My story is a little different than the others I’ve read. I believe my Mother suffered a traumatic brain injury while riding a horse when I was 11 years old in 1993. She instantly switched from a decently loving and fairly normal Mom to a very paranoid and angry person. She became convinced that I was doing hard drugs and performing criminal acts of all sorts. She put me in rehabilitation facilities in the United States but was extremely frustrated when they would give me a clean bill of health and recommend allowing me to return to normal schooling. I had weekly drug tests from the age of 14 to 16, and weekly psychiatric visits. All drug tests came back clean. Urine and hair. I was not doing drugs and was performing fairly well as a student as I always had even under this intense scrutiny and terribly damaging family life.
In 1998 I was 16 years old and beginning to feel that this crazy time of my life was coming to an end. Years of psychiatric evaluation, random drug tests and rehab visits had convinced my Father and brother and everybody else that my Mother was a crazy woman and that I was going to be fine. Unbeknownst to my Father or anyone my Mother had been researching these troubled teen programs around that time. She knew that nobody would support her anymore in her endless persecution of me and that’s when she found Casa by the Sea. She figured that if she had me kidnapped and taken out of the USA nobody would know where I was except her and she and the program could do as they please with me.
I had started dating my childhood sweetheart in 1998 whom I had known since I was in kindergarten. We are married to this day, 23 years later. We both were homeschooling through online programs with a local teacher I would see a few times a week. One day early in 1999 I arrived at the teachers house for our normal meeting. The teacher was not home so I decided to wait in my truck outside. My Mom pulled up in her car with a van with Utah plates immediately behind her. She told me these two men and a lady in the van were cousins of hers and she wanted me to get out of the truck and meet them. I refused as me and my mother had not really been on speaking terms for years by that point and I sensed something was amiss. She then entered my teachers house stating that our cousins wanted to go over my schooling with the teacher. I didn’t think that my Mom even knew my teacher so I went into the house with them because I honestly was worried for my teachers safety. The escort people from Utah told me that my teacher wasn’t coming today and that I was going away to a boarding school. I asked if they had spoken with my Father about this to which they didn’t respond. The lady stood in front of the door with my Mom, blocking my exit from the house. The two men attacked me and eventually handcuffed my hands behind my back after quite a fight. In the fight we broke many things in the house and I kicked out a window. They beat me up pretty good, I was a strong kid and did not want to go. They drug me by the handcuffs into the back of the van and that was that. Next stop Ensenada.
We arrived at Casa by the Sea around sunset. I had been kidnapped in Central California and cried and begged the whole way to Ensenada for them to notify my Dad of what was happening as I knew there was no way he knew about it. I was handcuffed in the van the entire trip. They checked me in and gave me some belongings packed by my mother. These included photos of my girlfriend and things that were important to me. I was put on the floor in a hallway with a bunch of kids that were on suicide watch. I will never forget the sadness and the hunger for any taste of the outside world these kids had so cruelly been deprived of. They pored over my pictures asking to see them over and over and even asking if they could keep them for themselves. They clearly were seriously abused and deprived of anything from the outside world. I was told by the staff that my first six months they would allow no communication with the outside world, and after that mail could only go to my Mom. I knew it would be censored or not sent and that it wouldn’t matter anyway, the crueler they were to me the more my Mom would like it.
The kids told me that I was now locked in hell and that if I was to survive I better shut up and do exactly as I was told. They told me that the staff abused them mentally, physically and sexually and that kids had tried jumping through the 2nd floor windows to kill themselves to no avail. I lay there terrified all night long. The next morning we went to breakfast and were served what I consider to be barely edible slop with a strange recording playing over and over in the background. I told the kid next to me that I was ill and could not eat my food. He told me that I had to or I would be in trouble with the staff. I couldn’t, so these kids around me split my food up onto their plates and ate it for me. I cant be entirely sure of the chain of events but after breakfast they took me to a pool in a cold courtyard. Kids were using bars of soap to wash their clothes in the pool with guards standing around menacingly. One guard than took me to exercise. He had me run up and down the hall of the building multiple times, I was feeling very ill and told him so. He began yelling at me in Spanish and said in English “ this is the one time we will communicate in English, any communication will be in Spanish and if it is not you will be severely punished”. I replied that I did not speak Spanish at which point he began punishing me by making me run more and more. He decided it would be funny to make me run to the end of the hall and spin in circles and than run back to him. He made me do this over and over, making me spin in more and more circles each time. I was so dizzy I was running into the walls going back and forth. Eventually I was running back to him and one of the rooms had its door open and I could see the bathroom inside. I ran into the bathroom and started throwing up in the toilet. The guard ran in after me and was absolutely furious that I did not ask to use the bathroom. He kicked me a few times on the ground and forced me up and back running. Eventually he just seemed to get bored with me. Later they took me to a room with a pile of textbooks in the corner and a bunch of kids of different ages reading from random books. I stupidly asked the guard in the room what we were learning today and he had me pick up a random textbook and just start reading. The kids said it doesn’t matter what you read, just make sure you are reading.
Back home my girlfriend immediately realized I was gone when she got off work that evening and notified my Father. My Father didn’t really know what to do. He asked my Mom and she denied everything I guess. Eventually my Brother ransacked her bedroom and found the paperwork for the school. She had forged my Dads signature on all of the paperwork and checks. My girlfriend, Dad and brother drove down to San Diego. Casa by the Sea had told him that they would fly me into San Diego to meet them to go home. Finally it became apparent that the “school” was lying and they drove down to Ensenada and pulled me out themselves.
I thought I would be there for years but during study on my second day in Casa the guard came and got me and walked me to the front office. I will never forget the feeling of seeing my girlfriend and everybody else and knowing that I was saved. Casa did not want to let me go, they had my Mom on the phone screaming to keep me there and my Dad screaming that he was taking me out. We got in the car and drove away, never to see that place again. My parents began divorce proceedings immediately after that, and I barely saw or spoke to my Mother ever again.
Casa by the Sea was the most cruel and inhumane thing I have ever experienced in my life, even though my time there was short. Trying to explain these experiences is impossible, nobody believes these places exist until they see them with their own eyes. The sadness of the poor lost souls locked in these places haunts me to this day. I think about it constantly. I feel that I have a weird form of survivors remorse, leaving those poor kids behind to be beaten and broken. I swore to myself that day and many times since that I would do everything in my power one day to burn this system to the ground. It is hard for me to believe to this day that a deranged adult can forge signatures and spin a web of lies and people will just show up and kidnap a minor and throw them in a place like this. This all was very traumatizing to me and has affected me all of my life. I have severe stress and trust issues stemming from this that kind of just turn into a deep sadness that never goes away.
I feel that I got a real peek behind the curtain into the evil and cruelty that exists right in front of all of us, you just have to scratch the surface. This knowledge of mans inherent evil nature gave me a weird edge in business and life. I do not go through life naïve of what people are capable of, I do not subscribe to a lot of things people do these days, and I have a different understanding than most of what motivates people. I have used this unusual knowledge and fear in my life to create multiple successful businesses and create a beautiful family of my own with as much separation from the past as possible. What doesn’t break you definitely makes you stronger, I fear any longer there and I would have been completely broken. Talking to people about these events is nearly impossible, most people have never been broken by a system and forced to submit. Most people believe that they would not break in these situations. I know what my point of submitting to evil is because of this experience. I also know how easy it is for a sadistic adult to break a child or anybody else for that matter. I read a testimony or comment about this in which the person stated that terrorists in Guantanamo have more rights than these children, I have often had the same thought and am truly disgusted that this is indeed the case.
I consider Casa by the Sea to be a place of truly evil acts and crimes against humanity. I hope and pray for all who experienced this terrible place or one like it. We will all carry our scars forever, even two days in this hell hole were enough to change me as a person completely, I can not imagine being there longer. Those poor children were so young, and some had already been there for so long. It makes me feel anxious and sick writing this 22 years later as a grown man. I am absolutely disgusted that this is still going on. Please reach out if I can assist in a battle against this demon in any way at all.
Thank you for your time,
Corey
