Word: blarigan
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...come home soon and be a better, happier and nicer and smarter person than when I came here. The water is so blue, the beach looks so sandy, the hills are so green, the weather is so nice--and the chain link so high." --Letter from David van Blarigan, Tranquility Bay, Jamaica, to his parents...
Just past midnight, David van Blarigan, 16, woke up in his Oakland, Calif., home to find his parents at his bedside with the two burly strangers they had called to take him away. "Why are you doing this?" the teenager cried out. "Because you're unhappy here," his mother replied. "If you don't cooperate," one of his escorts said, "we'll have to put you in handcuffs." David's first stop was Brightway Adolescent Hospital, a mental facility 700 miles away in St. George, Utah. Although David had no criminal record, was not violent and hadn't been abusing...
...magazines like Sunset, and their slogans are as no-nonsense as a five-mile run at sunrise. "Attitudes adjusted here," says an ad for the Ascent Program. Sea Hawk Academy promises "the wake-up call your teenager needs." Many offer to arrange the kind of "escort service" David van Blarigan found at his bedside. The schools and camps are often isolated, either in rural America (Thompson Falls, Mont.) or in faraway locales (Western Samoa). They number as many as 2,000, estimates Alexia Parks, author of a new online report on the subject, An American Gulag, and they come...
David van Blarigan found another way to try to take back his freedom. When he got off the plane in Jamaica, the escort team from Tranquility Bay was late meeting him. That gave him time to call a friend and neighbor, Neil Aschemeyer, who is also an administrative-law judge. Aschemeyer got in touch with Robert Hutchins, head of the Alameda County district attorney's child-abduction unit. And Hutchins went to court to petition for David's release. For the moment, he isn't bringing criminal charges, but he regards the teenager's abduction as kidnapping. "When they sent...
...Blarigans, for their part, say they were stunned to be hauled into court. "I was scratching my head," Jim van Blarigan says of the day Hutchins' office served him with papers. "I asked, 'What do you mean, kidnapping my [own] son?" They love their son, they insist, and are only doing their duty. "We as parents made a choice to send our son to a boarding school for his benefit," says Sue van Blarigan. "We're being challenged on whether we have that right as parents." If David's suit prevails, he will be placed not with his parents...
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