She was sent to Elan School. It was not a place for minors. Many teenagers took terrible beatings in the so-called therapeutic boxing ring.
Of course some tried to escape and with a history of many escapes the employees should have taken into consideration that she would try to escape yet another time and she did when she had the chance.
Unfortunately she met a murderer while she was trying to travel back home and it became her death.
17 years and brutally removed from this world.
It is not to believe but sadly it is the fact.
Elan School closed years later but not a minute too soon.
Sources:
- Dawn Marie Birnbaum memorial
- Victims - 1990s (Fornits Wiki)
- A Stranger in Town - The FBI files (Internet Movice Database)
After 40 years, troubling questions still remain about child abuse in Maine.
ReplyDeleteNew book seeks justice for former residents of Elan.
They are souls still seeking justice, if not vengeance.
The former residents of Elan, tortured as teenagers at a center for troubled adolescents in Maine, want reparations for their abuse.
Elan operated for nearly 40 years in Poland Spring until it voluntarily closed in 2011 because many of its former residents - now adults referring to themselves " survivors" - waged a campaign to tell their experiences via social media and anti-Elan websites. Their negative publicity resulted in declining enrollment and the eventual shuttering of the facility.
Author Maura Curley hopes the survivors of Elan will find the resolution other victims of child abuse are granted, often belatedly. Her updated book, Duck in a Raincoat, sheds new light on a story that has never been fully explored or explained, and it raises even more questions about for profit residential centers for teenagers, their origins and the people who run them.
Look Inside Duck in a Raincoat at Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/DUCK-IN-A-RAINCOAT-ebook/dp/B00ANZ26QS/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355587500&sr=1-2&keywords=duck+in+a+raincoat