True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 262: CEDU Detective
Aired: 2023-01-04
Duration: 01:37:38


=== Psycho Year Ahead (03:13) ===

[00:00:03]  Happy New Year!
[00:00:04]  Happy New Year!
[00:00:10]  Those are fireworks.
[00:00:12]  I gotta say, 2023, I don't like the ring of it.
[00:00:15]  I don't love the ring of it.
[00:00:16]  2022 seemed fake.
[00:00:18]  I kept thinking it was 2021.
[00:00:20]  And then once June hit, I thought it was 2023.
[00:00:23]  So I'm not loving this year number.
[00:00:27]  Yeah, it feels like a in-between Z's.
[00:00:29]  24?
[00:00:30]  Now that's a real round.
[00:00:32]  It's going to be crazy.
[00:00:33]  I'm telling you, 2024 is going to be the new 2020.
[00:00:35]  It is going to be a psycho year.
[00:00:38]  But it's like, to me, I have the feeling I'm like, let's get fucking through this thing already.
[00:00:41]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:00:42]  Like, like 2023, I don't care about it.
[00:00:44]  Nothing's going to happen.
[00:00:45]  Or like some.
[00:00:46]  I'm saying, let's slow it all down.
[00:00:47]  It's going too fast.
[00:00:49]  Let's do 2022, maybe six more months.
[00:00:51]  Yeah.
[00:00:52]  Why not?
[00:00:53]  Do you have a New Year's resolution?
[00:00:56]  It's okay if you don't.
[00:00:57]  I don't.
[00:00:58]  You don't.
[00:00:58]  I don't.
[00:00:59]  No.
[00:01:00]  I didn't think of anything.
[00:01:02]  Mine is I'm going to lose 200 pounds.
[00:01:06]  Interesting.
[00:01:07]  Yes.
[00:01:09]  I'm going to actually be sort of a negative weight in the world.
[00:01:14]  And sort of like a, I'm picturing like the way I want to look by summer, like even by spring, I want to be just like a sphere in the air that sort of sucks, like has like, has like a gravity to it, but like sucks it, like a black hole.
[00:01:27]  Yeah, you want to be a black hole.
[00:01:28]  Yeah, I want to be a black hole.
[00:01:30]  So I have started taking a diabetes-related drug to lose weight.
[00:01:36]  Ozembic.
[00:01:37]  Fentanyl.
[00:01:59]  By the way, I heard that there's a new diet drug coming out that makes Ozembic look like running a 5K.
[00:02:07]  Like it is so fast and like people are like, it is going to completely change everything.
[00:02:14]  More so than Ozembic.
[00:02:15]  Out there in Miami, Ozembic was talk of the town.
[00:02:18]  Yeah.
[00:02:19]  No, everyone, no one can stop talking about Ozembic and buccal fat.
[00:02:24]  Okay.
[00:02:25]  Is that how you say that?
[00:02:26]  Bucal?
[00:02:27]  I never heard of this before last week.
[00:02:28]  Bucal fat?
[00:02:29]  I only knew about it with the massage.
[00:02:32]  The French buccal massage is very famous.
[00:02:34]  However, here's what I'm going to say.
[00:02:38]  All the tumblerinas are all saying, you know, buccal fat removal, that's an out.
[00:02:45]  It's an out.
[00:02:46]  Well, here's my thing.
[00:02:48]  In an out list, you're not going to do any of that.
[00:02:50]  None of that's none of it.
[00:02:51]  You know what you're going to do?
[00:02:53]  Are you going to direct to consumer trend spotting?
[00:02:55]  You're going to look at your phone for the next year and then be like, oh, I should have done more with my life.
[00:03:00]  That's what you're going to do this year.
[00:03:02]  Don't give me, you're not going to be like, eh, in dinner with friends.
[00:03:06]  You're not going to do that.
[00:03:08]  You're going to want to take on.
[00:03:09]  You're going to sit there and you're going to watch a little fucking The Queen's Gambit.
[00:03:12]  I think TikTok is going to fall off.
[00:03:16]  That's my.

=== Profit Shift: 92's License Dilemma (08:01) ===

[00:03:17]  You just made, I could tell by your tone of voice.
[00:03:19]  You just came up with.
[00:03:20]  You think TikTok's going to fall off this year?
[00:03:22]  No, I didn't just come up with that.
[00:03:23]  I've been fucking thinking about that for like three weeks.
[00:03:25]  Oh, how come you just saved it for the show?
[00:03:29]  I don't know because we never talked about it.
[00:03:30]  Also, you don't like when I make predictions.
[00:03:33]  That's true.
[00:03:35]  That's because I think it's witchcraft.
[00:03:38]  Hello, everyone.
[00:03:39]  I'm Liz.
[00:03:40]  My name is Brace.
[00:03:42]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky in the podcast.
[00:03:46]  It's called Truodon.
[00:03:47]  Hello.
[00:03:48]  Hello.
[00:03:50]  We have quite the interview for you guys to start off the new year.
[00:03:54]  And I figured we would add a little context to it before we start because it's a little bit complicated.
[00:03:59]  And as we learned from our Utah series, sometimes you need to constantly restate things so that people don't forget.
[00:04:08]  I feel like pretty easy to remember information.
[00:04:11]  But we have with us today David Safran.
[00:04:16]  He is, I would call him a free, I guess I would call him an investigative journalist, freelance reporter.
[00:04:22]  And he's done a lot of work specifically around the disappearances or the disappearances, I guess I would say, of three kids from Running Springs in California from the CDU facility.
[00:04:34]  That's John Inman in 1993, Blake Persley in 1994, and Daniel Ewan in 2004.
[00:04:42]  CDU, for those of you who listen to our series, The Game, stood for, it's believed, Charles E. Diedrich University and was a youth school modeled directly after Cinanon.
[00:04:56]  Three children disappeared from there over a 10-year period, and none of them have ever been found.
[00:05:03]  And David wrote an article about the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department's essential cover-up of the case, I would say.
[00:05:13]  Yeah, I mean, the piece is called, Are Police Stifling the Investigation into Three Teens Who Vanished from a Controversial Residential Treatment Facility?
[00:05:21]  And we're linking to the piece.
[00:05:22]  We highly recommend you guys check it out before, during, and after the interview.
[00:05:27]  And David, of course, you know, brings his own experience with CDU to his investigation.
[00:05:34]  And so we talk about all of those things in this interview, which is coming up now.
[00:05:52]  Ladies and gentlemen, happy new year.
[00:05:54]  We are back with a bang, and we have with us today David Safran, a freelance journalist and local rock and roll musician from Chicago, Illinois.
[00:06:07]  He's written under the name Medium Anonymous.
[00:06:10]  I have been reading his work for a long time.
[00:06:12]  He has helped us out on this show, and we finally have him on to talk about, well, a variety of things.
[00:06:18]  But for those of you who remember our five-part miniseries, The Game that came out, I mean, you would have to remember because that was literally like a month and a half ago.
[00:06:29]  David helped out with that.
[00:06:31]  And he also has written quite a lot about these schools.
[00:06:34]  He attended one himself.
[00:06:36]  And we have him on to talk about quite a few things today.
[00:06:39]  David, how are you doing?
[00:06:40]  Welcome to the show.
[00:06:41]  Thanks for having me.
[00:06:42]  This is great.
[00:06:44]  So just let's just jump right into it.
[00:06:47]  A little bit of background.
[00:06:48]  You went to CDU, which is really related to the school that I went to as well, and which itself came out of Synanon.
[00:06:56]  But would you be able to give us a little context to what CDU is?
[00:06:59]  Because just to situate us and what we're going to be talking about today.
[00:07:02]  Yeah, I mean, I'm afraid it's going to take about 12 hours to bisex CDU.
[00:07:09]  Well, it was primarily it was functioning for decades as a sort of a rehab commune hybrid, an artificial society.
[00:07:21]  It was for the first three decades, really, it was based in Southern California, and it stayed there for most of its existence, but it developed also into Idaho too, which I think is kind of where Monarch emerged out of, you know, that kind of the Sandpoint abyss, that northern Idaho culture.
[00:07:47]  I was in the mothership, you know, in Running Springs, California.
[00:07:52]  That was CDU HQ pretty much, you know, since the really, I think they moved to Running Springs to the mountains in the late 60s.
[00:08:05]  But at that point, it was, you know, before then, it was really in Riverside County and also Palm Springs.
[00:08:13]  And it was sort of scattered about, functioning under the radar, mostly as a nonprofit, trying to lure in adolescents.
[00:08:24]  But, you know, they had members that were, you know, the ages ranged from 12 to like 40.
[00:08:31]  And eventually they changed from a nonprofit to a for-profit.
[00:08:36]  And they were licensed in 92 as a group home, which changed pretty much everything for CDU, especially in California when it became a group home.
[00:08:53]  Of course, they didn't advertise that it was a group home.
[00:08:56]  They called it a school.
[00:09:00]  Although, you know, whether it was an actual school is very debatable.
[00:09:06]  That was just like a marketing hook.
[00:09:08]  Although I think they believed that they were offering an alternative education.
[00:09:13]  Certainly, you know, Dan Earle would say that.
[00:09:16]  When you say that everything changed when it reclassified itself as a group home, what do you mean exactly?
[00:09:23]  A number of things.
[00:09:23]  One, they opened themselves up to they had to get licensed through the California Department of Social Services.
[00:09:31]  So, and their community care licensing division, particularly.
[00:09:34]  So when they were for three decades, they were operating in this kind of gray nonprofit rehab world.
[00:09:42]  So there wasn't a lot of state scrutiny.
[00:09:45]  So in 92, when they changed the license, which was in part for profit, because they could then open up a middle school and they could enroll.
[00:09:58]  I think under their license, they were allowed to bring in kids as young as nine and a half.
[00:10:05]  So for them, it was a financial thing.
[00:10:08]  But unfortunately, their ways of operating, they weren't accustomed to having licensing analysts making last-minute inspections.
[00:10:21]  So then that became a different issue for them as they opened themselves up to being regulated, really.
[00:10:27]  Because when everyone talks about the troubled teen industry, you very often hear that this is an unregulated industry.
[00:10:35]  In C. Doo's case, from 92 to 2005, at least, that wasn't the case at all.
[00:10:41]  They were being vigorously inspected and abuses were noted all the time.
[00:10:49]  And yet it remained open.
[00:10:51]  It remained open.
[00:10:52]  And that was the thing that, you know, when I was doing my initial investigation, the thing that really shocked me the most, because I assumed that, you know, they were just still operating under the radar and getting away with their violations.
[00:11:07]  And then I said, wait a sec, they're getting type A citations left and right, you know, things that would revoke or suspend a license, you know.

=== Regulated Troubles? (14:43) ===

[00:11:19]  And they were just kind of flagrantly beating it, you know, every time.
[00:11:24]  It really reminds me because, I mean, for those of you who remember, I think it's episode three and episode four where we talk about CDU in the game series.
[00:11:33]  You know, CDU does come out of Cinanon, and Cinanon had, especially in its early years, a sort of running battle with regulators of basically every stripe.
[00:11:43]  I mean, from city planning commissions to the police to health department or California Department of Health And sort of found themselves bouncing from place to place until they could get basically as secluded as they could while still being able to sort of leech off a major metropolitan area up in the North Bay.
[00:12:03]  And, you know, it's funny because CDU, which to me always is sort of like the main youth sort of outgrowth of Cinanon.
[00:12:13]  I mean, you know, Mel Wasserman, the founder, had some kind of relationship with Cinnanon.
[00:12:19]  It doesn't seem like he was a drug addict or anything, but he had certainly gone there and learned some things.
[00:12:25]  And then they added Bill Lane, like a longtime Cinnanon guy, who basically designed the program.
[00:12:32]  But, you know, CDU sort of runs a similar path.
[00:12:35]  And at first, they open up in Palm Springs and they have these sort of like, or like, you know, Riverside, Palm Springs, sort of desert, California.
[00:12:42]  And then they move up to this really secluded area in the San Bernardino Mountains.
[00:12:48]  And I'm actually, you know, I'm from California.
[00:12:50]  I've actually not spent a lot of time in that part of California.
[00:12:54]  You're lucky.
[00:12:55]  You know, Liz and I have talked about this before, but I'm freaked out by two kinds of folk: one of which is river folk and the other which is ripe folk.
[00:13:03]  Yeah.
[00:13:03]  And they're a related type of folk.
[00:13:06]  They're like cousins.
[00:13:06]  They're cousins.
[00:13:08]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:13:09]  What about if you have a river, river folk or rivers in the mountain?
[00:13:13]  Which is, yeah, I mean, that's a dangerous combination.
[00:13:16]  That's sort of Running Springs.
[00:13:17]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:13:19]  And so, so you, so I mean, they move there and then they open up.
[00:13:24]  And it seems like almost they decide to go somewhere more secluded for all of their other schools that they open, which would be Idaho.
[00:13:32]  But you went to the Running Springs campus.
[00:13:34]  You actually went to CDU yourself.
[00:13:36]  I did, yeah.
[00:13:37]  What, what, what, can you tell me about that?
[00:13:39]  What's the circumstances?
[00:13:40]  I want to talk about that.
[00:13:41]  I want to go, I want to back up, though, because, yes, Cinanon also was, I mean, investigated all the time.
[00:13:49]  Totally, yes.
[00:13:50]  So was CDU, though, in its own way when it first opened, to the point where CDU was getting worse media coverage than Cinanon in like the mid to late 60s.
[00:14:02]  Yeah, and they were forced to move to Running Springs because there was a raid.
[00:14:08]  And there was, you know, headline after headline, allegations of orgies and brainwashing and bad food.
[00:14:18]  The community they were in in Riverside County despised the CDU program.
[00:14:24]  They thought it was, and this wasn't like a get off my lawn incompatibility.
[00:14:29]  I mean, there were a lot of investigative civilians and very, very concerned parents that were seeing their kids drop out and go to these sensitivity sessions and the CDU family.
[00:14:41]  They were called a family back then.
[00:14:43]  And Mel Wassman considered himself the father.
[00:14:46]  So it's bad connotations with the Manson stuff there.
[00:14:49]  Exactly.
[00:14:50]  That's a really good point.
[00:14:53]  And there were so many allegations of this sex orgy thing that early members had to go on a local TV program or radio program or something to defend themselves and say, we don't just have orgies here.
[00:15:09]  We're doing more than that.
[00:15:10]  Yeah, not just.
[00:15:11]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:15:13]  Those had significantly faded into the background by my tenure.
[00:15:18]  Yeah, but what's so weird about all this is that all the negative coverage, the raid, the, you know, I mean, it was a health department thing too, the raid that they were, you know, they got in by saying, you know, they weren't up to code, their ranch compound.
[00:15:35]  And, you know, but they also brought the portable crime lab with them.
[00:15:39]  I mean, it was a real, obviously mid to late 60s, Southern California, there's a cult on every corner.
[00:15:47]  I mean, but, but this was a particularly insidious one.
[00:15:50]  I think one, some of the parents were, you know, they're organizing campaigns to shut it down.
[00:15:55]  They were trying to eradicate it.
[00:15:57]  And they referred to CDU as a plague.
[00:16:02]  So, you know, why then 30 years later, you know, parents were like enthusiastically sending their children to this place?
[00:16:14]  Like, how come they didn't go to their public library and look at all the old articles?
[00:16:19]  And how did this get missed if it was so apparent?
[00:16:23]  Well, how did it?
[00:16:24]  Yeah, how did that transformation happen?
[00:16:26]  I mean, that's an excellent question.
[00:16:28]  I don't know if that can be answered easily.
[00:16:29]  I don't know if I can answer that.
[00:16:31]  I certainly think that CD was excellent at marketing and changing and changing language.
[00:16:41]  Mel Wasserman was, I guess in a way, I think Bray and I have heard this a lot about the idea of the Synanon spin-off.
[00:16:52]  But for me, I think of Mel Wasserman as sort of the Ray Kroc of Synanon, where he didn't just take the duplicatable bits and bring it out into the mainstream.
[00:17:04]  He really took Cinanon and he made it safe and digestible, sort of.
[00:17:14]  And he was bringing in all the key players and he wasn't getting pushback.
[00:17:23]  Chuck Dietrich wasn't trying to have him killed or anything like that.
[00:17:26]  I mean, it was a real brotherly, sibling kind of relationship, from my understanding.
[00:17:32]  Well, that's what's sort of so fascinating about it because, you know, with Cinanon, Cinnanon had similar to CDU, a lot of people who left early, you know, splities, they'd call them.
[00:17:45]  And Chuck hated them.
[00:17:47]  I mean, he despised every single one of them.
[00:17:49]  And a lot of those guys left and started their own or started working at other rehabs, which did try to do like the Ray Kroc.
[00:17:58]  You know, they tried to basically mass market Cinnanon, like, you know, Daytop here.
[00:18:02]  I mean, just all over the country.
[00:18:03]  These guys would take what they had learned at Cinanon and open up their own places.
[00:18:07]  And, you know, Chuck would rage about them, you know, publicly and privately.
[00:18:12]  And what's so notable about Cinnanon is, or excuse me, about CDU's relationship with Cinanon is that CDU basically did a similar thing where they took large swaths of the Cinnanon program and under a completely different leadership structure, you know, Chuck, where they were not paying Chuck Diedrich, you know, marketed this thing.
[00:18:36]  And Chuck, I can't find any negative relationship about them or any private correspondence that Chuck sent talking shit about CDU or anything like that.
[00:18:46]  And CDU took prominent members like Bill Lane from Cinanon and had him there designing the program, which was really just, again, largely Cinanon.
[00:18:58]  And it's so strange because it really is only so like, it's like basically the only really official successor that you will find.
[00:19:06]  It's hard to call it a successor because, you know, it started during Cinanon's sort of the waning parts of Cinnanon's heyday, late heyday for Cinanon.
[00:19:15]  Was it?
[00:19:16]  I don't think if it was waning, though.
[00:19:17]  I mean, in 1966, 67, it was really, you know, and they were also, you know, Mel was really leaning into Hollywood too.
[00:19:26]  He was, he was seeing that you could kind of lure celebrities.
[00:19:30]  And you see this too.
[00:19:31]  I mean, there was like a charity baseball game with the monkeys and Alice Cooper.
[00:19:37]  You know, I cannot believe Alice Cooper did that.
[00:19:40]  Yeah, I had heard a rumor from someone who was there that Alice Cooper then, you know, played a little concert at CDU in the main lodge.
[00:19:53]  His music was out of agreement.
[00:19:55]  You weren't actually allowed to hear it.
[00:19:56]  But here he was anyway, doing a concert.
[00:19:58]  He was drunk from what I was told in a rehab.
[00:20:02]  I mean, at that point, it was not like this emotional growth or sensitive kids with depression.
[00:20:06]  It was like a, you know, just a cutthroat rehabilitation center and he's drunk.
[00:20:13]  That's just gossip.
[00:20:14]  Who knows if that's true?
[00:20:15]  But, you know, that's what I heard.
[00:20:17]  It's funny you say that because the thing about it being a rehab and then sort of later becoming a place for both kids who have maybe issues with addiction, but also for kids who just have like depression or some sort of vague psychological category that they're put in.
[00:20:38]  And that, I think, is the real transformation of both CDU and the industry as a whole, coming from this 1960s fear of juvenile delinquency or fear of everybody falling into drugs to really this like 1990s, like my kid has, unfortunately, he has ADD and anxiety, and we need to put him in this program, which is going to exacerbate both of those things.
[00:21:03]  But hopefully, by the end, he'll be cured by that.
[00:21:07]  You know, to me, it seems like CDO and the industry as a whole really adapted to change with the, I guess, the popular, the popular struggles in parenting.
[00:21:19]  I don't know how to put that, but like the popular sort of psychological or like juvenile issues of the day, which really did transform from being primarily about drugs and like teen rebellion to being about, you know, depression or mental issues, but also, you know, drugs as well.
[00:21:35]  But I think drugs really is seen as like an out, that's how they were really treated at Monarch as an outgrowth of psychological issues.
[00:21:45]  Yeah.
[00:21:45]  Well, I think what happened was, and again, it's so hard to distill this, but from my understanding, the major change, especially with CDU, and I think Mel Wasserman is viewed, at least within this kind of smaller industry, as having revolutionized a kind of alternative education that became acceptable.
[00:22:13]  So what they did was they blobbified into like special education.
[00:22:23]  The thing that I, I mean, I think about this all the time, Bill Wayne was running a transport agency.
[00:22:31]  While he actually started, while he was at CDU, he started escorting kids from one CDU program to another.
[00:22:38]  And then transport became this huge, huge subcategory of the so-called troubled teen industry.
[00:22:50]  It was mainstream enough, though, for his transport company to have a vendor's table at a very dry, special-ed academic conference that was put on by the state here in Illinois.
[00:23:04]  I mean, Illinois really propped up the troubled teen industry and has for decades.
[00:23:10]  You can, you know, some of these programs are, you know, if you send your kid out of state, it's at the taxpayer's expense, which is, yeah, it's really overlooked.
[00:23:20]  And I think every state has some variation of this.
[00:23:24]  But if your kid, you know, as an IEP and you're not satisfied with public school, you can talk about other placements and you can get the state to pay for residential treatment out of state.
[00:23:40]  I worked on a big report that came out a couple years ago out of, it was NPR, Illinois, and I was the source for that.
[00:23:51]  I did an interview too.
[00:23:52]  And it really, I wish it had gotten more attention because, you know, once regular folk realize that they're paying for this bullshit, you know, you think that maybe there would be an end to it, but there hasn't really been.
[00:24:06]  I mean, the pandemic changed enrollments, but it's still a business.
[00:24:11]  And, you know, so my point here is that you're up against an alien invasion, except like the aliens are all quoting John Dewey.
[00:24:22]  And that's kind of where we're at now.
[00:24:24]  It's like they are within special ed.
[00:24:28]  And special ed is a broad category.
[00:24:30]  So your kid may have depression, but he could be receiving special education treatment for it.
[00:24:35]  And if that isn't working in your, you know, in your public school, well, then maybe there's a place for, you know, a therapy camp or whatever.
[00:24:44]  This nice little place in Utah or whatever or northern Idaho.
[00:24:48]  So it really, a lot of things haven't changed since I was there, since you were there.
[00:24:56]  Well, let's get into that because I think we've been kind of circling around this.
[00:24:59]  I mean, at the heart of all of your investigations and journalistic work into this industry, including the piece in LA magazine, which we're going to talk about in a little bit, is your own experience at one of these facilities.
[00:25:14]  And I'm wondering if you can, if you don't mind, just talking a little bit about that and, you know, how that kind of informed your work today.
[00:25:23]  Yeah, I mean, I was shipped off.
[00:25:28]  I was a freshman in high school.
[00:25:31]  I was shipped off in January.
[00:25:33]  I guess it was, you know, this is January.
[00:25:38]  Not that long, you know, in some ways.
[00:25:41]  But yeah, I was shipped off in January of 99.
[00:25:45]  And I did not do the full two-year term.
[00:25:48]  I was pulled and I went right back to public high school.
[00:25:53]  So I was at CDU for about, I think it was like 15 or 16 months, which is still a long time.
[00:25:58]  That is a long time.

=== The Swibles' Influence (06:46) ===

[00:26:02]  So I mean, my enrollment, I don't want to kind of go on too much of a digression, but there was a family in Chicagoland.
[00:26:18]  They're called the Swibles.
[00:26:21]  influential family, Howard Swieibel and Cheryl Swibel.
[00:26:25]  And they were running a foundation, the Friends of Sidu Foundation, massively influential in recruiting kids.
[00:26:38]  And more important, they were, I mean, they were really proselytizing the CDU education.
[00:26:44]  And it was very, it was such a hard sell, Howard Swieibel to my family that my dad still remembers it.
[00:26:54]  He remembers it more than, you know, actually like sending me off.
[00:26:59]  It was, you know, it was this, the Swibel family are notorious and a very political family.
[00:27:09]  Howard Swibel's dad was the chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority.
[00:27:14]  Oh, God.
[00:27:15]  Long tenured.
[00:27:17]  I mean, the Swibles kind of created modern Chicago.
[00:27:24]  And I think my family was enamored with the Swibles, particularly my father.
[00:27:30]  They were kind of in this rarefied dinner jacketed world, not where my, you know, my mom's an elementary school teacher and my dad was selling seasonal products.
[00:27:41]  I mean, he wasn't, you know, this wasn't that much of an affluent background.
[00:27:47]  We were doing okay, but, you know, it wasn't the Swibles.
[00:27:51]  Yeah.
[00:27:54]  And they were, the Swibles were brilliant at selling this idea of family reunification, that you need to go out of state to get close with your family.
[00:28:09]  And they had a profound impact on this idea of like the CDU parent education, which was this other component that was far more successful.
[00:28:23]  So I think my own parents were concerned with my behavior at the time.
[00:28:30]  I was getting more depressed.
[00:28:32]  I was loaded up on antidepressants, which I thought were ugly and insidious and I wanted off of.
[00:28:40]  I thought they were causing more problems than needed.
[00:28:45]  But my parents were worried nonetheless.
[00:28:48]  And they weren't looking for residential treatment.
[00:28:53]  It's not like they wanted to send me anywhere out of state.
[00:28:56]  CDU was the only place they had heard of, the only place they looked at.
[00:29:01]  And even then, they thought it was a giant leap to like send this freshman in high school who's kind of moody and spiky and defiant a little bit.
[00:29:12]  Not terribly, but also getting really good grades.
[00:29:15]  I mean, I wasn't like Truant or any of that.
[00:29:20]  So, what happened was, you know, by pure unluck, the Swibles were my aunt-uncle's neighbor.
[00:29:30]  And I'm not close with my aunt-uncle.
[00:29:32]  My parents weren't particularly close with my aunt-uncle.
[00:29:36]  They make, let's put this into context.
[00:29:39]  My aunt uncle, they make like Roger Ailes seem like Studs Turkle.
[00:29:45]  I mean, good God.
[00:29:47]  They're far right.
[00:29:48]  I'm estranged from them.
[00:29:50]  You know, my parents are basically estranged from them too.
[00:29:52]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:53]  But they were very, my aunt uncle, and uncle Far Right were really close with the Swibles.
[00:30:00]  And the Swibles just kind of volunteered to show up at my parents' house with this pitch for CDU.
[00:30:07]  And they had heard of it.
[00:30:08]  And it was a therapist that I was seeing who also loved CDU.
[00:30:14]  He's this old hippie therapist, this deadhead, who had great success sending other kids to CDU and happened to have a VHS and a brochure.
[00:30:23]  It was this kind of, but he was also really close with the Swibles.
[00:30:27]  And, you know, it was all this real kind of web of bullshit that I sort of saw through, but my parents couldn't.
[00:30:37]  And it was really the Swibles' pitch at reunification.
[00:30:43]  My dad called Howard Swibel a Messiah of Hope.
[00:30:47]  And all of it was bullshit, all of it.
[00:30:49]  And I'm actually quite close with the son that they were using, the son that went to C. Doo.
[00:30:56]  He did do the full term.
[00:30:59]  And they used him in all of their marketing.
[00:31:02]  They said that, you know, if it weren't for, they named him, you know, he was just part of their story for the Friends of Sidu Foundation, which was also founded by, no, no, they founded Howard and Cheryl, but they then brought in a guy named Joel Horowitz, who was, you know, part of the, I think it was Tommy Hilfiger or something like that.
[00:31:21]  We should fact check that, but he was part of that kind of branding machine, you know, yeah.
[00:31:28]  So yeah, so I mean, later on, I mean, their own kid was referring to CDU as an institutionalized cult.
[00:31:37]  That was his phrase.
[00:31:39]  But his parents were using his story as a success story.
[00:31:44]  He was the poster boy for CDU, for the Friends of Sidu Foundation.
[00:31:50]  And they were hiring up a lot of Exynan people for the foundation.
[00:31:56]  And they changed their name to the Friends and Families of Children in Crisis after CDU kind of closed down.
[00:32:05]  And they did the same thing, but across the entire industry.
[00:32:08]  It's, you know, it's funny.
[00:32:12]  Like That same pitch, I think, is used on so many different parents by so many different, you know, whether it's individual educational consultants or therapists or something like this.
[00:32:23]  But like, we, it's essentially this promise for family reunification.
[00:32:27]  But the sort of implication there is that, like, well, you're the parents, like you guys are kind of already there, but like your kid is missing.
[00:32:34]  And like, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll take them away, um, fix them up.
[00:32:39]  And then, you know, you're, you're, you'll start to visit them and you'll see these changes and they'll come back to you as your old son that you remember from when, you know, they were a little eight-year-old boy or something.

=== Family Reunification Promise (08:06) ===

[00:32:48]  And it's, you know, you know, I know there's some problems with that.
[00:32:52]  That I can't remember her first name, but the book by Slavitz, Helping.
[00:32:57]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:32:58]  But, but one of the things that I remember when I first, Maya, one of the things I remember when I first read it that stuck out to me, and that seems so simple and obviously true, was that like, you know, a lot of kids are kind of fucked up when they're 13 or 14.
[00:33:14]  And then, you know, what happens?
[00:33:15]  They grow up.
[00:33:16]  You know, a couple years go by and they get things like, you know, and sometimes it's not very fun and sometimes it doesn't, you know, it doesn't doesn't, you know, it's, it's a painful process.
[00:33:25]  But like, you know, if your kid has some depression by the time they're 14, there's a, there's a large area between that and then sending them to what is essentially like a group home, you know?
[00:33:41]  And so you, you know, I'm familiar with your story, but you know, you were, you were, you were sent away and you, you know, you were not transported there.
[00:33:51]  I was, you, you had the, I can't, actually, it sounds almost more traumatized than we dropped off by your family because at least I had some stranger to hate.
[00:34:01]  You know, what were your initial reactions to C do?
[00:34:06]  Because to, I mean, in my memory, I know I had no familiarity with this kind of stuff.
[00:34:11]  I mean, I had been to wilderness and so I had I had sort of like heard rumors and sort of heard these heard these sort of tall tales, what I thought were tall tales from people.
[00:34:20]  But then to be thrust into this world that is, you know, you know, first of all, totally rural.
[00:34:28]  And then second of all, just filled with really obscure sort of 60s lingo and all these sort of strange esoteric practices.
[00:34:38]  You know, for me, it was a, it was a huge shock.
[00:34:40]  And it was almost like I remember thinking like, everybody here must be insane except for me, because I seem like I'm the only person who realizes the absurdity of all of this.
[00:34:51]  Yeah.
[00:34:52]  And, you know, what was what was your reaction to?
[00:34:55]  I was a startled contactee.
[00:34:56]  I was like everybody else.
[00:34:58]  Yeah.
[00:34:58]  It's like, you know, I also, I mean, what was your move-in process like?
[00:35:05]  Because I mean, for me, it was, you know, you're photographed, you get a cavity search, you know, your civilian clothes.
[00:35:13]  I mean, so I mean, I was like this nice suburban kid that had never really, you know, I had no context for what was happening.
[00:35:24]  And then I couldn't get a phone call out.
[00:35:25]  You know, like after all that happened, I was like, oh, wait, this is a mistake.
[00:35:29]  Let me call my dad.
[00:35:30]  He's still on the mountain.
[00:35:32]  You know, if I can just call the motel and he could pick me up and then that's it.
[00:35:38]  And they wouldn't let me make a call.
[00:35:39]  So it was just like, yeah.
[00:35:42]  You know.
[00:35:42]  No, I mean, that was, that was, I had not at that point after wilderness, I was like, there's, there's, it's going to be pretty restricted communication here.
[00:35:53]  But I was sort of shocked.
[00:35:55]  I remember when they told us, because we, I mean, I can't tell you, we had the exact same program basically as you guys.
[00:36:02]  And so it was the same thing.
[00:36:03]  I mean, I think you guys were allowed one 15-minute phone call every two weeks.
[00:36:06]  Yep.
[00:36:07]  That's what we got as well.
[00:36:08]  And we did it.
[00:36:10]  The person who sat next to me during that was the son of a director of a CDU school.
[00:36:18]  And they were ready to essentially pull the plug on a call if you started to talk about your problems with the program.
[00:36:27]  You know, for me, I remember my parents, I mean, and the staff told us this, like, we've told your parents that you're going to lie to them and manipulate them.
[00:36:37]  And so to take any negative words that you say with that context, and we're going to let you say as few of those negative words as possible.
[00:36:47]  And so I remember just feeling really trapped and trying to think of like a way to get around that.
[00:36:52]  Like, I was like, well, okay, like, I know that like they've taken all these safeguards to where whatever I say that's bad about the program will not be believed.
[00:37:01]  And so I have to somehow communicate that.
[00:37:03]  But, you know, I actually never, I mean, I eventually changed, changed tact when I realized like I actually had a plan to run away.
[00:37:11]  And so I was like, I actually, I became very positive about the program in order to get a home visit so I could make my escape.
[00:37:17]  But it was, I remember trying to figure out how to get around that.
[00:37:21]  And I couldn't.
[00:37:22]  And there's sort of this feeling of like trapped desperation because even though you get these phone calls with your parents, you are essentially forced to be dishonest and communicate something that's not actually true.
[00:37:38]  Absolutely correct.
[00:37:39]  I can't.
[00:37:40]  Yeah.
[00:37:40]  You nailed it.
[00:37:41]  I mean, that's it.
[00:37:42]  I mean, I think for me, it took about six months, a good six months of trying every conceivable way to get out.
[00:37:58]  Yeah.
[00:38:00]  Every embarrassing thing I could think of.
[00:38:04]  I just destroyed myself really for six months trying to leave.
[00:38:08]  And then I realized I am going to, because, you know, one of the kind of therapeutic techniques, shall we say, was, you know, forced confession and also lots of disclosure and storytelling.
[00:38:22]  You're always telling your story over and over and over.
[00:38:24]  So you have all these Sundays.
[00:38:26]  Swirling around like everyone's dirt lists.
[00:38:30]  You know, you knew everything.
[00:38:33]  What that also meant is I could ape other kids and then I could eventually figure out who is the one that has the most, you know, the most privileges and how can I just become that person.
[00:38:49]  And maybe if I just, you know, appear to be doing the program, I will get more time with my parents, more off-campus visits.
[00:39:00]  I can actually leave home, you know, I mean, go return home, you know, have these kind of these two-day, you know, where you fly back home.
[00:39:10]  Yeah.
[00:39:12]  And I did that.
[00:39:12]  So I became, I became a dormhead.
[00:39:14]  I was doing, I was giving campus tours because, you know, all the tours had to be done by kids.
[00:39:20]  We were, we were selling the place.
[00:39:22]  We were doing all the groundskeeping.
[00:39:23]  We were doing all the selling of it as well.
[00:39:25]  It's funny.
[00:39:26]  I think it's in the Medium Anonymous or in the Running My Anger piece that you wrote.
[00:39:31]  You describe yourself as like a California real estate agent.
[00:39:34]  Yeah, that's kind of how it felt.
[00:39:36]  But that's, you know, it's funny because my mom, that's what she remembers.
[00:39:40]  She took a tour as well on her own.
[00:39:43]  And she came back and what she remembered was that it looked pretty.
[00:39:46]  You know, like, that's the takeaway.
[00:39:48]  That's the takeaway from all these places.
[00:39:49]  Yeah.
[00:39:50]  Yeah.
[00:39:50]  It looked pretty.
[00:39:52]  So, yeah, that's right.
[00:39:53]  There's, there's rivers and there's mountains.
[00:39:55]  You know, your favorite, your favorite.
[00:39:56]  So, you know, like I guess it was what I'm saying is I looked at the counselors and I stopped seeing them as like the prison guards.
[00:40:06]  I looked at my parents and they were the ones that I needed to appeal to.
[00:40:11]  And once I figured that out, I was, you know, I was pulled not long after.
[00:40:16]  So, I mean, it took a while of just being totally stupid and defiant.
[00:40:22]  I mean, I was always out of agreement in my own way.
[00:40:26]  Well, we should explain to the audience, you know, agreements were what they called rules, which is a really, I remember even at the time, I was not the most perceptive 13, 14 year old in the world.
[00:40:42]  And frankly, I'm not the most perceptive 33-year-old in the world.
[00:40:45]  But I do remember at the time being like, wow, by calling rules agreements, you know, the obvious implication there is that like we're all agreeing to this.

=== Agreements Were Rules (08:59) ===

[00:40:55]  And I remember these sort of like childish, defiant arguments that I have.
[00:40:59]  Well, I don't agree with this.
[00:41:01]  And they'd be like, well, okay, you don't agree with this.
[00:41:03]  Then here's your punishment.
[00:41:04]  I'm like, but that's a, that's a, you're describing a rule.
[00:41:08]  Like an agreement is, as far as my little, you know, teenage head was concerned, something that two people maybe mutually came to an understanding on and agreed upon.
[00:41:16]  Instead, this was a list of rules foisted on you like they would be in any kind of institution.
[00:41:23]  And being out of agreement at Monarch, at least, could mean anything from digging stumps, which was my most common punishment.
[00:41:31]  I dug out a lot of stumps, including in the winter.
[00:41:35]  In fact, for all of the winter, I dug out stumps.
[00:41:40]  Or to, you know, having basically what I guess you would call KP duty, you know, kitchen duty to whatever else.
[00:41:49]  And then eventually getting up to, and this happened to me a couple of times, being on bans from people and not being able to speak to either certain groups of people or to anybody at all.
[00:41:57]  They called it bands there too.
[00:41:58]  Yeah.
[00:41:58]  Yeah.
[00:41:59]  I mean, yeah, yeah.
[00:42:01]  Which is, it's funny because they really did not update the lingo from CDU.
[00:42:05]  Yeah, it seems that way.
[00:42:21]  So you have a line in your piece in LA Magazine.
[00:42:25]  You say, in 2015, the 10-year anniversary of CDU's closure in Running Springs, I realized I'd become more curious than haunted.
[00:42:32]  And this, that line really stuck with me when I was reading this piece.
[00:42:38]  That's such an interesting juxtaposition, like curious and haunted.
[00:42:42]  And I think that, you know, our series on Synanon and Brace's experience, which dovetails, obviously, as you guys are, you know, illustrating so much with yours, I think kind of walks the line between both, you know, curiosity and a haunting.
[00:42:59]  And there's a way in which I think dealing with these experiences, you're sort of, you know, these like traumatic moments, you're sort of presented with that, not as like a fork, right?
[00:43:08]  But that there's these sort of two, you know, pulls you can feel within yourself, right?
[00:43:15]  And I'm, and I guess I'm curious, you know, what you, what, what was really pulling you, what, what the kind of curiosity there was pulling you versus a kind of feeling kind of haunted by this experience.
[00:43:28]  Well, when I returned from CDU and I went right back into public school, I was leaving CDU because I was pulled, I was basically shunned from the family, you know, the CDU family.
[00:43:43]  My peers, I mean, I had friends there.
[00:43:46]  But even then, I mean, it was what I was doing something, I was doing the worst thing you could possibly do because the, because, you know, CDU considered itself, you know, not just a business, but also this, it was, it was a cult.
[00:44:00]  I mean, yeah.
[00:44:02]  So, I mean, uh, the, you know, my, my parents were getting it at their end as well.
[00:44:08]  Just this kind of brutal, arrogant, indifferent attitude towards pulling, and that it wouldn't just like break apart the family, but you know, then they're going to wash their, you know, the CDU world's going to wash their hands of all the saffrons.
[00:44:26]  You know, you don't exist.
[00:44:28]  And that was a really helpful coping mechanism for me when I returned, because if they didn't find me authentic, then I can say it never happened.
[00:44:40]  So I cut this out of my life completely.
[00:44:43]  And I, I mean, my normal friends, you know, when I returned, they barely asked questions anyway because, you know, they're dopey high school kids, but I could, you know, I could lie and say, you know, I was, oh, I was testing a private school, you know, for a year and a half, you know, and wherever, you know.
[00:45:02]  And no one really asked questions, and my parents weren't pressing me at all.
[00:45:06]  I mean, I was having serious nightmares.
[00:45:11]  I was also trying to get off the meds that I had been on for three years or four years.
[00:45:16]  So that was my motivation was to have as normal a life as possible, to return to the life I had previously had and get off these dumb fucking meds.
[00:45:24]  That was it.
[00:45:26]  So I cut it out for 15 years.
[00:45:29]  And it was a really, I didn't, I mean, I, you can't really return to therapy in my case at least.
[00:45:36]  You know, I mean, I was, I went to a place that was trying every possible bullshit self-help.
[00:45:44]  So I'm not going to be affected by normal therapy anyway.
[00:45:47]  So, and I don't, you know, you can't do the thing that triggers you.
[00:45:50]  So I avoided it.
[00:45:53]  I still avoid it.
[00:45:54]  It's just not for me.
[00:45:57]  What I want to do is have life and experiences outside of this world and read a lot and make music and, you know, whatever, be as debauched as I could, but in a healthy way.
[00:46:12]  So, and basically to do every to have a life that would be everything CDU was against.
[00:46:20]  Yeah.
[00:46:21]  Just proudly flaunt what they consider destructive and prove that it's not.
[00:46:30]  So I did that for 15 years.
[00:46:32]  I always expected, because CD was so influential, this was the thing.
[00:46:37]  This was the foundation of an entire industry.
[00:46:44]  And its tentacles were everywhere.
[00:46:48]  So I always expected media to do something, especially on a 10th anniversary of its closure, at least in California.
[00:46:55]  I mean, it's still operating in Idaho.
[00:46:58]  And it never happened.
[00:47:00]  And I also kept trying to find, you know, I kept this a secret.
[00:47:05]  I finally told my girlfriend it was a, I couldn't, I was in love.
[00:47:10]  I couldn't drag this thing around anymore.
[00:47:11]  I had to tell her.
[00:47:13]  I didn't have the language for it.
[00:47:15]  Yeah.
[00:47:15]  So then I started looking around and the language wasn't there either.
[00:47:19]  There was no comprehensive summing up of the thing.
[00:47:24]  So then I said, all right, I got to do this.
[00:47:26]  That's my curiosity.
[00:47:27]  It's like, how, how come this hasn't occurred?
[00:47:32]  So I tried.
[00:47:33]  And then I thought I could get a lot of help from editors.
[00:47:35]  And I was, you know, it took three years to write this dumb thing because not because it took three years of me just like, you know, I was doing a sentence a week.
[00:47:45]  It was because I was, you know, well, one, I mean, you know this, you know, you have to, if you're putting in like records requests, you expect something in three weeks and it arrives like eight months later.
[00:47:56]  Yeah.
[00:47:57]  But I was also sending drafts on spec to editors thinking naively like someone was going to run this.
[00:48:04]  Someone's going to really want to do a comprehensive retrospective on the thing.
[00:48:08]  And there was some interest, but it was more like I kept pitching and repitching and banging my head against the wall with editors and the media.
[00:48:18]  They just didn't want to do this.
[00:48:19]  So finally, I'd had it three years of doing an independent thing, you know, this, this, I'm just like, and waiting for, you know, the Guardian to come forward or someone to just be like, you know, we're, the, the, I, there were two reasons for rejection that I heard over and over and over.
[00:48:37]  And one was it was too, you can't do a first person investigation and it doesn't work.
[00:48:43]  You're too close to it.
[00:48:45]  And the other was, we don't want to get sued because CDU may not be in existence anymore, but this is a very litigious, you know, community and we know it.
[00:48:55]  And we can't afford, you know, our outlet can't afford some kind of frivolous lawsuit, especially if it's a freelancer's work.
[00:49:03]  So I was hearing these things over and over.
[00:49:05]  I said, fuck this.
[00:49:06]  I'm going to just put it up on Medium and I'm going to do it anonymously, not because I care about being sued necessarily, but because I don't want this story to be about me.
[00:49:14]  I want to use my story to underscore, you know, or push back on some kind of claim that I know isn't true.
[00:49:23]  But beyond that, this isn't about me.
[00:49:27]  So I did it, you know.
[00:49:29]  Well, you were able to use kind of your, you know, I guess it's three years work into like investigating into CDU.
[00:49:37]  You were able to kind of use that, not as a jumping off point.
[00:49:40]  I mean, that makes its way really into like the hands of actual investigators, police investigators.
[00:49:47]  Can you walk us through that?
[00:49:48]  Yeah, I mean, well, you mean the actual investigation that I was consulting on?

=== Inside CDU Investigations (15:40) ===

[00:49:54]  Yeah.
[00:49:55]  Well, because so, I mean, for those to put this in a little more context, you're talking about the running my anger piece.
[00:50:03]  That's like a piece of the piece.
[00:50:03]  Yeah, that was the piece.
[00:50:06]  Medium anomalies is a joke.
[00:50:07]  I mean, it was because I'm posting on Medium and Anonymous.
[00:50:12]  Just to put that into context for me, that was the first piece that I had read as somebody who went to one of these schools, somebody who went to a school that was almost exactly the same as your school.
[00:50:24]  That was the first thing that I had ever encountered that was like, oh, this is my experience.
[00:50:29]  Like this was this, this, that, that really, that piece just for me actually really helped me to give me the language to like think about this stuff because I had the same experience coming home and like not, I mean, I ran away and sort of had, you know, long, we, we talked about that in a previous, for the listeners, we talked about that in a previous episode called Brat Camp that was not part of the game series.
[00:50:53]  But that was, I, I tried not to think about it for a really long time.
[00:50:59]  And then it, it, it, you know, came up and it came up and it came up.
[00:51:02]  And I finally read that piece and I was like, this is, this is the language.
[00:51:08]  But, but yeah, I mean, you know, I'm so glad.
[00:51:10]  I mean, that really, you know, that makes me very happy because that's what I wanted, you know, like these kids to read this and just instead of having a conversation with parents, they could just like send the link and say, you read this and then we'll do.
[00:51:25]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:51:27]  You know, but like Liz said, that that actually ended up in the hands of a deputy at the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department.
[00:51:35]  Detective.
[00:51:36]  Detective, excuse me.
[00:51:38]  Yeah.
[00:51:39]  And, well, that deserves a little bit of unpacking.
[00:51:43]  First of all, why would a detective at the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department in 2021 be looking up CDU at all, a school that closed at Running Springs, at least in 2005?
[00:51:54]  Yeah, I mean, the short answer is that there are three missing persons cases still open, never solved, that occurred on campus.
[00:52:08]  Three kids, all boys, 93, 94, and 2004.
[00:52:13]  And they've never properly been investigated at all.
[00:52:19]  So a new detective, a newly promoted detective named Alicia Rosa was assigned to the Twin Peak Station, which is the, you know, the small station in Twin Peaks.
[00:52:37]  You know, it's in the San Bernardino Mountains.
[00:52:38]  It's one of the many small mountain communities that make up that particular area.
[00:52:45]  But it's part of the San Bernardin County Sheriff's Department.
[00:52:47]  So she looked, she was basically what she was doing is she was going through all the missing persons accounts in the region.
[00:52:58]  And then she was kind of shocked to see there was three that occurred in the same location, which is rare.
[00:53:06]  So she revived them.
[00:53:08]  It's not like she reopened these cases.
[00:53:10]  They were open.
[00:53:11]  They just were inactive.
[00:53:14]  And then she started looking up Seedoo.
[00:53:17]  And she found my article.
[00:53:20]  And she found my work credible.
[00:53:23]  I mean, I've done other things besides that article.
[00:53:27]  And she asked me to consult on her investigation.
[00:53:30]  That was November 2021.
[00:53:33]  And not long after her investigation shut down somehow by her superiors.
[00:53:41]  And, you know, to date, there's a giant question mark about whether that investigation is even happening.
[00:53:48]  It was taken up by Homicide Cole case unjustifiably.
[00:53:53]  The detective is not permitted to work these, to assist on her own cases, essentially.
[00:54:03]  There's a lot of questions swirling about how the Twin Peaks station handled or mishandled these cases and CDU in general.
[00:54:14]  I mean, the numbers, they knew all the dark doings that were happening inside CDU for decades.
[00:54:23]  Basic stuff like call logs even tell a story of how they flagrantly ignored runaways, AWOLs.
[00:54:33]  I mean, the numbers are extraordinary.
[00:54:37]  The calls they were getting, rather, what I'm saying is, you know, they're getting hundreds and hundreds of calls about runaways, and they were not investigating.
[00:54:44]  They were not searching.
[00:54:44]  They were not doing area checks, just completely washing their hands of anything having to do with this place for a number of reasons.
[00:54:54]  Yeah, what do you think those reasons are?
[00:55:00]  Well, I think one has to do with just, you know, CDU, the area was sort of a company town.
[00:55:08]  I mean, CDU employed everyone.
[00:55:12]  The town doctor was also the medical director for CDU.
[00:55:15]  wife was you know like it's spouses working in this place it was a real exactly how it was at monarch in the town in the little town that we were in And exactly how it is.
[00:55:25]  You know, when you were in Sandpoint, I mean, it was this, you were in Sidu country.
[00:55:29]  That is Sea Dew country through and through.
[00:55:32]  I mean, they were at one point the biggest employer in Bonner County.
[00:55:35]  That's right.
[00:55:37]  Yeah, and it was the same thing with, you know, I think it was like, you know, Lake Arrowhead skiing and Sea Dew.
[00:55:44]  And that was like, it was such an economic hub for that particular area.
[00:55:51]  And they were CDU, oh man.
[00:55:54]  I mean, I think at a certain point they realized that putting a snake in the mailbox is not going to be successful.
[00:56:02]  You need like a cease and desist.
[00:56:04]  So they started really, I mean, they would sue detectives who were not just detectives.
[00:56:12]  They would sue law enforcement officials looking into wrongdoing.
[00:56:18]  You know, they would file complaints against deputies that were.
[00:56:23]  getting a little too close.
[00:56:26]  They consider themselves a self-policing institution, CDU.
[00:56:30]  And they hire their own private detectives, which they called escorts.
[00:56:38]  And largely the, you know, the local mountain cops tolerated that.
[00:56:43]  You know, these are out-of-state kids.
[00:56:46]  We don't want to get sued by a thuggish, brutal, kind of Roy Cohen-esque program that could take us on.
[00:56:56]  And so I mean, CDO just co-opted the town.
[00:56:58]  It co-opted everything.
[00:56:59]  It's funny, too.
[00:57:00]  Like, you know, for instance, I ran away from Monarch twice, actually.
[00:57:05]  I ran away after about a week there.
[00:57:07]  I ran through the woods and then I successfully ran about a year later.
[00:57:12]  And I remember thinking, like, well, if I run, when I did run, I was actually caught by staff.
[00:57:18]  But, you know, they called the police and, you know, I'm a 14-year-old kid.
[00:57:24]  And if I told the police, like, hey, I'm at this insane cult.
[00:57:28]  Like, they are making us do all this weird shit.
[00:57:30]  Like, you know, I, they're not, my parents sent me here.
[00:57:33]  I don't know what's going on.
[00:57:35]  You know, what they would do is they wouldn't investigate anything I said.
[00:57:39]  They would just send me right back there.
[00:57:42]  And that's the case with all these places.
[00:57:44]  Like, the police aren't there to like, you know, I can't, you can't call the police.
[00:57:49]  If you are beaten at one of these programs, there's no way you can call the police.
[00:57:53]  And if you do call the police, no one's going to fucking jail.
[00:57:57]  You know what I mean?
[00:57:57]  Like, you have absolutely, you have, you have less rights in one of these programs than you would in.
[00:58:06]  You have no rights.
[00:58:06]  You have no rights.
[00:58:07]  Yeah.
[00:58:08]  You said you, yeah, yeah.
[00:58:09]  Actually, I can't.
[00:58:10]  You're stripped of all your personal rights.
[00:58:12]  Yeah.
[00:58:12]  Yeah.
[00:58:12]  So I have a question for you, though.
[00:58:14]  Did you get the option of like getting 5150?
[00:58:18]  Because usually, you know, if the cops picked you up, you know, in Running Springs, you have a choice.
[00:58:23]  You can go back to this tripped out treatment center that you're struggling to escape from, or you could go to either a juvenile detention center or you go to the hospital, you know, to get 5150 treatment.
[00:58:36]  And a lot of kids opted off-mountain because you can get access to a payphone.
[00:58:41]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:58:41]  No, well, I was caught by staff, so that didn't happen.
[00:58:46]  But you absolutely chosen 5150.
[00:58:49]  Are you crazy?
[00:58:50]  Yeah, If you're ever in a situation like that, choose the second location, motherfucker.
[00:58:55]  Do not go back to the original location because, you know, the future is unwritten.
[00:59:00]  So you could, you could, who knows?
[00:59:01]  Maybe you can escape from the nuthouse.
[00:59:03]  Yeah.
[00:59:04]  But, but, no, it's, it's, it's, it's funny, like the relationship that that the police have with these programs is so opposite from the relationship that the police initially both had with CDU and had with Cinnanon, in that they were, they were really like, you know, there'd be these raids, they'd come down on them.
[00:59:21]  Um, and then at the end, by the 1990s, I mean, they were essentially functioning as like ancillary employees in some cases.
[00:59:29]  And like you said, yeah, like they were very litigious.
[00:59:32]  Um, you know, you mentioned there's this one, one uh sheriff's deputy, Charles Wyatt, and you post his logs here too.
[00:59:41]  And I mean, some of these uh are sort of astounding.
[00:59:46]  I mean, 220 on this in 2004, Charles Wyatt was investigating a rape he believed occurred, but received no cooperation from the CDU staff.
[00:59:55]  You know, two CDU staff members told Charles Wyatt that CD was not required to make reports to CPS or law enforcement, and they disagreed with mandatory reporting requirements.
[01:00:02]  You know, yeah, those were depositions that were taken for Daniel Ewen's case, so that they occurred after CD was closed.
[01:00:11]  And Wyatt ended up, he's deceased, but he ended up a crime reporter.
[01:00:18]  He had left the sheriff's department and he was writing for the Mountain News.
[01:00:23]  He's also responsible for bringing in a DOJ consultant in 2009 to investigate the possibility of a serial killer, James Lee Crummel, and the other two missing kids, which I think was very misguided and has had a kind of negative impact on wanting to investigate these cases.
[01:00:48]  Well, let's talk about these kids, these kids, really quickly.
[01:00:51]  Sure.
[01:00:52]  You know, there's, like you said, there's three of them: two from the 90s, John Inman and Blake Persley.
[01:00:57]  Yeah.
[01:00:58]  And then from 2004, Daniel Yoon.
[01:01:00]  And so, can you, can you, I mean, you know, runaways are pretty common or splitees are pretty common at these kinds of places.
[01:01:12]  It's a sort of natural reaction.
[01:01:13]  You get taken to somewhere that you think is insane.
[01:01:17]  And, you know, if you're a sane person, you want to leave there.
[01:01:21]  And, you know, most of the time, kids are caught by somebody in some capacity.
[01:01:28]  And again, like you said, either return there, return sometimes very rarely, returned home.
[01:01:34]  Most of the time, returned to the facility.
[01:01:37]  But in these three cases, none of these kids were ever found.
[01:01:43]  And like you said, the cases were still open.
[01:01:46]  I mean, can you tell us the circumstances of these kids disappearing?
[01:01:50]  Yeah, I mean, John Inman is the most mysterious.
[01:01:57]  He just, you know, and there's a lot of what I should say before I even, you know, start talking about this is that there's nothing but conflicting accounts here and all of them.
[01:02:07]  Yeah.
[01:02:07]  And many, many discrepancies and nothing adds up.
[01:02:11]  And especially with Daniel Ewan's case, I mean, I'm writing a follow-up now about it.
[01:02:17]  And I've been, you know, helping his parents coming up on five years and nothing makes sense.
[01:02:25]  There's like maybe a line or two in a deposition.
[01:02:28]  I'm like, oh yeah, well, well, that's possible.
[01:02:30]  And then everything else is just kind of fantasy.
[01:02:36]  And, you know, that's a strategy too.
[01:02:39]  One of the agreements at CDU, which we have in a, it's an archived like rule book, essentially.
[01:02:47]  And one of, one of them is no snitching.
[01:02:50]  Yeah.
[01:02:50]  So, you know, it's the code of the streets is, you know, how they describe it there.
[01:02:54]  It's, you know, no snitching.
[01:02:56]  So.
[01:02:57]  By the way, that's no snitching outside.
[01:02:59]  You snitch out.
[01:03:01]  Inside.
[01:03:03]  Yes.
[01:03:03]  You have to snitch inside.
[01:03:05]  That's the whole, yes.
[01:03:06]  It was the code of the streets.
[01:03:07]  Don't snitch to outsiders.
[01:03:11]  So I can't really tell you.
[01:03:13]  I know that all three disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
[01:03:22]  John Inman, you know, he claimed he was just, you know, from the little we know, he was just, he wanted to get out and he ran.
[01:03:31]  Yeah.
[01:03:31]  Blake Persley had severe developmental disabilities and a leg length discrepancy and walked with a limp and couldn't run.
[01:03:42]  And yet somehow he outran adult staffers and disappeared into the night.
[01:03:47]  Yet at the same time, from what I was told from an eyewitness, he was actually being, he was at the middle school.
[01:03:53]  Middle school kids were always monitored.
[01:03:56]  So he was just en route from one building to another and then he disappeared, this kid.
[01:04:03]  Daniel Ewan, ask me anything.
[01:04:06]  I have no idea.
[01:04:07]  The missing persons report that we just obtained, interestingly enough, the deputy who was clearly a little bored identified Daniel Ewen as suspect number one.
[01:04:23]  And the reporting party, a counselor, and his suspicious story, he's labeled a victim.
[01:04:29]  So if that tells you anything about, if it sums up the relationship between the Mountain Cops and Sidu, I think that's it.
[01:04:35]  It's like the, you know, the person who possibly lied to law enforcement is a victim and the kid who's trying to escape institutional child abuse is a suspect, suspect number one.
[01:04:48]  Yeah, the title of your piece is Are Police Stifling the Investigation into Three Teens Who Vanished from a Controversial Residential Treatment Facility.
[01:04:55]  Yeah.
[01:04:56]  And I hate the like, I mean, I didn't, I didn't come up with that title.
[01:05:00]  No, I don't mean, I hate it.
[01:05:01]  I'm saying, I mean, I think it's, you know, the core, the, the crux of your piece is pretty obvious, which is yes, at almost every turn from not just, you know, the like in the immediate aftermath of their disappearance and the like just immediate reporting, which, you know, we could talk about how long it took for any of that to actually happen in each of the cases.
[01:05:22]  But then through like through the years following, and then, you know, afterwards, as re-investigations or the cases were like, you know, allegedly tried to be like kind of reopened up, right?

=== Core Of The Investigation (14:46) ===

[01:05:34]  Yeah.
[01:05:35]  I've never consulted on a police investigation before.
[01:05:39]  I try to avoid police.
[01:05:41]  Yeah, me too.
[01:05:43]  I'm an old Chicago punk rocker.
[01:05:45]  Like I'm, you know, I'm not, they're not my friends.
[01:05:49]  So I did it.
[01:05:51]  I happen to like Alicia Rosa, the detective.
[01:05:55]  I'm, I find her passion and her enthusiasm just such a stark difference between everything I've encountered with police in these cases.
[01:06:07]  Well, and it's, it's, it's sometimes it's such a, I don't, I don't, we talked about this before, but like when you have, even as an adult, when you have another adult being like, oh my God, like that would, that's insane.
[01:06:20]  You're like, it's a very validating thing to hear from an adult, especially someone in a position of authority.
[01:06:27]  Absolutely.
[01:06:28]  It was the first time all this work, all the repercussions that went along with this work, the cost of it, the emotional cost, the health cost, all of it felt worth it consulting on this investigation.
[01:06:45]  And then to see it fall apart, to get shut down.
[01:06:52]  And then to see, you know, Daniel Ewan's parents hopeful again and then just crushed again by an impenetrable amateurish sheriff's department.
[01:07:07]  I'm still reeling from it.
[01:07:08]  I don't, none of it makes any sense to me.
[01:07:11]  And at the same time, it really kind of does make sense, just knowing that you have a police department that just cannot, for whatever reason, admit its errors.
[01:07:25]  And in order to solve these cases, the sheriff's department has to admit its own wrongdoing and its limitations and its endless failures with CDU.
[01:07:36]  So you have an institution that, I mean, it's just huge, huge sheriff's department.
[01:07:41]  And all they want to do is make sure they want to ensure their reputation is as intact as possible.
[01:07:47]  You can't do it in these cases.
[01:07:49]  So you got to bury them.
[01:07:50]  And where do you bury them?
[01:07:50]  You bury them in the homicide department, where they're absolutely-I mean, there's no evidence that these are even homicides.
[01:07:56]  Um, why are they there?
[01:07:58]  Yeah, I mean, that was sort of my next question.
[01:08:01]  There's why are they in the homicide department because that's where you can bury a case, there's where you can make it cold.
[01:08:07]  There's a huge difference between a cold case and open case.
[01:08:09]  Yeah, you can you can make it cold by claiming there's a lack of evidence.
[01:08:14]  You could put it in a drawer, you can give it an H number, which means it's it's blocked.
[01:08:20]  From my understanding, it's blocked from outside divisions working on it, and that's it, you know.
[01:08:26]  And uh, and there you go.
[01:08:28]  So, you can take it from a missing person's detective and uh and lock it away in an elite unit that's always overworked anyway.
[01:08:38]  You can make sure that it's not prioritized, and you can call it a day.
[01:08:43]  And that's that's where we're at now with these three Cedar cases.
[01:08:46]  So, you know, unless people are vocal enough and the pressure is so overwhelming, they're going to get away with it.
[01:08:55]  And they are so far.
[01:08:58]  And that's, and I, I was, I'm saying this not as some sort of conspiratorial guy who just kind of ripped my hair out here.
[01:09:06]  I'm speaking as someone who was asked to assist in an investigation and then watched that investigation completely collapse.
[01:09:15]  Well, that's what's sort of so astounding about it is that, like, you know, two of these cases are from 1993 and 1994.
[01:09:23]  Right.
[01:09:23]  2021 is when you start consulting on it.
[01:09:26]  Yep.
[01:09:27]  You know, and obviously, I mean, from what you seem to describe, this detective, you know, noticed that these three kids disappeared from the same place.
[01:09:36]  She's looking into it.
[01:09:38]  She, she, she, you know, is bringing in outside consultants to actually help and really do a proper job on this for the first time.
[01:09:45]  Yeah, she had Team Adam approved.
[01:09:47]  She got approval for an outside agency that is reputable to do this, not just some guy, you know, like.
[01:09:55]  And then it's yanked from her and then shunted off to a drawer where it cannot be worked on.
[01:10:03]  And then she's forbidden from speaking to the press and speaking to you, even as a person.
[01:10:10]  That's right.
[01:10:10]  And admonished for requesting the cases back when it became clear they were not being prioritized.
[01:10:16]  She asked for them back.
[01:10:18]  And, you know, I was just texting with her a couple days ago because I wanted, you know, the missing persons report that we got for Daniel Ewen.
[01:10:26]  I wanted to know how much was redacted versus what she saw.
[01:10:34]  And, you know, she had to remind me, she doesn't have this stuff.
[01:10:37]  You know, it's just, it was, it was all her files are now in a different, you know, down the mountain.
[01:10:41]  So, you know, I don't really know.
[01:10:46]  At the end of the day, like what we're talking about here is not like it's, it's, it's three missing, I mean, in some cases for multiple, for three decades missing, missing kids, uh, you know, possibly dead, very possibly dead.
[01:11:02]  Um, that there's just like was absolutely, I mean, that is just like, it's, it's, it's sort of extraordinary to think about that.
[01:11:11]  Like, you know, three, three very possible deaths and however that might have occurred or, you know, missing whatever from from a single place just totally not looked on.
[01:11:25]  And, you know, you mentioned earlier the call logs to the sheriff's department.
[01:11:28]  I mean, there's almost a thousand calls about CDU, like you said, from that's in eight years.
[01:11:34]  That's exactly.
[01:11:35]  They won't even give up the ones before 97.
[01:11:37]  I know.
[01:11:38]  And something else you mentioned, the article is like, yeah, there's a thousand calls from 97 to 2005.
[01:11:44]  And before that, the sheriff's department is claiming that they actually have, they have no records due to a system switch.
[01:11:51]  Yeah, that's exactly it.
[01:11:52]  Yeah.
[01:11:52]  Software upgrade.
[01:11:54]  So I don't understand what would happen.
[01:11:56]  So all their records are gone?
[01:11:58]  I think the committee is gone.
[01:11:59]  That's because they keep all their records in an iPhone and they just, you know, it's.
[01:12:02]  It's, yeah, just got lost.
[01:12:04]  Yeah, they got lost.
[01:12:05]  That's right.
[01:12:05]  Yeah.
[01:12:06]  Can't get it.
[01:12:06]  I mean, it's, it's, it's bullshit, by the way.
[01:12:09]  I mean, it's all bullshit because when I was consulting on the case, I was looking at, you know, reports from earlier than 97.
[01:12:17]  So why can't you say, you know, this is public information?
[01:12:21]  I mean, I guess just from my perspective, like, you know, there is a, quote, conspiracy going on here.
[01:12:26]  And I'm not saying it's like a conspiracy where like children are being abducted and, you know, their adrenochrome is being taken out or whatever.
[01:12:32]  No, it's like there is, there is a group of people who, at the very least, want to cover up the fact that they essentially bungled any sort of investigation, whether it's a search and rescue operation or an actual like investigation into like a well, they didn't search, they didn't search for John Inman and they didn't search for Daniel Ewan and Daniel Ewan's parents had to threaten to complain,
[01:13:01]  you know, file a misconduct complaint to allegedly have the sheriff's department do an area check.
[01:13:08]  And then I asked Wayne Ewan, well, do you have any proof that they actually did it weeks later?
[01:13:12]  And he said, no.
[01:13:14]  So this is all happening.
[01:13:15]  They're in Jersey.
[01:13:17]  Their kid goes missing 3,000 miles away.
[01:13:20]  CDU immediately instructed the parents to hire one of their escorts, Keith Raymond, to search for Daniel.
[01:13:33]  So on top of their own tuition costs, now they're paying for CDU.
[01:13:37]  They initiated the runaway services agreement for CDU.
[01:13:40]  Bill Wayne had a hand in this too.
[01:13:41]  I mean, this is kind of his thing, you know, where it's this additional fee.
[01:13:46]  So you're paying, I mean, it's a huge, huge conflict of interest, but his parents are frantic.
[01:13:50]  They're desperate.
[01:13:51]  They don't understand what's happening.
[01:13:52]  They're very confused.
[01:13:54]  So they do that.
[01:13:56]  And Keith Raymond comes on the scene with his wife.
[01:13:58]  They claim to look for Daniel.
[01:14:00]  They can't find him on campus.
[01:14:01]  Next thing you know, he's conveniently in San Diego.
[01:14:04]  There's sightings.
[01:14:05]  They claim that there's bloodhounds that they brought to the San Diego Park.
[01:14:10]  They're picking up his scent.
[01:14:11]  I know that's fucking fake.
[01:14:12]  Well, and they do that.
[01:14:14]  Not only that, but then he reappears in late 2018, 2019, not long after I was introduced to the UNs.
[01:14:25]  Keith Raymond, who's had no, apparently, any dialogue with the UNs for over a decade, he reappears.
[01:14:32]  He says he's sickly.
[01:14:34]  He's trying to understand this case.
[01:14:36]  It's on his mind.
[01:14:37]  He wants for any, he wants to know if there's been any leads in the last decade plus.
[01:14:42]  Next thing you know, weeks later, this do-gooder with no agenda happens to get a voicemail.
[01:14:49]  It's Daniel.
[01:14:50]  No, no, no, I'm sorry.
[01:14:51]  This is where it gets very tricky.
[01:14:53]  He claimed at first that the voicemail came from like an anonymous caller saying Daniel's alive.
[01:14:59]  He doesn't want to be found.
[01:15:00]  In the missing persons report, he changes that to, it's a supplemental report in 2019 that was added.
[01:15:08]  He was interviewed by a reporting officer and he claims it was a psychic that called Keith Raymond saying Daniel's alive.
[01:15:15]  And then Raymond further amends that in a podcast we did a year later and he says it's Daniel himself.
[01:15:22]  Nevertheless, Raymond goes back to the San Diego Park and wouldn't you know, he claims like five minutes being in the park.
[01:15:30]  He speaks to someone who had just seen Daniel Ewen.
[01:15:34]  This gets picked up by media.
[01:15:36]  It becomes a sort of where's at risk Waldo for San Diego.
[01:15:42]  All the local ABC News is covering this.
[01:15:45]  It really just becomes mainstream.
[01:15:47]  And at this point, I mean, you have, I think it was the director of communications for NICMEC, you know, the national, whatever, it's the main missing persons organization.
[01:16:01]  Yeah.
[01:16:02]  She does a segment on Court TV, which is a Daniel Ewen-friendly tabloid-y outlet.
[01:16:09]  Yeah, yes, I'm familiar with Court TV.
[01:16:11]  Yeah, no, I know you are.
[01:16:12]  No, no, no, no, I know you are.
[01:16:13]  I'm saying that it's a very, but it's Daniel, it's like Daniel Ewen centric.
[01:16:16]  They do so many segments on Daniel Ewen.
[01:16:19]  So she appears, the director of communications, and she, you know, it was a moment where finally someone could challenge this really dubious, decades-long sort of sightings of this guy.
[01:16:34]  And she leans into it, you know, and she says, you know, there's all these, you know, We believe he was there after CDU.
[01:16:45]  She kind of reinforces Keith Raymond's claims that maybe now he's alive still and has a family in San Diego.
[01:16:53]  So what's happened is we've just become this, the story of Daniel Ewan is now, it's so complicated because his parents believe he's in San Diego.
[01:17:07]  And they've been led to believe this.
[01:17:10]  And it's also given this has helped the Sheriff's Department not investigate.
[01:17:18]  I mean, even in the missing persons report in the original one, 2004, the deputy twice mentions that the parents have hired a private detective.
[01:17:29]  Yeah.
[01:17:30]  Why bother?
[01:17:31]  You know, why bother looking into a CDU case if the parents have, or they're doing their own thing?
[01:17:36]  And if people are claiming he's alive, even better.
[01:17:39]  I mean, that's, that's, you know, from my perspective, obviously I know less about this than you.
[01:17:47]  It's like that, that, that seems unlikely to me that he would, he would be in San Diego with a family and just have been totally under the radar this entire time.
[01:17:58]  I mean, obviously, you know, this goes without saying, actually, I'm going to say it, but that detective's fucking lying.
[01:18:05]  You know, like these, that is, that is the, to me, that's a huge crock of shit.
[01:18:11]  You mean Keith Raymond?
[01:18:11]  I mean, well, Keith Raymond is a serial liar.
[01:18:14]  I can say that.
[01:18:14]  Yeah, of course.
[01:18:15]  Without question.
[01:18:15]  I mean, everything he said to me, everything he's said under oath in the Daniel Ewan case is questionable.
[01:18:26]  He gets numbers wrong all the time.
[01:18:29]  And also he's a CDU employee.
[01:18:32]  And every time we tried to press him, he became, you know, he claimed he was very sickly.
[01:18:36]  He'd even show up when the Ewans flew out to San Diego in 2019 to follow up on his leads with him.
[01:18:43]  And then when we were doing the Lost Kids podcast, he said he was basically dying and he couldn't even talk to us.
[01:18:49]  So, you know, Detective Rosa, when she was working the investigation, she did track him down.
[01:18:56]  And that was, you know, that was a rare moment where someone could finally press Raymond.
[01:19:05]  Yeah.
[01:19:05]  You know, what do you know?
[01:19:07]  Case has gone.
[01:19:08]  He's still alive?
[01:19:10]  As far as I know, yeah.
[01:19:11]  Because he was dying when you did that podcast.
[01:19:13]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:19:14]  He was dying all the time.
[01:19:15]  A while ago.
[01:19:16]  He's just been, that's a, I guess by those metrics, I'm dying now.
[01:19:23]  But yeah, I mean, that's, that's sort of what's so heartbreaking about this because, you know, I've heard, I've heard interviews with the Ewans.
[01:19:32]  And I can't imagine the feeling of like sending your kid to this place that turns out to be a pretty different place than maybe even somebody with not the rosiest goggles might see it as.
[01:19:47]  And then your kid disappearing and then every single person who should help you be helping you with this, you know, from the sheriffs to the staff at the school to the private detective that they have you hire is fucking lying to you and misleading you and pointing you at every exploiting you right and ripping you off for fucking money while your kid is somewhere, I mean, I don't know where, you know?
[01:20:12]  But he was only there for less than two weeks.
[01:20:14]  So we're not talking about my 16 months or whatever.
[01:20:17]  I mean, he was there for no time at all.

=== Dueling Narratives (10:01) ===

[01:20:21]  And throughout that time, he was, from everything I know, profoundly traumatized and silent, essentially.
[01:20:34]  He was not, it doesn't appear he was making a lot of friends.
[01:20:37]  I think for me, what really helped was making friends.
[01:20:41]  And also, I kind of viewed CDU as the West campus of my public high school because there were just so many fucking kids from Chicagoland.
[01:20:51]  And I'm talking, you know, like I had a friend who knew my, who saw my punk band at Fireside Bowler or wherever it was or, you know, some venue.
[01:20:58]  So like it was, we were all there together.
[01:21:02]  And that profoundly changed my own enrollment and confinement was friends.
[01:21:13]  And I don't think Daniel was able to get that luxury.
[01:21:22]  And then he and then he vanished.
[01:21:23]  And then, I mean, what's really, I've been going through these, you know, the depositions for years now.
[01:21:30]  And it's, you know, what a count, what the count, the narrative the counselor told the the deputy who responded to the call is so different than the narratives, you know, we learned about the, you know, circumstances, alleged circumstances, from testimony.
[01:21:49]  And it really hasn't really been, it hasn't been made public yet, most of it.
[01:21:54]  But the narratives are crazy.
[01:21:55]  I mean, one, one kid, let me back up.
[01:21:59]  The narrative that the counselor, Stephen Kravchuk, told the deputy was that Daniel walked off to buy cigarettes.
[01:22:10]  That was it.
[01:22:11]  He just kind of huffily left to get some smokes.
[01:22:14]  And that was taken as fact.
[01:22:17]  So in the missing persons report, it says that the probable destinations, quote unquote, probable destinations were a gas station or Arrowbear, a neighboring town.
[01:22:30]  A lot of questions with that one.
[01:22:32]  One, the first thing is Daniel had never been in the Running Springs before.
[01:22:36]  He'd never been in the San Bernardino Mountains.
[01:22:37]  He doesn't know where the fuck the town is.
[01:22:39]  Exactly.
[01:22:39]  Like his entire perspective is CDU's facility.
[01:22:46]  Cigarettes were forbidden.
[01:22:48]  I'm sure it was like that at Monarch, too.
[01:22:50]  Yeah, of course.
[01:22:50]  You can't leave to go buy a cigarette.
[01:22:52]  I mean, that's, I was, I was at Monarch in 2004.
[01:22:56]  Yeah.
[01:22:57]  Same program as CDU.
[01:22:59]  We were not allowed to go buy.
[01:23:00]  You know what I would do is I would roll up toilet paper in the fucking port-a-potty outside the classroom and I would pretend to smoke cigarettes.
[01:23:07]  Yeah, I think I did that too.
[01:23:08]  Yeah.
[01:23:08]  You were definitely not allowed.
[01:23:09]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:23:10]  But you were definitely not allowed to.
[01:23:13]  No, I mean, that's absurd.
[01:23:15]  That's like me saying I'm going to Mars or something.
[01:23:17]  Right.
[01:23:18]  That's exactly what I was going to Mars.
[01:23:19]  So there was no whatsoever follow-up because the deputy just, you know, it's Sunday morning, didn't want to go to CDU anyway, probably.
[01:23:30]  And, you know, he made, he took the report, moved on.
[01:23:35]  None of that made any sense.
[01:23:37]  They also didn't check.
[01:23:38]  So it's, you know, all these probable destinations weren't actually investigated.
[01:23:42]  So.
[01:23:43]  Okay, yeah.
[01:23:43]  What's the point of fucking taking them?
[01:23:45]  Right.
[01:23:46]  So, well, I mean, and again, I mean, what's the point of even taking this report if Daniel Ewen is listed as the suspect and the reporting party is the victim?
[01:23:56]  So the narratives that are coming from, you know, the in-house narratives that are being pulled based off depositions in the civil case that the Ewans launched against CDU.
[01:24:10]  And at the time that this was launched, all the San Diego sightings had already emerged.
[01:24:16]  So, you know, they kind of weren't maybe asking the right questions.
[01:24:20]  The lawyers were concluding things that, for me, make me want to, you know, bang my head against the wall.
[01:24:27]  Yeah.
[01:24:28]  Nevertheless, there are these dueling narratives about what happened to Daniel.
[01:24:32]  One guy says he was sweeping next to him in the backside of campus.
[01:24:39]  It's mountain perched.
[01:24:40]  So it's just, it's cliffside.
[01:24:42]  You know, here's your main lodge.
[01:24:44]  Here's the mountain.
[01:24:46]  They're sweeping in the back of the campus and Daniel disappears, which, you know, short of wrapping yourself in an invisibility cloak and jumping on a helicopter, probably unlikely.
[01:24:58]  And yet, that's it.
[01:24:59]  So there's another version of the escape narrative.
[01:25:03]  Then there's another one that says at the time of his disappearance, Daniel was being monitored 24-7 by an escort, another resident, because he was non-complying with everything.
[01:25:17]  So they had him being monitored all the time.
[01:25:19]  They would do that to kids of mine, too.
[01:25:21]  Exactly.
[01:25:21]  Yeah, they did.
[01:25:23]  So in a free moment where he was unmonitored, Daniel bolted and another kid saw him fleeing, tackled him, and he was restrained by a kid until a staffer could bring him to the dorms.
[01:25:41]  He hauled him off to the dorms for some indefinite amount of time.
[01:25:45]  And then the kid who restrained him testified that he saw Daniel that day, like throughout that Sunday.
[01:25:55]  If even half accurate, that would have meant the deputy was taking down his report for a runaway juvenile with the runaway juvenile still on campus.
[01:26:07]  That also raises a number of other questions about restraint because I don't know how it was at Monarch, but kids weren't really supposed to be restrained, especially the high school-aged kids.
[01:26:20]  CDU prided itself on not doing restraints.
[01:26:23]  They did restraints at Monarch, did they?
[01:26:25]  Yeah, but there just wasn't really that many kids getting them.
[01:26:29]  Yeah, okay.
[01:26:30]  That's interesting.
[01:26:31]  But were kids restraining other kids?
[01:26:34]  No, you were.
[01:26:35]  No, definitely.
[01:26:36]  Actually, I did see that happen once with this kid, Daryl, but it wasn't supposed to happen.
[01:26:41]  Yeah, right.
[01:26:42]  It was kind of just a kid got beat up.
[01:26:43]  Yeah.
[01:26:44]  Well, it's a little different than, you know, some random teens seeing Daniel fleeing and feeling like he needed to do something and you restrained him.
[01:26:55]  So, you know, all these things conflict.
[01:27:00]  They make very little sense.
[01:27:02]  And no one followed up on them.
[01:27:05]  You know, no one put anyone under polygraph.
[01:27:07]  Not like polygraphs really can amount to much, but still, like, there was no official investigation or looking into false narratives or any of this stuff really until Detective Rosa launched these cases.
[01:27:22]  And as soon as she started doing that, you know, you know the rest.
[01:27:35]  In so many ways, I think your piece in LA Magazine mirrors some of, I mean, I don't want to speak for you, Brace, but I'm going to speak for you.
[01:27:43]  Or not for you, but at you or describe you, maybe.
[01:27:46]  I don't know.
[01:27:46]  We'll see.
[01:27:47]  You have my permission to do all three.
[01:27:49]  But I think that your piece in LA Magazine, you know, kind of serving as this culmination in so many ways of this, you know, your own personal investigation, your curiosity, as you, you know, you put it at your own experience.
[01:28:03]  And of course, then how that, you know, intersex dovetails met in the middle with the disappearance and the cover-up of these kids from the CDU facilities.
[01:28:16]  And I think, you know, for Brace, like something that we talked about off air a lot was the kind of lack of, you know, as much as you're kind of going into these investigations and kind of putting yourself in the middle of it and how that can, you know, like you say, come with, you know, it's its own baggage in a lot of ways, right?
[01:28:39]  That the idea of like closure from any of this, I think, is a little bit too Hallmarkian, if I may, that like something like this can serve as a kind of closure.
[01:28:51]  I mean, at the end of it, you say like, there's nothing to be done and I can't do this alone.
[01:28:56]  Right.
[01:28:56]  You know, and I think that that serves as a good kind of, you know, kind of guiding light a little bit.
[01:29:05]  But I'm wondering like how you feel at the end of all of this, you know, kind of throwing yourself in the middle of it and, you know, what, what's come from it?
[01:29:18]  That's an excellent question.
[01:29:19]  And I don't know if I can answer that in any intelligent way.
[01:29:24]  I'm, I believe that these are solvable cases.
[01:29:29]  And I believe it's going to take, you know, you guys, people that care and are outside of law enforcement to make actual breakthroughs, serious developments that could then push law enforcement to act.
[01:29:50]  Yeah.
[01:29:51]  But it's going to take, it's going to take us.
[01:29:53]  I mean, that's kind of it.
[01:29:57]  And it's possible.
[01:30:00]  So unless, unless we, if we don't care, it's just going to be sitting in a drawer in San Bernardino County for the rest of time.
[01:30:11]  You know?
[01:30:13]  Yeah.
[01:30:13]  Well, I mean, the piece is incredible.
[01:30:15]  We'll, we'll, you know, link, link to it, obviously, and your other pieces on Medium.
[01:30:21]  It's just.

=== Why Humiliate Patrick? (04:32) ===

[01:30:22]  I think you're, you know, that last episode, we were talking, trying to talk to Patrick, that was, that was incredible.
[01:30:29]  I mean, that was really, I just wanted to, you know, give you guys a hug.
[01:30:33]  I wanted to be in that car with you on the stakeout.
[01:30:35]  You know, we had talked, we had talked, I think, like the day before.
[01:30:39]  We were talking.
[01:30:39]  No, you were texting while you were there.
[01:30:40]  You sent me that crazy CED, you know.
[01:30:45]  Oh, yes.
[01:30:46]  Yeah, the photo.
[01:30:47]  Yeah, I know.
[01:30:48]  Yeah.
[01:30:49]  I got to tell you, you know, for listeners, you know, behind the curtain, David was a big help, not only just in information-wise, but also just like talking about that stuff because it's, it's, um, yeah, it can be hard.
[01:31:03]  It can be hard to like to have the language for it.
[01:31:08]  You had the language.
[01:31:09]  And that voicemail is, I mean, that was, I've wanted so many times to say that.
[01:31:15]  Going to say, like, have you, have you, you know, you have you spoken to anybody who was there?
[01:31:22]  Like, who is?
[01:31:23]  Oh, I certainly have.
[01:31:24]  No one remembers me.
[01:31:25]  I mean, I mean, the kids, some of the kids remember me, but like, staff, who the fuck is this guy?
[01:31:30]  Um, I mean, I spoke with Mel's widow.
[01:31:33]  I mean, I've really, I've gotten, I've gotten to the top.
[01:31:36]  Um, yeah, Bill Lane was supposed to, he died in 2018, 2019.
[01:31:41]  He blew me off and he took my questions and he sent them to Lon Woodbury, who's, you know, kind of a notorious figure in the so-called troubled teen industry.
[01:31:53]  All of our pictures, not all of our, but several of our pictures of Patrick comes from the Woodbury website.
[01:31:58]  Yeah, I know.
[01:31:59]  Yeah, I remember seeing that too when you were posting things.
[01:32:02]  And they did a kind of like Trump Hannity thing, you know, the two of them with my questions.
[01:32:10]  Anyway, I mean, yeah, I've spoken.
[01:32:12]  For me, though, you know, you said something interesting in that last episode where you kind of wanted to humiliate Patrick a little bit.
[01:32:25]  Yeah.
[01:32:27]  I understand that.
[01:32:28]  I totally understand that.
[01:32:31]  I don't know if it would work.
[01:32:33]  And I don't know if that's my style, you know, when I try to interview these people.
[01:32:40]  I'm not trying to do a gotcha.
[01:32:43]  They're already got.
[01:32:44]  I mean, like, I really want to understand extremism.
[01:32:47]  I want to understand how extremism can get infected in the educational system, the American educational system.
[01:32:57]  I'm fascinated by this.
[01:32:58]  So I'm more fascinated by like, you know, why is Bill Lane and Associates at a vendor's table?
[01:33:03]  Or why do they believe that this was an alternative education?
[01:33:10]  What made them think this way?
[01:33:13]  And so that's the fascination.
[01:33:14]  That's the curiosity.
[01:33:16]  But the anger for me is actually more at state agencies.
[01:33:21]  So when I'm going through thousands of pages from California Department of Social Services and they're substantiating abuse allegations, and then I go to their office and I say, I would like to speak with the licensing evaluator who is making these reports.
[01:33:40]  And I'm told, oh, they don't know anything about CDU.
[01:33:43]  And then I look at the name of the person that was writing those reports and it's the same person that's overseeing the Riverside office.
[01:33:49]  So then I try and contact that person and she doesn't speak with the public.
[01:33:54]  So that's my rage with the state institutions that were aware of these abuses and allowing them to occur and coddling them and tolerating them.
[01:34:12]  So that's my focus, really.
[01:34:15]  So I was maybe the worst person to end up consulting on a police investigation and then watch as it fell apart because now I'm, you know, I'm going to continue looking into that law enforcement agency.
[01:34:30]  But maybe that's actually the reason why you were the best person to be involved.
[01:34:34]  Yeah, I will say it depends on who is listening.
[01:34:39]  Well, certainly for the victims, I think you're definitely the best person to be consulting on something like that.
[01:34:44]  Well, I thank you very much for that.
[01:34:46]  I really appreciate this.
[01:34:47]  And I appreciate your time and your kindness.
[01:34:50]  I don't often get a lot of kindness when I'm doing this stuff.

=== Wild Story Revealed (02:43) ===

[01:34:54]  Well, I'm glad.
[01:34:56]  I mean, I've been, yeah, I'm thrilled to have you on.
[01:35:01]  Yeah.
[01:35:02]  You said you're working on a follow-up to this piece about the missing persons report.
[01:35:08]  Yeah, I'm working.
[01:35:09]  Yeah, I have that going on.
[01:35:12]  It's longer than I expected.
[01:35:14]  And it's specifically about Daniel Ewen's case.
[01:35:18]  Yeah.
[01:35:18]  I don't know when that's going to be out.
[01:35:21]  He went missing in February, so we're coming in 2004, and he was shipped off in late January, five years after me.
[01:35:30]  So we're hitting some real anniversaries.
[01:35:35]  So maybe it'll coincide the piece with that.
[01:35:37]  And I have a long piece that is on Medium that I haven't posted yet about obtaining the CDU archive.
[01:35:45]  Yeah, you've told me that story.
[01:35:47]  That's a story for another day.
[01:35:49]  But yeah, that's.
[01:35:50]  Yeah, it's a crazy.
[01:35:51]  It's a wild story, though.
[01:35:53]  It's a wild story.
[01:35:54]  I never actually expected this to become essentially a part-time job.
[01:36:01]  Running my anger was supposed to be a one-off.
[01:36:04]  And then I've moved on.
[01:36:05]  And they keep pulling me back in.
[01:36:11]  So I'll keep, you know, I'll keep going.
[01:36:14]  David, thank you so much for joining us.
[01:36:16]  We're going to link to all that stuff in the episode description here.
[01:36:21]  And I highly recommend you guys check it out.
[01:36:23]  There's a lot of stuff in the LA Mag article we didn't even get to.
[01:36:27]  There's then that, I got to tell you, that Running My Anger piece, you know, if I would just say that is like a central reading for anybody interested in this topic whatsoever.
[01:36:41]  It's really good.
[01:36:42]  And David, you know, it's been a pleasure and we'll talk soon.
[01:36:46]  Definitely.
[01:36:47]  Thanks, guys.
[01:36:47]  It was great to see you.
[01:37:03]  Well, we'll definitely have links to all of David's pieces in the show notes.
[01:37:07]  And if you guys haven't checked out our series, The Game, The Story of Synanon, we're going to link to that as well because it's all available for free now.
[01:37:17]  We've got a link to all the episodes, and all of that will provide more context for a lot of the stuff we're talking about here today.
[01:37:28]  Well, with that, I am Brace.
[01:37:31]  I'm Liz.
[01:37:32]  We are, of course, as always, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:37:35]  And this has been Truanon.
[01:37:37]  We'll see you next time.