Editor’s note: This article is based on more than 100 pages of confidential behavioral treatment records, child welfare paperwork and juvenile justice documents, in addition to interviews. The Bangor Daily News is not using Austin’s last name because he was a minor for most of the reporting. Reporter Callie Ferguson is a former fellow with The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship. You can read all of her stories published about juvenile justice here.
Austin was back at his grandparents’ house in Winterport, thinking through his next move.
The 17-year-old had just spent 15 days at Maine’s only youth prison after a disastrous streak of months that culminated in his arrest for allegedly threatening someone with a gun in Bangor. This June marked his fifth detention at Long Creek Youth Development Center in nearly as many years, he said.
But this time, his release came with the uneasy weight of a different kind of freedom.
When he walked out of the South Portland prison earlier this summer, Austin was no longer under the supervision of Maine’s juvenile justice system. His gun case was over and so was his period of probation. Ashley Pesek of Sedgwick, who became Austin’s legal guardian in 2023, believed that Austin had only left the juvenile system once since he first entered it at age 12. That period did not last long.
The goal of Maine’s juvenile justice system is to help teenagers like Austin onto a better path as much as hold them accountable for their wrongdoing, ideally at home in the communities where they live.
But Austin’s turbulent adolescence tested the limits of that system and other state services that aim to protect and support Maine’s most troubled, vulnerable kids. The combination of juvenile court, the foster care system and both in- and out-of-state behavioral health systems could not keep Austin safe and out of trouble. Instead they sometimes made his situation worse.
Sitting at his grandparents’ dining room table, he felt slightly unbalanced.
“It feels really good, but it’s a little scary,” he said three days after leaving Long Creek, sporting a fresh buzz cut. “I’ve always had that accountability in the back of my head. Like, if I do something, I have probation. But now, I’m kinda free.”
His release happened to fall on Father’s Day. He planned to spend the coming months rebuilding what he’d lost after his life unraveled last fall, he said, starting with regaining custody of his 19-month-old daughter, Dalilah. Though having a child at 16 made his difficult life more complicated, becoming a father had given him a sense of motivation and purpose.
He knew what losing a parent could do to a child. Almost exactly five years earlier, in June 2019, the state had removed Austin from the custody of his mother after she was arrested for selling drugs at their apartment in Medway. The crime separated them but did not break a bond that endured over the rollercoaster years that followed, as Austin passed through foster homes, hospital rooms, prison cells and a locked facility across state lines.
That twisting path of adolescence would come to an end in a few months, on Austin’s 18th birthday in late August. Austin stared down that moment without knowing how it would feel, only that life would be different afterward.
Austin, pictured this summer, tattooed the name of his daughter on his neck. Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN
Austin already had a severe history of trauma by the time child welfare officials discovered him in Medway at age 12.
Both of his parents struggled with addiction and mental illness, which could make them neglectful of his care, according to a psychiatric evaluation. It described how he suffered painful flashbacks, including memories of reviving a family member who had overdosed on heroin. He’d also watched his father, who was already in jail for drug and gun crimes when Austin entered foster care, shoot someone with a gun. The evaluation noted that he had mostly raised himself.
Even so, Austin adjusted poorly to the sudden loss of the life he knew.
In foster care, he wasn’t accustomed to following household rules after living so many years without any, he said. He spent two months at his first foster home before he caught his first criminal charges for robbing a store for alcohol and cigarettes in the Millinocket area. He only lasted a couple days with a second foster family.
Few foster families are willing to accept older boys, so, when state officials can’t find a placement, they put kids in hotel rooms where they fall asleep under the supervision of social workers. Austin felt he had it even worse: On his 13th birthday, he woke up on a couch in the Bangor office of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, he said.
In September 2019, he threatened to stab an office supervisor there with a tack, according to a hospital record. He felt cooped up and “freaked out,” Austin recalled. He was admitted around that time to a psychiatric crisis unit nearly two hours east, in Calais. Desperate to escape, Austin and another boy stole the first unlocked truck they could find on the streets of Calais and drove it all the way to Millinocket, near his old home in Medway, Austin said. The truck, it turned out, belonged to a judge. They turned themselves into police when they ran out of stolen alcohol and food, he said.
By the end of that brutal summer, a portrait emerged of an angry, aggressive, severely traumatized boy with little respect for authority. That was how staff at Acadia Hospital in Bangor described Austin in paperwork after a psychiatric evaluation in September 2019, two weeks after he turned 13.
“They just expected me to accept that my parents were locked up and to do what they say.”
Austin
They diagnosed him with severe, unspecified conduct disorder; post-traumatic stress disorder; a substance use disorder; and disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, which is a condition describing children who are frequently angry and hostile. The hospital recommended he be enrolled in MaineCare, the state’s Medicaid program, and case management services to help coordinate treatment.
Kristin Sanderson, the child protective caseworker assigned to Austin’s case, questioned whether those diagnoses reflected Austin’s state of mind and if the assessment adequately considered the impact of his traumatic upbringing, according to notes from a meeting she attended with other social workers to discuss his case. She declined an interview, citing the confidentiality of child welfare cases.
Sanderson also had a rare view into Austin. Angry as he was, he had not lost the ability to trust people he felt close to. He trusted Sanderson. She was kind, always answered his phone calls and had been the only person to remember his birthday.
There are many kids like Austin. Earlier in September, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Maine for unnecessarily placing scores of children and adolescents in institutions due to the state’s lack of community-based behavioral health services in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The lawsuit, which echoed the findings of previous state-commissioned assessments dating back to at least 2018, asserted that the state has inadequately funded services that treat children with disabilities at home and in foster care, which can prevent behavioral crises from worsening.
This was the impoverished landscape that Austin’s behavioral health and child welfare caseworkers had to navigate. State officials within the juvenile justice system have also faced a dearth of community-based intervention programs, while simultaneously trying to reduce the number of youth sent to Long Creek.
“I feel like every kid is different, and every kid needs different things,” Austin said.
Yet in that first year he felt he had to accept whatever he was offered.
“They just expected me to accept that my parents were locked up and to do what they say,” Austin said. “I was 13. I was angry. I was upset. I was not going to listen to these strangers keeping me in an office.”
All he wanted was to be left alone. So wherever Austin went, he did not stay long.
He struggled when he attended the Bangor Regional Program, an alternative school that had high rates of restraining and secluding kids. He did not respond well to those methods. He flipped desks, told staff to shut up, threatened to beat up his peers and tried to leave, treatment records said. He felt anxious in the classroom because he had missed so much school growing up. The presence of police at the school aggravated his “dysregulation,” according to the records, after an upbringing where law enforcement signaled trouble.
He had been staying with his grandparents but ran away in early 2020 for several months to live on the streets and at the Shaw House, the youth homeless shelter in downtown Bangor, the records said. The onset of the pandemic ground the world to a halt, but Austin’s life devolved into using drugs and helping adults he knew sell them, he said. He continued to accumulate charges for theft and substance use.
He occasionally resurfaced. State corrections officials detained Austin at Long Creek at some point in the spring for a missed court date, he said, but didn’t keep him long. And in a moment caught on camera and publicized in the news that May, Bangor police arrested him near the shelter for smoking a cigarette and allegedly broke his elbow. (A city police sergeant denied that at the time, though Austin’s records say he was treated that spring for a broken elbow.)
During this period, a team of social workers and state officials were trying to find him a spot at a residential treatment program, Maine’s most intensive treatment option for adolescents with mental health diagnoses, according to his records.
In June 2020, he was admitted to the Roundel program at Good Will-Hinckley in central Maine with a flushed face, watery eyes and a bloodied ace bandage around his elbow. He agreed to go, realizing that his life had become exhausting and scary. During his intake, he yawned, placed his head on a table, and told intake staff he’d used methamphetamine, heroin and bath salts in the past 24 hours, and warned them they might find a gun in his backpack. (They found a knife, records show.)
He awoke the next morning “agitated and anxious,” according to a document residential staff submitted to the state. He had changed his mind. He threatened to stab the staff if they didn’t call Sanderson to pick him up.
The answer was no because the state had no other safe place for him to go, the document stated. Austin ran off the property, across Route 201 and into the woods.
State officials ultimately decided that Austin needed to go somewhere he couldn’t run away from. That ultimately meant Maine had no place for him at all.
Maine has no locked residential programs, only the youth prison and emergency rooms that can strap patients to their beds. After fleeing Good Will-Hinckley, Austin spent two weeks living in the emergency department of Redington-Fairview General Hospital in Skowhegan, an experience his mother said has made him hate hospitals ever since.
He continued to flee. After being admitted to the only residential substance use program in southern Maine, Day One, he ran away, records show. Police found him near Medway, and the state kept him at Long Creek until staff could try something new: a secure residential program in another state.
The team of lawyers and state officials overseeing Austin’s case wanted to avoid committing Austin indefinitely to the youth prison, records state, while behavioral health providers noted “that Austin had a very high risk of death without immediate intervention.”
On Sept. 4, 2020, Austin arrived just outside of Memphis, Tennessee, at Bill’s Place, a secure residential program run by the nonprofit Youth Villages. His treatment paperwork noted he was there to treat his “delinquency” and that he had 23 pending criminal charges in Maine. He had just turned 14.
“I’d rather do five years in Long Creek than go back and do another eight months in Tennessee.”
Austin
Advocates have long decried the practice of sending Maine kids across state lines to receive treatment they are eligible for under MaineCare because it places them farther from their communities and from oversight. In recent years, anywhere from 41 to 85 Maine kids have been sent out of state on a monthly basis, according to the lawsuit brought by the Justice Department.
Tennessee was supposed to be better than a jail cell. Austin, who had never left New England before, recalled thinking how pretty its campus seemed on paper. In reality, he found Youth Villages just as restrictive as Long Creek, only now he was thousands of miles from home and didn’t know when he would go back.
Staff restrained kids frequently; they made them line up single-file and speak aloud their initials when they passed through a doorway; and there was a camera in his room, Austin said. Austin’s mother recounted being on a Zoom call with Austin from her prison cell in Maine that ended abruptly when Austin grew agitated, and staff grabbed him and slammed his computer shut. He liked his individual counselor, but it was hard to build trust in the program’s environment, he said.
Austin tried to run away immediately, using a stolen key card to flee the building, but he broke an ankle jumping over the program’s fence, according to Youth Villages paperwork and hospital records from a surgery to treat the injury.
On the way back to campus, Austin said a staff member physically assaulted him in retaliation for trying to escape. He reported the abuse to Tennessee child welfare officials, telling an investigator that two staff members caught him outside, then handed him over to an employee who punched him in the stomach twice and dragged him on his injured ankle. The officials did not find enough evidence to substantiate the allegation, according to records from the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services. The staff member denied the assault.
“I’d rather do five years in Long Creek than go back and do another eight months in Tennessee,” Austin said.
A spokesperson for Youth Villages described Bill’s Place as a program that provides individual, group and family treatment in “a safe place for young people with the most serious mental health needs stemming often from past trauma, such as abuse and neglect.”
The presence of cameras and use of restraints are to ensure safety among a population of youth with serious behavioral challenges who can pose a risk to others and themselves, the spokesperson said.
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Austin neared the end of his time in Tennessee unsure of where he would live next.
His discharge paperwork from Youth Villages recommended he continue practicing positive decision making under close supervision, noting that he loses motivation to live a healthy life when he feels powerless. His treatment did not directly address his substance use, it said.
But it was such a scramble to find a place for him to go that Austin worried his insurance would stop paying the Tennessee program before he had somewhere to live in Maine, he said.
In the absence of a step-down residential program, he finally moved into another foster home in Corinth in April 2022. But the transition from a locked facility to attending middle school made him feel immediately out of place.
“In Tennessee, I was really institutionalized. I was really uncomfortable being out,” he said.
He ran away after a few weeks.
Over the next year in Maine, Austin fell back into using drugs, dealing them, and bouncing between couches, motels and Long Creek. Then, in the spring of 2022, he and his girlfriend, Taylor, learned they were expecting a baby. Though his struggles were far from over, the news drew a bright line across Austin’s childhood, and he resolved to change. He and Taylor stopped using drugs, he said. He was 15.
Ashley Pesek of Sedgwick has been fostering kids for 10 years and became Austin’s foster mom in October 2022. “It’s my pleasure doing this,” Pesek said. “They’re all great kids who have just had a rough go of it.” Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN
It was Sanderson’s idea to put the couple in touch with Pesek that summer, believing they could use a caring adult in their lives.
Pesek, a therapist who works in crisis services in Hancock and Washington counties, is a rarity in Maine’s child welfare system. She and her husband foster teenagers, including boys who have been in the juvenile justice system. Over lunch and at movie nights, she forged a connection with Austin and Taylor, and they all agreed they should live with her family in Sedgwick.
To everyone’s frustration, Pesek said, the state initially opposed the idea, worried that her family wouldn’t be able to support two more foster children with high needs given that they already had seven kids at home. But enough pressure built that the couple eventually moved into Pesek’s home in October 2022, a month before Dalilah was born.
“It makes you wonder: If he had access to holistic wraparound [services] when all this started, would he be in a different boat?
Ashley Pesek, foster mom
In Austin, Pesek saw a resilient boy trying to overcome misfortune and self-destruction to be a good father.
She also understood from her years as a social worker and foster parent that even a loving family like hers could not provide all the nurturing and supervision boys like Austin need.
“These children need a level of support that is so intense,” Pesek said. “We are asking them to overcome things in their life with almost no support except their parents, if they have parents.”
In 2021 and 2022, Austin participated in a program funded by the Maine Department of Corrections called the Youth Advocate Program, which helped him turn a passion for sneakers into an online resale business, in what became a high point of his time in the juvenile justice system.
The mentorship-style program has a national reputation for reducing juvenile recidivism, but its recent implementation in Maine has suffered from staffing issues and long waitlists, according to interviews with lawyers, Long Creek volunteers and Pesek. Austin’s first mentor left soon after he started, so the program’s former supervisor worked with him despite living nearly four hours away in Aroostook County, Austin and Pesek said.
Pesek said she couldn’t underscore enough the importance of programs that offer kids safe people to spend time with who aren’t treatment providers or parents, whose job isn’t to tell them what to do but advocate for what they want. But programs like that should be one piece of a multi-pronged support system for kids like Austin, she said.
Mentorship, supervision, treatment — “a good system needs all those components,” Pesek said, to realize the goal of community-based juvenile corrections. But it was hard, if not almost impossible at times, to get just one.
“It makes you wonder: If he had access to holistic wraparound [services] when all this started, would he be in a different boat? Probably. It’s likely. There are positive outcomes from those things,” she said.
At Pesek’s, Austin finally had a place he didn’t want to run from — but only for so long. For a while, he went to school, worked at Dunkin and on a lobster boat, and even attended a judicial conference where he spoke to judges — including the judge whose truck he stole years earlier — about his experience in the child welfare system.
But in June 2023, Austin drove from Sedgwick to Bangor in a manic, drunken fit. He crashed his car, stole a taxi while fleeing police, and ultimately spent more than two weeks at Long Creek for headbutting a police officer at an emergency department in Bangor, he said. (He said the officer had made a disparaging comment about his mother.)
When he got home from Long Creek, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Pesek said. In an interview a few weeks later, right around his 17th birthday, he said he felt determined to move past that summer’s setback and hoped medication would subdue more out-of-control feelings. He resolved to spend his final year as a teenager holding on to what he had — his job, his sneaker business, his home and his daughter.
But he couldn’t.
Austin went off his medications and relapsed in late 2023. He moved out of Pesek’s house, returned to selling drugs and lost custody of his daughter, unable to meet her needs due to his drug use, Pesek said. Austin overdosed three times last winter and spring, he said — once in a dumpster behind the Bangor Public Library after swallowing drugs while hiding from a police officer.
He became so afraid of his inability to stop his self-destructive behavior that he asked his juvenile community corrections officer, similar to a probation officer in the adult criminal justice system, to send him to Long Creek. He was technically in violation of his juvenile probation for leaving Pesek’s and using drugs, he and Pesek said, but the officer worried that detaining him would trigger an underlying, two-week prison sentence, ending the oversight that came with probation.
“I feel like I was stuck in survival mode for so long.”
Austin
But what good was corrections supervision without any meaningful help or consequences? Pesek said. She worried all spring about getting a call that Austin had fatally overdosed. At least he would be unlikely to hurt himself or someone else at Long Creek, she said.
It ultimately took Austin’s June arrest for threatening someone with a gun for an intervention to come. Initially, law enforcement tried to avoid detaining him in Long Creek by having him live with his mother in Brewer, but she refused, his mother said. How was she supposed to supervise her out-of-control son while she worked full-time and when he apparently carried a gun? she said.
Austin said carrying a gun was a safety precaution while selling drugs. He also couldn’t go back to Pesek’s because her foster care license prohibited it after he jeopardized the safety of his daughter.
Ashley Pesek of Sedgwick, who was Austin’s foster mom for two-and-a-half years, walks into one of the bedrooms in her home.
Ashley Pesek of Sedgwick, who was Austin’s foster mom for two-and-a-half years, walks into one of the bedrooms in her home. Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN
Austin had never seen Long Creek in worse shape, he said. He spent most of his days locked in his cell because the prison was so understaffed. In its lawsuit against the state, the federal government called Long Creek a “de facto psychiatric facility” due to the high number of youth there with behavioral health disorders. It criticized the prison’s conditions as an inappropriate place to treat such a population.
Austin did, however, feel calmer when he was released to his grandparents after two weeks, he said.
His mother did not.
She didn’t think the juvenile system had prepared Austin to turn 18 in a few months, she said in an interview, when he would face harsher consequences in the adult criminal justice system for breaking the law.
The way she saw it, the juvenile system either gave him nothing, or put him “where he was getting hit and abused and locked down,” she said.
“There is no middle ground.”
Not long after he got out of Long Creek in June, Austin relapsed, stopped taking his bipolar medication, and spent a few sleepless weeks using again. He didn’t unravel quite as badly as in the winter, however, and eventually checked himself into a hospital. He began taking a monthly injectable version of his medication designed to prevent future interruptions, he said.
By August he found his way back to his mother’s apartment in Brewer where she’d been rebuilding her life since getting out of prison. Now he was living with her for the first extended period of time since he was 12. He was about to start a job at a bakery where she worked as a supervisor.
The day before his 18th birthday, Austin tried to block the prospect of adulthood. He was becoming an adult, he said, without having had a real childhood. But he felt hopeful when he woke up the morning of Aug. 29, as if he was entering a fresh, new chapter.
“I feel like I was stuck in survival mode for so long,” he said that afternoon. “I’m at a place now where I feel more comfortable with myself, more relaxed. I’ve never really felt like that before.”
That morning, his mother drove him to Ellsworth for a supervised visit with Dalilah, a weekly requirement for regaining custody. When they returned around lunchtime, he fell into an unexpected sleep.
Around 3 p.m., the doorbell of his mother’s apartment rang, and he answered the door and his cell phone at the same time.
“Hey, I just got it,” he said, taking inside a brown paper bag that had been delivered.
His older brother had sent him a PlayStation for his birthday. Tommy lived across town in Bangor and still kept as a pet the bearded dragon, Lizzie, that they had had as kids in Medway.
“Thank you. I love you,” Austin said into the phone.
He took apart the packaging before disappearing into his mother’s room to put it together.
Reporter Callie Ferguson may be reached at [email protected].
