Arizona Senator T. J. Shope is calling for a full investigation into the allegations of brutality.
“We have to have a top-to-bottom review,” Shope said. “It’s disgusting. I mean, I can’t believe some of the things I read.”
“It’s time for people to know what’s going on behind these closed doors.”
Since 2022, the facility has been cited 40 times by state regulators for serious deficiencies in care, including employing an unlicensed clinician and injuries caused by improper restraints.
In a 2024 US Senate investigation entitled, “Warehouses of Neglect: How Taxpayers Are Funding Systemic Abuse in Youth Residential Treatment Facilities,” Mingus Mountain and its parent company, Vivant Behavioral Healthcare, were featured prominently.
“RTFs [Residential Treatment Facilities] employ a model that has the potential to expose all children in their custody to harm arising from risk of abuse (physical, sexual, harmful use of restraint and seclusion), inadequate behavioral health treatment and non-homelike facility conditions,” the Senate report reads. “While RTFs secure a steady stream of federal dollars meant to fund placements and intensive services, some RTFs regularly fail to hire adequate numbers of qualified staff, allowing them to maximize operating margin and profit at the expense of children in their care.”
Most shocking by far is information contained in a lawsuit involving 13 former patients of Mingus Mountain claiming horrific incidents of sexual abuse. The patients include Melissa Catalano, who was housed at Mingus Mountain for a year when she was 15, and states that one staff member, assigned as her “shadow,” sexually assaulted her some 80 times.
“When all the other girls were upstairs, he would take me down to the showers, and he’d make me undress, and he’d rape me,” she said. “And he told me that I deserve it because I was just a foster kid.” She also describes being sexually assaulted by staff members who “drove me outside. They took turns molesting me in the snow…. They would brag about what they would do to me.”
The lawsuit refers to what happened to patients at Mingus Mountain as “unspeakable horrors” and “horrific sexual abuse” and called the facility “a venue for employee-abusers.”
“The remote nature of the facility lends itself to keeping the secrecy of what is happening at Mingus,” attorney Ashley Crowell, representing the 13 girls in the lawsuit, said. “The individuals that are sent to Mingus are the most vulnerable of our population, and they are told repeatedly that ‘no one will believe you.’”
One former patient, Elinore Hilborn, who was sent to Mingus Mountain at the age of 17, said: “It’s time for people to know what’s going on behind these closed doors.”
“These staff would take that way too far,” Hilborn said. “Way too far…. They would get very physical—like I’m talking elbows into the spine.”
“These kinds of things can’t just stay in the dark,” she added.
The former patients suing Mingus Mountain say they were told to not report the incidents, but things have a way of leaking out. In 2016, four cases of staff sexual abuse were reported. In 2012, a staff member admitted to a sexual relationship with a resident patient, and was permitted to resign. In 2010, a 28-year-old male staffer was reported for having sex with a 17-year-old patient.
It’s not only Mingus Mountain, not by a long shot. The Senate report found abuse and neglect throughout the entire private, taxpayer-funded psychiatric racket.
“Despite the egregious failures outlined in this report, these companies are not failing,” the report states. “They are succeeding wildly in securing federal dollars by warehousing children and providing them with inadequate services to meet their needs.”
Elinore’s stepmother didn’t mince words in describing what her daughter endured at Mingus Mountain. “It’s like kids being sentenced to child abuse by the state,” she said.
The National Disability Rights Network wants better federal regulations on the industry. Its executive director, Curtis Decker, said: “It’s just an oxymoron that people can make a profit, a large profit, by claiming to provide good quality care to children with serious behavior and mental health issues. Of course, the answer is pretty simple. They don’t. They don’t provide quality care.”
