It was supposed to be a haven for troubled teens. They risked everything to escape 14%
By Brittany Hailer15% Ilica Mahajan15% The Marshall Project15%
7/30/2026, 9:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 34 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Appeal to Authority, and Anecdotal, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 23.4% saturation with 565 hits. Analysis detected 2,953 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,419 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 29.4% and a BS Rank of 14% (19,403 of 22,362 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 86.80% of the article peer group.
This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system.
Paitin Pahoundis jolted awake, a siren blaring in her ears.
Her friend Samantha Primeau was in her room.
It was time.
The other girls, Samantha told her, were gone.
They had jammed a sprinkler, triggering the fire alarm and filling the hallway outside with water.
Their escape plan was working.
But there was a problem: Paitin didn’t have shoes.
The checkered Vans and the white Jordans with the bright orange stripes that her father had bought her before he went to prison, the ones she meticulously kept in mint condition, had been taken by staff and locked in another room, along with the rest of her possessions.
She was on “no personals” status for not following the rules.
But, Paitin wanted out, and this was her chance.
As they walked out of the building and into a snowstorm, Paitin remembers a staff member standing in a doorway.
She looked at Paitin and said, “If you want to go, just go.”
Both teens said they dreamed of escaping the staff members who forcibly held them down hard enough to leave bruises, the blood in the hallways from kids cutting themselves, the girls strangling themselves with bedsheets, the adults who insisted no family wanted to adopt them and who looked through them like they were already gone.
On that January night in 2022, the girls careened down the hill below the Fox Run Center for Children and Adolescents, their pumping adrenaline temporarily masking the frigid Ohio air.
Not even Paitin’s soaking wet socks slipping off in the snow could deter her descent toward freedom.
Barefoot, Paitin crossed the highway that snakes along the back end of Fox Run’s grounds, dodging cars and climbing over medians.
As they considered going to a nearby hotel, things started to fall apart.
Electric pain ripped through Paitin’s frozen feet.
Samantha felt herself getting sleepy and slowed to a crawl, wishing she could pass out right there.
They had nowhere to go.
All they could do was turn back in failure.
At the top of the hill, police dragged Paitin into a squad car.
She pounded the window, screaming in agony.
Before she was hospitalized, Paitin recalls a staff member walking up and peering in.
“I bet you will never do that again, will you?”
She would, she told herself.
“I would rather be dead outside in the snow.”
Paitin and Samantha desperately wanted to escape what was supposed to be a therapeutic haven for kids with mental health and behavioral issues.
Instead, they found themselves confined for months — in Paitin’s case, years — inside an institution where they witnessed kids routinely attacking and sexually assaulting each other, anarchic riots by children pushed to the breaking point, and suicide attempts using makeshift weapons fashioned from scraps of metal or bedsheets, according to police and state records and numerous interviews.
They endured violence from some of the adults charged with their care, medically unnecessary sedative injections and long, painful periods of being physically held down by staff.
Many of those same episodes, some of which ended with children in handcuffs or ambulances, appear to be missing from the state’s own oversight records, according to an analysis by The Marshall Project.
This leaves parents, caseworkers, regulators, and the judges deciding where to place kids in foster care with an incomplete picture of what was happening behind the facility’s locked doors.
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As the number of youth prisons dwindles in a nationwide push for rehabilitation over punishment, the juvenile justice system continues to place kids in residential treatment facilities like Fox Run.
However, advocates say the facilities are “virtually indistinguishable from incarceration.”
Some, like one in Pennsylvania with a record of child abuse, have secured contracts to house migrant children amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Fox Run, one of Ohio’s largest youth residential treatment centers, is owned by Universal Health Services, a Pennsylvania-based Fortune 500 company.
It’s a privately operated, 100-bed facility housing boys and girls as young as 5 from as far away as Alaska.
Many of the youth are sent by their parents, foster care agencies, and juvenile courts.
County governments across Ohio have paid Fox Run millions of dollars to house children who have complex mental health or behavioral needs, according to county contracts.
Kids were sent to Fox Run following suicide attempts or fights while in foster care.
Others were placed by their parents at a doctor’s recommendation after a suicide attempt.
Some, like Paitin, who lived at the facility for three years, found themselves at Fox Run because no foster parent would take them.
To understand what was happening inside Fox Run, The Marshall Project reviewed hundreds of pages of police and state inspection reports between 2020 and 2025, obtained through public records requests, and interviewed seven women previously housed in the facility.
These records and interviews told stories of children desperate to escape, fleeing into cornfields, sprinting into traffic, and attempting to hitchhike.
Former Fox Run staff members said the youth turned violent inside the facility because they were pushed to their limit.
Many eventually ended up in juvenile detention as their behavior escalated.
They thought ending up behind bars, like facing the frozen woods, would be an improvement over Fox Run.
In a statement, Fox Run CEO Randy MacKendrick said the facility serves children with “complex behavioral health needs” and that incidents involving aggression, self-harm, suicide and attempts to leave the facility are “unfortunately not uncommon among this high-acuity population.”
“Fox Run cooperates with state regulators and other oversight agencies, investigates concerns, and implements corrective actions whenever warranted,” MacKendrick added.
“When concerns arise, they are reviewed promptly and, when appropriate, reported to the appropriate regulatory and law enforcement authorities.”
While officials from the Belmont County Sheriff’s Office diligently documented desperate attempts by children to get out of Fox Run, often through violence, many of those incidents were absent from a database maintained by the Department of Behavioral Health, the state agency charged with licensing and inspecting the facility.
The Ohio Department of Behavioral Health and Belmont County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Six months before her escape in the snow, Paitin ran away with her friend Isabella.
They were a part of a group of 10 girls, one of whom was hospitalized after she threatened to run into traffic.
They made it about 10 miles down the road to Wheeling, West Virginia.
Police picked them up after the pair contacted their parents, who turned them in.
The girls told Fox Run staff they’d hitchhiked with a local man who bought them clothes at Target and gave them money.
Isabella said the man had a brother who had been placed in Fox Run.
He understood their desire for freedom.
In bodycam footage obtained by The Marshall Project, an officer searching for the girls expresses his frustration on a phone call.
“That fucking place needs [to be] shut down.
I’m tired of it … I said this is ridiculous … Fucking shit hole,” the officer says.
“They’re just going to run again later,” he added, referring to the girls.
Several other adults connected to Fox Run shared the officer’s frustrations.
In interviews, five former Fox Run employees told The Marshall Project that children lived in a constant state of crisis.
One worker, Julie Lipscomb, was left with bruises, nerve damage from a bite wound and stress so severe she said her hair began falling out.
“That place could turn the nicest person into what they feel like is a monster,” she said.
Sydney Smith, who worked at Fox Run for about four months last year after graduating high school nearby, underwent training on physically restraining kids before stepping out on the floor at Fox Run.
But she said she wasn’t prepared for the reality of what she was asked to do.
“You were pinning children to the floor, usually one person on each arm and a person like laying perpendicular over their body,” Smith said.
“And then somebody holding their head where they couldn’t bite you.”
State inspectors cited Fox Run multiple times for its use of restraints, inspection records show.
One child under age 9 was held down for a full hour, double the state’s maximum time limit.
Four other children were restrained for “substantial” periods despite being described as “calm, non-combative and quiet.”
In 2022, inspectors found Fox Run injected children with sedatives without a clear link to a psychiatric condition.
Wendy Opic, who worked at Fox Run when Isabella and Paitin were there, said she still prays for the children inside the facility.
She remembers a manager thanking her for de-escalating children through conversation instead of restraining them.
“Isn’t this what you’re supposed to do?”
Opic thought to herself.
“Be nice to these children?”
“I kept thinking, how do you get this place shut down?
Because I don’t know how to do anything like that.
No child should be in there,” she said.
As she cried, she added: “They were just treated like animals.”
The Marshall Project obtained inspection reports from the Department of Behavioral Health — the state agency regulating residential facilities for kids with significant behavioral health needs, like Fox Run — from September 2021 to February 2025.
Inspectors cited Fox Run for unsafe restraints, medical neglect, understaffing and deteriorating facility conditions.
However, inspection records do not show state follow-up investigations tied to those incidents.
Additionally, it seems that many incidents may have never reached regulators’ attention.
An analysis of Fox Run’s self-reported incident data from January 2022 through June of 2025 found that at least 40 incidents involving police did not appear in state documents.
An Ohio statute requires residential treatment facilities to report suicide attempts, arrests, assaults and child hospitalizations to the state within 24 hours of the occurrence.
The incidents for which the state had no record included: a child being arrested or taken to a juvenile detention center (21 incidents), assaults (15 incidents), and hospitalizations or evaluations by emergency medical services (9 incidents).
The story of the trans boy who was arrested after being assaulted and escaping to the hotel did not appear in these official records.
MacKendrick, the Fox Run CEO, said that a state review showed that some “were not reportable” while others “were appropriately reported,” but did not indicate which, or how many, of the dozens of incidents fell into each category.
MacKendrick noted that the facility had not been cited for violating the law for its handling of the reporting of any of the incidents The Marshall Project identified as not being in the state’s database.
Lax government oversight has largely been the norm for Ohio’s youth residential treatment industry.
While several of the state’s residential treatment centers have voluntarily surrendered their licenses to operate following pressure from media or investigative agencies, only a few have actually had their licenses revoked.
Most companies instead reach settlements with the state.
A watchdog group, Disability Rights Ohio, has the right under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to investigate residential treatment facilities, usually triggered by complaints from children and parents.
The group’s investigations in recent years led to voluntary license suspensions by Sequel Pomegranate Health Systems in Columbus and Youth Intensive Services in Youngstown.
However, some state lawmakers want to force regulators into more aggressive responses when facilities harm children.
A bill recently introduced in the Ohio House of Representatives by Rep.
Crystal Lett would require the Department of Behavioral Health to take measures against youth treatment facilities with incidents of violence and other serious violations.
That could mean even shutting them down rather than leaving the agency with discretion over what sanctions to impose, if any.
Lett said she introduced the measure in response to The Marshall Project’s investigation in November 2025 that revealed escalating violence, staff injuries and campus-wide fights at Mohican Young Star Academy, Ohio’s largest youth treatment facility.
That report also led to the state suspending admissions to the facility and a license revocation hearing that began this June.
“Just the fact that it’s continuing in real time.
It was our proof that this isn’t a hypothetical situation that we’re legislating for.
It’s a real situation unfolding,” Lett said in April of this year.
“I can’t help thinking: If my kid were in there right now, what am I doing to help that kid?”
For the children who have come out the other side of living in residential treatment, the healing process is often a slow one.
Years after her escape and discharge, Paitin still has the shoes staff members took from her, but she never put them on after getting out.
She’s kept them pristine, a cherished object from her dad.
“It hurts me to see them dirty,” she said.
When he visited her at her new apartment, he immediately noticed the shoes.
“He looked happy,” Paitin said.
Paitin, Samantha and Isabella have a collection of various items from their stays in Fox Run and other residential treatment facilities: clothes with their initials still written on the tags, journals, drawings, and, for some of them, medical records detailing psychiatric treatment.
When Paitin requested her records, Fox Run administrators told her she’d have to return to the facility to get her paper documents.
She said she had a panic attack in the parking lot and couldn’t set foot in the building.
It’s just one way the facility’s impact lingers.
“I’m more quiet, reserved now, and it’s just not who I remember me being,” Paitin said.
“Like, it makes me want to cry.
I remember being so bubbly and everything.
Now I just feel like I’m stuck in the same mindset ...
It’s kind of like I’m numb.”
She still dreams of running.
Sometimes she wakes up and forgets she’s no longer locked inside Fox Run.
Other days, she dreams of what life is like outside of Ohio and its expanse of cornfields.
For now, she leans on her friends.
They Snapchat, call and text each other.
They gather evidence and give it to a journalist.
They hope for change.
“I just feel bad for the kids that are still there,” Paitin said.
Additional reporting by Rachel Dissell.
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