BOOT CAMP GUARDS DEAL IN 'PAIN, PAIN!'

Violence: Authorities in Baltimore and Howard County listen to their
juvenile delinquents and decide the punishment doesn't fit the crime.

The violence of the Savage Leadership Challenge -- the bald 15-year-old in
fatigues told the judge yesterday -- began with the bus ride there.

As the state Department of Juvenile Justice van pulled out of the
Greenridge Youth Center in Allegany County and took to the highway, a guard
inside the bus began banging on its side. Soon, heads would be banged. Eyes
would be poked. Kids would be slammed to the ground.

"They said, 'Your life is over from now on,' " the boy said. The camp
loomed closer. "In 15 minutes, all you're feeling? Pain." "Ten minutes,
your life is over." "Five minutes, your life is over." "Thirty seconds!
Pain! Pain! Pain!" It was true.

As soon as the youths tumbled out of the bus, handcuffed and shackled to
face a cadre of boot camp guards called TAC officers, one slammed the
15-year-old to the ground.

The date was Nov. 29 -- three months after Maryland juvenile justice
officials claimed they had stopped violence at three state-run boot camps
in Garrett County. The assault was among many, the boy said, that he
andothers suffered at Savage just in the past two weeks.

The teen-ager, locked up for riding in someone else's car, was the first of
five juvenile delinquents to stand before Baltimore Circuit Judge Martin P.
Welch in an extraordinary hearing yesterday to determine whether any of 26
youths assigned from Baltimore to three state boot camps in Western
Maryland should stay.

The judge would hear three of the five cadets testify with military
politeness to abuse by their guards. He would peer at a scar on the shaved
head of one of the three, a 16-year-old who said guards had put it there.
He would listen to a fourth ask to be removed from camp just a week before
graduation.

And at the end of the day, he would conclude that the boot camps were no
place for a kid. He wouldn't even let the cadets go back to collect their
belongings.

A Howard County master did the same Thursday night for three youths from
that county who had been assigned to the camps.

A few of the cadets are headed home; most will go to other juvenile justice
facilities.

Welch summoned the cadets after reading a series of articles about cadets
sent to the Savage camp earlier this week in The Sun, which documented
beatings and abuse at the camps. He said he was not making "factual
determinations" about what had happened there.

But his order made clear that he thought something was seriously wrong.

"The court reaches this decision not lightly, but with grave concern as to
how this could have occurred," Welch said.

Attorneys for the Baltimore public defender's office interviewed two other
cadets. Sources said one also would have testified to abuse. The other
reported no problems at the camp.

As the boys testified, a handful of parents wandered in, curious and
confused about what might have been happening to their sons. They said camp
employees had discouraged them from visiting the camps, and that when they
called, a TAC always stood by their sons to monitor the conversation.

One father slouched drowsily in a corner of the courtroom, seeing his son
for the first time in four years.

"In my opinion, boot camp is good," the father mumbled as he waited to hear
the boys' testimony. "Basically, from what I seen, they teach him
discipline, teach him responsibility. It's the best place for the kid."

Then his 16-year-old son stood before the judge -- and reported the TACs
had thrown him through a window and back the other way.

"They told me to [get] out -- and not through the door," said the young
man, who'd been locked up for simple assault and a misdemeanor deadly
weapon charge.

"Have you been hit?" asked assistant public defender Jenny Parks. "Yes,
ma'am." "Have you been kicked?" "Yes, ma'am." "Have you been punched?"
"Yes, ma'am." The sleepy father had a new opinion after that. "Boot camp
stinks," the man said.

But even after hearing the stories, another father, whiskey on his breath,
still supported boot camp for his son.

He complained that the hearing made a mountain of a molehill -- that even
if the boot camp guards used violence, there was more violence for kids on
the street. The father knew -- he said he'd been shot himself, nine
different times, and had several stints in prison.

"I'd rather for my son to get a few scratches on him than to be locked up
in prison or buried in a graveyard," the West Baltimore man said.

Most of the boys asked the judge to exclude camp guards from the courtroom
while they spoke. But one 16-year-old expressly asked to have them there.

After six months of boot camp, he is supposed to graduate Friday. He wanted
his keepers to hear that he had no problems with them. No problems at all.

"I ain't never seen anybody get abused, sir," he said. "I seen cadets that
can't take the pressure.

"It helps you more than it hurts you, sir.

"They break you down, sir, and build you up to a whole new different person."

Outside the courtroom, Jeff Graham, who runs the camps, pulled the young
man aside and congratulated him on his testimony. But that was the
exception. The first boy to testify, the 15-year-old, told a far different
story.

During his first lunch, said the tall, articulate teen-ager, he was slow to
stand at position. A TAC, he said, slammed his head against the wall. The
cadet cried out. He was slammed again. This time, he was quiet.

He sat down to eat. But he left some coleslaw on the plate. The TAC seized
his head, pushed it toward the food.

"You'll eat what we tell you!"

The officer then pressed his thumbs into the boy's eyes.

On another day, the squad was being "smoked," he said -- forced to exercise
until the cadets collapsed from exhaustion.

One cadet, the boy said, "couldn't take it anymore." A TAC officer pulled
the flagging cadet out of formation. "He picked [him] up in the air, and he
just let him fall," the boy said. "He took [the cadet] by the head and was
mushing his head into the ground."

Then there was the bathroom.

The squad was told to line up to go. "They would take a cadet, throw 'im in
the bathroom," said the 15-year-old. "When the bathroom door was closed,
all you could hear was:

" 'Boom! Boom! Boom! " 'Aaah! Aaah! Aaah!'

"I'm hearing that. I'm saying to myself, I'm not going to the bathroom."

But a TAC threw him in anyway, against the toilet. "My whole shoulder just
came forward when I hit the wall."

The 16-year-old with the scar on his head, who has been at one of the three
camps, Meadow Mountain Leadership Challenge, since late November, testified
he had been hit for talking.

His arms had been pulled behind his back, and he had been kicked, he said.

"How are you supposed to go from a home where you're abused, [to] boot camp
where you're being abused?" he asked the judge.

"How are you supposed to change your life, sir?"