, they would have sent me to Mexico or Costa Rica, which actually would have been better because they got closed down before I got rid of.

It's like we teleported there because I don't remember getting anywhere.

It was like a jail transport almost.

They tied your hands to your feet?

Yeah, like behind the back.

They were handcuffs.

So you're just like laying on your belly essentially in the car?

Yep.

It was either a Ford tourist or a Ford escort, certainly not a police-looking vehicle.

I was like, hey, I gotta pee.

I'm gonna pee all over you guys.

We stopped at a rest area.

They let me out of the car to pee in the back of the parking lot.

I screamed that I was kidnapped.

Multiple individuals hurt me.

And nobody did a goddamn thing.

So they threw me back in the car.

I didn't pee.

Next thing you know, I woke up at Ivory Ridge.

How long of a trip do you think it was?

It's about eight hours.

Do you remember, was it daytime by the time you arrived?

It was the morning time.

Do you feel like that event alone was traumatizing for you?

It was the most traumatizing of all of it, honestly.

They had broken me before I got to the doors of Ivory Ridge.

They get you in such a vulnerable state that there's nothing you can do really, but comply at some point.

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Jason Finland, the program director, was not excited to find out that I ran from the transports.

He met me at the car doors and they dragged me in.

There's a double door.

It's a magnetic door.

So as soon as you hear that click, nobody's going anywhere.

When they brought me in, there was actually an Ivy Rich family lined up right in front of the front door like they made it a spectacle bringing me in because I ran.

I talked to a couple of the guys.

They're like, man, I remember you being brought in those doors with that beard, and we felt sorry for you because we knew it was about to happen.

They weren't even supposed to look out of line to see me but Finlinton keeps throwing me around by my collar as I'm still handcuffed behind my back.

I've got a pretty full beard now but even as a 17 year old I had a pretty full beard.

Finlinton kept making comments about the beard and how he can't wait to make me shave it off.

Finlinton was a pretty big guy.

He's probably like 260s, muscular.

I'll 185, 17 year old.

So the intimidation factor had set in at that point.

He ended up driving me up the stairs to the dorm and handed me a single thick razor.

And he's like, go ahead and shave.

And I turned the hot water on and there's no hot water coming out.

He's like, no, there's no hot water in here.

You ought to use the cold water.

I was like, well, give me a shaving cream or something.

He wasn't going to do that.

He's like, you need to just get it off with that razor and kept throwing me around into the sink, into the mirror as I'm trying to shave my beard off.

And he's like, why don't you turn around and look out the window?

I asked him why I would look out the window.

And he said, so I can throw you on your face and tell everybody that you tried to run again.

If you get cut, we'll just blame the razor.

My spirit was so broken from the kidnapping and the thought that my parents could have me taken against my will to some place they had never visited or apparently never even checked down.

It's a different time now than it was then.

Back then, you could hide all your family trauma.

All you got to do is shift your kid away and nobody will ever know.

My parents told my aunts and uncles that I was at a prestigious school in the Northeast on a fully paid soccer scholarship.

If they didn't think they were doing anything wrong by sending me there, why would they lie about it?

How things appeared to the outside is taking priority, it seems.

Yep.

I didn't know how to continue even living.

So I submitted pretty quickly throughout the whole thing.

The rule system is explained to you through somebody called a hope buddy.

They actually gave me a pretty cool hope buddy.

He gives you the ropes.

It's pretty much don't talk, don't look out the window, don't drop your pencil, don't look around in the classroom.

You can't do anything.

The first two weeks, you wear sweatpants and a t-shirt and socks.

You don't get shoes because everybody wants to run and and it makes you easier to restrain if you don't have shoes on.

Your first two weeks at Ivy Ridge, you sleep in the hallway.

In prison, if you don't want to eat whatever you're eating, you just don't eat it.

In Ivy Ridge, if you don't eat what you're eating, you're getting restrained and put in the observed placement position.

What do you do if you have to go to the bathroom?

Do you have to like raise your hand?

Yeah, and there has to be a multitude of people that have to go to the bathroom.

Then they have to have the staff member escort the whole family to the bathroom.

In which you stand in the very structured line, you're supposed to be looking at like the small of the person's back in front of you.

And if you look out a line, you get a consequence.

You only have 60 seconds to pee or three minutes to go number two.

You can wash your hands, but you can't look in the mirror at yourself.

You can't look in the mirror.

Not until your upper levels, which is maybe seven months if you're doing well.

They gave you a book based off of whatever grade you had last completed.

I had just done junior year, so I was a senior.

There was no one-on-one instruction ever.

I have taken advanced classes throughout my other three years.

So I was slated to be in physics and calculus.

So I ended up having to teach myself physics and calculus in there.

They gave me a home economics book.

Each chapter in the book had a chapter test.

And then you would take the chapter test test during a one-hour period during the day.

And if you got eight out of 10 of the questions right on the chapter test, you would pass that chapter and you could move on to the next chapter.

You would get a bunch of points every class that you graduated.

I got there on like a Thursday or Friday, I believe.

Come Monday, they gave me the home economics book.

I went to the testing for an hour and I passed all the tests without reading the book.

They gave me like 150 points.

So I said, yeah, well, this is easy.

I passed four other classes in that same week and kept accumulating points.

You got a candy bar on Tuesdays if you had more than 200 points.

Jason Finlinton, the director, came down.

He's like, why is he eating a candy bar?

I was like, I got 740 points already.

And he was furious.

Because a thousand points, I get to level three and I get to call my parents.

I'm there four days.

I broke the system for him.

I just kept doing school thinking, Hey, I'm going to keep my nose down and do school and not pay attention to any of this child abuse over here because there's nothing I can do about it.

If there was a poster child for that program, I was probably it.

It's so unfortunate for me to say out loud.

The program on Netflix did a great job of explaining the program, but it didn't do much for the male side.

We witnessed the violence every day.

We were seeing multiple restraints on multiple children every day.

I mean, kids as young as 14 being held down by three guys that weigh 300 pounds apiece.

It's just how they pass their day, was restraining it.

Like, it was not uncommon to see a restraint once every 90 minutes.

Like a violent restraint.

They're going to throw you down.

The restraints were trying to make you compliant.

If you spoke out of turn, you're getting restrained.

We saw staff joke around with kids in the hallway and then get them in trouble for speaking out of line and then restrain them all in the same time.

There was one individual whose mental acuity wasn't what it should be.

The staff would torment him and it wouldn't just be the immediate staff around him.

It would be the owner, the secretary.

We'd all try to help him.

I tried to help him multiple times.

And he would just end up overreacting because he couldn't contain himself.

He was in the observed placement position, which is where you're laying on a cold tile floor on your stomach, legs straight out, arms tucked to your side.

and your chin dead flat on the floor.

He was in that position for so long that he developed a massive infection on his chin, and the infection was itching him, so he was itching it.

The only thing they needed to do, because they wouldn't take him out of the building to go see medical, was to duct tape oven mitts on his hands so he couldn't itch the infection on his chin.

They would joke with him and in the bathroom line, they wouldn't take the oven mitts off his hands, so he would urinate himself.

And then he would get in trouble for doing that.

They'd slam him to the ground, strip him naked, throw him in the shower, put clothes back on him, and then duct tape the oven mitts around him again.

He wore oven mitts for the weeks and they would just not ever take him off.

But he was there for a good two and a half years.

We all hope we can find him one day.

In general, what were the other staffers like?

It's like prison.

You like certain COs that come in and you dislike other COs.

But as a child, you kind of almost sought their approval because they were the only adult figure that you're seeing.

If they showed you any kind of compassion or care, you felt indebted to them.

They don't have any certified medical staff.

There was a kid.

I was actually his hope buddy, and

he

got really sick.

He was the sickest person I had ever seen.

I was fairly certain he was going to die.

They never let him go out to see anybody.

When I got there, I had a cracked molar and I had a dentist appointment two weeks before I had gotten picked up.

I didn't have that tooth dealt with until seven months later.

I finally was able to get the tooth pulled out.

The tooth had rotted.

It was just gone because of neglect.

At the reunion, a lady walks up to my wife and I and says, did you go to the dentist?

while you're at Iveridge?

Did you have a tooth that was pulled?

I was like, yes.

She was like, I remember you.

I knew something was wrong when I looked at you it really surprised me because we were wondering how that community allowed that to take place for so long but to know that some of them were seeing the red flags helped a little bit did you actually receive any therapy from a licensed therapist while you were at ivy ridge when we went through the paperwork there was I think only one person that was actually licensed.

They didn't do any of the therapy.

It was just young girls that they would bring in to do group therapy, which lasted about an hour.

Then they would tell the parents all the bad stuff that the kids are doing because they were getting bonuses if they kept kids for certain amounts of time.

We do all have the paperwork for incentives for holding kids.

There was incentives for getting new kids brought aboard through referrals from parents that have kids at Ivory Ridge.

I'm I'm not talking about small referral fees.

I'm talking $3,500 if you got a kid referred there.

Did you actually end up trying to communicate your concerns to your parents or were you prevented from doing that because of the censorship?

You couldn't until you were out of there.

So the phone calls you got were about six minutes and they were on like a three-way phone call with your counselor.

So if you said anything negative towards anybody or the program, they would immediately hang up the phone.

And then you would get tossed down to observed placement and restrained and manhandled.

The day I got out, I waited about 20 minutes to make sure we were actually leaving.

And I told him that there's some kids in there that are being severely abused.

I think if my dad financially could afford it, he would have drove around and dropped me back off.

He didn't believe me.

I don't think he's ever believed anything I've ever told him.

He's a lawyer who goes to trial, but they've got to be skeptical.

Here I am making excuses for him, but it was brushed off.

And then I never spoke about it again because I didn't want to give them that power.

You mentioned feeling like the poster child.

Sounds like your dad was like the poster parent.

Did he do the seminars?

We only did two of the parent seminars before I got pulled.

The seminars were a whole different thing.

My parents still have quotes up in their house from seminars, like you fear what you create.

They have it all over their doors and everything.

They bought in fully.

My dad's still referring these kind of programs right now.

If you look at his website today, it says fighting for the rights of kids.

Were you under the impression that as soon as you turned 18, you'd be able to leave Ivy Ridge?

I knew based off my dad's legal history and a little bit of knowledge I had that there was no way that they would be able to hold me past my 18th birthday.

So I figured my best bet was to just get my high school diploma through them and then convince my parents to get me out of here early before my 18th birthday, which was late September.

My parents did pull me about seven to ten days later.

Once I graduated high school on July 4th, when I finally got my independence, how many months would you say you were there total?

It was nine months.

Me seeing the kids in there that were 13 years old for an indefinite amount of time broke my heart.

One of my best friends from that place, he was like 14 years old.

And he was just this frail little kid.

We got there the same day.

Put him under my wing and he couldn't get it.

He was too young and he just took the rough road through it.

It breaks my heart, but he's doing well now.

What do you feel like was the most difficult part for you?

I would say it was the deceit, the lying to me to get me to a place where I could be taken against my will.

The manipulation by my parents and the callousness of them during the act of my transport was the hardest thing, honestly.

I had completely blanked out by the time I got to Ivory Ridge.

I had gone through so much of a journey thinking that everybody in my life now is going to always

do me wrong.

I never did overcome it.

I'll drop a relationship in no time with somebody over minuscule stuff because you can't hurt me if I can't deal with you anymore.

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Reminder, no phones allowed.

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I actually had a scholarship for soccer to a college in New York.

I went to college and I ended up falling down the stairs and breaking my back three days later.

At that point, I was no longer in college.

The college accepted my diploma at first and then I went and I tried to apply to a college here in Delaware.

After my back healed, they alerted me to the fact that the diploma was fake.

And so then I asked my parents about it.

And they said, oh yeah, we know.

We tried to sue them, but we couldn't get a lawsuit through.

They never disclosed to me that my diploma was fake.

I had to find that out in a guidance counselor's office.

at Delaware Technical Community College.

Were your parents upset about that?

I think they were just happy I was of legal age and was no longer their problem, honestly.

I think they washed their hands of me October 3rd, 2002.

And I'm sorry that I put myself back in their lives for any amount of time.

I haven't been more successful in my entire life than since I've stopped talking to them.

I haven't spoken to them in over seven years at this point.

I do miss the interactions at time with my mom, especially with the son-in-laws of my sister.

I'm afraid that my parents are going to praise this program shit even more because I'm mildly successful as an adult.

I have two businesses and a happy marriage and house.

And my sister didn't go to the program and she's now deceased from an overdose.

Are they thinking, oh, well, maybe this worked?

As soon as I got the news, I considered Spiralum out of control.

You're not going to say this program did anything for me.

I did it in spite of the program.

That's right.

You have a very amazing wife, too.

It's important to give her a shout-out, as I'm sure you were planning to, anyways.

Her support and advocacy, what has it meant to you?

She is the only family I've ever known.

Her and her kids and her mom are

by far my biggest supporters, my family.

They're my everything.

I can't thank her enough for everything she's done.

And I know the whole Ivory Ridge community and the whole TTI community feels the same way.

That can be really healing too.

Not that we want to anchor our healing within other people or outside sources, but having loving, positive, caring relationships can heal parts of us.

It's very sweet to hear you talk about her.

I know she's been such an advocate for, like you said, yourself and so many others.

And I really appreciate that about her and all of her efforts.

We've recently shut down a program in Nevada called Aurora Center for Healing.

Christie laying on the floor behind me while I was talking facts about it in the OP position.

exposing herself to the world so we can get our message out.

Aurora Center for Healing opened in Hawthorne, Nevada in late 2022.

The facility was founded by McKay Trainer, who had previously worked in adolescent treatment centers and served as the executive director of the Heritage Community in Provo, Utah.

According to an NBC affiliate MyNews4 article, Aurora Center for Healing provided a range of physician-directed psychiatric services to individuals under 21.

Despite its advertised holistic approach, Aurora faced significant regulatory challenges almost immediately.

In May 2023, a legislative audit raised concerns about conditions at the facility, leading to a ban on admissions, according to the Nevada Independent.

By December of that year, Nevada's Division of Child and Family Services announced it would no longer place children at Aurora.

Ultimately, Aurora was unable to continue operating.

As reported by KRNV, on April 8th, 2025, Aurora's facility license was suspended by the Nevada Division of Public and Behavioral Health.

The closure stemmed from serious compliance issues identified by state oversight bodies.

The following is a post Ed shared on his social media platform.

that highlights the detriment of the observed placement position as well as his continued work work to bring awareness and change.

Behind me, behind me is my wife in OP position, otherwise known as observed position.

This is essentially the worst part of your program.

This is after restraint.

Generally, you spend an hour in observed placement

on a bad day.

You can spend an entire day there.

The incident reports I attached, all three are regarding the same incident.

It's regarding not one male staff,

three male staff restraining a female student,

most likely 15 to 18 years old.

This female student, after being restrained by three male staff, was placed in OP position for over two hours.

The reason that I feel so passionately about this story in particular is because OP position hasn't really been touched upon.

She was placed in this position after being restrained for a category two rural violations.

And to break that down in regular English, a category two rural violation could be as simple as unauthorized communication with another student.

Or it could be looking out the window.

So this teenage girl was restrained by three grown men and then placed on their tune for over two hours and ten minutes.

So the reason this is so impactful to me, a reason I want to make this video, is because there's still school boards that are messaging not only me,

multiple other survivors, asking for information, sometimes inappropriately, regarding staff members that they currently have employed.

And my question is,

where did we lose the fact that this is not okay?

One last thing, which is really crazy considering these incident reports, is male staff were not allowed to restrain female staff.

Yet, these incidents show

that three male staff had to restrain a 16-year-old female girl, but there was female staff writing these incident reports.

Everybody in that building knew exactly what was going on.

I'm curious what it was like for you when the documentary came out.

It was validating.

I had got a ton of messages from high school friends that I had on Facebook that I haven't really talked to in some time because I disappeared my senior year and nobody knew what the whole member given the story that I went to play soccer at a prestigious boarding school and others weren't told anything.

So when I was like, hey, so this is where I was my senior year the messages flooded in and they all kind of knew something fishy was going on but nobody could really do anything it was nice having the story out but it also opened up a whole bunch of stuff I hadn't thought about for over 22 years to this day I I'm not the biggest fan of talking about it Every time you go through it again, it's like you're there.

Like, I'll have crazy dreams tonight.

It'll be all back.

now i have severe social anxiety amongst a tirade of other mental health and even physiological conditions i've got stomach conditions now from trauma and only being able to use the bathroom during the certain times of the day and for this amount of time and that's not uncommon amongst all of the ivy ridge kids when i visited doctors they take your blood pressure as your first thing and that's not uncommon for me to get like 220 over 130 and they send me home with a blood pressure kit to monitor my blood pressure and i'm fine if i'm not speaking to anybody these amazing reunions and meetups that you guys have been a part of how did you guys get involved with the protests and the community

we have a facebook page for the ivory rage group facebook keeps it pretty private for us they actually reached out to us during the drop of the netflix thing to say hey we're actually gonna like super hide this and nobody can find it it was actually quite the gesture.

We've been on that page since Facebook has started.

So we've all kind of been there for each other throughout this whole time.

But once the Netflix documentary dropped and we all got our files, stuff we never thought we'd see, it changed everything because we all always believed.

the stories that were told, but nobody else believed them.

Until we got all the paperwork and the videos.

And now it's hard not to believe it.

The meetups we've had since have been incredible.

It's like we've never missed a step, even though we never got to talk to each other in there.

It sounds so weird.

We never got to sit down and just have conversations and enjoy each other in there, but we immediately accept and love and understand where everybody's coming from with no words needed.

It is really a special community.

I had one staff member, John Free, he messaged me and one other student some threatening stuff right before the reunion in Ogdensburg.

It almost derailed our plans because I felt something was off about it.

I thought it was quite weird that he would do this after almost 20 years and then come to find out he had murdered an individual about 10 days before that.

Hadn't been caught yet, was still on the run.

So there is a chance that he was up there looking for some individuals that he wanted to add to his murder list.

John Free was employed as a dorm parent at the Academy at Ivy Ridge from 2002 to 2006, amidst Ed's time there.

In November 2006, Free and another dorm parent were charged with endangering the welfare of a child, according to charging documents, which allege the two men failed to prevent the assault of a 14-year-old by fellow students.

Free claimed he was walking behind the student and was unable to protect him.

The charges were eventually dropped.

Nearly two decades later, Free resurfaced in the public eye on April 2024, when he gave a televised interview with 7 News WWNY.

In it, he described the physical and psychological abuse at Ivy Ridge, calling it a horrible place.

He painted a disturbing picture of beatings, violent restraints, and ritualistic seminars that defined the school's culture of fear.

Within weeks of speaking out, Free was then charged with second-degree murder in a case unrelated to his work at Ivy Ridge.

Authorities allege that between April 5th and 12th, 2024, Free killed 58-year-old John Barr, whom Free had been acquainted with prior.

Prosecutors said Barr Barr died to blunt force trauma to the head.

Investigators recovered a metal pipe, a wooden and a BB gun at the scene, all linked to Free's DNA.

Evidence also suggested that after the killing, Free sold Barr's vehicle.

Free later confessed to the killing and was formally indicted January 2025 on charges of second-degree murder, first-degree manslaughter, and first-degree assault.

Before trial, Free was found dead in his cell at the St.

Lawrence County Jail, March 2025.

Officials ruled his death a suicide.

This

will not ever stop unless there is some sort of agreed upon federal oversight where there is a specific department that goes and asks about kids' well-being in these schools randomly until there's a massive lawsuit against one of these schools and the states realize that it's such a liability to have one of these schools in their jurisdiction that they will not tolerate it.

It's sad because we tried to seek retribution through a lawsuit of our own.

We were going to hopefully sue the state of New York and the Board of Education in New York.

About three weeks ago, we got a letter saying they can't proceed with it.

They just cite statute of limitations.

It's a cephal trial so it doesn't really make a lot of sense to me.

Apparently we're too late so somebody else has to do it.

Otherwise this is just going to continue to happen.

Tens of thousands of kids today are in these programs.

I appreciate you being willing to speak out and to give that energy.

Thank you to yourself and your wife for the community work that you do for the other survivors and for those who also cannot speak for themselves.

Next time on something was wrong.

I remember the first day, all of this is hitting me really fast, and I started hysterically crying, having a panic attack.

This woman was a very large, extremely intimidating, scary woman.

She hovered over me and screamed in my face, nobody's coming, scat you.

I still had it in the back of my head, no, no, my parents are not going to let me stay here.

That's not going to happen.

And I think part of being immigrant parents, my parents were raised very differently where they came from.

The American school system was already a huge change for them.

Something Was Wrong is a broken cycle media production.

Created and produced by executive producer Tiffany Reese, associate producers Amy B.

Chesler and Lily Rowe, with audio editing and music design by Becca High.

Thank you to our extended team, Lauren Barkman, our social media marketing manager, Sarah Stewart, our graphic artist, and Marissen Travis from WME.

Thank you endlessly to every survivor who has ever trusted us with their stories.

And thank you, each and every listener, for making our show possible with your support and listenership.

In the episode notes, you'll always find episode-specific content warnings, sources, and resources.

Thank you so much for your support.

Until next time, stay safe, friends.

Sups!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book!

We demand bequality!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

A happy place comes in many colors.

Whatever your color, bring happiness home with CertaPro Painters.

Get started today at Certapro.com.

Each Certipro Painters business is independently owned and operated.

license and registration information is available at Certapro.com.

Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be hurt!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book!

We demand to be quality!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.