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| Teen Died in Illegal Restraint Hold |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 11/04/2002 |
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Moments before a 17-year-old boy died in their care, employees of a Texas wilderness program held him in a restraint hold that had been outlawed because of its lethal potential, officials of the program said. Charles Chase Moody was at least the fifth youth to die in Texas since 1988 after being restrained in a facility or program run by the Brown Schools. Officials of the Nashville-based company acknowledged that Moody was placed in the illegal position on Oct. 14. 'Our staff was not trying to take this man into a prone position, but they ended up falling to the ground in the course of things,' Diane Huggins, a Brown Schools spokeswoman, said in the October 23 edition of the Austin American-Statesman. 'When they went to the ground, they did fall forward,' Huggins said of the three staff members. 'This young man was a pretty big fellow: He's 6'1' and weighed 180 pounds. From our own looking into things and knowing how our staff responded, we know that they did the best job that they could to respond appropriately.' Moody and two other boys had become aggressive toward staff members, but he was the only one placed in the restraint hold, officials said. The state's rules on use of restraints on youth do not allow staff members to place a person face down and apply pressure to his back, the so-called prone restraint. Other forbidden restraints include any that keep the staff member from seeing the youth's face, restrict the person's ability to communicate or impair the ability to breathe. Investigators said Moody was having difficulty breathing when sheriff's deputies arrived and died before paramedics arrived. Authorities have not commented on the cause of death, pending a toxicology report. Moody's father said investigators told him that his son died from asphyxiation. 'He vomited and nobody even knew it,' said Charles Moody, a Dallas defense lawyer who once represented the Brown Schools in a case involving a restraint-related death. 'There are many, many unanswered questions.' |
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