Katie’s Testimony – Casa By The Sea

One night in early 1999, I was feeling like I was having another sinus infection. I had already slept a bit that day and it was early at night for me but I did remember having a headache and mentioning it to my mom. I remember my mother giving me a red pill that she told me would help take away the headache. Without hesitation, I took the pill. It was around 10PM at night. At that age, I was a night owl so I didn’t usually go to bed before 4-5AM at this point. After taking the pill, I went upstairs and within 15 minutes, I couldn’t stay on my feet. I couldn’t even change out of my clothes. I remember passing out on top of my covers in my bed.

The next memory I have is being woken up by two people telling me that I needed to go and my parents weren’t anywhere in the room. I remembered looking at the clock and it was midnight. I could barely keep my eyes open or process any coherent thought. Did I know these people? Are they friends of mine? Will my parents overhear them? I was spinning and didn’t really know what was going on but for some reason, I trusted these people and thought maybe some friends were trying to hustle me out of bed. It was probably whatever my mom gave me that fogged up my brain so much that I wasn’t rationally processing this.

They escorted me down to the car and laid me down in the back seat. I passed out and the next thing I know, the sun is up and I groggily ask where we’re going. They told me Mexico and I said something along the lines of “let me know when we’re in Orange County.” I guess I realized around then that I was being taken by people I did not know and since I knew people in Orange County, I could kick out the window then and jump out of the car but I am not sure why I thought they would tell me if I asked them. I ended up passing out again and when I woke up, I was in Mexico and it was too late for me. I had arrived at Casa By The Sea.

My parents apparently sent me here without checking out the place first because the first thing I noticed going through the gates was how run down it looked. They ushered me inside and I heard nothing but silence in the hallways. There were girls walking around in single file lines from place to place but no one spoke at all. Classrooms were silent. There was no noise at all except maybe the wind or the staff. The staff were all Mexican and did not speak English. The only people there that did were the administrators who were American and turns out they owned the place. I would later learn that all these programs were owned by the same family which operated out of Utah. This was the gate we passed through into the facility and the last of my freedom that I would see for almost 6 months:

After walking into the building, I was surrounded by American girls my age and one middle-aged-looking Mexican woman. I assume told to strip in Spanish. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand Spanish so the lady was becoming more frustrated with me. One of the girls raised her hand and asked something in Spanish to this lady and I guess she got agreed to it because the girl turned to me and told me in English that I needed to strip out of my clothes. I complied and stripped down naked in this room full of girls and this adult stranger. They handed me a sweatshirt and pants that I would have to wear for the rest of my time there. All my belongings and regular clothes were taken away from me.

Casa was operating on the bones of an old motel (Ironically, the old motel used to be called Motel California) and every room was jam-packed full of dirty mattresses everywhere. They had obviously gone over legal capacity because there were 4-5 dirty mattresses piled on every small 10×10 room’s floor. Some of the mattresses had sheets and some did not. During my stay in Casa, they eventually moved the girls out of the main building to some trailers sitting on the lot. The small trailers would house 40 girls per trailer with the bunks stacked beside each other. Because of the living conditions, almost everyone had lice and scabies and there wasn’t really any treating it. This appears to be a picture of the trailers after WWASP was abandoned. To give you an idea, there are 40+ beds in this long line and we were all to sleep here with 2 bathroom stalls in the door at the end.

There are communal-ish showers beyond that door next to the bathroom stalls. The rules were that we had exactly 7 minutes to shower from the time we walked in dress to the time we walked out and there were no luxuries such as hot water. We often had shampoo or soap – never both at the same time so it made showering pretty quick and gross. Most of the time we’re trying to not get completely immersed in the water either because it was freezing cold and the trailers were often freezing so we didn’t want to shiver all night.

The entire facility was fenced with 30+ foot walls except the part facing the ocean. There was only a small sliver in a classroom we sat in where we could see the ocean but I dreamed of running out that window and finding a way to scurry down whatever drop there was to get to the ocean and hopefully escape. I’m glad I never tried because what I didn’t see from my point of view was that there was a huge drop which you can see here:

One girl eventually did jump off of there but she wasn’t trying to escape. She was trying to commit suicide.  Unfortunately, it did not change things at Casa or close that school down though the Mexican authorities would later shut it down in 2004 for suspected child torture after I was long gone.

I was assigned a “buddy” for the first three days who would be exempt from the normal rules of not speaking to explain things to me. My buddy explained that we were not allowed to speak to each other ever. Since none of the staff spoke English, we were never allowed to speak English when we spoke and the only time we could speak was to ask staff a question. The only exception to this rule was when we were in our hourly group a day because one of the American administrators or their wives would be in there with us or this ominous thing that happened once a month called a seminar. There were no therapists. There was no medical staff. We had a “family rep” who would talk to our parents on our behalf. We couldn’t write to friends or whomever we pleased. There was no list of patient rights and responsibilities. It wasn’t a treatment center, it was something called a “behavioral modification center.” We were only allowed to write to our parents and we could not seal the letters – we had to allow our family worker to read them and decide if it would be sent. We could only receive mail from our parents. There would be no communication to the outside world and outside of the one hour of group a day (which was NOT fun – I’ll get to that shortly), there was complete isolation except for the occasional knowing glance at each other or non-verbal communication we could get away with.

We could not move or do anything freely. We had to ask to stand up, sit down, use the restroom, etc. Staff was expected to be referred to as “mama” or “papa.”. The facility was coed but we were not allowed to see the boys. If the boys were about to cross paths with us, we were forced to get on the ground and cover our eyes to prevent seeing them. The boys were expected to block their vision with their hands to prevent this as well. If a boy or girl were caught breaking the rules or even accidentally looking at someone of the opposite gender, there were three levels of punishment:

• Worksheets – These were isolation rooms where we had to sit on chairs staring at the walls but we could not lean back in the chair. Our butts had to be forced against the edge of the chair ledge so we would be having to hold ourselves up partly by our legs in the sitting position. We had to keep our back straight and stiff during this time because if they caught us slouching, it restarted the clock. We were made to listen to 1-hour blocks of self-help audiotapes and quizzed at them at the end of the hour. Each hour we completed was 2 points. If we slouched, looked away from the wall, fell off the chair, or failed the exam, we lose those 2 points. The minimum consequence handed out 12 points (or 6 hours of this) and the max can go into the 1000s.
• R&R – This is where you have to sit on the floor in total silence with your arms next to yourself and no move, look away or communicate. This is like worksheets except longer. I guess 48 hours or dateline did an expose on the WWASP programs and got a picture of R&R at a sister school which you can see here (with some amusing addition by someone in that WWASP group):
  
• If you were resistant to both worksheets and R&R, the same thing would happen to you except could potentially be hogtied or physically restrained

The structure of the program was levels-based. There were 5 levels. Level 1-3 is considered lower levels and the incentive to raise up were extra little things like a pastry in the morning (One girl said early on: “I will not conform for the donut” – God I loved that and it became the mantra I told myself in my head every time I got tempted to comply). Levels 4-5 are advanced levels which means you are now “Jr Staff” and you could send people to worksheets, tackle children, punish them, etc. One example of the broad ability of Jr staff to abuse children is this surveillance tape that was smuggled out after one of the other WWASP programs were closed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZFnaLBJ_5E

The child in that video simply looked out the window without permission and was tackled and bloodied for it. That kind of shit was typical and encouraged. The harsher the jr staff was with the kids, the more perceived “leadership” they were displaying for staff.

They fed us horrible food. Like the kind of food you would get sick just looking at and definitely not enough because the shit you would be willing to do to get higher in your levels to get a little more food was ridiculous. I never remember being more hungry than I was at Casa. Even though the food was absolute shit, I never felt like I ate enough. People got food poisoning all the time but we weren’t allowed to be bed rest. Instead, we were accused of not working the program and whatever physical ailment ailing us was psychosomatic because we were “processing so much” and the program “brought stuff out” in us. We would get an average of 5-6 hours of sleep a day during normal days and it usually wasn’t very good sleep. The trailers were freezing and unless your parents sent you with blankets, you had no sheets or blankets so you’d have to double up and wear layered sweats. Unfortunately, my parents didn’t know to send me blankets so I ended up not having a blanket for the first month until a nice student gave me a thin one which was spare.

Group was brutal. As I said, there were no trained psychological staff on hand and the American admins were probably some of the cruelest human beings I’ve ever met in my life. They loved to start shit and get the girls attacking other girls. During one of these groups, I admitted to being gay and since a lot of these admins were religious, they wouldn’t let me live it down. At some point after a few months of being there, I gave some girl a hug. I remember this was after I had already gone to a couple of seminars and I was trying to “fake it until I make it” to get the fuck out of the place so I was trying to act chummy with the other kids. Unfortunately, one of the admins who knew I was gay saw it and the next group was brutal. She and like 10 other girls came out and accused me of having a crush on this girl that I gave a hug to because… well… I guess you can’t give hugs to girls. They told me that they felt given the fact that I was gay, I should avoid giving girls hugs or generally being close to them. They told me that their “experience” of me was that I was only gay because I had issues with my parents and that I was trying to get attention by being different. I remember being horrified by that and after that, I never touched or even showed physical affection with ANYONE. To this day, I don’t give random strangers hugs or touch them uninitiated because it became a pretty deeply rooted fear that someone would get the wrong impression. I became hyperaware of how I would be perceived if I spoke to someone too long or showed too much affection. When I went to Provo Canyon School after Casa, I went right back in the closet and wouldn’t tell anyone I was gay. I stayed in the closet until a week before my 19th birthday.

In order to advance the levels, you have to go through these things called seminars. The seminars were held every month for 3-4 days by an outside facilitator from a company called Resource Realizations. We were told that seminars were the therapeutic part of the program and we would come out of it with a “seminar high” and it would change our lives. It was the worst part of the program and the most destructive to anyone there. I know I probably sound like a conspiracy theorist but it was literal cultish brainwashing. I learned after I left Casa that the company Resource Realizations was founded by David Gilcrease (He also facilitated the seminars often and he did one of the ones I was in) who used to work for a company called Lifespring which was labeled an “urban cult” and shut down due to their seminars causing people to go literally insane and get institutionalized (details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifespring#Lawsuits). Resource Realizations basically regurgitated the same seminars that LifeSpring did but had a separate set for parents and a separate and much harsher set for children. Both the parents and the children who went through the seminars were ordered to not tell people any details so they wouldn’t “ruin it” for them and they usually followed that rule with a cult-like vigor. One parent who actually had some education in psychology went through the less harsh parent version of one of the first seminars and wrote her account here: http://www.insidersview.info/breakingthesecrecy.htm

The experience was so bad that she pulled her child out of the school and became a child advocate after that.

I learned what “behavioral modification” meant in the seminar. Imagine being restricted from hearing music, seeing boys, speaking in English, talking freely, and then suddenly you’re ushered into a room and sat down next to a group of boys while some inspirational music played in the background. That was how the seminar started and immediately you’re thrown off. You sit down in one of many aisles of plastic chairs and the facilitator stands in the front. There is a line of desks in the back where jr staff sit and work as staff in the seminar watching your every move. The Jr Staff never taught the seminars but they would take notes and point things out to the facilitator to get you called out in front of people and they would often come around to criticize you in the middle of emotional moments (“giving feedback”). You were beaten down so much emotionally by the end that the slightest kind word would mean so much but I’ll get to that.

It’s been almost 20 years since I’ve been in Casa and I certainly don’t remember every activity we did in the seminars but rereading those posts on the WWASP Survivors group really brought it back. I won’t bore you with every activity because that’s not as important. What was important was what they were trying to do to us. They pushed us – harder than you should push a child. Gave vague directions, spoke fast, and then got extremely harsh when we couldn’t complete the task and critical. They would keep the days going for 80 hours, they pulled back the amount of food we were allowed to eat, release us with less than 4 hours before start time with some REALLY time-consuming homework that was supposed to keep us up all night and if we didn’t finish the homework, we would be “choosing out” of the seminar and stuck coming back to redo it next month which meant we couldn’t advance in the program and were stuck there longer. Facilitators got physical with students. They made it very clear that this was not a safe space and they intended it to be that way. This was a place where you could be physically, sexually, or emotionally abused if they willed it so don’t get comfortable. Imagine being a kid who’s 12-17 years old during all this and trying to resist. You maybe could for a few months but everyone eventually breaks.

The seminars were the place where the definition of words changed for us and we were indoctrinated with “program lingo.” For example, on the first day of the seminar, the facilitator would make it very clear that there is no such thing as wrong or right. In fact, he would make it a point to physically initiate us by threatening us with rape, beatings, murder to show us that anyone can justify any action and call it right therefore we should remove the word “wrong” and “right” from our vocabulary. There is only what is “working” for us and “non-working” for us. From then on, we would equate the words “working” and “non-working” with right and wrong. We also didn’t get kicked out of the seminar. We were “chosen out.” Even if we were dragged screaming from the room against our will, they always claimed we “chose” to leave the seminar and commit to staying in the program for longer.

Another lesson we had to learn in the seminar was that “based on results, you have exactly what you intended.” This means anything that has ever been done to you, has happened to you, or will happen to you is due to consequences due directly to things you did and therefore no one else has any blame to take. This applies to my dad beating me or a girl being raped or any horrific thing you can think that can be done to someone. If you try to push blame anywhere else, you are in the “victim” headset. “Victim” is a very very very bad word in WWASP programs. That part of it definitely took roots in me because in another session where you said the word victim in relation to something that happened in my past, I could feel myself recoil and fight against that. I didn’t to be labeled as a victim because being a victim is bad. Ironically, being “in your head” was also something considered bad but it’s somewhere I hid in because if I broke down in there, I would be savaged.

The individual exercises and games we did in the seminars were designed to break us down, put us in impossible situations where we had to make the other people feel bad, etc. For example, the “trust” exercise was where we had to walk around the room and tell people if we could trust them or not based on nothing but our initial gut feeling. Then we were asked if we could trust them with someone’s life we loved and had to do the same thing. Then we were asked if we could trust them with our darkest secret and continued to go around the room. Then we were asked to disclose our deepest secret if that was the case. Basically, we were put in a position of telling people we didn’t trust them or we had to disclose something deeply personal. If that was the most emotionally manipulative thing, I would say that wouldn’t be horrible but it got worse.

Other exercises were things like “playing your number” where people would say what they think you were at home (i.e. the class slut) and then everyone would dogpile on “the class slut” to telling her they were going to rape her, she deserved to be fucked, etc until she broke down. Some boys were even instructed by the facilitator to motion their penises at her or menace her until she broke down. When whoever was “running their number” broke down and was at the end of what was considered sane, the facilitator would come through and show her a little kindness and reinforce the lesson he was trying to learn. This became a pattern: Break them down, show a little kindness, force the lesson/views on them when they’re at their most vulnerable.

“Feedback” became a word that made you fear for what you were about to hear. If someone gives you feedback, they could make you go to the front of the room and stand on a chair while they and your other 50 or so peers grill you with feedback. It would start nice because we were only allowed to use “I feel…” and “My experience of you is…” statements but what came after was usually brutal and it wouldn’t stop until you are broken and coerced into sharing the most horrific things:

“My experience of you is that you are holding back telling us something about your mother…”

“I feel you are being very fake right now”

“I feel you aren’t taking your responsibility for the rape/abuse/etc you endured”

Probably the hardest part of reading through the survivor groups was reading the “feedback” that other people received because I remembered it so clearly.

Even though I wasn’t the one raped or the one on the hot seat, I felt so violated and powerless watching all of this happening. I felt anger. I felt rage watching the way others were being destroyed in front of us all. The only thing I could do was detach and hide my emotions so far deep inside me that even they couldn’t pull it out. I remember becoming desperate to find anyone who was like-minded in there to anchor onto and I found one: Brock Riley. He was a boy who arrived around the same time I did and, for all intents and purposes, he was the only one besides me who admitted to being awake during all this. We stuck close together through that first seminar and somehow made it through with some crocodile tears but the facilitators were close to “choosing” us out of the seminar (the first one is called “Discovery” – As in discovering your magical child. No joke.).

The next seminar I had to do a month and a half later was called “Focus.” The one thing that kept me sane waiting for the next seminar was seeing Brock again because at least I could find one person that didn’t believe this bullshit to anchor me. What I expected to find was a resilient Brock who would keep me sane through it all when I walked into Focus and sure enough, Brock was still awake but there were bandages on his wrists now. He had become hopeless and attempted to kill himself with a nail he pried off of a window. While I still stuck close to him and tried to keep both of us sane, we both ended up getting chosen out of the second seminar by the second day. This would repeat itself many times and I never ended up making it past the second day of Focus.

I think Brock did make it past Focus after I was gone but mostly because he broke down so much he couldn’t resist anymore. It’s probably for the better that I didn’t because what I found out later was that we would be asked to write “confession letters” to our parents at some point if we made it and pushed to exaggerate our confessions or confess to things we never did. The pressure was put on the student so harshly that people would confess to things they didn’t do or weren’t bad in the first place. For example, a kid played doctor with her cousin when they were both 9 years old and she was forced to write a letter to her parents and her aunt saying she molested her cousin. Another girl was forced to “confess” to getting raped when she never was. It was a high-stakes pressure game to get you to one-up other people on what you confessed for the tiniest bit of approval from the facilitator after being emotionally beat silly for days. Even more dangerous: After writing this confession letter of horrific shit and sending it to your parents, how can your parents ever believe you were abused by Casa By The Sea? How would any authority figure ever see you as sane or that the letter was untrue? I don’t regret not making it past Focus at all for that reason.

Everyday life for me at Casa was trying to find little bits of myself to hold onto. I realized from my previous program experience that part of what breaks you down is being detached from the world outside but I also knew that Casa was a different beast and I was not safe here in any way. I ended up reading books and doing math to stay sane and mentally detach from what was happening daily. Since we didn’t really have school, our normal work was reading a chapter out of a book and doing an open-book test. When I was done with that, I would read anything I could get my hands on. One time I read a book on stocks and then started doing math problems to see how much revenue and growth I would need to make enough money to buy a house. Little games like that to keep myself thinking about the future and out of the present. Casa and Provo Canyon School both brought up the past but in different ways. Casa assumed you would always be missing the past so it would make you be ashamed of it and horrified by it and your present was horrible as well so you would eventually break. The one thing they had no control over or no way to manipulate was the future… So I just obsessively planned for the future. In hindsight, I realize all that reading, planning, math, etc was repetitive and neurotic behavior but it was something of a survival skill to keep myself sane in a place that was as close to hell as I had been to.

At one point, I made calendars and counted down until I was 18 years old. One of the American admins found my calendar and reminded me that being 18 years old meant nothing in Casa and if I was there at my 18^th birthday, they would simply get a court order to keep me there until I was 21. This was my worst fear so I buried myself further. I think I channeled all my hate to the letters I had to write my parents. I got away with not writing them for the first months but then I got put on worksheets when the family rep realized I hadn’t been following the rules and writing to them the mandatory once a week. So I started writing… the rules were pretty clear, I couldn’t talk about how shitty the program was and I couldn’t talk about wanting to go home but nothing restricted me from writing about how horrible I thought they were and how much I hated them. If anything, I think the staff thought that would make my parents keep me there longer and think I was out of control. I said some of the meanest things I’ve ever said to another human being in those letters. I channeled every evil I had seen there, every piece of hate in me, and just wrote about how I hated them and would report them for doing this to me when I was old enough. I would wait until I got out and make sure they would never be able to keep another kid again. I just piled on week-after-week. It was the only rebellion I could do and in hindsight, I was taking out my anger at the whole place unfairly on them but in the end, it worked because they never saw me as that kind of person who would send mean things to people and ended up sending me somewhere else in the end.

Another hard part about Casa was there wasn’t really any medical staff or ones that were qualified. We had one “nurse” who distributed meds but most of the time, she would mess up meds and I would always end up with other people’s pills. We weren’t allowed to argue since she didn’t understand English and if we tried, we would be going to worksheets so we complied. I got sick more than once and I remember one time, I couldn’t go to the bathroom for over a week. I was doubled over from pain in my stomach and two of the “mamas” and the nurse walked me into the bathroom. They motioned me to bend over the toilet with my face aimed at the toilet and then asked me to drop my underwear. I panicked and asked what they were doing. They said something in Spanish that sounded like “enema” but at the time, I didn’t know what enema was. I was forced to comply and without knowing what was happening, it was forced in and I was told to wait 15 minutes. 15 minutes later, I was violently at the toilet and still stunned over it all.  I still don’t know what to call it to this day. It wasn’t sexual abuse because I don’t think anyone got off on that but it’s definitely far from me consenting or being prepared for a medical procedure.

Two weeks before my 17^th birthday, Rennie, one of the American Admin’s wives, pulled me aside to tell me some “bad” news. She told me my parents were pulling me from the program and she was pretty disappointed in them. She said my chances at failure in life were almost certain and while she wished she could be proven wrong, she knew for a fact I would fail and continue to fall into my “non-working” ways. I was told that in the morning, some escorts my parents hired would be picking me up.

In the morning, I was shuttled out to the parking lot where a man and a woman met me. The American admins were out there as well and there was some strange tension in the air. The man and the woman got me in the car and started to drive away. The first thing they said was “Holy shit, you were in that shithole for how many months?” I laughed so hard I could cry. It felt so strange to be having someone talking to me like a normal person. Apparently, before I got ushered out to the car, the situation was extremely tense with the escorts because the American admins had tried to delay and block them from taking me and it got close to a physical confrontation. The escorts told me that I was going to Provo Canyon School and that we had 8 hours until my flight.

I don’t know why they treated me like they did or what considering my parents had told them I was a monster but they treated me with dignity. I probably looked like a mess… dirty, stinky, 2^nd degree burns everywhere from constant sunburns, greasy hair, and they just saw what I had come out but they were the right kind of nice that I needed. They even made a comment about how they understood now why I wrote the letters I wrote to my parents after seeing that hellhole. If they thought that was bad, they should have seen the seminars.

When we got over the border, they were even nice enough to let me kiss the ground. They took me to McDonalds and I ate roughly three meals worth of food and they had to stop me before I made myself sick. They ended up taking me to one of their houses while waiting for the plane to Utah and showed me albums from back when they were roadies for the RedHotChiliPeppers. Again, I don’t know why they were so nice to me considering their whole job is usually transporting rebellious teens and they were told some pretty horrible things by my parents but they seemed to act like I was no risk at all and treated me like a human being. I am thankful for it to this day because being shown the smallest shred of human dignity at that point meant so much. At the airport, I spoke to my mom on the phone for the first time in months. What she told me later was that she had seen nothing but a monster for months from those letters but once she was able to hear my voice on the phone, she finally remembered that I was her daughter and there was more to me than just those letters.

I ended up going to Provo Canyon School after that and stayed there until I was 18 years old. Things were different after Casa and PCS wasn’t the same for me anymore. When I left for Casa, I was 110 pounds and I came out of Casa weighing 168 pounds. I had all sorts of parasites, 2^nd degree burns from sunburns on my arms and legs, lice, etc. They were worried I had hepatitis at first since the first blood test came back with indicators of it but thankfully, it only ended up being some parasites. I didn’t recognize the person in the mirror anymore. I hadn’t seen myself in months and finally looking at the mirror in a PCS bathroom, I had lumps where I didn’t have lumps before, burns, greasy hair, and so much I didn’t recognize. The first hot shower in months felt good but the physical exams, all the meds, having staff pick lice out of my hair, etc was pretty mortifying.

To learn more about Casa By The Sea, visit the Casa By The Sea Archive