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Matt Grise, 14, of Rifle, Colo., is being held behind the 10-foot-high barbed-wire fences of the New Bethany Baptist Church juvenile detention compound in northern Louisiana. He has not been charged with any crime. No court supervises his detention. The boy's father, other family members say, has decided Matt is "evil" and must be subjected to the Rev. Mack W. Ford's stern brand of corporal punishment. No one on the outside, except for Matt's father, Vincent Russo of Independence, Mo., is allowed to communicate with the boy. Joan Grise says she won't rest until her grandson is freed. But Ford appears in no hurry to release Matt. This has set the stage for a confrontation in the same rural Louisiana parish where lawmen gunned down desperadoes Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in a roadside ambush in 1934. For three months, Joan Grise has done everything she can think of to free Matt. But lawyers in three states told her she has no standing to act on Matt's behalf. Now, she plans to travel to Arcadia and approach Ford, hoping to convince the preacher to back down. Ford angrily declined to be interviewed. He ordered a reporter off the property Oct. 22 and threatened to call the police. Deputy Sheriff Bob Stewart of Bienville Parish, where Arcadia is located, says there's no way of knowing the conditions inside what he calls Ford's "private jail." "It's a money-making deal," Stewart says. Ford gets children "down here and works the heck out of them and spanks the heck out of them and does what he wants to." Ford has said relatives need not worry. What the kids have called "beatings" were merely "paddling" and "licks," he once explained. The kids need this type of punishment, Ford told a Baton Rouge newspaper in 1985. "When a boy is placed here, he is not a Sunday school dropout," Ford said. "When a boy is placed here, this is the end of the road for him. We take boys no one really wants or cares for. "We feel this is the goal of the New Bethany Home -- to reach the unwanted with the love of God." If there's one thing Matt Grise is, it's wanted. Not only by his grandmother, but by uncles, aunts, teachers, counselors and dozens of friends. They uniformly describe a youngster bright and respectful, an athlete in the best circles at his school in Rifle and then after moving to live with his father in Independence, Mo. In his last semester at Rifle Middle School in 1996, Matt earned six As and one B, in band. In the standardized comment section of the report card, most of the teachers used No. 3 to describe Matt -- "a pleasure to have in class." Sandy Playter, a guidance counselor at the middle school Matt attended in Kansas City, even offered to adopt him. Matt Grise was born Nov. 9, 1983, in Aspen, Colo., the son of Joan's daughter, Sarah Elizabeth "Libba" Grise, and Vincent Russo, a laborer who soon left the scene. The Grises were not part of the Aspen jet set. In the late 1970s, Libba and Joan worked together as domestic servants in Snowmass. Joan, whose husband died in 1970, eventually started a caretaking business and worked at the local rodeo. Just before Matt turned three, Libba contracted throat cancer and underwent several surgeries to try to save her life. To stay off welfare, she moved to Grand Junction and opened a day care center. In September 1995, Joan was diagnosed with lung cancer. A month later, his mother died. Matt was 11. Vincent Russo came to Libba's funeral. Relatives say it was the first time Matt had seen his father in years. Family troubles didn't visibly affect Matt's performance at Rifle Middle School. He made the honor roll and once was named Student of the Month. But those around him knew there was a hole in Matt's life. He wanted a father. For Christmas 1996, his Colorado family agreed to send Matt to Independence to visit Vincent. He never came back. Exactly what was happening inside the Russo home outside Kansas City while Matt was there isn't known. Vincent Russo refused to discuss it, saying: "This is a personal affair of a family. It's ridiculous for the public to get involved and embarrass my son." Those on the outside picked up clues from comments made by Matt, Vincent and Tami. Sandy Playter says Vincent Russo converted to a strict fundamentalist Christian theology and thought Matt had gone astray. He began carefully monitoring Matt's diet, at one point reducing it to peanut butter carefully weighed on a scale, she said. Matt got along well in school but told classmates that things at home were very tough. He tried to stay away from home as much as possible but that only got him in further trouble. Matt told friends that his father and stepmother grounded him frequently. Sharlene Grise, Matt's aunt, says that Vincent called early this year and said things weren't working out. He was going to send Matt back to Colorado. That was fine with Sharlene and Payson, but they insisted that Vincent formally surrender custody to them. Vincent did not sign the legal papers, and soon the plan to send Matt back to Colorado unraveled. Sharlene said Vincent began refusing her requests to talk to Matt. On July 7, Sharlene says, Vincent told her that Matt was no longer there but at a "really neat place" in Louisiana with "horses and pigs and a swimming pool." After hiring an attorney in Missouri, the family tracked Matt to New Bethany. New Bethany is located in a remote, heavily wooded region 60 miles east of Shreveport. Arcadia, pop. 3,079, is a few miles to the east. Barbed-wire fences ring two areas in the compound -- one on the east containing the church and boys' facilities and one on the west a school and rooms for staff and their children, according to two young girls interviewed recently. As the girls talked, a line of boys walked single file from one of the locked compounds to the other. The swimming pool Vincent Grise mentioned wasn't visible from the narrow dirt road separating the two areas. When he learned that a reporter was asking about Matt Grise, an angry Ford approached one of the fences with another man. Dressed in overalls, Ford stood with his face almost pressing against the fence. "What are you doing down here trying to start trouble?" Ford asked. He refused to discuss Matt's situation, loudly repeating, "Ask the daddy. Ask the daddy. Ask the daddy." Louisiana state officials have tried but failed to close down Ford's unlicensed private compound. State courts have upheld Ford's contention that his compound is a church protected by First Amendment guarantees of freedom of religion and exempt from state control. Ford repeatedly has rebuffed the attempts of state regulators to inspect the facility. Even the state fire marshal is not allowed on site to assure the safety of the approximately 50 children housed there. Ford has a long history of run-ins with state authorities in the South. In 1981, the state closed a Ford-run boys home in Longstreet, La., amid accusations of child abuse. A year later, Ford opened the New Bethany Baptist Church Home for Boys in Walterboro, S.C. Within a year, abuse charges again swirled around Ford. Hearing tales from runaways of savage treatment, South Carolina authorities raided New Bethany, uncovering a logbook for beatings. Boys there told of being hit with a plastic "rod of correction." Some said they were confined to a tiny cell. Handcuffs and ropes allegedly used to restrain the children were recovered. In 1988, officials raided Ford's Arcadia compound, freeing 28 children aged 12 to 17. An affidavit in the case indicated that several children had severe bruising of the buttocks. Some parents, however, returned their kids to Arcadia, some bringing them in handcuffs from as far away as California, deputy Stewart said. A state legislative committee later said it could find no children who told of abuse and cleared Ford. In 1992, the state removed three girls and a boy from the Arcadia after renewed allegations of abuse. In 1996 child welfare workers were turned away when they arrived to investigate further complaints. They were told the children they had come to see were no longer there. Deputy Stewart has no illusions that the New Bethany Baptist Church is a pastoral boys ranch. "It's nothing but a juvenile jail," he says. But this juvenile jail isn't run by the state or governed by local laws. "Everybody's afraid of him," Stewart says of Ford. "I've been working for the sheriff for about 18 years and I've tried every way (to stop Ford's operation), and I've just about given up. " . . . I say if these people are ignorant enough to bring their child down here or send their child down here, then they deserve what they get. "But, see, the kids are the ones getting the punishment, not the adults." Sandy Playter sits at the kitchen table of her Kansas City home with a six-inch stack of notes and documents she has collected during the Grise family's three-month campaign to find help. She has called welfare workers, attorneys, investigators, congressional staffers and Louisiana state officials who possibly could influence Matt's fate. She has learned to surf the Internet to find anything she can about Ford and his church. She contacted Gregg Trusty Sr., a spokesman for the sheriff of Caddo Parish, which includes Shreveport, La. Trusty said he was moved. But like everyone else so far, he didn't know what to do. "New Bethany has been a thorn in the side of the Louisiana juvenile justice system for more than 20 years," he e-mailed Playter. He said Shirley White, an official with the Louisiana Department of Youth Services, told him the only way "to get a boy out of there is if he runs away and goes straight to the Sheriff's Office. She said there is no way on God's Green Earth that the Bienville Parish Sheriff's Office would ever under any circumstances return a boy to New Bethany. "But that's a Catch-22. The only way to talk with Matt is to get him out, and the only way to get him out is to tell him to run away." Trusty offered Playter his condolences. By LOU KILZER, Scripps Howard News Service. (Kilzer writes for the Denver Rocky Mountain News in Colorado.) Past Stories:
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Louisiana becomes a battleground for 14-year-old boy in church detention center Copyright (c) 1998
Nando.net ARCADIA, La. (November 3, 1998 3:50 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) -- She is a 70-year-old victim of cancer from Colorado who is determined to see her grandson one more time. He is a fiery Louisiana preacher who has incarcerated children for 27 years. In the middle is a popular high school honor student who has disappeared --inside an American gulag. |