Speaker 1: Camp Hell. Anawaki is a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: The views and opinions expressing this podcast are solely those
Speaker 1: of the author and participants and do not necessarily represent
Speaker 1: those of I Heart Media or its employees. Due to
Speaker 1: discussion of traumatic, sexual and violent content, listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 1: In the outskirts of Atlanta, just twenty miles west is
Speaker 1: the town of Douglasville. It is here that lies what
Speaker 1: was once the largest medical facility in the state of Georgia,
Speaker 1: and all but forgotten organization that you've probably never heard of,
Speaker 1: the Anaweki Treatment Center for emotionally disturbed Youth. At its core,
Speaker 1: it was meant to help children with emotional behavior issues.
Speaker 1: He says, he enjoys it. They've got a football team
Speaker 1: and they sponsored. He says. A counseling helps him a lot.
Speaker 1: He is making almost all a he's now. He's very
Speaker 1: productive in school, very productive at home. It helped our
Speaker 1: whole family pretty much brought us all back together. For
Speaker 1: some this is a place where they grew up and
Speaker 1: learned how to work and live off of the land.
Speaker 1: It taught me a lot for the future. It taught
Speaker 1: me a lot. I think you learned responsibilit Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think you learned how to be an adult. For others,
Speaker 1: it represents some of the darkest times of their lives.
Speaker 1: I still when I drive Interstate twenty and I get
Speaker 1: around Chapel Hill Road or Highway five or ninety two
Speaker 1: or anything there, my anxiety still goes up. This organization
Speaker 1: would help its founder, Lewis Petter, become one of the
Speaker 1: most wealthy and powerful people in the region, with a
Speaker 1: reach that would go far beyond the state of Georgia.
Speaker 1: If you've got the church, and you've got the bureaucrats,
Speaker 1: and you've got the cops, you know, you can pretty
Speaker 1: much get things done for decades. This facility would exploit
Speaker 1: its patients, literally building its massive infrastructure off its patients
Speaker 1: backs and leaving a trail of shattered lives behind. It
Speaker 1: was kind of like a kind of like an outdoor
Speaker 1: summer camp where you would, you know, live in some
Speaker 1: cabins and uh, you know, do outdoor things and tike
Speaker 1: and go through the woods and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: That's really how it is explained. They always seemed to
Speaker 1: leave out the building of the buildings and the slave
Speaker 1: labor board as they called it. Vocational therapy. They would
Speaker 1: have us bend over and they would put a bag
Speaker 1: of cement on our back, which weighed four pounds, and
Speaker 1: we were to hold that position and carry that bag
Speaker 1: bent over up a mountain in order to make the
Speaker 1: footings for the cabins. I would just like to know
Speaker 1: why we had to go through what we went through,
Speaker 1: why everything was so covered up, Why I was lied to,
Speaker 1: why I was cheated. Those are questions that still pop
Speaker 1: up in my head all the time. Annawaki was able
Speaker 1: to expand continuously over two decades, all the while funneling
Speaker 1: millions of dollars to the upper management of its organization.
Speaker 1: This can only be attributed to its many ties to
Speaker 1: people in power, some of which would extend all the
Speaker 1: way to the White House. He was a player who's
Speaker 1: a political player, and he'd made sure that he maintained
Speaker 1: those kinds of contacts that would benefit him later. You
Speaker 1: would see the names of the board members and there
Speaker 1: was a lot of ex Georgia State politicians. He said, well,
Speaker 1: I don't think you realize how powerful Petter is. A
Speaker 1: lot of powerful people were involved with kind Awaking. What
Speaker 1: you are about to hear is a largely unknown and
Speaker 1: dark chapter in Georgia's history, one in which thousands of
Speaker 1: children experienced and many never recovered from. This is a
Speaker 1: story a systemic abuse in the most literal sense, with
Speaker 1: an empire, real estate built upon the backs of its patients,
Speaker 1: and a system that, instead of helping children, exposed them
Speaker 1: to some of the worst horrors imaginable. Before Jeffrey Epstein,
Speaker 1: there was Lewis Petter and the network of people that
Speaker 1: allowed his exploitive actions. This is the story of an
Speaker 1: awaking I'm gonna passed several weeks. We have received number
Speaker 1: of very serious allegations concerning both the facility out there
Speaker 1: in a number of individuals involved with him. It was
Speaker 1: just a form of their therapy. They were told to
Speaker 1: do it, and at the time he was fourteen and
Speaker 1: a half fifteen years old, they didn't know any better.
Speaker 1: I asked him, why are you letting this happen? Why
Speaker 1: are you covering up for Louis Batter. He had no
Speaker 1: answer to that question. Involved having a insitution paid its
Speaker 1: little could be that shock destrick place and did do
Speaker 1: absolutely the contrary of what they should have done. I'm
Speaker 1: disturbable the fact of something I can still going on
Speaker 1: it Ana Wicky. I'm Josh Stein and this is camp
Speaker 1: Hell in Awaki. I've often been asked while conducting interviews
Speaker 1: for this podcast, how did you find out about in Awaki?
Speaker 1: My name is Josh Stein. I'm in podcast producer. Much
Speaker 1: of what I work on are many true crime documentary
Speaker 1: style podcasts, some of which you may have heard. In
Speaker 1: the summer of two nineteen, I was on a vacation
Speaker 1: for my wife's birthday, visiting Disney World and staying in
Speaker 1: neighboring Clearwater, Florida. During one of our drives, my wife's
Speaker 1: friend Julia, knowing I had been working in true crime lately,
Speaker 1: suggested something I'll never forget. You should do a podcast
Speaker 1: on Anawaki. Anawaki? What does that even mean? What language
Speaker 1: is it? Initially I found very little regarding an Awaki.
Speaker 1: There is currently only a two paragraph article on the
Speaker 1: Wikipedia page for it. I continued digging and eventually found
Speaker 1: a rabbit hole of information, one that will continue to
Speaker 1: surprise me with the depths of its scandal and those involved.
Speaker 1: So how is my friend aware of this seemingly forgotten
Speaker 1: dar piece of history. Well, it starts with the story
Speaker 1: of a donkey George was quite a character. He lived
Speaker 1: with my parents on the horse farm that we had
Speaker 1: in Douglas County. He was a very interesting donkey. This
Speaker 1: is Julia's friend, Georgia. She's a close family friend and
Speaker 1: has known Julia mostly all her life. I grew up
Speaker 1: in Douglasville. Moved to Douglasville when I was approximately six
Speaker 1: years old with my parents from Tennessee, and grew up
Speaker 1: there my whole life. I'm from Douglasville all the way
Speaker 1: through in n one when we moved there, I twenty
Speaker 1: westbound ended at Highway five in Douglasville. It did not
Speaker 1: go any farther than that. It was kind of a sleepy,
Speaker 1: sleepy little town and you know, close enough to Atlanta,
Speaker 1: but get far enough. White, kind of a little bedroom community.
Speaker 1: I guess that's George's mother. I'm Pat Kirkland. I currently
Speaker 1: live in Grace and Georgia. When Georgia was a child,
Speaker 1: the Kirklands adopted a donkey from Anna Waki. He came
Speaker 1: to be a bit of a local celebrity. He did
Speaker 1: palm Sunday at Sacred Heart Church. The Sacred Heart Church
Speaker 1: is a massive Catholic church in Atlanta, it's towering steeple
Speaker 1: can be seen off of alter. Boys would lead him
Speaker 1: around and palm leaves on his back. After the first year,
Speaker 1: it went over so big. I mean, the media was
Speaker 1: there and everything. I mean, George was on TV on
Speaker 1: the evening news, on Palm Sunday services for a long
Speaker 1: long time. There was one Sunday he got loose and
Speaker 1: he's running down Peachtree Street and I guess the news
Speaker 1: did an article on it, and you know, loose donkey
Speaker 1: in the street. He was a character who he definitely was.
Speaker 1: How a donkey would come to be involved in this
Speaker 1: story was a mystery to me. Georgia explain means. My
Speaker 1: father was an Atlanta police officer for the mount of
Speaker 1: Patrol and he had a good friend named Tony Morris,
Speaker 1: who was a priest at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. Tony
Speaker 1: used to visit the boys home to basically talk to
Speaker 1: the boys see how things were going with them, and
Speaker 1: while he was there, he noticed some abuse to this
Speaker 1: little donkey that they had. So he came back to
Speaker 1: my father and he said, I think that the church
Speaker 1: might need a donkey. And my father said, Okay, where
Speaker 1: are you going to keep it? And he said, look,
Speaker 1: where's at your place? So long story short, George the
Speaker 1: donkey came to live with us, and he came from
Speaker 1: the Annawiki Boys Home. Georgia was still just a child
Speaker 1: while all of this was happening. She remembers seeing George
Speaker 1: for the first time. He said, they don't have a
Speaker 1: place for him anymore, so we're going to keep him
Speaker 1: here at our place. And I thought it was cool, thought, oh, great,
Speaker 1: you know, a little donkey's gonna be so cute and stuff.
Speaker 1: And then when they unloading him from the trailer, I
Speaker 1: remember seeing his ears and I said, Dad, what's wrong
Speaker 1: with his ears? Why aren't they so burnt? Well? I mean, what,
Speaker 1: what are all those marks on him? And why is
Speaker 1: he so skittish? And he's so well, that's that's a
Speaker 1: story for another day. He had been abused, He had
Speaker 1: cigarette burns on him, He had been sexually abused. I
Speaker 1: didn't understand it at the time. This was in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight. He went through a lot while he was there,
Speaker 1: so I can understand why he was like he was
Speaker 1: poor George. Oh, poor George had cigarette burns in his ears,
Speaker 1: on his back. It was very, very apparent that that
Speaker 1: animal had been abused. I mean, I just can't even
Speaker 1: amad Witchen, even with her parents trying to protect her
Speaker 1: from what they knew was about situation. Georgia remembers how
Speaker 1: she viewed an awake as a child, especially in the summertimes.
Speaker 1: I was home with my sister and we would just
Speaker 1: get on our horses. It was our way of entertainment,
Speaker 1: and we would get out and stay gone all day,
Speaker 1: and we would go past an awake, you know, riding
Speaker 1: up but it was less than, you know, maybe five
Speaker 1: miles from where we lived. I didn't even want to
Speaker 1: ride the horse past there because it almost seemed like
Speaker 1: just a cold dungeon. It seemed almost Pollyanna, everything's happy
Speaker 1: on the outside, but it seemed to me on the
Speaker 1: inside it was there was a lot of darkness in there.
Speaker 1: I heard rumors that the boys were being abused sexually, physically,
Speaker 1: and to hear. Even at my young age at the time,
Speaker 1: and I was probably the age of some of the
Speaker 1: boys there, I just remember feeling a lot of sadness
Speaker 1: for them. People were pretty quiet about it. As the
Speaker 1: years progressed, it it came out more and more. There
Speaker 1: was just you know a lot of talk about it,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't good. And I've heard this said many
Speaker 1: many times. Those poor boys are much worse off there
Speaker 1: than they would have been had they, you know, state
Speaker 1: in the situation that they were in. It was a
Speaker 1: place where they could be abused physically, sexually, mentally abused,
Speaker 1: and nobody said anything about it. You know, nobody really
Speaker 1: cared who is in charge of this place that would
Speaker 1: let something like that go on? And I heard that
Speaker 1: more than once. I mean, I don't know why wasn't
Speaker 1: the law involved in it. I think that there was
Speaker 1: a lot of money in that place, and I think
Speaker 1: people just didn't want to rock the boat. I remember thinking, Wow,
Speaker 1: how sad that must be for these people that ended
Speaker 1: up there. They're there with people that should care about
Speaker 1: them and care about their well being. It was almost
Speaker 1: if you were there, you never came out, or if
Speaker 1: you came out, they came out a different person. And
Speaker 1: then it started to all make sense why this little
Speaker 1: donkey was how he was, and that story for another
Speaker 1: time that my father talked about, it all started to
Speaker 1: make sense. I began to understand maybe it was offset
Speaker 1: or displaced aggression that they took out on this little donkey.
Speaker 1: I do believe animals remember, they remember good times, they
Speaker 1: remember pain. It's my opinion that those boys were doing
Speaker 1: to George what had been done to them, or it
Speaker 1: was being done to them. And if that's the case,
Speaker 1: that is awful. Makes me sick to my stomach. How
Speaker 1: many people's lives, not only the boys that were there,
Speaker 1: but the parents and everyone else. How many lives were
Speaker 1: totally destroyed because of that. My thought when I closed
Speaker 1: my eyes and everything is that I see that poor animal.
Speaker 1: That that's what I see. And yes, human life is
Speaker 1: certainly much more worthy than animal life is. But you know,
Speaker 1: if it had that kind of effect on an animal,
Speaker 1: what kind of effect did it have on those children?
Speaker 1: You know, an animal is a living, breathing being that
Speaker 1: was created by God, just like I was. And if
Speaker 1: he could remember those things that stayed with those boys
Speaker 1: all of their life. Even some of them may not
Speaker 1: even still be living now, but if they are, I
Speaker 1: can assure you that that still has an impact on
Speaker 1: their life, their relationship with others and trust issues. You
Speaker 1: can't ever erase that. How can you look yourself in
Speaker 1: the mirror know and that you had a part of
Speaker 1: that that you had a part of destroying and I'm
Speaker 1: talking about totally destroying another human being. How can you
Speaker 1: look yourself in the mirror. I don't get it. And
Speaker 1: after hearing George's story, I had to find out more
Speaker 1: about in Awaki. I started coming through newspaper articles from
Speaker 1: through the nineties and couldn't believe how many stories there were.
Speaker 1: It seemed at one point that Anna Waki was in
Speaker 1: the paper almost every day. I kept finding the same
Speaker 1: name covering this story. I'm Albert Auchen. I am a
Speaker 1: producer now for CBS News in Washington. I was a
Speaker 1: newspaper reporter for about fifteen years and began in my
Speaker 1: hometown of Savannah, Georgia, went to Richmond, and finally to Tallahassee, Florida.
Speaker 1: And from Tallahassee, after doing a lot of stories about
Speaker 1: the Annawaki situation, I was hired as a consultant for
Speaker 1: sixty minutes. Annawaki would come to be the story that
Speaker 1: launched Albert's career into the mainstream. It was the main
Speaker 1: focus of my journalism from late nine until mid n
Speaker 1: It was the main story I was working on. There
Speaker 1: were weeks and weeks where it was all I did.
Speaker 1: I would spend a lot of overtime. I lived near
Speaker 1: the newspaper and was back and forth, you know, at night,
Speaker 1: keeping up with things. And of course I had to
Speaker 1: pick up the Atlanta paper every day and see what
Speaker 1: they had, and that could change my agenda for the day.
Speaker 1: So it was a lot of time. Originally, the story
Speaker 1: involved a small investigation that was taking place in Carabelle,
Speaker 1: Florida at the time, one of three locations in a
Speaker 1: week he would come to have. It would soon take
Speaker 1: on a life of its own and become a bigger
Speaker 1: story than they ever expected. We had a stringer, a
Speaker 1: part timer who was covering Franklin County, anything that went
Speaker 1: on in Franklin County, which is in the circulation area
Speaker 1: of Tallahassee. It's west of Tallahassee in the Panhandle of Florida.
Speaker 1: And he was a part timer and a very good journalist,
Speaker 1: and he came across the story first and did a
Speaker 1: few pieces about the situation in Carrabelle, Florida. And then
Speaker 1: we began watching that just curiously in the newsroom, and
Speaker 1: it was exploding at the same time up in the
Speaker 1: Atlanta papers. So we learned about the Douglasville Facility, and
Speaker 1: at a certain point the story grew enough where the
Speaker 1: managing editor asked me to keep an eye on it
Speaker 1: and to start doing the fundamental reporting because he wanted
Speaker 1: a regular staff never doing it. It became a bigger
Speaker 1: story for us than just an occasional piece from the stringer.
Speaker 1: But after a while it became important to understand how
Speaker 1: the system was being manipulated. So in order to understand that,
Speaker 1: we needed to understand more about what the system was.
Speaker 1: It's important here to note how in Awake he was
Speaker 1: perceived by many of the parents who sent their children there.
Speaker 1: Learning disabilities like a d h D and others are
Speaker 1: now well known ailments with understood treatments of how to
Speaker 1: deal with them. However, in the nineties sixties, parents and
Speaker 1: teachers alike were in the dark on how to address
Speaker 1: these issues. Enter and Awaki. It is a place where
Speaker 1: the upper middle class of Atlanta sends their troubled kids. Initially,
Speaker 1: it was supposed to be the kinds of children that
Speaker 1: went there were very, very troubled people who had severe
Speaker 1: debilitating not necessarily mental illness in the sense of you know,
Speaker 1: severe pathologies, severe psychological problems that could be diagnosed medically,
Speaker 1: but emotional issues which caused behavioral problems, and the behavioral
Speaker 1: problems that they were dealing with were the kinds of
Speaker 1: things that in those days in the sixties, conventional institutions
Speaker 1: like schools and churches were not capable of dealing with.
Speaker 1: When the place was established in the early sixties, they
Speaker 1: may have only been taking very troubled kids, but it
Speaker 1: seemed to me that by the time I knew anything
Speaker 1: about it, that it had partly devolved into this place
Speaker 1: where if you had a kid who was obstreprous and
Speaker 1: you were financially in good shape, you could send kids
Speaker 1: there and they would take care of them for you.
Speaker 1: The Aniwaki program was based on what is called wilderness therapy.
Speaker 1: Since the nineteen forties, wilderness therapy has proven to be
Speaker 1: truly helpful, with many programs still practicing it today and
Speaker 1: Awake he managed to take that and twisted into something
Speaker 1: that would allow counselors and others to run wild with abuse.
Speaker 1: Fundamental idea behind it was not unlike the fundamental idea
Speaker 1: behind the Marine Corps. You take somebody, in this case
Speaker 1: troubled children, and for lack of a better term, you
Speaker 1: break them down. The goal is to make them, in
Speaker 1: this case, self reliant. It's not like the Marines. It's
Speaker 1: not to make them do what you tell them to do.
Speaker 1: It's to make them learn to do what they think
Speaker 1: they should be doing, to learn a set of values
Speaker 1: and to learn a way to be self reliant. It
Speaker 1: was innovative, but it was also subject for severe abuse.
Speaker 1: At the top of the hierarchy was Lewis Petter, or
Speaker 1: Doc Petter as he was known, the founder and president
Speaker 1: of an Awake. Not a doctor in any actual degree,
Speaker 1: he and his family would rule over an Awake and
Speaker 1: its profits, taking whatever they wanted along the way. He
Speaker 1: had innovative thoughts about child treatment and that was revolutionary
Speaker 1: in Georgia. That was very, very commendable and got him
Speaker 1: a lot of attention and a lot of respect. But
Speaker 1: he had his own personal troubles in his own fundamental
Speaker 1: corruption that went across the whole myriad of things. To
Speaker 1: truly understand and Awake, I had to go back to
Speaker 1: the beginning to see how this treatment center devolved into
Speaker 1: what it became. The land of the friendly People. That
Speaker 1: is said to be what the word and awake he
Speaker 1: means in Cherokee, one of many Native American names which
Speaker 1: would be used on its grounds. The irony is not lost.
Speaker 1: The beginning of the Nawaki School for Troubled Boys is
Speaker 1: a mysterious one. What we do know is that a
Speaker 1: plot of land was bought in nineteen sixty two by
Speaker 1: Lewis Petter and his wife Mabel, along with a co
Speaker 1: worker from Petter's Jason Savannah, Georgia, named Brett Baxley or
Speaker 1: Mr B. I spoke with one of the very first
Speaker 1: patients who attended. Hey, I'm Dale Strickland. I grew up
Speaker 1: here in Atlanta, been here since I was knee how
Speaker 1: to goat? Grew up here a seminar euclid. Haven't you hear?
Speaker 1: A little? Five points? And raising raised myself over on Cleveland?
Speaker 1: Have you after that? And then went on out into
Speaker 1: the world and started digging in. Every patient who attended
Speaker 1: an awake was given a number upon entry. This was
Speaker 1: referred to as their laundry number, as it was written
Speaker 1: on every piece of clothing or personal item they owned.
Speaker 1: These numbers were given chronologically, corresponding to when the patient
Speaker 1: attended an awake. Over the course of this podcast, I
Speaker 1: spoke with people who had numbers in the fifties into
Speaker 1: the thousands. My number was seventy four. One of the
Speaker 1: first times to years I was in the testing phase
Speaker 1: the years in an awaken. I'm a little bit fuzzy
Speaker 1: on sometime back in the early sixties, I was young.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna stay around twic over thirteen somewhere, maybe eleven.
Speaker 1: You know, it was before I started high school. I
Speaker 1: know that because I started high school while I was there.
Speaker 1: Dale says he, like many other survivors of an Awaki,
Speaker 1: was sent for acting up in school arts Ley, in
Speaker 1: part to his A d h D. Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: way out of control. I was never diagnosed with the
Speaker 1: A d D and a d h D because they
Speaker 1: didn't know anything about it at the time. When they
Speaker 1: did learn about it, I was long out of an Awaki,
Speaker 1: but I went there for a d D and a
Speaker 1: d h D. A lot a lot of lines, stealing,
Speaker 1: you know, talking back and getting in a lot of
Speaker 1: trouble and just you know, pretty much normal kids stuff.
Speaker 1: But you know, hearing it too extremes, mostly because of
Speaker 1: my A d D and D. Dale remembers first meeting
Speaker 1: Louis Petder before attending in Awaki. At this point in time,
Speaker 1: pet Or did not yet have an office on campus
Speaker 1: and was using a professional building in downtown Atlanta to
Speaker 1: conduct his business. We were taking down to the King
Speaker 1: Professional Building. I was and my parents walked in Dr
Speaker 1: Petter's office and I was allowed to meet Dr Petter
Speaker 1: and he, you know, shook hands with me, and we
Speaker 1: talked for a long time there, and then my parents
Speaker 1: left the room, and then I spoke with Doc by myself.
Speaker 1: And after that, and I would say about three months later,
Speaker 1: I was in an Awaken. When first entering in Awaki,
Speaker 1: residents were cut off from any contact with their family. Well,
Speaker 1: you first have to go out there, and you've got
Speaker 1: three months that you can't visit with your parents anything.
Speaker 1: I said, that's probably about the worst part of it,
Speaker 1: you know, waiting those three months. You're trying to adjust,
Speaker 1: you know, and and get everything together. I mean you
Speaker 1: can write letters and stuff and and send them mail
Speaker 1: on everything, but you weren't allowed to view them for
Speaker 1: ninety days. Being one of the first attendees of an Awaki,
Speaker 1: Dell was the first to be subjected to what was
Speaker 1: referred to at the time as the quiet Room. This
Speaker 1: room would serve as the equivalent of solitary confinement, and
Speaker 1: would go on to be an essential part of the
Speaker 1: entry process to anawaki. This would later be called and
Speaker 1: oh or evaluation and observation. I'm the only one that
Speaker 1: went there at this time. I was the only one
Speaker 1: in there. I had gotten a fight with somebody, can't
Speaker 1: remember who it was, and they just snatched my butt
Speaker 1: up and put me in what we called the quiet room.
Speaker 1: It was a stainless steel mesh with hard edges around it,
Speaker 1: like a channel line, you know. And I was in there,
Speaker 1: I want to say, for maybe about three or four week.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, like a month. I really have nobody to
Speaker 1: talk to you about yourself. Nobody come by and visit you.
Speaker 1: They're bringing your food when it's time to have that now.
Speaker 1: And other than that, that was it like a regular
Speaker 1: jail cell. It was solite confoment. I got my first
Speaker 1: taste at thirteen. Yeah. Dale remembers what the day to
Speaker 1: day schedule was like for the first patience of an awake.
Speaker 1: You start out in the morning and you get up
Speaker 1: and you had to bake your beds up. Okay, you're
Speaker 1: responsible for waking yourself up, and then somebody run around
Speaker 1: the campit and say all right, let's go, come on
Speaker 1: when I got five minutes. If you don't get up
Speaker 1: like you're supposed to, the first place you go to
Speaker 1: is the reality Partner. That's for you buddies. I'll pick
Speaker 1: you up on your blanket and walk you down to
Speaker 1: the creek and didn't chuck you. But an't it. That's
Speaker 1: called the reality part Okay, one time that happened to me.
Speaker 1: That's only one time. Everybody would all meet down by
Speaker 1: the Reality upon it and then we leave from there
Speaker 1: and you walk around the lake and go over to
Speaker 1: the lodge and you would sit out there. Your group
Speaker 1: goes in and certain time, and then after you have
Speaker 1: your meal, you'd come back out and you would go
Speaker 1: down by the toolship, which is the ways down. And
Speaker 1: when you get down by the toolshed, you stop down
Speaker 1: there and you check out the tools that you plan
Speaker 1: to work on whatever project for that day, and you
Speaker 1: check them out, and you've been go overy and go
Speaker 1: to work. If it was cutting down a tree, you
Speaker 1: cut down a tree. If it was putting moaning up
Speaker 1: in the cabin, you was put moaning up in a cabin.
Speaker 1: Whatever project deemed necessary, to be done that week is
Speaker 1: what she was working on. It's hard to imagine groups
Speaker 1: of children no older than ten or eleven being able
Speaker 1: to handle some of the work which Dale describes. This
Speaker 1: would be hard physical labor for a grown man, much
Speaker 1: less an untrained child. One common thing I would continue
Speaker 1: to see in my interviews is the long term effects
Speaker 1: this work would have on the bodies of the survivors.
Speaker 1: We does a porter potty. We've cut down trees and
Speaker 1: split logs and shaved them all down where they were
Speaker 1: smoothed enough to sit on. We put moating up in
Speaker 1: the cabins. We fixed wiring in the cabins then and
Speaker 1: people were put up their pants or build a frame
Speaker 1: cabins over there, and build a buildings and once the
Speaker 1: block was up, we're going in, said all the trust is,
Speaker 1: and run the roof out on it and everything. And
Speaker 1: then we did all of it. I learned the first
Speaker 1: patients of an Awaki were actually helping build the campus
Speaker 1: for the place which they were supposed to be attending,
Speaker 1: including Doc's office, clear up to the time that that
Speaker 1: we built the a building out there on the campus,
Speaker 1: and then that's when he moved his office out there.
Speaker 1: And the layout for the building out there for him
Speaker 1: to be in was party laid out land that we
Speaker 1: just had to build it. This construction done by the
Speaker 1: early patients would become the inner structure from which all
Speaker 1: other in Awaki business would be done over the years.
Speaker 1: It would also serve as a template or how to
Speaker 1: further expand. In a week, He's reach, building the a
Speaker 1: building was one of the biggest things that we've done.
Speaker 1: Then they went and built the lodge. After that, the
Speaker 1: new lodge and some more campuses got built. Everything was
Speaker 1: still the same. You're still owning, you're still putting stuff up.
Speaker 1: When you got through, you could go, man, did you
Speaker 1: see that? You know? We did. Look what we did,
Speaker 1: you know, and we were proud to show it off,
Speaker 1: you know, just like any normal person would be proud.
Speaker 1: I asked Dale if he considers the work he was
Speaker 1: doing at such a young age as a form of
Speaker 1: child labor. No, because we were we were learning to
Speaker 1: be responsible on adults. It taught me a lot for
Speaker 1: the future. It taught me a lot. We learned how
Speaker 1: to do stuff, We learned how to be the better
Speaker 1: or the best. I guess by knowing before we even
Speaker 1: got to the project. You know, we knew what to do,
Speaker 1: what tools to use, uh, how to get it done,
Speaker 1: what you could and couldn't do. I think you learned responsibility.
Speaker 1: I think you learned how to be an adult. We
Speaker 1: built that awaking. We were proud of what we've done.
Speaker 1: You know, not only was an awake he getting their
Speaker 1: labor for free from its patients, it also came at
Speaker 1: a cost to the parents involved. Even in the seventies,
Speaker 1: this was not cheap, and it only became more expensive.
Speaker 1: My mother sold her three bedroom too bad at home
Speaker 1: my granddaddy Belcher up at Lately and Near and bade
Speaker 1: him over ninety thousand dollars. That's back in the seventies,
Speaker 1: so that's a lot of money. She shouldn't have lost
Speaker 1: that on me then, but she'd made it. Dale remembers
Speaker 1: Lewis Petter, the founder van Awak, fondly. The guy was very,
Speaker 1: very likable, very likable. You know, I didn't think I
Speaker 1: had to throw an old you know, I how you
Speaker 1: throw you all night defenses up. Never like I had
Speaker 1: to do that. You know, I didn't never feel like
Speaker 1: I had to protect myself or hide anything from him.
Speaker 1: And he just pointed looking at you and asked you
Speaker 1: a question, and you just answered it. I felt very comfortable.
Speaker 1: Roundy Dale stands by his statement that he was never
Speaker 1: abused while at in awake and never saw any abuse happen.
Speaker 1: For him, it was a learning experience that he feels
Speaker 1: helped him in life. I asked him if he thought
Speaker 1: there could have been an inappropriate behavior, even if he
Speaker 1: himself did not see it. You know, you have to
Speaker 1: ask the question, okay, because these young guys would would
Speaker 1: go on the weekends to spend the night with dock
Speaker 1: docks house or whatever. Nobody ever really claimed him to
Speaker 1: be homosexual things, but it was thought of that way
Speaker 1: by a couple of people. But the ones that went
Speaker 1: were all very perfectly willing to go. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: it's not possible. I'm not even saying it's It's problem
Speaker 1: was that we don't know, because we really wasn't there.
Speaker 1: Dale claims that any time something inappropriate happened, it was
Speaker 1: dealt with swiftly. In his time, it an'tawaki deal were calls.
Speaker 1: One counselor that was removed from the staff. He's his
Speaker 1: name is George Lemmo. He lived down here somewhere I
Speaker 1: don't know where now, but by now he's got to
Speaker 1: be Will in his seventies or eighties is kind of
Speaker 1: be he just hitting up on time to get him
Speaker 1: to play with him at all, you know, And any
Speaker 1: time that was brought up, all we know is that
Speaker 1: come on missing the next day. It's just it's yeah,
Speaker 1: it's disgusting. It shouldn't be going on. Deal was a
Speaker 1: young child during his time at an Awaki, and his
Speaker 1: experiences stayed with him his whole life. When the inn
Speaker 1: Awaki scandal would later come to light, Deal visited Doc
Speaker 1: himself to see if he believed Petter could be capable
Speaker 1: of what he had heard. I know it's hard for
Speaker 1: people to understand, but when you find somebody good in
Speaker 1: your life that you feel like I did something for
Speaker 1: you in your life, you're gonna protect him at all cost.
Speaker 1: It's what you do. I wanted to know the truth,
Speaker 1: and I could look at him when he told me,
Speaker 1: and he knew I knew it. So walked up to him,
Speaker 1: hugged his neck and hug Mabel's neck and say, I'm
Speaker 1: the kitchen with him, and they started explaining to him,
Speaker 1: and I said, you know what, it don't matter to me.
Speaker 1: What you say. My time for you were this, okay,
Speaker 1: you're two of the most special people in my life
Speaker 1: ever had being and what other people say, don't make
Speaker 1: this ship to me and it didn't, you know, as
Speaker 1: you want to happen. That's what he's gonna say. He
Speaker 1: didn't do it, and that's where it's at. He said
Speaker 1: he didn't do it. He must not have done it.
Speaker 1: But once again, I'll read the bullshit real well, believed in. No. Now,
Speaker 1: I can't talk like that. That'd be bad. Dale's story
Speaker 1: is one of many I've heard in the past year
Speaker 1: regarding people's experience at Aintawaki, each one different, many of
Speaker 1: them heartbreaking. When I first began looking into this story,
Speaker 1: I had no idea where it would take me. It
Speaker 1: seemed at each turn, when I thought I knew the
Speaker 1: whole story, another fact would emerge that would turn it
Speaker 1: on its head again. In the past year, I've interviewed
Speaker 1: dozens of an AWAKEI survivors, government and state officials who
Speaker 1: were involved, and even some former counselors. They all seem
Speaker 1: to have one thing in common, and that was that
Speaker 1: nobody truly knew with the whole story. This season on
Speaker 1: Camp Hell in a week, Think and awake he and
Speaker 1: you see Dr Lewis Petta. Dr Petta, who's not a
Speaker 1: doctor and yet lorded over his youthful patients as though
Speaker 1: by a background in training he was properly prepared to
Speaker 1: help them. It was a big deal. Nothing happened at
Speaker 1: the sheriff's office. We went to the stage child Welfare program.
Speaker 1: They didn't want to hear it. We went to the newspaper,
Speaker 1: to the Atlanta Journal. We went to an attorney all
Speaker 1: by ourselves, and we went in and he didn't want
Speaker 1: any part of it. We tried everything we could. Department
Speaker 1: of Family and Children's Services actually placed boys in that camp,
Speaker 1: even though they knew about what he did in Savannah.
Speaker 1: I can't say that we dropped the ball, but I
Speaker 1: also can't tell you that we did not. If an
Speaker 1: agency does not report any reports that they might have
Speaker 1: of alleged child abuse, it is very difficult for us
Speaker 1: to pick that up. It's certainly the biggest case I
Speaker 1: was involved in, from how many people were affected and
Speaker 1: many people were hurt, how much time was involved, how
Speaker 1: much resources were involved. The g b I is also
Speaker 1: considering sending agents to Mexico, where Mr Petter owns property
Speaker 1: as it broadens its investigation into the Anawaki operation. This
Speaker 1: could be a good place, This could be a wonderful place,
Speaker 1: but it's not an awake he founder. Lewis Petter's bond
Speaker 1: has not been set at one million dollars. Mr Petter,
Speaker 1: do you have any comment about the charges against except
Speaker 1: that he's innocently Up until recently, charges a sexual misconduct
Speaker 1: had nothing leveled against the Aniwaki Facility for girls here
Speaker 1: in rock Mark. Now it too has come under fire
Speaker 1: with former female patients alleging they were victims of sexual abuse.
Speaker 1: Many of us are already deceased and we're only in
Speaker 1: our early to late diftease. And it hurts me real
Speaker 1: bad to hear people saying that my father cheated them.
Speaker 1: My father has cheated no one there dn't awake. You
Speaker 1: testify to that these like cons of things Louis Petter
Speaker 1: will do. Louis Petter cras islas to do go the
Speaker 1: tricks on people to try to help them. He thinks
Speaker 1: they're hurting him. And I spent three months in the
Speaker 1: hospital remember the name out of wicked and the months
Speaker 1: years to come. It may stand for a story, the
Speaker 1: tragic half of which has yet to be told. Camp
Speaker 1: how Anna Wake was created and hosted by Josh Thane,
Speaker 1: with producer Miranda Hawkins and executive producers Alex Williams and
Speaker 1: Matt Frederick. The soundtrack was written and performed by Josh
Speaker 1: Thane and Adrian Barry. Archival footage provided by ws B
Speaker 1: and CBS News. Find us on Instagram at camp hell Pod.
Speaker 1: That's c A M p h E L L p
Speaker 1: O D. Educate yourself about the issue of child abuse
Speaker 1: and things that you should look for at the Darkness
Speaker 1: to Light website D two l dot org. That's d
Speaker 1: the number two l dot org. Camp hell Ana Wake
Speaker 1: is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
Speaker 1: from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.