Questions on Illinois officials’ oversight of state-funded South Side center for troubled kids

Soon after Gov. JB Pritzker took office in 2019, his administration pointed to Aunt Martha’s Integrated Care Center on the South Side as a model for how Illinois would serve abused foster children with mental health diagnoses.

The fortress-like, red-brick facility at 5001 S. Michigan Ave., the first of its kind in Illinois, was touted as a humane haven where judges could send young people scarred by family abandonment and physical or sexual abuse — vulnerable children who needed sanctuary.

But this summer the Pritzker administration abruptly shut down the facility amid charges of sexual assaults of youth by a care provider and a guard beginning in August 2023.

Now, an Injustice Watch investigation has found oversight failures dating to the opening of the center in 2019.

The list of alleged transgressions — many overlooked by state officials for years — include: hiring people who should have been disqualified by prior convictions for crimes ranging from armed robbery to felony theft; overlooking complaints that guards used sexual innuendos with children, slept on the job and shared pornographic videos at work; and being the subject of thousands of reported violent attacks of young residents by their peers.

After the facility was closed in June, records show, an official with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services tried to persuade the center’s operators to backdate child-protection plans amid an ongoing investigation by the agency’s inspector general — a move an agency spokesperson says was a “misstep” made out of “sheer panic.”

Aunt Martha’s Health and Wellness — the not-for-profit organization that runs the South Side center — is one of the state’s top-paid child-welfare providers. It runs several types of facilities throughout Illinois and was paid more than $50 million by the state to run the South Side center since it opened. Millions more in state taxpayers’ money went to its private security company.

Pritzker and his top aides declined interview requests.

It wasn’t until May — nine months after the first report of sexual assault of a resident by a staffer — that DCFS officials began to monitor the facility with 24-hour on-site supervision, this investigation found. Within weeks, the place was shut down.

The closing of Aunt Martha’s exacerbated a critical need in Illinois for wards housed improperly at psychiatric hospitals and juvenile jails. The lack of available placements for these children is so dire that state officials this spring authorized a $14 million, 20-bed expansion of the Aunt Martha’s center on the South Side even after the sexual assault scandal emerged. That state grant has since been scuttled.

Among the hundreds of young wards sent to the center by judges and state social workers was a 13-year-old girl who, at 10, was declared missing and soon was being sex-trafficked on Chicago’s streets, police and juvenile court records show. In 2021, authorities found the girl in a Chicago hotel and placed her at the center, where police say she was again targeted — this time by a uniformed guard assigned to protect her.

A Chicago police investigation resulted in Antonio Hopkins, 33, being charged in February with four counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child. He is now a fugitive after failing to appear at an August court hearing.

Hopkins was an employee of A-Alert Security Services Inc., the private state security contractor working at the center. He was hired to guard children despite a prior felony conviction for a $12,000 theft from a DuPage County armored-truck depot In Chicago, Also, Hopkins had prior arrests for domestic violence and child endangerment. And, when Hopkins worked as a Joliet Job Corps security guard in 2019, he was charged with making a sexual proposition to a trainee while exposing himself.

All of the Chicago and Joliet cases were dropped for reasons not stated in court records.

A second staffer, who was hired at Aunt Martha’s as a direct-care service provider despite serving five years in federal prison on a conviction for armed robbery, has been charged with sexually abusing three minors at the center. Trulon Henry, 39, had been a football standout at the University of Illinois who spoke about his incarceration as a redemption story.

Problems at the facility went beyond accusations of sexual abuse. During the center’s five and a half years of operation, DCFS logged 3,850 “unusual incident” reports of young residents displaying “physically aggressive behavior” against their peers or staff, records show.

Injustice Watch found no evidence, though, that state officials were analyzing the stream of reports.

The Chicago police logged 175 reports of battery at the center since 2019, with 65 arrests. One teenager was arrested seven times after fights with staff and peers, police and court records show.

Child-welfare workers said in interviews that several girls were sex-trafficked while on brief runs from the center by men who met them on the streets.

A DCFS spokesperson said the department “was not aware of any instances of sex-trafficking taking place” at the center, though agency records show instances of girls 13 to 17 years old put under one-on-one guard supervision to prevent them from being trafficked.

Aunt Martha’s bought the building in 2006 as a temporary shelter for teenagers.

In January 2019, the month Pritzker took office, Aunt Martha’s revamped the facility to care for the most severely troubled teens. Within three months, Pritzker selected Marc Smith — a longtime top executive of Aunt Martha’s — to be the director of DCFS.

Child-welfare advocates were skeptical of the facility’s state purpose as an integrated-care center, records show.

In the face of that criticism, the Pritzker administration organized tours with lawmakers and child-welfare specialists. It cited the center as a response to findings by judges and state auditors that foster children were being improperly housed in jails and psychiatric hospitals.

DCFS officials, repeatedly held in contempt of court by Cook County Juvenile Court Judge Patrick Murphy for not providing alternatives, testified that the center was a “state-of-the-art” program whose services were “compassionate,” according to a court order from Murphy. 

A February email from Heidi Mueller, DCFS’s current director, described the center to top Pritzker aides as “one of our most reliable placement sites for kids who are ordered into placement by Judge Murphy.”

Starting in 2022, Aunt Martha’s executives complained repeatedly to DCFS officials about the use of A-Alert after its guards were caught making sexual innuendos to youths and shared pornographic videos among themselves.

“None of A-Alert’s staff have been cleared through the DCFS background check/clearance process,” Raul Garza, Aunt Martha’s chief executive officer, wrote in a three-page letter to Mueller in March.

DCFS called the criticism unfair but revamped its checks of the guards.

A-Alert owner Ricky Martinez declined to comment.

Martinez unsuccessfully sued the city of Chicago in 2006 for not hiring him as a cop because police officials said he failed to disclose an expunged 1991 assault conviction and that he was questioned by the FBI about his position with a charity designated as a terrorist organization.

In 2015, A-Alert denied civil court accusations that its guards harassed and wrongly detained tenants at a far South Side affordable housing complex. In 2022, the company was sued by a former guard at a DCFS facility, not run by Aunt Martha’s, with the former employee saying colleagues boasted on internal communication channels about beating children in care.

“Hell yeah bro I’ll drop kick them little kids quick asf,” one officer wrote, according to screenshots of text messages included in that pending case. A supervisor responded with a smiling devil emoji: “Take him to the dark side of the room under the camera. N mop his ass lol.”

By May 2024, DCFS had directly paid A-Alert a total of $2.3 million to guard young people at the Aunt Martha’s center and other facilities.

In July, about a month after state officials shut down the facility, a DCFS official asked Aunt Martha’s to backdate “protective plans” for several youths who’d had interactions with the staffers suspected of sexual assault.

The request came amid an investigation by the DCFS inspector general into oversight failures at the facility.

On July 22, DCFS licensing representative Renardo Johnson sent a vice president of Aunt Martha’s three protective plans with his signature and that of a DCFS supervisor. Their signatures were dated May 22 and May 28 — before the facility was closed.

“Please sign the three protective plans for the dates issued and return. I have to get this to the OIG” — the Office of Inspector General – Johnson wrote in his email to the Aunt Martha’s executive.

Aunt Martha’s refused to backdate the plans, emails show.

Heather Tarczan, DCFS’s communications director, at first defended the actions, saying the backdating was “simply” a way to “consolidate investigation numbers.” In a later interview, though,Tarczan said the request to backdate records was a “misstep” by Johnson, who has worked for DCFS since 1990.

“Sometimes, people hear the words ‘inspector general,’ and they panic,” Tarczan said. “It becomes a very scary scenario. There wasn’t anything nefarious he was trying to do.

“He just panicked. It was sheer panic. It was that moment of him panicking that resulted in this misstep.”