My name is Andrea and I am a survivor of the troubled teen industry. I was sent to Sunset Bay Academy (a WWASP affiliated program) in June of 2010 at the age of 16 when it was located in Rosarito, Mexico in what is now the Motel Camino Inn. I was there for six months, 189 days, and during that time I was emotionally, psychologically and physically abused. Reading other survivor stories on Breaking Code Silence, Unsilenced, and WWASP Survivors has helped and encouraged me to share my story.
Amy Ritchie who’s previous employment had been at another WWASP facility in the state of New York called Academy at Ivy Ridge, was the Program director of Sunset Bay Academy. She ran it just like any other WWASP facility, with the support of the Heredia Family, Guillermo Heredia and his daughter Christina Heredia (owners), Habib Bechelani Kuri (medical director), Ruth Hensley (seminar director), and their “enforcer” Edgar Medina (a Tijuana cage fighter). Marketed as an “inpatient, single, or dual diagnosis residential treatment center for teens with behavioral issues near California”, SBA followed all the typical workings of a WWASP Program. Starting with deceitful marketing and offering parents a choice to drop off their kids or hire an escort/transportation service to kidnap and transport the child across state lines and country borders. To the isolation room, strip searches, the use of physical force on children, the use of both physical and chemical restraints, room searches, attack therapy, complete lack of privacy, experiential self-improvement and family seminars which were developed off of LifeSpring, lack of academics, lack of nutrition, peer-on-peer policing, complete cutoff form the outside world, monitored communication (letters, phone calls and visits), and 24 hour surveillance of children 12 to 17 all inside a secured locked down facility. This is a place where the most basic human rights are considered a “privilege” that have to be “earned”, and can be taken away at any moment.
The staff hired to work at SBA were untrained, unlicensed, and inexperience, with a language barrier for most US students since English was most of the staffs second language. Special needs and LGBTQ+ students were constantly picked on, made fun of and verbally abused by the staff, who often spoke in Spanish so the kids couldn’t understand. I had the advantage of being bilingual. When I first arrived one of the “lower-level” boys had one of his legs in a cast, Edgar told me he had tried to run away and they had stopped him. While I was there I saw a 15 year old girl who was screaming while being dragged inside the facility by two huge men from a transport service. She was taken to the isolation room and sedated, it was her second time there.
I was taken to the school by my mom under the impression that we were going to run some errands that day. We pulled up to an old white building that looked like an old motel with security cameras surrounding it. We were met outside by some of the staff including Claudia and Edgar who walked us to into the lobby, where we were instructed to say our goodbyes. I wasn’t sure what that meant or where we were and then they said those words, “you can come with us the easy way or the hard way”, “por las buenas o por las malas”, as they looked over at Edgar. With a feeling of disbelief and betrayal, and still not fully understanding the gravity of the situation, I turned away from the hug my mom was trying to give me, waked through the only open door which locked behind me and was escorted to what I would come to know as the isolation/intervention room.
Once inside my “intake” began. I was instructed to take my clothes off, and strip completely naked while one of the chaperones on staff, Martha, held up a thin airplane like blanket for “privacy”. After removing myclothes I was instructed to bend down facing away from them, then I had to do squats whilst coughing both facing them and facing away from them, and last were the jumping jacks also in both directions. All while still naked. They were making sure I wasn’t smuggling anything in through any of my cavities. I was then showed where the toilet was in the same room separated by a door with no doorknob and handed a cup to pee in, this was for the drug test. There were about three adult strangers in that room watching me the whole time. I was in shock, completely silent as tears rolled down my cheeks while trying to process what I could only describe as what I imagined a prison intake to be like, but I hadn’t committed any crimes. After my intake, my “street clothes” were taken away, including my bra and shoelaces. I got handed a smelly old uniform that read Oceanside, the schools previous name, given flip-flops that were too big and taken to another room where the same chaperone from the intake and another girl in the program explained where I was, how the program and levels worked, and gave me a sheet with “consequences” (rules) that I was to carry with me, memorize and follow at all times. These rules included staying in line formation, no eye contact with anyone especially anyone of the opposite sex, no talking at anytime, no complaints, even crying had to be done silently or you’d be accused of manipulation and wanting attention. When I was introduced to the “Excellence Family” (the other girls) I was not allowed to talk to any of them and no one was allowed to talk to me, unless we were given permission to speak in “family group therapy”, where we would hold each other “accountable” for our actions and “non-working behaviors” by using phrases like “my experience of you is…” or, “my experience of myself when I’m around you is…” and following the attack therapy model that is so common in these institutions.
I vividly remember the layout of the old motel they had modified into this locked down facility and the feelings of hopelessness, fear and desperation that lingered in the hallways. Inside the walls were bright orange, the windows facing the outside were blocked with bars leaving no way of knowing what streets looked like, the other windows faced a concrete courtyard in the middle of the building that used to be the parking lot, it was painted green as if to resemble grass. The kitchen and dinning room smelled like a mix of old refrigerator and too much cleaning product, and the only utensils available were plastic sporks no matter what the meal was. It faced a pool that had a slimy green substance growing on top and during every meal we were made to listen to Tony Robins and other self-improvement sermons which played on a bluish-purple CD Player that sat in the middle of the room. It was a two story building with the boys rooms on the first floor and the girls rooms on the second floor. There were two bunk beds per room with four kids assigned to each room, and all the doorknobs to the bedrooms and bathrooms had been removed. At the very end of the hallway on both floors, past all of the bedrooms were the isolation/ intervention rooms (one for boys and one for girls). The intervention room was cold with a tiled floor and there was a broken window over the sink that couldn’t be closed. On every wall there were words of encouragement, and phrases painted in different colors. They read “Trust”, “Courage”, “Excellence”, “Love”, “Loyalty”, “Accountability”, “Stop, look, choose, vote, do it, step left” and more. To this day I have reoccurring nightmares where I’m walking down those hall ways again, stuck with no way of getting out, I get woken up by the wave of anxiety the nightmare causes.
The most traumatizing experience I lived while I was there is something that has taken me a long time to be able to share. I was sent to the intervention room by one of my “upper-level peers” who gave me a consequence for being “out of area”. We were in the laundry room picking up our clean clothes for the week, only two people were allowed to be inside at one time and I stepped inside not knowing I was the third person. I was given the consequence and immediately escorted to intervention. Before entering the room I was made to take my shoes off and then pointed to four tiles on the floor where I was forced to stay in stress positions standing up for 14-16 hours a day, from the time I woke up to the time they said “lights out”. The only moments I was allowed to change position was at meal time, when I received, cold, unseasoned food and I could sit on the floor to eat, or during fitness time which were 30 minutes of high-intensity workouts every few hours in the same room. There was a chaperone on staff and an “upper-level peer” sitting outside the door keeping watch at all times. After a few days I decided to sit down in protest of this punishment and of the consequence I had received. That was the worst thing I could have done. Edgar was radioed, came into the room and made me stand up by force, physically holding me up by my arms and shoulders. When I still refused to stand up by going dead weight I was handcuffed with my arms behind my back and again made to standup by force. Edgar held me up by the metal chain that connected the handcuffs. I screamed in pain, cried, and pleaded for it to stop. By the end of the day my mattress had been moved from the bunk bed into the intervention room floor, that’s where I would be sleeping now, with the light on at all times, the door open, and the night guard sitting right outside the door. The next day I was woken up an hour before the normal wakeup time, taken to the courtyard and told I had to run until “wakeup call”. When I refused I was handcuffed again, with my arms behind my back and dragged around the courtyard. It hurt so much, that day the schools “wakeup call” for the rest of the kids were my screams. I was 17 years old and under 100 pounds being dragged around a parking lot by a cage fighter whilst handcuffed. I still have the vivid image of every student lining up outside their rooms that morning for roll call, they were made to face the wall, not allowed to look at me or in my direction, if they looked they would get a consequence, or be forced to join me. I was being restrained and physically abused, screaming and crying in pain, in the courtyard in the middle of a building full of people and no one stopped it. The following day I was woken up two hours before everyone else and taken to the courtyard again, this time they also woke up one of the “upper level” boys to help drag me around. This went on for a few days, until the soles of my shoes were completely gone and they had broken me. I ran until they told me to stop and then stood on the four tiles from sun up to sun down until I was allowed to rejoin the “family”. It is hard to remember exactly how many days I spent in there, but I think it was about a week. During my time in intervention there were two other girls with me in that room who were also physically and emotionally abused, one of them is no longer here to tell her story. The upper-level boy who dragged me around later became a full time staff member at SBA.
In the letters I received from home while I was being held in the intervention room my mom addressed it as “my episode in intervention”, “my crisis”, and wrote that she couldn’t believe I was so comfortable in that room to want to stay in there for so many days. The family rep Daniela who was the one in contact with my mom weekly did not give her the full report, instead she lied and refused to let us talk to when it came time for our weekly call. The explanation she received was that I was defiant, resistant, and had lost all of my privileges, points and levels, because I was in intervention and I had to earn them back. My mom pulled me from the program and picked my up after they refused her that call, it was three days before Christmas.
Since leaving SBA the trauma stayed with me. I have anxiety, I have problems with sleep, I’ve dealt with depression, I don’t trust mental health professionals, when something very emotional happens I tend to get physically ill and the vivid nightmares still happen weekly. It’s been fourteen years since this experience and I still have a lot of healing to do. Sitting down to write my story, re-reading letters that had been sitting in a box for over a decade, and remembering what that place was like has been hard and scary at times. I had to step away at moments, but as I finish writing this I feel like the weight of the shame that comes with being sent to one of these places should have never belong to me. The resentment I felt towards my mom for sending me to SBA was replaced by the understanding that we were both victims of this predatory and unregulated multibillion dollar industry that is made up of boarding schools, boot camps, residential treatment centers, and wilderness programs that have operated for decades around the world.
Sunset Bay Academy is still open, owned and operated by the Heredia family. It is now located in Playas De Tijuana. Amy Ritchie left SBA in 2011 and since then the program director has been Hugo Wright who has many allegations of abuse against him from survivors formally in the program. The facility moved from Rosarito to Playas de Tijuana shorty after the local Rosarito police started investigating allegations of abuse made by a former student and their parent. In 2011 Habib went on to open another tti facility in Playas de Tijuana called Pacific Life Program. PLP and SBA market themselves as cheaper alternatives to US troubled teen industry programs. Both of these facilities have operated without many regulations or government oversight.
