Abuse at Boys & Girls Clubs revealed
Investigation finds hundreds of claims in Texas, 29 other states
Some 250 victims in 30 states, including Texas, say they were sexually abused as children by employees, volunteers and other members of Boys & Girls Clubs of America affiliates, a Hearst Newspapers investigation has found.
Children as young as 6 were raped and sexually assaulted, court documents show. Some were molested during sleepovers or club trips. In some cases, the abuse continued for years. The molesters were coaches, club directors and volunteers, according to records of criminal convictions reviewed by Hearst.
The investigation is believed to be the first comprehensive nationwide accounting of child sexual abuse tied to Boys & Girls Clubs of America.
Lawsuits dating to the 1970s assert that in some instances, leaders of the clubs knew about the abuse and did not report it to law enforcement and that administrators at some clubs did not adhere to Boys & Girls Clubs of America safety guidelines or failed to conduct adequate background checks. In a case in Sonoma, Calif., a perpetrator was able to move to another club just miles away after the abuse was reported to staff.
In a San Antonio case, Demetris Keno, 23, is charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl who was a volunteer at the Boys & Girls Club of San Antonio, where Keno was employed. According to the arrest warrant, Keno sent the girl several messages via Snapchat in which he tried to coerce her into sex. He later picked her up from the club and raped her in his car in a nearby cul de sac, the warrant alleges.
A club official said Keno was fired and that the organization is “fully cooperating with law enforcement authorities as they complete their investigation.”
Keno is free on $60,000 bail while awaiting trial.
Among other cases discovered by Hearst Newspapers:
• A 14-year-old boy sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl at the Boys & Girls Club of Arlington when the two were left alone during an afterschool program, according to a 2016 lawsuit. Both children were disabled and required adult supervision at all times. The club was ordered to pay $600,000, according to court documents.
• Alejandro Hernandez, a 23
year-old employee of Boys & Girls Club of Sierra County in Truth or Consequences, N.M., was put in charge of a club sleepover even though administrators learned a few months earlier that he had made sexually inappropriate comments to at least one teenage girl at the club, according to a civil complaint. He molested a boy at that club sleepover in 2015, court documents say. Hernandez was convicted of two counts of criminal sexual contact with a minor and sentenced to six years in prison.
• A program manager at the Lester H. White Boys & Girls Club in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., knew that 18year-old employee Khalon Booker had hugged and kissed an 11-yearold girl at the club, according to court records. The manager’s only action, a lawsuit alleged, was to tell Booker and the victim the behavior wasn’t allowed at the club. Booker was later convicted of sexually assaulting the girl multiple times during the same period the hugging and kissing was reported.
Boys & Girls Clubs of America, founded in Hartford, Conn., in 1860 and now headquartered in Atlanta, is the largest youth development nonprofit in the country. It serves more than 4 million children a year, has a congressional charter and federal funding and has a $100 million annual budget. Celebrity alumni have attested to its positive effect on their lives. Its members refer to it as a “movement.”
Top officials acknowledge that the organization does not comprehensively track allegations of child sex abuse at its 4,600 local affiliates.
“There’s no reason to keep a list of people that somehow are going to slip through the cracks,” said John Miller, senior vice president of field services for Boys & Girls Clubs of America. “We’ve created the layers so that it’s not about one person holding the list. It’s about the whole movement, whole network, ensuring kids are safe.”
Miller said records from criminal cases are available to the public through law enforcement agencies and media reports, which makes Boys & Girls Clubs of America “transparent.”
“Everything is public for us,” he said. “So, when I say public, the local clubs report (to police) locally, so there is a public account of a report. They report to us. And so, we have those data points.”
Miller declined to disclose the number of cases local clubs have reported to Boys & Girls Clubs of America since 2014, when the organization made that a requirement.
“I can say that that number is not a large number, and the average that results in arrests is probably in the single digits every year since 2014,” he said. “Any single incident is too many. Our goal is to get to zero.”
Attorneys representing victims say compiling and releasing that information to the public is a best practice for organizations that serve youths and would help educate the public about the extent of sexual abuse.
“The national organization has a moral obligation to release the names of perpetrators within its ranks and crimes found, so victims can try to heal,” said Boston-based attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who has represented victims of abuse at a local club. “It speaks volumes that they don’t.”
Boys & Girls Clubs of America said affiliated clubs must adhere to a uniform set of rules for reporting and preventing child sex abuse.
But in several instances, those clubs’ background checks failed to prevent adults with criminal convictions from working with children.
Christopher Sims, then 22, worked at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Wayne County in Goldsboro, N.C., in 2014 despite convictions for communicating threats, injury to real property, possession of weapons on educational property, resisting a public officer and disorderly conduct. Those convictions should have barred Sims from being hired under Boys & Girls Clubs of America rules.
Sims was later convicted of sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl and a 13-year-old girl who attended club programs.
Because of the role of the club in the children’s lives, attorneys say some victims feel conflicted about coming forward.
“Youth service organizations fill a void in a kid’s life, especially if that child comes from a broken home,” said Seattle-based attorney Jason Amala, who represents people who say they were abused at a Boys Club. “There were very fond memories for a lot of people there. But the flip side is they find out later the organization didn’t protect them.”
Realizing as an adult that officials who ran the institution they loved as children failed to protect them from abuse is difficult for many to accept, Amala said.
“A lot of people think it’s their fault, that they did something wrong,” he said. “They wouldn’t think in a million years the organization they loved may have failed them.”