Investigators wrongly said Lincoln Hills probe ended

Investigation was far from over in mid-2015

MADISON - Criminal investigators told the Department of Corrections they had completed a probe of Wisconsin’s troubled juvenile prison in the summer of 2015, even though it was far from over, state records show.

A year and a half later, the investigation continues into prisoner abuse and child neglect at Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls.

State Department of Justice staff told corrections officials the investigation “is done” and had “transitioned to the prosecution stage” in June and July 2015, according to Department of Corrections records released under the state’s open records law.

In fact, the criminal investigation had a long way to go.

By the end of 2015, Department of Corrections investigators were raising concerns that some employees were running what they dubbed a “fight club” at Lincoln Hills. In an internal investigation, the department did not find that guards had been setting up fights for entertainment, but did fire a guard for fighting an inmate and turning a blind eye to a fight between inmates.

It is unclear if criminal investigators ever looked into the issue.

Johnny Koremenos, a spokesman for Attorney General Brad Schimel, said state Department of Justice investigators believed their overall investigation of the prison complex north of Wausau was complete in July 2015 but later learned of more allegations that prompted them to expand it.

The attorney general last year told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he should have put more than two agents on the investigation in the early stages. “Hindsight’s 20/ 20,” he said in December.

Schimel’s office handed the investigation off to the FBI last year. Federal officials have not said how much longer the probe will take.

A review of Lincoln Hills by the Journal Sentinel over the past year found prison offi-

cials trained staff improperly, failed to preserve video evidence, didn’t document serious incidents and often shirked their duty to report matters to parents, police and social service agencies.

The newly released records give the most detailed chronology yet of the internal and criminal investigations of Lincoln Hills that began more than two years ago. Among the documents is a 78-page timeline compiled by the Department of Corrections that describes developments from November 2014 to May 2016.

The timeline shows the criminal probe was conducted in fits and starts. The timeline and other documents also reveal the Department of Corrections at times did not have an accurate understanding of where the criminal investigation stood.

In March 2015, the Department of Justice officials told the Department of Corrections that investigators were putting in overtime on the case.

But in the three weeks after saying that, the lead criminal investigator, David Forsythe, didn’t work on the case at all, a review of his time sheets shows.

The time sheets show he put in long hours on the case in February and early March 2015, and then put in far fewer hours through that spring and summer.

Work on the case slowed in April 2015 when Forsythe was pulled from the Lincoln Hills case so he could lead the investigation into the shooting death of state Trooper Trevor Casper.

In May 2015, DOJ told a top corrections official

that criminal investigators had completed 95% of their investigation of Lincoln Hills, according to the timeline. In June 2015, the agency reported the case “has transitioned to the prosecution phase” and in July said the probe “is done.”

By that fall, however, the investigation was expanding, with investigators taking testimony under oath.

In November 2015 — nearly a year into the investigation — the Department of Justice asked for the medical records of one or more inmates whose bones were broken at Lincoln Hills. Koremenos said investigators had no reason to gather medical records before then.

“Investigators and prosecutors took, at face value, a child’s claim that his arm was broken,” Koremenos said by email. “The plan was to put together a case that might be chargeable on the facts and then collect the medical records.”

Also that month, DOJ officials made an impromptu call to the DOC secretary’s office to say they had reported to the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department that youth were at risk at Lincoln Hills, according to the timeline.

In December 2015, state investigators raided Lincoln Hills before handing the probe off to the FBI.

The timeline and other documents also show:

Internal investigators put two guards, Lance Glisch and Peter Vandre, on paid leave because they suspected they were running fight clubs, though they did not ultimately conclude that they were setting up fights. Glisch was fired in February 2016 for fighting an inmate and not stopping a fight between

two other inmates. Vandre quit that month amid an investigation into whether he concocted a story with an inmate to cover up how the inmate was injured. The fight between Glisch and the inmate occurred in the summer of 2015, when the Department of Justice was maintaining its investigation was complete or nearly complete.

A DOC internal investigator sought a legal hold to preserve the electronic files for three top officials responsible for Lincoln Hills — Paul Westerhaus, the state’s juvenile corrections administrator; John Ourada, the superintendent of Lincoln Hills; and Bruce Sunde, the security director of Lincoln Hills. All three retired as the investigation intensified.

In 2013, an inmate told guard Ronald Kohlman he was thinking of suicide. Kohlman twice told him to “go ahead and kill himself.” Kohlman , who afterward told his bosses he was kidding, was suspended for 10 days without pay.