Escapes from new Oak Hill prompt firings
By: Michael Neibauer
Examiner Staff Writer
July 10, 2009
The head of the District's new juvenile detention center has been demoted, five officers fired and two placed on leave in response to a pair of escapes that may have been aided by serious flaws in the facility's construction, Mayor Adrian Fenty said Thursday.
The $45 million New Beginnings Youth Center in Laurel, a rehabilitative campus that replaced the Oak Hill Juvenile Detention Center, was plagued by "doors that did not secure properly" and "windows which were not secured enough," Fenty said. The contractor, Tompkins Builders, has been "put on notice in great detail" about the deficiencies, said Attorney General Peter Nickles, and is "liable for failing to meet the requirements of the contract."
But the two escapes -- one youth absconded on May 30 by shimmying up a pole and six more briefly got away Sunday -- were "completely preventable," Fenty said, if the staff was paying attention.
"What we have found is that the personnel and operations inactions even overwhelmed the weakness of the facility's plant," the mayor said. "There were staff on duty who either should have, could have or just plain did not do everything that they could have or should have done to prevent these escapes."
The former superintendent of New Beginnings, Dexter Dunbar, was placed in a "severely demoted role" within the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, Fenty said. The seven disciplined staff include six "youth development representatives," formerly known as corrections officers, and one shift supervisor.
A representative for the officers union could not be reached for comment.
Vincent Schiraldi, DYRS director, said New Beginnings has its share of hard-working staff who are "very bitterly disappointed when their colleagues don't do all they can in the same manner as they are," he said. The shuttered Oak Hill had a history of "staff sabotage and staff intransigence," Schiraldi said, and some transplants "continue to resist" the new rehabilitative culture.
"I hoped that was buried when we closed Oak Hill," he said. "It apparently is not."
New Beginnings houses 60 young offenders in a rehabilitative setting.
James Tolbert Jr., Tompkins' vice president for business development, said in an e-mail that New Beginnings was built "to the specifications and standards requested by the District." There are some items, however, "that are being remedied as we speak," he said, and the company has offered to provide additional security measures that were not part of the contract.
Fenty said the building has been secured with barbed wire and "some bars on some windows."
