Sununu Center Survivor: 'The State Hasn't Learned A Thing'

By Damien Fisher, NH Journal

After months of outrage over the reported abuse of children inside the Sununu Youth Services Center in Manchester, state Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) officials want the public to know they have fixed the problems — which they also claim never happened.

That contradictory response from DHHS is simply more of the same, former Sununu Youth Services Center (SYSC) residents told NHJournal.

“The State hasn’t learned a thing,” one SYSC survivor said.

New Hampshire’s Child Advocate Cassandra Sanchez told lawmakers earlier this spring that children inside the Manchester facility were being held in a months-long lockdown, subjected to strip searches, and battered by aggressive staff. Her report also cited a child’s broken arm and video allegedly showing a child held down in an illegal prone restraint for about three and a half minutes.

The allegations kicked off a legislative inquiry by an ad hoc committee chaired by Sen. Victoria Sullivan (R-Manchester). The committee is holding hearings, called witnesses, and ultimately issued a report calling for new oversight and a change in leadership at the state-run youth detention facility.

But the committee members were blocked by the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office from talking to the children inside the center — the very people at the center of the abuse allegations.

That gave DHHS officials an opening to call the allegations misrepresented and blown out of proportion, as DHHS Associate Commissioner Patricia Tilley reiterated last week. Tilley went to the State House on Friday to dispute the findings in the ad hoc committee’s report, arguing lawmakers had not spoken to firsthand witnesses.

“Many of the ad hoc committee’s conclusions do not appear to be based on the primary source evidence presented by DHHS,” Tilley said.

DHHS is responding to the committee’s concerns by expanding staff training, increasing youth programming, and rolling out body scanners to replace strip searches. SYSC Director Joshua Nye resigned in recent days, 24 hours after the ad hoc committee called for a change in leadership.

Nye had only been appointed in January. His resignation came amid multiple investigations into allegations of abuse, extended lockdowns, staff injuries, and injuries to children. DHHS confirmed his resignation but has not publicly explained why he left.

To the survivor, the end result is just another rerun of every other time DHHS has had to respond to abuse allegations inside New Hampshire’s juvenile facilities: deny, deflect, announce reforms, and wait for the headlines to fade.

Until someone in power takes responsibility, the whole of New Hampshire is locked in for more abuse and more coverups, the survivor said.

“There is no moving on when those doors are still open, and kids are still being destroyed,” the survivor said.

New Hampshire is currently trying to deal with claims from close to 2,000 adult survivors who say they were raped and/or physically brutalized by staff inside the state system. The scandal of what has happened to children held in state custody has been an open secret for decades.

The Sununu Youth Services Center, formerly known as the Youth Development Center, has become the center of one of the largest institutional abuse scandals in state history. More than 1,000 former residents have sued the state, alleging they were physically or sexually abused while in state custody. The state also created an alternative settlement fund to handle claims from former residents.

Reports that staff engaged in aggressive and dangerous physical restraint, that children were held in solitary confinement, and that services were withheld have been known for decades. The New Hampshire Disability Rights Center investigated SYSC’s mistreatment of children in 2009, 2010, and 2018, issuing public reports.

But the survivor told NHJournal those public reports were ignored, and circumstances inside the facilities have been even worse. Meanwhile, people throughout state government have been trying to keep the public from knowing, according to testimony that came to light during the only civil abuse lawsuit to go to trial.

Former DHHS staffer Karen LeMoine quit her job at SYSC in 1991 after she faced frightening retaliation for reporting staff abuse of children. LeMoine testified during the 2024 David Meehan civil trial that her supervisors warned her about being a “rat” when she reported other staffers for abusing children.

Soon after that warning, one boy inside the facility confided in her that some of the staffers were setting her up to be raped. The staffers had been telling boys for months that if they behaved and did what they were told, they could have sex with her, LeMoine testified.

LeMoine kept pressing her supervisors to do something about the abuse and retaliation. Instead, she was forced to sign a confidentiality agreement. LeMoine testified she was threatened with jail by her supervisors if she ever told anyone what happened inside the state-run facility.

Meehan, who accuses the state of covering up hundreds of rapes he suffered in the 1990s, was awarded a record-setting $38 million by the jury in that trial. But New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella is appealing the award, arguing that the state should pay only $475,000. The New Hampshire Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling at some point.

The survivor said the current crisis shows the state still does not understand what went wrong because it refuses to admit who was responsible.

For decades, New Hampshire officials dismissed or minimized warnings about abuse inside its youth detention system. Now, even as the state faces massive legal exposure from the old YDC scandal, watchdogs are again warning that children inside the same Manchester facility may still be unsafe.

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.