Victory Christian Academy
Ramona, CA
Articles
Carey Dunn - LA Times - Falling Lumber Kills Hesperia Girl at Academy
The Los Angeles Times
Falling Lumber Kills Hesperia Girl at Academy
September 25, 1988
A 15-year-old Hesperia girl died Friday after a stack of lumber fell on her at the Victory Christian Academy in Ramona.
Carey Dunn, a student at the school, suffered severe head injuries in the accident, which occurred while she was helping staff members in a construction project.
Girls of Victory Christian Academy News and Updates
Blog to relate News and Information for the Girls of Victory Christian Academy
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23, 2011
SIA Organization remembers Michele Tresler Ulriksen, author of Reform at Victory.
Jodi Hobbs, the President of SIA Organization, credits Michele’s book and dogged pursuit of Palmer’s whereabouts for inspiring her to create SIA Organization.
“The Survivor’s of Institutional Abuse would not be here without Michele.” Jodi says, “Michele inspired others to speak out and share their own testimony of what happened to them. She was an advocate of getting the laws changed and spoke out at numerous events against abuse. Her tireless efforts changed many lives and gave others the strength and courage to come forward. SIA Organization’s first convention will be dedicated in her honor for her commitment and tireless efforts in getting the word out and speaking against institutional abuse.”
We will always remember, forever friends Thank you Michele for all of your effort courage and dedication. You mean so much to so many. Much love always.
Please read full article about Michele Tresler written by Dwayne Walker.
SIA Organization remembers Michele Tresler Ulriksen, author of Reform at Victory.
Reform at Victory
http://reformatvictory.com
Condolences are being left on her Facebook profile.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/profile.php?id=1701387565
Troubling Legacy by Abigail McWilliam:
http://www.messengernews.net/page/content.detail/id/513243.html
Lockdown: Are Teens and Taxpayers Paying the Price for ‘Christian Reform Schools? by Michele Ulriksen:
http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/09_may_jun/Ulriksen.html
How Faith Based Initiatives help unlicensed reform schools thrive by Michele Ulriksen:
http://girlsofvcanews.blogspot.com/2010/03/research-on-tough-love-christian-reform.html
Posted by Jodi at 12:35 AM
In God's Name: Lighthouse of Northwest Florida
God and punishment intermingle at a reform home for girls in Florida
Alexandra Zayas, Times Staff Writer
Monday, October 29, 2012 5:38pm
In God's name: Lighthouse of Northwest Florida
While Lighthouse of Northwest Florida promises to help girls live a more conservative life, girls at the facility say the emphasis at the school is more about the abuse that goes on inside. [Kathleen Flynn | Tampabay.com]
Lighthouse of Northwest Florida offers refuge to parents terrified of losing their daughters to the tempest of a sinful world.
It promises an oasis where teenagers wear nylons and say "yes, ma'am," where Scripture is sung and words are spoken only in turn.
Alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, self-mutilation, eating disorders — the reform home approaches all ills with heavy doses of punishment and God.
The home's doors lock shut, to keep the girls in, and the sin out.
But within that isolation, strange things happen.
Girls say they have been ordered to tackle, pin down and sit on their out-of-control peers. They describe being confined to a time-out room the size of a walk-in closet, almost every waking hour, for days at a time.
Police reports filed over the years give glimpses of desperation. A girl slits her wrists with a razor blade. One grabs a butter knife. One tries to make a noose with her tights.
A girl bangs her head on the floor, screaming of murder and suicide, telling a police officer, "I will find a way to kill myself if you don't get me out of here."
Much of what goes on inside remains secret.
Lighthouse is one of about two dozen children's homes shielded from state oversight under a religious exemption created by Florida lawmakers in 1984. The homes are closed to state licensing officials and monitored instead by the Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies, a private nonprofit organization whose inspection records are not made public.
Russell Cookston, head pastor at Lighthouse, offered no religious justification for restraining girls or putting them in isolation. He first said those measures were rare and used only to calm girls who were endangering others.
However, he went on to describe how multiple-day sentences in the Room of Grace are handed out on a sliding scale depending on the "offense" a girl committed.
Restraint and isolation, he said, are the last resort. They are followed by counseling sessions. The goal, he said, is to have a "therapeutic rapport."
"When a child goes ballistic they can do a lot of damage," Cookston said. "That's the last thing that we want."
What he wants, Cookston said, is for girls to learn how to be polite and do what they're told.
"We want them to get to the point that parents can work with them again. . . .
"God actually put the program together," he said. "We're teaching his word and that never changes. …
"It's a liberal world. And we show them how they can live conservatively."
God's program
A two-lane road slices through the cotton and peanut fields of Jay, a one-stoplight farm town in the western end of the Panhandle, just south of Alabama.
For two decades, girls from as far as California have found themselves here, following a long driveway toward a manicured compound, unaware of what awaits them in their minimum 12-month stay.
The home had fewer than 20 girls when the Times visited in August. Monthly tuition is $1,500 paid for privately by parents and donations. The home advertises for girls as young as 10.
Most days at Lighthouse start before sunrise and are filled with self-directed study and sermons. Girls pledge allegiance to the American flag, the Bible and the Christian flag.
The home is clean, the pantry well-stocked. On Friday nights, girls play games like balloon volleyball. "We bring students in here that are trying to be older than they really are, trying to have their body cash checks that they can't right now," Cookston said. "To be a kid again is refreshing."
Little filters in. No radio, no TV, no Internet.
Girls who behave get their first phone conversation with parents 90 days in; calls are monitored, letters reviewed. Girls who break the rules — which include uttering the words "yeah" or "cool" — must copy hundreds of lines from the Bible.
Reach 5,000 lines and you're on detention, stripped of privileges like shaving, speaking and making eye contact, former residents say.
It is not uncommon for girls to have to work off tens of thousands of lines before they can get off restriction, though Cookston says in the past three years, he has sometimes granted "grace," resetting punishment to a goal with a realistic end.
Good girls rise in the ranks to become "helpers." Troublemakers are isolated, or worse.
Tackled and floored
In 2007, Lindsay Brooks was a 15-year-old with a neurological condition she could not control. She was prone to violent outbursts and her mother had run out of options.
Brooks, of St. Petersburg, had been in and out of treatment in four different counties. None was like Lighthouse, where Brooks said she was gang-tackled and sat on by as many as six girls at a time.
The Times interviewed a dozen residents who spent time at Lighthouse in the past five years, 10 of them in the past two. Those who went on the record: Ali Reichle, Allie Crawford, Brittani Stoffregen, Cheyenne Homminga, Hannah Kilfoyle, Felisha Ibanez, Jennifer McKee, Jessica Albanes, Lindsay Brooks and Rachel Beaton.
Some said they benefited from the program.
All described a practice in which the same troubled girls the program sets out to help are used to restrain others.
Some recall "flooring" sessions that lasted an hour or longer, with helpers having to switch out in shifts, even after the legs of the girl beneath them had begun to numb and purple.
Residents at Lighthouse when Brooks was there in 2007 and 2008 recall her being floored frequently, by six to seven other girls, sometimes for hours.
"Six girls sitting on top of you is like those silent movies where they're running through the park and they stop under a window and a piano is dropped on top of them," said Brooks, now 20. "Your body is functioning the way it should be, then bam, you've got, like, 3,000 pounds on you. …
"You could take little tiny breaths, because there was so much weight on you."
Girls recall others being floored not only for violence, but for walking away or giving attitude.
Rachel Beaton, now 20, said she was once floored for crying too loud. "When they get off of you, your body is so numb. I used to have bruises on my ribs, my hip bones."
One allegation about flooring is documented in a 2008 Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Office report. Parents showed up at the station with a daughter who had a human bite mark on her leg, an injury she said she sustained while restraining a disobedient girl.
When DCF investigated, Cookston said the girls restrained each other on their own, not at the direction of the home.
Cookston repeated that explanation even after the Times told him former residents said they had been ordered by adults to tackle or sit on other girls.
Cheyenne Homminga said she was made to physically "put down" other girls when she was at Lighthouse from January 2011 to January 2012. The 15-year-old said she was given the task because she was bigger than the others.
"They wanted you to sit on their thighs and then to hold with your hands their hands on their back," she said. "It's never like you lightly hold their hands together. You're really violent and you're forcing them. . . . I hated putting girls down. A bunch of the girls didn't like me anymore.
"I never wanted to hurt them.
"But it was like I had to, I was commanded to."
Robert Friedman, a psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of South Florida Department of Child and Family Studies, said the practice described by former residents is harmful to everyone involved. It makes the girl on the floor angrier and adds to the sense that she's worthless, he said.
"The act of holding down a friend, a bunk mate, a roommate, it leaves the youngsters feeling bad about themselves," he said. "It turns them against each other instead of creating a supportive peer environment where they help each other and they listen to each other."
'A disgusting little box.'
After a girl is floored, her likely destination is a white, windowless cell called the "Room of Grace."
The room, the size of a small bathroom or walk-in closet, has no bed, no chairs, just a thin carpet for girls confined all day, from the time they wake until bed.
Former residents complain they would be held there for days, with limited bathroom breaks, nothing to do and no one to talk to.
Other girls, they said, had soiled the carpet, out of necessity or spite.
"It was a disgusting little box," 18-year-old Ali Reichle said. "Whenever you walked in that room, you could smell just the puke and the urine."
The makeshift cell has an opening where a door would have hung. When a girl is banished, the opening is blocked with a table and manned by someone who makes sure the troublemaker stays put. Cookston said an adult is always present; residents said girls were often watched over by other children.
When the Times visited in August, the room was barren, the only sign of its purpose walls scarred by years of punches. There was no smell.
On the wall just outside the empty doorjamb, officials have hung an inspirational poster — Oh, cheer up!
The irony is not lost on girls who passed through Lighthouse. Many say they spent hours stuck in the room, seething and being forced to listen to taped evangelical sermons:
"There was yelling in them," recalled 16-year-old Allie Crawford. "Some girls would plug their ears. Some girls would kick walls. I was definitely sick of it."
Even a few days in isolation is unacceptable, experts say.
"Incredibly abusive," Friedman said. "Absolutely, totally inappropriate."
Five former residents recall girls being confined for more than a week at a time. Four said they remember girls who were kept away for more than a month.
Cookston denied such lengthy stays. He said the worst offenses net a girl three days in the room, and if she misbehaves inside, she can get another three days. Girls are given adequate bathroom breaks, he said, and taken to chapel. Although he remembers one girl being kept in the room overnight, he said "no one's been in there a month or weeks."
But if Cookston wanted to hold girls that long in isolation, there was little to stop him.
During its 28-year history, FACCCA, the private, nonprofit agency that oversees Lighthouse, has had no limit on how long its facilities could hold children in seclusion.
After the Times visited the home, FACCCA inspectors went to the campus and told Cookston he had to cap seclusion time to one day. The association plans to adjust its standards, executive director Buddy Morrow said.
FACCCA officials also told Lighthouse it could not use children to watch or restrain others.
"That was not acceptable," Morrow said.
Stories from the past
Lighthouse's story goes back long before Cookston and stretches far beyond Jay. It even meanders through Mexico. But it begins with the name on a Panhandle property deed:
Pastor Michael Palmer.
In 1985, at a gated compound in Ramona, Calif., the Baptist preacher founded Victory Christian Academy, a home to reform troubled girls. It was never licensed.
In 1988, a student working on a campus construction project was killed by falling lumber. After that, California officials saw the "Get Right Room," where girls told them they were confined for up to 12 days, made to listen to hours of taped sermons.
In 1992, a judge ordered that Palmer apply for a state license or shut down.
Instead, Palmer moved to Florida, where a religious exemption meant he could run Victory without government hassle.
That very year, Victory was up and running in Jay.
Although Florida child abuse investigators reviewed allegations several times, they never found evidence of abuse, and Palmer's girls' home operated without public incident for years.
Then in 2004, a former resident showed up outside the home and caused a stir in this sleepy town. She carried a sign calling Palmer a rapist.
In November of that year, Rebecca Ramirez, 36, told Santa Rosa sheriff's deputies the pastor raped her in 1992 while she was 16 at the home in Florida. The Times does not typically name alleged victims of sexual abuse, but Ramirez gave permission to identify her, believing it will give validity to her story.
She told the Times the abuse began with private, lights-off sermons in his office. She said he told her God wanted him to make her his wife, and when she reminded him he already had a wife, he said that marriage didn't count because it happened before he was a Christian.
"He was kissing on me," she said. "And then he told me to lay down on the floor.
"And so I did. …
"I didn't make a noise. I didn't say anything. …
"You don't talk back to him."
Palmer has denied it all. A statute of limitations prevented the case from moving forward.
Palmer left Lighthouse not long after Ramirez's report. He did not respond to a letter the Times mailed to a home he owns in Fort Dodge, Iowa. He no longer appears to be running the girl's home in Florida.
He left that to Pastor Cookston, whose daughter had lived at Palmer's home.
Cookston said he started working at the home in 1996 and soon after moved to Mexico, where Palmer had started Genesis by the Sea, a girls' home near Rosarito Beach.
Cookston was head pastor when the home was shut down by Mexican authorities in 2004.
At the time, officials said the home was not properly licensed. They were concerned by the electric fence surrounding Genesis and told the Copley News Service that neighbors had reported hearing "cries in the night."
The Times spoke with three former Genesis residents who said "flooring" was common under Cookston's leadership and recalled a girl who slept bound to her bed.
That former resident, Melanie Villaruel, 26, told the Times that when she was caught after running away, she was made to walk barefoot for weeks, bound in plastic zip-ties.
Cookston denies any abuse occurred in Mexico and said authorities there shut him down for technical infractions, including not having a permit for a sign on a wall and not having business hours posted.
And Palmer?
"The only reason he holds onto a house here is so he feels he still has it or has claim to it," Cookston said. "I let the parents know that he's not here. He's not a part of this ministry. He's gone.
"But what do you do about stories from the past?"
'I'm so sorry'
In 2007, St. Petersburg mother Michelle Brooks needed help with her daughter's uncontrollable violence. She was disillusioned by state-licensed group homes, where she felt Lindsay didn't get adequate supervision and staff was just there for a paycheck.
She was drawn to Lighthouse because it shared her Christian ideals. She spoke to Cookston and his wife and she saw misty eyes and heard trembling voices when they spoke of changing girls' lives.
She still feels they care.
But had she known what would happen to her daughter, she said she would never have agreed to send Lindsay to Lighthouse.
Lindsay had been there for almost two years when Brooks called the pastor from the hospital the second time her daughter was taken in under the Baker Act, a Florida law that allows for the temporary detention of a person having a mental health emergency.
She had some serious questions.
Lindsay had told hospital workers she had been hog-tied.
Brooks knew Lindsay might be restrained.
But she didn't expect this.
Lindsay had been kicking people, she remembers the pastor told her. "Well, I know she can do that," Brooks said.
"But then he's telling me that she wouldn't stop screaming for eight to 10 hours solid. Solid.
"How they weren't feeding her because she would throw the plate, so they stopped bringing her food.
"Her feet and her hands were bound because she was trying to hurt other people.
"And I said, why didn't you have her Baker Acted before you bound her hands and her feet?
"He says, 'Because we're trying to handle her.' "
She remembers he acknowledged, in that conversation, that his group home was not equipped to deal with Lindsay.
"I was done," the mother said. "I didn't know where we were going from here. I didn't know what all of this meant. But all I knew was that wasn't okay."
Lindsay is doing better now, in her social abilities and behavior.
Her mother says she connected with some good staff members at Lighthouse and, like some others who spoke with the Times, left with a deeper sense of faith. She was also weaned off of medications that did her more harm than good.
But something needs to change, Michelle Brooks said.
"There absolutely needs to be regulation somewhere," she said. "There needs to be outside eyes. These children have emotional difficulties. So there should absolutely be someone there, in the mental health field that's licensed by the state, monitored by the state and who is also reporting back to state agencies what's taking place."
Michelle Brooks listened to Lindsay describe it all to a reporter this past summer, and the mother had to pause at one point, saying she couldn't breathe.
At the end of the interview, she hugged her daughter and whispered, "I'm so sorry."
Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report.
Victory Christian Academy rebranded and called themselves, Lighthouse
Tampa Bay Times
Editorial: Step up to protect children
Thursday, February 14, 2013 3:30am
Girls listen to a sermon during a church service at Lighthouse of Northwest Florida in the small town of Jay. The facility is shutting its doors.
The state of Florida long ago should have shut down the Lighthouse of Northwest Florida, a so-called Christian reform school whose operators have been accused of child abuse. Instead it took a Tampa Bay Times investigation to finally help trigger this week's closing. That highlights the need for better state oversight of institutions entrusted with the welfare of children. With the 2013 legislative session weeks away, Gov. Rick Scott, House Speaker Will Weatherford and Senate President Don Gaetz should push to repeal a 1984 state law that prevented rigorous regulation of Lighthouse and similar institutions accused of abusing their charges. All of Florida's children deserve protection.
Lighthouse head pastor Russell Cookston told Times' reporter Alexandra Zayas this week that her October series of stories that exposed students' charges of abuse there led to a decline in enrollment. The enrollment drop prompted the school's landlord to decide to put the 9.7-acre property in the tiny town of Jay up for auction. The investigation by Zayas uncovered decades of abuse allegations against Cookston and the school's landlord and founder, Michael Palmer. The two men had ties to a Mexico school shut down by the Mexican government after abuse allegations. And before that, in the 1980s, Palmer had run afoul of California regulators for operating an unlicensed girls school where a student died on a campus construction site and others told officials of being locked for days in solitary confinement, forced to listen to recorded sermons.
Former Lighthouse students told Zayas of similar solitary confinement at the Florida school and of physical takedowns in which several girls would be ordered to restrain another by sitting on her. At least one Lighthouse student has accused Palmer of sexual assault. He was never formally charged, but amid allegations he turned over the school's day-to-day operation to Cookston.
Sadly, Lighthouse is just one of the religious group homes or unlicensed boarding schools with questionable practices exposed in the Times investigation. Since the articles, state bureaucrats have attempted to crack down on illegal boarding schools, and the Department of Children and Families is investigating how some foster children were placed in unlicensed religious group homes. The Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies, the private agency assigned under state law to regulate religious group homes, has also amended its rules to limit how long a child can be kept in seclusion and banned the use of handcuffs and other restraints.
Yet little is known about the welfare of children living in lightly regulated or unregulated facilities, and too frequently even parents are in the dark about what happens to their children there. The governor and legislative leaders should push to repeal the 1984 exemption for religious groups and enact more oversight of boarding schools so that children at both kinds of facilities are protected as well as those in state-licensed homes. Scott, Weatherford and Gaetz need to stand for all the state's children and against abuse.
Editorial: Step up to protect children 02/14/13 [Last modified: Thursday, February 14, 2013 5:15pm]
Private School Raided by State, Local Officials
February 27, 1991|NANCY RAY | TIMES STAFF WRITER
Investigators from the state Department of Social Services, along with county child protection services staff members and deputy sheriffs raided the all-girls Victory Christian Academy Feb. 14 in the most recent effort to force the private boarding school to obtain a license as a community care facility.
Pastor Mike Palmer, operator of the school, called the raid an outrage and said he and many parents of past and present students of the school "will fight this illegal effort by the state to license a private religious boarding school."
During the raid, investigators armed with a search warrant took copies of some of the private records of the teen-age girls who were sent to Victory by their parents because of behavioral problems, truancy and occasional drug abuse, Palmer said. The state officials also conducted private interviews with the most recently enrolled students without allowing school staff or parents to be present.
"That is an invasion of privacy and against the rules of our school," Palmer said. "We allow any state or local authority access to the school and to its students, but only with a school official or parent in attendance. As for the girls' personal files, they are private and should not have been taken."
Rick Peralto, Department of Social Services investigative analyst who led the search at the school, could not be reached for comment, but Tom Hersant, head of the department's San Diego office, confirmed that a search of the Victory campus had been conducted.
Hersant said information obtained from the search had been turned over to the department's legal section to determine what action should be taken.
Kathleen Norris, spokeswoman for the state agency in Sacramento, said the raid was part of an attempt by the state Department of Social Services to force Palmer to license the school as a care home for delinquent girls or to close it down.
She said a search warrant was obtained because the school was in a compound surrounded by a 12-foot fence and with a locked gate.
Palmer said the state Department of Social Services filed a lawsuit against him and his wife in 1989, charging them with the misdemeanor criminal offense of operating a community care facility without a state license.
Although the case never went to trial, it's unclear how it was settled. A file about the case is apparently missing from the El Cajon court. Tim Rutherford, attorney for the Palmers and the school in the 1989 case, said an agreement was reached before the case went to a jury trial.
He said he's not sure how the case was settled but believes that Palmer pleaded no contest to a reduced charge. State investigators were not available to confirm this account.
"There was no fine, no sentence, nothing," Rutherford recalled.
"We thought that it was all over, that we would not be bothered any more," Palmer said about the 1989 court case. He denied that the school provides medications or counseling to the students--one prerequisite for being classified as a community care facility.
Ramirez: ‘He said it was God’s will’
Former Victory resident claims she was abused by Palmer
February 27, 2009
By ABIGAIL McWILLIAM, Messenger news editor
When Rebecca Ramirez came forth five years ago to protest at Michael Palmer's Victory Christian Academy in Jay, Fla., it was because she couldn't forget what happened to her when her parents sent her to the facility.
Ramirez said she was raped by Palmer in 1992 when she was a 16-year-old student at Victory. That's what led her back to the facility some 12 years later to speak out, she said.
Following her protest, Palmer left the facility and it was renamed Lighthouse of North West Florida.
"The first time that he actually raped me was Oct. 2. I remember this because he made a big deal out of that date. It was like an anniversary and he always reminded me. I will never forget that date," she said in a telephone interview with The Messenger.
Ramirez, 33, said she was raped once in Palmer's office and a second time in a trailer on the academy's property.
From that point, Ramirez said she was taken out of all of her activities and spent all of her days in his office as he tried to brainwash her into loving him and agreeing to marry him.
"He said it was God's will," she said. "I felt ashamed."
She said Palmer gave her a promise ring while at the facility and later sent her a necklace when she returned home to California.
Ramirez's parents kept the notes and jewelry Palmer sent to their daughter when she returned home from Victory. They were turned over to Florida authorities in 2004 as evidence, but no charges could be filed because the statute of limitations had run out.
"Rape is rape and many people have to suffer with the consequences," Ramirez said. "The issue I had to deal with is that I was basically mind raped, and emotionally and mentally tortured, with physical rape on top of that. My parents tried to sweep it under the rug. They believed he was a man of God."
Ramirez's mother, Bonnie Ramirez, said she turned to a local church when her daughter was having problems as a teenager. First she sent Ramirez to the Victory Christian Academy in Ramona, Calif., and then to the Jay, Fla., location.
"I thought it would be good for her to be with other girls and learn about God and do her studies, too," Bonnie Ramirez said in a phone interview. "They told me no teacher would be alone with her; it was supposed to be the same way in Florida."
Bonnie Ramirez said she started getting phone calls from Michael Palmer's wife, Patty Palmer, about her daughter's relationship with Michael Palmer.
"She told me all kinds of stuff - that he was trying to look good and wearing cologne," she said.
Once Rebecca was sent home, Bonnie Ramirez received another call from Patty Palmer.
"She called and said he was on his way here and he had his guns," she said. "He came to our house all cleaned up and acting like he was so great and took my husband to a restaurant. He asked to marry Rebecca, although he was already married, and wanted to pay us $25,000 to marry her - like he was going to buy her."
Years later, Bonnie Ramirez still struggles with what happened.
"It's just really hard because you don't get over it. You always keep this heavy, hurtful feeling," she said. "I feel like it's my fault for believing this person. I'm her mother. I want to protect her from all bad things and here I send her to a place where this happens. It's really, really hard."
Of all the interviews and research done by Paul Lio, a detective sergeant at the Santa Rosa sheriff's office, he said Ramirez has the most concrete case.
"She had quite a story to tell about Palmer," he said. "The sad part for us is that many years had gone by, so we had the statute of limitations here in Florida."
A solid case against Palmer has never materialized, Lio said.
"He has been the subject of allegations of improper conduct and sexual abuse," Lio said in a telephone interview. "No criminal charges have ever been filed."
Lio said, "There are some very strict laws in this state regarding child abuse, reporting child abuse, as well as for people who run residential facilities. There is an organization called FACCCA that has exceptions to all of these rules," he said.
The Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies was founded in 1982 and permits facilities in Florida to join the organization instead of obtaining a license from the state. The organization has nearly 40 members.
Palmer said he is no longer involved with FACCCA.
One FACCCA facility, Our Father's House, in Milton, Fla., was closed in 2003 after an investigation determined that the director was sexually molesting one of the residents, Lio said.
"It's clergymen versus wayward child," Lio said. "They make the perfect victim."
Allegations of abuse and brainwashing by girls who attended Palmer's facilities are strikingly similar.
California court records and statements by Florida authorities back up many of the claims.
Contact Abigail McWilliam at (515) 573-2141 or amcwilliam@messengernews.net
Victory Christian Academy - Genesis By The Sea GULAG SCHOOL Jay Florida
*General Comment: Aniece Orlando Flordia U.S.A.
My experience at Victory Christian Academy is one that many girls share with me. I was sent to VCA in 1994 for being a "problem teen". I was there for a little over a year. I did not use drugs, drink, or disrespect my parents. I had a crush on an older guy in my neighborhood and my overly-zealous parents thought I was hell-bound. My parents found the school through a friend of the family, which is how this school is typically found. (There are no advertisements or marketing in regards to this school.) VCA was run, and still is, by Michael Palmer and his wife Patty. It is an all-girls fundamental southern Baptist boarding school.
Parents are lead to believe that their child will receive counseling, an education and learn to be a "proper lady". Nothing could be farther from the truth. Girls as young as 11 are stripped of all of their belongings, self-worth and dignity at VCA. I was forced to eat/drink several meals that were blended into a shake because I was scared to death and had no appetite for my first few days at the school. Letters home from the girls are read before they are sent out by the staff to assure that nothing that is going on at the school is reported to parents.
The cost of the school is on a sliding scale and because my parents are well-off, the cost was 4k a month for my tuition (and that was over TEN years ago...you do the math). The girls at the school are nothing more than cheap labor. We were fed HORRIBLE food that we were forced to eat. Some girls slept on the floor for months due to lack of beds. We took care of all of the laundry, food preparation, yard work and even construction on the buildings. Here is a newspaper clip about one fatal incident:
--------------
The Los Angeles Times
September 25, 1988
A 15-year-old Hesperia girl died Friday after a stack of lumber fell on her at the Victory Christian Academy in Ramona.
Carey Dunn, a student at the school, suffered severe head injuries in the accident, which occurred while she was helping staff members in a construction project.
She was taken by Life Flight helicopter to Palomar Memorial Hospital in Escondido, where she died.
---------------
Michael Palmer has several court cases and allegations that are closed and/or pending (yet the school is still open). They are all legitimate and verifiable. Palmer also ran a school in Southern Califonia back in the 80's that was shut down by officials and he was forced to take his school out of the state, due to many reasons. This is also documented in court files.
The list of the horrible experiences that happened at VCA is a very long one. This posting is just to help get the word out to any parent out there that is thinking about sending their girl to Victory Christian Academy. Please do some research first and know that former students ARE NOT exagerating. This school has also changed it's name several times, DO NOT BE FOOLED. Please get your daughter the help she really needs, she WILL come out of VCA a lot more damaged than when she went in.
If you need help locating any of the documentation about VCA, please contact me or any former student that is willing to talk.
Aniece
Orlando, Florida
U.S.A.