Sable’s Hector Garza Residential Treatment Center Testimony

Hector Garza center is a residential “treatment” facility in San Antonio Texas that I was placed at twice I’m the span of a few years while in CPS custody. I was placed in this and bounced between here and several other Texas facilities for 7 years of my adolescence. I was placed here due to being suicidal and self harming at age 11 after losing my mother to suicide and my father being imprisoned. My brother and I were separated and he went to a foster home where as I was put in these lockdown facilities where I was horrifically abused for the crime of being depressed and suicidal.

I was told these facilities were therapeutic at the beginning and were supposed to help me with my trauma. Little did I realize the trauma about to be inflicted on me was much worse than the loss of my family. Within my first couple of weeks I came to understand this was not therapy it was prison, and the staff had free reign to do whatever they wanted to me and the other girls there. I was a strong spirited young girl and decided it was my duty to fight back against what they were doing and protect the other girls as best I could and I did absolutely try my best. This quickly led to me being on constant restrictions, not being allowed to eat for weeks at a time, barely having any water, being locked in a completely bare, concrete isolation room for almost months at a time, being physically beaten by staff, injected with tranquilizers against my will and being force fed about 17 different psychiatric medications that made me feel constantly ill and receiving no medical attention for that or any injuries sustained. I was on constant suicide watch which meant I usually didn’t get much sleep due to having to sleep in a hallway right next to a staff member under bright florescent lights with no blanket or pillows or sheets on a bare cot on the floor.

The over-medication, sleep deprivation, starvation and forced intense physical work outs had weakened me enough that I was no longer able to fight back as before, making it that much easier for the male staff that were assigned to watch me shower and use the restroom due to suicide watch, to sexually assault me on almost a daily basis. There were many girls who became pregnant by these staff members as well, but due to the abuse miscarriage was guaranteed and it was swept under the rug as everything else.

Many of us tried to run with little success, a few girls did manage to get away an we all were incredibly happy for them, and incredibly jealous. The culture amongst us girls was akin to that of a women’s prison, many of us looked out for each other, exchanged contraband, and became friends but as these things were forbidden they would often separate anyone that got close to each other, and fighting and drama amongst us was encouraged by staff. Many of us were in CPS custody and some girls were placed due to juvenile probation but there was no separation from those placed on criminal charges and those placed due to mental health. Many of the girls who had never done drugs or committed crimes were Introduced to these things through this and came out of the program worse off than they came in.

There were many suicides that took place and some girls passed in there due to medical neglect or outright abuse and because many of us were wards of the state, this also was covered up and swept under the rug. We weren’t allowed any contact with the outside world at all not even allowed phone calls and we were trapped behind 10ft wire fences lined with barbwire. Hector Garza, new life children’s center, Krause center and multiple others here in Texas were all the same and the only reprieve we could access were the psychiatric hospitals we’d be placed at between treatment centers while our case workers found the next center to put us in. To say the psych ward was almost like a Vacation is an absurd thing for a child to have to go through.

Many of the girls I was in the centers with after having gotten out took their own life due to the trauma of it, or have ended up struggling in life with addictions, homelessness, and various other unfortunate circumstances. Often needing extensive therapy and support to overcome what we endured in these facilities.

I myself have struggled with finding my footing in life but I am surprisingly doing well compared to my peers that were there with me, all things considered. I am still homeless, have never had an opportunity to learn to drive, have struggled with employment and have severe mental health issues and trauma from my time in the centers. I’ve struggled in relationships due to how my trauma presents at times and its difficult to find people that understand this trauma that haven’t seen it for themselves and it’s very difficult to explain to them, as they will never experience what I and many other young girls did. It was essentially legal child trafficking as we were all basically being sexually exploited and exploited for forced labor such as cleaning the facilities, forced animal clean up and being forced to volunteer at labor warehouses. I hope to one day be able to share my story with many more people than I have and I think this is my first step to that. I hope one day I can be a catalyst for getting all of these facilities shut down, as I did with Hector Garza.

Hector Garza is no longer in operation due to myself and a few other girls finally reporting all this to CPS and DCFS in my state but all of the other similar facilities are still in operation to this day and I hope to be able to bring these monsters down and expose them for what they really are.

Thank you for hearing my story and I hope we as a collective can bring these abuses to light and put an end to the troubled teen industry for profit for good