Budget Faulted In Boy's Death at Arizona Jail

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By Arizona Republic

Published: 07/29/2002

Relatives say 14-year-old David Horvath wouldn't have been able to hang himself with a bedsheet recently if he'd been sent to a treatment facility rather than a jail cell.
But judges had no choice. State budget cuts have forced them to send youths like David to juvenile detention facilities because there is no money to pay for residential treatment.
The Mesa boy killed himself at Adobe Mountain School, a state juvenile prison in northwest Phoenix, exactly three months after another boy killed himself there. David was taken off life support July 15.
'They have all this security to protect the staff members, but they can't protect the inmates from themselves,' said David's sister, Christina Horvath, 19. 'If they had sent my brother to a treatment center, he would be alive.'
Court officials were forced in the spring to put a moratorium on sending children to treatment facilities.
'Residential treatment is not an available option to the court at this time because of funding,' Maricopa County Juvenile Court Judge Emmet Ronan wrote in June when he ordered David to serve a minimum six months at Adobe.
And it is going to get worse. Under the new fiscal budget, which started July 1, there will be $1.5 million less for treatment of juvenile offenders.
Concerns are growing that youths in residential care may be pulled out.
Child advocates are pleading that something be done.
Another young inmate, Christopher J. Camacho, 15, of Peoria, hanged himself in a drug-treatment unit at Adobe on April 11. His was the first suicide since 1988 of a juvenile offender in state custody.
'How many kids have to die before we admit that there's a problem out there?' asked Barbara Cerepanya, a Phoenix attorney who has represented juvenile offenders

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