By John Cheves
Lexington Herald-Leader
LEXINGTON, Ky. — At least three rank-and-file state workers lost their jobs in March at Kentucky’s juvenile detention facility in Graves County amid investigations into employees who apparently had sex in the control room on multiple occasions and allowed an alleged fight club for youths in a classroom closet.
Additionally, the facility manager was notified March 24 that he will be fired and the deputy manager was demoted that same day to the position of youth worker.
“Multiple staff interviewed during the investigation knew about the allegations and rumors of inappropriate sexual relations between staff,” Juvenile Justice Commissioner Randy White wrote to facility manager Larry Jackson in his dismissal letter.
“It is clear from the interviews that there was widespread knowledge of sexual relations between staff as early as June 2024, yet nothing was done by you to address the rumors and to ensure nothing inappropriate was happening at the facility,” White wrote.
In a statement to the Herald-Leader, White said: “As with all professions, individuals who are employed make daily decisions on whether they will adhere to their workplace policies and training, and if they chose to engage in misconduct, they will need to find employment somewhere other than the Department of Juvenile Justice .”
White, a former state prison warden, was appointed by Gov. Andy Beshear a little over a year ago.
“Since day one, I have been committed to removing those who wish harm on our juveniles and facilities, and I have continued to keep that pledge. We have no tolerance for actions such as what took place at the Mayfield Youth Development Center and will not allow employees to remain employed if they chose to conduct in similar behavior,” White said.
The story began Oct. 24, 2024, when rehabilitation instructor Nicholas Morris, 43, was accused by colleagues of needlessly taunting a teenage boy into a hallway confrontation that led to the youth getting pepper-sprayed, according to records obtained by the Herald-Leader through the Kentucky Open Records Act.
After state investigators drove to Mayfield to review that use of force, Morris and two of his co-workers turned over several different pieces of incriminating evidence against each other.
That evidence launched a web of investigations at the 30-bed Mayfield Youth Development Center, which is run by the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice.
This is only the latest trouble at the department.
The U.S. Department of Justice is probing the department for possible civil rights abuses of youths in state custody following several recent years of news stories about staff misconduct, including guards breaking teenagers’ bones, unjustifiably pepper-spraying them and neglecting them in filthy cells while ignoring their failing mental health.
Among the new problems that state investigators say they substantiated at the Mayfield facility:
- Oral sex between two employees in the control room that was caught on a private FaceTime video last June.
- Control rooms — the nerve center of a detention facility — are supposed to be staffed around the clock by employees who monitor security cameras and radio transmissions, answer phones and distribute protective equipment.
- The sounds of what appear to be a separate sexual encounter between employees in the same control room that were accidentally captured on a digital audio recording last August.
- A roughly 10-second cell phone video of a topless female employee, a counselor, that was shown to youths at the facility by a male employee.
- A fight club between youths that was referred to as “running 30s” because they were allowed to fight for fun — body shots only, no face shots — for up to 30 seconds. The fights took place inside a classroom closet where no security camera was mounted, creating a blind spot, investigators said.
No injuries were reported as a result of the fight club, the Department of Juvenile Justice said.
While they pieced all of this together, investigators said they grew concerned by other things that caught their attention.
There was a young girl — not a resident of the all-male facility — who could be seen on security footage as she walked around the detention facility on Aug. 25, 2024 , including unsupervised time by herself in the control room, they said. The girl seemed to be there that day with a member of the Critical Incident Response Team , they said.
Also, investigators said, security footage showed the control room repeatedly was “left abandoned, not manned by anyone,” revealing a glaring security gap.
The facility has reported a number of escapes into the surrounding community over the past two years, including three escapes in July 2023 and four escapes in January 2024 .
Kentucky’s six youth development centers hold young people serving time after their criminal cases ended.
The medium-security Mayfield campus, with seven buildings, opened in 1978. It houses males between the ages of 12 and 21, with an average daily population of 14 detainees and 34 employees, according to a 2023 audit report.
Problems just keep happening
“It’s very sad to see the shape that place has gotten into,” said Earl Dunlap, a nationally respected authority on juvenile justice who lives in central Illinois.
In 1995, Dunlap was appointed by US Attorney General Janet Reno to monitor the newly created Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice . The agency was born in a consent decree between Kentucky and the U.S. Justice Department to settle a federal lawsuit over the longstanding mistreatment of youths in state custody.
For five or six years, under outside scrutiny, Kentucky worked to clean up its act and run a professional system of juvenile detention centers, Dunlap told the Herald-Leader in a recent phone interview. A 10-week training program at Eastern Kentucky University weeded out bad hires and helped new employees learn their jobs, he said.
But gradually, the state dropped the ball on juvenile justice, Dunlap said. Budgets and training requirements were cut, wages shrank and facilities became understaffed by employees not up to the task, he said. Agency leaders in Frankfort turned over so frequently that nobody was in charge for more than a year or two, he said.
Recently, Beshear has “thrown some money” at juvenile justice by raising employee wages, Dunlap said.
But Beshear also imported staff and leadership from adult prisons at the state Department of Corrections, and he has authorized the use of pepper spray, tasers and isolation, none of which are appropriate for minors, Dunlap said.
It’s shocking that repeated news stories about the abuse and neglect of youths inside Kentucky’s juvenile detention facilities hasn’t caused more of a stir among the state’s politicians, Dunlap said.
“I wonder how many of our legislators, or the governor, for that matter, would feel about their own kids getting caught up in this system and treated this way,” he said. “You better believe their priorities would shift then and they would take it a lot more seriously.”
“But right now, it just feels like they want to keep it all under wraps long enough to either pass it on to the next administration or wait and see if maybe the Justice Department won’t hand down another consent decree and tell them what to do again to fix things this time,” he said.
‘Getting their freak on’
Most of the following information comes from reports from the Department of Juvenile Justice’s Office of the Ombudsman and the Internal Investigations Branch of the Justice and Public Safety Cabinet, as well as from Morris’ Feb. 27 termination letter, all obtained by the Herald-Leader under the Open Records Act.
Investigators said they learned during interviews that upset and demoralized juvenile justice employees believe some of their colleagues are having trysts across the Mayfield campus — in the control room, the garage, a classroom and elsewhere — as well as going off-site during work hours for sex.
Nurse Supervisor Perri Mathis, a 16-year employee, “advised that due to the rumors of staff having sex in the nursing exam room, the nurses wipe down the exam table every day when they come in,” Tim Corder, an ombudsman for the Department of Juvenile Justice, wrote in his Jan. 25 report on alleged sex among staff at the facility.
“Mathis stated that she wished she could give dates and times because it was asinine and needs to stop,” Corder wrote.
“She further stated that staff are not doing the things they need to do to supervise the youth effectively because they are too concerned with ‘getting their freak on.’”
Erin Truelove, a social service clinician who has worked at the Department of Juvenile Justice for 18 years, told investigators the workplace environment is “toxic.”
“Truelove also stated that she mainly stays in her office, because with the rumors about staff having sex in the control room and the garage, or kids looking up pictures of girls in bikinis on a computer, she does not want any part of that,” they wrote.
“Truelove advised that she does not trust anyone at the facility.”
Instructor fired, plans appeal
After separate investigations by the Office of the Ombudsman and the Internal Investigations Branch, Morris was fired from his $64,708-a-year job as an instructor, effective March 2 .
White, the department’s commissioner, sent Morris a three-page dismissal letter from Frankfort .
White said “the clear weight of the evidence establishes” that Morris shared a cell phone video of a topless female colleague with youths in his class; started a confrontation by harassing a youth, leading to the youth getting pepper sprayed; kept a FaceTime video screenshot showing colleagues having oral sex in the control room, an incident he should have reported to his superiors but did not; and allowed youths to fight each other in his classroom closet.
“Multiple residents stated that you would allow the residents to go in the closet and fight for 30 seconds,” White wrote to Morris. “One youth also stated that you would participate in the ‘running 30’s’ with them.”
In an interview with the Herald-Leader, Morris said he is appealing his firing to the state Personnel Board.
Morris disputes two of the four charges made against him — the allegations he shared the video with his students and allowed them to fight. Others at the facility invented those stories to get him in trouble, he said.
When he wasn’t paying enough attention, Morris said, his students once used a computer to access and print out inappropriate pictures of women in bikinis. But he never encouraged misconduct, he said.
If state officials had pulled security camera footage from his classroom as he urged them to, Morris said, they would have seen he did not show his phone to students or let them go into the closet.
“I kept saying, ‘Look at the video! Look at the video!’” said Morris, who worked for the Department of Juvenile Justice for 23 years. “I felt targeted in some sort of way. I felt like they didn’t want to hear my side. Like, they heard me, but they wouldn’t listen.”
Two other employees quit
In response to Morris’ concerns, Morgan Hall, a spokeswoman for the Justice and Public Safety Cabinet, told the Herald-Leader: “These matters were investigated. Any disagreement Morris has with the findings, he can bring to the Personnel Board.”
Two other Mayfield facility employees quit their jobs in March rather than be fired, Hall said.
They were social services clinician Aimee Timmons and youth services program supervisor Joseph Swanigan , who were identified by ombudsman Corder’s report as the couple in the Aug. 25 control room encounter that was audio recorded.
Timmons and Swanigan could not be reached for comment.
“As soon as these serious allegations were reported through our ombudsman, we investigated and took action,” Hall told the Herald-Leader. “We terminated Morris, and two other employees resigned after we notified them of our intent to dismiss. Additional personnel actions are under review.”
A surprising FaceTime video
Morris said he was at the barber shop one afternoon last year when he got a FaceTime video on his phone from a male friend at work. To his surprise, it showed the man having oral sex with a female colleague in the control room of the juvenile detention center.
Morris said he took a screenshot of the video and saved it. He told the Herald-Leader he didn’t know what to do with the screenshot, so he hung onto it for months without mentioning it to anyone.
That decision got him in trouble later. Agency policy required him to report such an incident. But he said he was trying to mind his own business.
“I’ve heard about a lot of stuff that happened in the control room, with people going in there and having sex,” Morris said. “I worked in the school. That’s a separate building.”
The screenshot eventually would surface, anyway.
Investigators are called in
Last October, after the teen was pepper-sprayed during an altercation with Morris, the teen approached a female counselor at the Mayfield facility and told her Morris showed some of his students a roughly 10-second cell phone video revealing her topless in Morris’ car, according to investigators.
The woman reported the allegation to her superiors, who requested a formal investigation.
Several other youths backed up their peer’s account, although they said they were reluctant to be seen as snitches.
“Don’t get me wrong. Yeah, it was cool to look at or whatever,” one youth told the ombudsman Oct. 31, 2024, according to his report. “But I’m not gonna sit out here and tell everybody somebody else’s business.”
The woman told investigators she had reluctantly exposed her breasts in Morris’ car at his urging while he gave her a ride, but she did not realize he was filming her.
“He kept begging, and I was in his car and I felt pressured,” the woman told investigators, according to their report.
Some of the youths also told investigators about the playful fighting they said Morris let them carry out in his classroom closet for up to 30 seconds at a time, sometimes referred to as “running 30s” or “closet action.” One of them said the fights got noisy enough that they could be heard by people outside the closet.
What the recorder caught
Morris denied the topless video allegations by his female coworker and students.
“C’mon, now, I’m not that stupid,” Morris told investigators, according to their report.
However, Morris told them he did have a different compromising picture of his female coworker. He provided the control room oral sex screenshot he saved months earlier.
Morris told investigators he “kept the photo to use when appropriate,” they wrote in their report. “Morris said that he should have said something when it happened, but he’s saying something now.”
Two days later, another employee gave investigators a digital audio recording that was made Aug. 25, 2024 .
Youth worker Carol Hernandez said she had been transcribing notes into her phone in the control room when she stepped out and inadvertently left her phone behind, still recording. The device captured the sounds of people who occupied the room after she left.
When Hernandez returned later to listen to her notes, she told investigators, she “started hearing some weird stuff.”
The recorded sounds included people in the control room drinking something one of them says tastes like “piss water,” laughing, having a candid conversation about a woman’s underwear, “toys” and batteries, and repeatedly moaning.
“At 4:53 [name redacted] is making a moaning sound and again at 4:57,” investigators wrote. “At 5:06, another moaning sound is heard. The same type of moaning noise is heard at 5:17.”
‘This was very unfair’
The youth worker said she prayed and agonized over what to do with the recording.
Her bosses at the facility knew she had a recording, she said, but they didn’t ask for details about what was on it or ask to listen to it. In his dismissal letter to the facility’s manager, White said Hernandez informed the manager about her recording on Oct. 10 , but the manager failed to pass the word to internal investigators as required.
Hernandez expressed concerns about “what if something bad happened while there were ‘shenanigans’ going on,” investigators wrote. She “also stated that she was afraid of getting fired because maybe she knew too much.”
As the investigations picked up speed, Morris was placed on leave Dec. 17 for the allegations — which the department said were substantiated — about his showing a video of a topless woman to students. He wrote a letter to his superiors denying it, which was placed in his personnel file.
“I’m not innocent in everything I do, but I do know this was very unfair to myself,” Morris wrote.
However, a pre-termination hearing held Feb. 26 failed to convince department leaders that Morris was right. Multiple witnesses testified against Morris’ version of events, said White, the juvenile justice commissioner, who sent Morris a termination letter the next day.
More personnel actions may be coming, said Hall, the Justice and Public Safety Cabinet spokeswoman.
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