Caught shred-handed
Order to destroy docs after sex suit
A supervisor at a city-run home for troubled youth ordered up wholesale shredding of internal documents days after she was named in a lawsuit alleging a coverup of out-of-control sex abuse at the facility, the Daily News has learned.
City Administration for Children’s Services officials say the records were not destroyed but were seized by management and transported to a locked warehouse. The incident was then referred to the city Department of Investigation.
The employee at the Bronx facility who sent out the shredding order, an $83,502-a-year administrative director of residential child care named Tahia Dennis, was not authorized to order up the records destruction, an ACS spokeswoman said.
Dennis, who no longer works at the agency, did not return a call seeking comment.
Dennis ordered the shredding shortly after a lawsuit named her and other supervisors and staff at the Horizon Juvenile Center, a juvenile delinquent detention center for children and teens ages 10 through 15 in Mott Haven.
The suit filed on behalf of Franklyn Maldonado, a teen who spent 2010 through 2014 in and out of Horizon, alleges that adult counselors at the facility coerced the teens into performing sex acts with them and that supervisors, including Dennis, participated in “grooming” teenage boys and girls to have sex with Horizon employees by plying them with smuggled booze, cigarettes and food.
The suit describes one female counselor found naked on top of one of the teenagers in his cell by Horizon staff. Maldanado alleges that same counselor told him she would ensure he faced no disciplinary actions if he “took care of her needs.”
Initially the suit, first filed in August of that year, did not include names of specific Horizon workers, listing the defendants as John and Jane Doe. But on Sept. 26, 2017, Maldonado’s lawyer, Vik Pawar, filed an updated lawsuit that for the first time named supervisors — including Dennis.
Twelve days later on Oct. 8, 2017 — a Sunday afternoon — Dennis fired off an email to the facility’s tour commander and overseer of counselors stating, “Please begin immediately to shred old paperwork and files that you might have since the building opened. Thank You.”
The email was labeled of “High” importance and copied to Dennis’ boss, a $108,841-a-year ACS superintendent named Donna Locke.
The ACS has declined to address what Locke did in response to the email, which was obtained by The News.
A former worker at Horizon says documents were shredded shortly after the email went out, but last week in response to The News’ questions, ACS spokeswoman Chanel Caraway insisted that none of the records were shredded.
“This was part of a routine shredding of duplicate documents, but these documents were never actually shredded and have been stored in a secure location the entire time,” she said. “However, the matter was referred to DOI upon learning of it.”
Because of the lawsuit, Caraway said, ACS’ general counsel ordered the documents in question be transported to a locked warehouse, where they remain while the probe unfolds.
In a second lawsuit filed in May — several months after the shredding email — Miguel Smith, another teen who was at Horizon in 2013 through 2015, alleged that Dennis and another supervisor would “stand guard” while a female counselor had sex with him.
Pawar, the attorney for the youths who are suing, questions the claim that the email shredding order was part of a routine task. “It says ‘from the beginning’ so they’ll be hard-pressed to explain that they’ve been doing this (shredding) going back,” he said. “I think they’re hiding stuff. I think they got caught with their pants down and they were destroying evidence.”
ACS spokeswoman Caraway emphasized that all of the alleged misconduct at Horizon took place before the appointment of ACS Commissioner David Hansell, and said he “ordered a top-to-bottom overhaul of leadership and practices at Horizon after he was appointed last year.”