According to authorities, video shows a Devereux staff member using a desk to shove a 16-year-old resident across the room.
“At least 41 children as young as 12, and with IQs as low as 50, have been raped or sexually assaulted by Devereux staff members in the last 25 years.”
According to an April 1, 2026, statement, state police charged employee Caitlin Cambridge over the March 6 incident. She now faces a felony count of endangering the welfare of an incompetent or physically disabled person, along with a charge of falsifying records for lying to investigators.
Erika J. Travis, a teaching assistant, allegedly witnessed the incident, but rather than intervene, she joined in—dumping out the contents of the desk and ordering the teen to clean up the mess.
This was not an isolated incident at a facility whose stated mission is “Unlocking human potential.” In Red Hook, the pattern goes back years:
On September 30, 2025, staff member Samuel I. Ezechukwu was charged with endangering the welfare of an incompetent or physically disabled person in the first degree for striking a resident and holding their head down.
On August 6, 2024, a jury convicted Oscar Sosa Amaya of abusing a 14-year-old autistic child after ordering him into a bathroom, closing the door and beating him—leaving multiple bruises, including near the site of a recent brain surgery. What incited it? Amaya put his coffee cup on the child’s desk, and the child knocked it over.
On September 23, 2022, 14-year-old resident Romelo Cruze was killed by a pickup truck after wandering on US Route 9, 5 miles away from the facility. Red Hook employees Churchil Orodi and Beryl Orech were arrested for falsifying records and making false statements, claiming the child was safe at the facility 40 minutes after he lay dead on the highway.
But Devereux’s Red Hook facility is merely following the business model of Devereux facilities across the United States.
On January 26, 2021, Lieff Cabraser announced the filing of a federal class action sexual abuse lawsuit in Pennsylvania against Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health and its subsidiary QualityHealth Staffing, LLC on behalf of six named plaintiffs and a proposed class of thousands of children nationwide. The complaint alleges a pattern of abuse and systemic failure, including assault, failure to report child abuse, deliberate indifference to prior sexual misconduct, and widespread negligence in hiring, supervision and care.
One sexual abuse case against Devereux already led to a jury verdict of $60 million for the victim.
But the full scope may be even broader. In August 2020, The Philadelphia Inquirer published an investigation documenting decades of misconduct inside Devereux facilities. The report found that “at least 41 children as young as 12, and with IQs as low as 50, have been raped or sexually assaulted by Devereux staff members in the last 25 years.”
“The appalling, widespread allegations of the physical, emotional and sexual abuse of vulnerable children entrusted to Devereux’s care shine a light on this large-scale institutional child abuse,” said Annika K. Martin, who represents the plaintiffs in the class action suit. “Given its scale, securing immediate relief to stop any ongoing abuses from continuing is as important to our team as getting justice for those who have suffered the abuses at Devereux over the years and even decades.”
What happened in Red Hook is not an outlier. Again and again, institutions operating under the banner of “mental health” care are exposed for egregious abuse—the more helpless the individual, the greater the abuse. Consider the following headlines:
“Child Deaths Uncover More Psychiatric Abuse and Greed in Wilderness ‘Therapy’ Camps”
“47 Young Women Claim ‘Hunger Games’ Torture at Michigan Mental Health Facility”
“Watchdog Finds Nursing Homes Use Schizophrenia Diagnoses to Justify Drugging of Elderly Patients”
“Nearly Half of Psychiatric Patients Report Sexual Violence in ‘Treatment’ Facilities”
“Abuse and Neglect Plague Arizona’s Mingus Mountain All-Girls Psychiatric Facility”
“One in Four Dementia Patients Prescribed Lethal Psychiatric Drugs, According to First-of-Its-Kind Study”
When a “science” specializes in thuggery and calls it therapy, when mental health facilities brand torture as treatment, and when a profession excels only at victimizing the helpless, the time for reform has long since passed.
Psychiatry does not need reform or correction.
It needs criminal justice.
