FBI assists in Trails Carolina wilderness camp child death investigation; toxicology test
The FBI is now assisting in a death investigation of a 12-year-old boy at a Western North Carolina therapeutic wilderness camp.
That is according to a Transylvania County Sheriff's Office spokesperson who gave a Feb. 13 interview to the Citizen Times about the probe, now in its second week, at the Trails Carolina camp in the Lake Toxaway community. Sheriff's deputies have been frustrated by the lack of access to adults and children who were present during the Feb. 3 death, said spokesperson John Nicholson, who also said investigators anticipated a long wait for toxicology results.
"The FBI is doing some analysis for us on computers, on latops," Nicholson told the Citizen Times. The electronics were taken from the camp along with cell phones and personal belongings of the boy using a search warrant approved by a judge.
The camp — which has an average price of $66,000 for an 83-day outdoor experiential mental health treatment program — and the sheriff's office have clashed over deputies' statements that the death was suspicious, and that Trails Carolina was not fully cooperating. On Feb. 13, Nicholson sought to clarify the description, saying "suspicious" can mean a death not attended by medical personnel and when there are "no clear answers as to why a person would be deceased," in this case, an apparently healthy child who died within 24 hours of arriving at camp from his home in New York.
Deputies have interviewed one staff member present in the room where the boy slept and another had reached out to schedule an interview, he said, but they have not been able to talk to the two remaining staffers. The camp has also not provided names of parents, something deputies could use to ask permission to interview the children, Nicholson said. Officials with the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, meanwhile, have said social workers were blocked from accessing children.
The camp has said they were following the law and protecting children by removing them from the site of the death. Parents declined interviews with law enforcement, a camp spokesperson said.
The search warrants described the boy as being found with foam coming from his mouth, a possible sign of having ingested poison.
"There can be a whole host of reasons why that would occur," Nicholson told the Citizen Times. "The more common would be the child ingests something that would be toxic to them."
The test results from the N.C. Medical Examiner's Office typically take "quite some time," the sheriff's spokesperson said when asked about a timeline.
Responding to the most recent statements by the sheriff's office, Trails Carolina spokesperson Wendy D'Alessandro said, "we all agree this investigation will take time."
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Death certificate details
According to a death certificate obtained by the Citizen Times and the search warrants, the boy was a resident of the wealthy Upper East Side neighborhood in New York City and was brought to the camp Feb. 2.
The boy was "loud and irate" when he arrived at the camp and refused dinner but later ate snacks, camp counselor Jackson Hunt told investigators, the warrant said. Per camp policy he spent his first night on the bunk house floor in a sleeping bag inside a bivy sack, a type of one-person shelter, Hunt said.
Starting around midnight he began to experience a panic attack and Hunt and another counselor stood against the wall. Hunt did not say if he or other counselors attempted to assist the boy, the warrant said, but they checked on him at midnight, 3 a.m., 6 a.m. and 7:45 a.m. when they found him "cold and stiff to the touch." EMS was called and life-saving efforts made but he was determined to have died Feb. 3. Detectives attempted to talk to the other campers but were denied access.
Findings of deficiencies, lawsuits
The death was not the first at the camp. In 2014, a 17-year-old Atlanta boy died of hypothermia, Authorities at the time said Alec Sanford Lansing of Atlanta was camping with Trails Carolina and ventured off on his own through the forest.
N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, which certifies the camp, has filed five statements of deficiencies regarding the camp from 2018 to 2023. The latest citation was June 12, 2023, when it found that the camp implemented training in "seclusion, physical restraint, and isolation time out" before getting approval by state regulators.
In a separate incident, a former camper is suing Trails Carolina in federal court, saying staff was negligent in not preventing another female camper from sexually assaulting her when she was 12, as well as sexually assaulting two other girls.
"Despite the façade of providing a safe and therapeutic residential treatment center for children, Trails Carolina has failed to screen and assess the children in its legal custody and creates an environment where troubled children have and do sexually assault other children," said the suit filed Feb. 10 by Gertie Seigel in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina. The camp and counselor Derry O'Kane, also named as a defendant, had not responded to the suit.
Spokesperson D'Alessandro said the camp was unaware of the lawsuit until it had been contacted by the media.
"We haven't been served the lawsuit, so we won't be able to respond to its allegations," she said.
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Joel Burgess has lived in WNC for more than 20 years, covering politics, government and other news. He's written award-winning stories on topics ranging from gerrymandering to police use of force. Got a tip? Contact Burgess at jburgess@citizentimes.com, 828-713-1095 or on Twitter @AVLreporter. Please help support this type of journalism with a subscription to the Citizen Times.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: FBI assisting in death probe at WNC wilderness camp; toxicology test
