One school with an alarming death rate has its alumni fighting for answers

When four former students from the same school died within months of one another in 2015, it seemed random, a morbid coincidence. Then the number kept growing. At least seven more died the next year.

Their fellow alumni, feeling more anxious with each death, started to keep count. By the time a classmate in Ohio died of a heroin overdose in October, the toll had reached at least 87.

Three weeks later, another fatal overdose in New Jersey: 88. Three more weeks saw another, a schoolteacher in the Bronx found dead in the faculty restroom. Ten days later, number 90, in Minnesota.

“Damn,” a friend of the last victim wrote on Facebook. “This is outta control.”

All of the dead were alumni of the Family Foundation School, a small boarding academy in rural Hancock, New York. Since its opening in the 1980s, the school was an option of last resort for parents who sought help for their teenagers troubled by drug and alcohol abuse or behavioural issues.

Some attempted to escape together, dashing through the woods to the nearest town and hiding in a McDonald’s bathroom.

And now, alone and back at their respective homes, they are dying, largely of drug overdoses and suicide, their names joining classmates on the list.

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The school closed in 2014 after a drop in enrolment that followed a self-described truth campaign by alumni telling of abuses there: solitary confinement, “blackouts” of silence and isolation from others, the restraining of unruly students by wrapping them in rugs and duct tape. There were reports of physical abuse in complaints to state officials and police.

In 2015, a year after the school closed, at least four former students died. The next year, there were at least seven.

Former students sought to find someone to blame, their first target being the school, only to come to terms with a more likely truth, that their dead classmates had been overcome by the sources of despair and addiction that took seed in their youth and brought them to the school in the first place.

Emmanuel Argiros, the son of the school’s founders and its former president, declines to comment on the school’s history. “I’m trying to move on,” he says. He has had many conversations with angry former students, he says. “It’s painful to go through it over and over and over again.”

There is no clearinghouse for data regarding mortality rates among secondary schools. Robert M Friedman, formerly with the Alliance for the Safe, Therapeutic and Appropriate use of Residential Treatment, says he is familiar with the Family Foundation School and the push by alumni to close it down. He says the deaths of graduates are not typically tracked.

“Nobody knows how these kids have done, overall,” he says.

In recent months, many of the school’s former students have pivoted to a sort of social media suicide watch, urging alumni on Facebook to look out for one another. The effort is led by Elizabeth Ianelli, 39, an alumna of the school and a former police instructor, who has tallied the death count – now up to 101, all under the age of 50 and the vast majority under 40.

A special-education teacher, Lillian Becker, heard about a job opening at the school in 1998 and went for an interview.

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“It looked wonderful,” Becker said in a recent interview. “Very professional, very clean, very neat and orderly and everybody was very friendly. They had a student give me a tour. She just seemed so happy to be there.”

Becker got the job. On her first day, she saw something strange. She was asked to monitor a timeout room for 20 minutes until a staff member arrived to take over. “A storage room, probably like six feet wide by 12 feet long,” she recalls. “On the floor was this student wrapped in a blanket with duct tape to hold the blanket shut. Just the head was sticking out.”

She was told the student was at risk of hurting others or himself.

She settled into her job as a de facto nurse, making outside medical and dental appointments for students and tending to their aches and pains.

Former students could remember who watched them while they were bound or locked up: other students, effectively deputised by staff members to serve as jailers.

Some of those accounts are corroborated by the reports of state officials who, after receiving complaints, conducted surprise inspections.

In 2010, inspectors noted “a previous culture of harsh treatment at the facility”, adding, in a letter to the school, “The Family Foundation School has been working to change this culture,” according to documents released by the state’s Justice Centre for the Protection of People with Special Needs.

In a written response to the inspectors, Argiros, the president, denied that the school acknowledged its past as harsh, and said it has always been open to outside agencies and new protocols for “dealing with often incorrigible and oppositional adolescents who have failed to thrive before coming to our school”.

Becker enrolled her own son, Lee Grivas, at the school. He did well, earning good grades and going go on to study photography. He eventually dated actress Christina Applegate and moved to California. In 2008, he died of a drug overdose.

In 2004, a 17-year-old student died after jumping from an upper floor of the school. Becker remembers treating students who she believed had attempted to take their lives.

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Ianelli says she was repeatedly groped by an employee of the school and then reprimanded when she tried to report the behaviour. The experience left her so distraught that she grabbed a plastic jug marked “bleach” and entered a walk-in cooler. She gulped the liquid.

“I was so excited to die,” she says. Nothing happened. She looked at the jug again and saw another word written on the other side: “vinegar”.

Anne Moss Rogers sent her son, Charles, to the school in 2012 in hopes of treating his depression and anxiety. He left the school in 2014 and killed himself a year later while suffering from withdrawal from heroin.

She believes the school prolonged Charles’ life: “He would have been dead at 17.”

Rogers says the list of dead classmates should be placed in a larger perspective. “These are high-risk kids,” she says. “We’re in an opioid epidemic and a suicide epidemic.”

Jon Martin-Crawford, an alumnus, achieved notoriety among his peers when he testified about the school before a congressional hearing regarding treatment programmes for teens in 2008.

“The nightmares and psychological scars of being dragged from your home to a place in the middle of nowhere; restrained in blankets and duct tape; assaulted, verbally and physically – those scars and that trauma never go away,” Martin-Crawford, then 28, testified.

“For my friends who have since died from suicide because of the nightmares or those who still suffer the nightmares, our time and our voice will not be in vain.”

Seven years later, he hanged himself.

“It’s like, who’s next?” a former student, Sara McGrath Brathwaite, says when contacted by a reporter earlier this year. “Why?”

© New York Times