They're among metro Detroit's most vulnerable children: teenage girls who have been abused, neglected or suffer from mental health issues.

But the place that's supposed to protect them is putting many in harm's way, police and court records allege.

Rapes. Suicide attempts. Assaults. Sex trafficking.

This is what happens to many girls who wind up at 665 East Grand Boulevard, a youth shelter where one girl a month attempts suicide, nearly three a month get assaulted and one gets raped every other month after running away and ending up in dangerous situations, police records show.

Also troubling to some are the rules: The girls are free to leave throughout the day because it's a shelter, a short-term facility for 11- to 17-year-old girls; it is not a lock-down facility. Girls run away, every other day.

And the City of Detroit has had enough.

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In a lawsuit unfolding in Wayne County Circuit Court, the City of Detroit has planted a bull's-eye on the Davenport Shelter, a decades-old facility for girls who are at risk because of emotional or mental health issues, or have been removed from their parents’ homes because of abuse or neglect. The 12-bed shelter offers individual and group counseling, as well as social and personal living skills training.

Davenport is also endangering vulnerable girls, draining police resources and creating a public nuisance, the city claims in its lawsuit, citing two years' worth of police data. Since 2017, records show, the residential youth center has accounted for more than 500 911 calls, which is the highest number of emergency calls received from any location within the 7th Precinct.

Spectrum Human Services, which owns the shelter and is the named defendant in the lawsuit, claims the city's suit has no merit and is seeking to have it tossed.

'She's not the same'

According to police records, in less than two years, 315 girls went missing from the Davenport Shelter, a yellow-brick building that sits across the street from a burned-down structure; two girls wound up in the hands of sex traffickers in January, including a 15-year-old Warren girl who was raped and drugged before Detroit police and the FBI rescued her from a drug house.

The 15-year-old's family has been consumed by outrage, grief and pain ever since, saying the the girl never belonged at Davenport to begin with: She has mental health issues and previously ran away from another facility. What she needed, they said, was a more secure youth shelter.

"My dad said multiple times, 'Do not put her there. Find somewhere else. She can come home' " the girl's 18-year-old sister told the Free Press in an exclusive interview this week. "For them to place her in a facility that's not locked down — in lower east Detroit — was a terrible choice."

The 15-year-old had been at Davenport for only a day and a half before fleeing with a 16-year-old girl in an Uber one January night, her older sister said. She thought the Uber was bringing her home to Warren, her sister said. But instead, the older girl instructed the Uber driver to take them to a house that turned out to be full of drugs, guns and sex traffickers.

The girls were held at that house for two days, against their will.

"I'm so furious ... she was raped and drugged and they put a gun to her head threatening to go to Atlanta," the older sister said of the sex traffickers. "My dad was out until 4 a.m. searching the streets of Detroit. ... She was nowhere to be found."

The next day, the girl said she and her father put up missing child flyers all up and down East Grand Boulevard when a stranger approached them and said:

" 'Are you looking for someone from Davenport? This street is known for girls running. There are men and boys who wait outside in their cars for girls to come out.' "

On Jan. 16, the Detroit Police vice unit got a tip about the 15-year-old Warren girl who had fled Davenport.

The tip came from the girl's mother, who called police about a random text message she had received from someone demanding ransom for her daughter.

"If you don't give us $2,500, me and my men will kill her," the text message read, according to the victim's 18-year-old sister.

The call was a bluff, family and sources familiar with the case said. Someone had seen the missing posters on social media or the streets, and called the number demanding money.

But the mother's call may have saved her daughter's life.

According to family, the 15-year-old girl was using Snapchat off and on while being held captive by the sex traffickers. The FBI and police tracked her phone down using cell-tower data and pinpointed her location, kicking down the door of the house where she and the other girl were being held.

When law enforcement showed up at the house, family said, men started jumping out the windows. Two men were arrested: an 18-year-old and a 21-year-old.

The 15-year-old girl ran out of the house and grabbed the hands of the police, who interrogated her for five hours before releasing her to family.

"Her legs were shaking. She was so pale," recalled her 18-year-old sister, who was waiting outside the police station. "She didn't even have shoes on. ... As soon as she walked up, I ran up and I grabbed her and I was crying. I wouldn't let her go."

A sex crimes unit eventually brought the 15-year-old to the hospital, where she underwent a rape test and spoke privately in a room with her 18-year-old sister, whose account of events is based on that hospital room conversation.

"She's not the same," her sister said. "She didn't want to be touched. She wouldn't tell me what happened. She told me about the drugs in the house, the people in the house ... but she wouldn't talk about the rape. The police told us."

Detroit Police have said little about the incident since the girls were rescued. Detroit Police Chief James Craig made some brief comments about it at a news conference the day after the rescue.

"The missing young lady was abducted and she was sexually assaulted," Craig said in January following the girls' recovery. "The suspect was preparing for her and another female that was also missing from the same location. They were going to move them to Atlanta to continue this sex trafficking activity."

Craig added: "We may have saved lives."

The 15-year-old girl's grandfather is furious. He faults the state Child Protective Services for placing his granddaughter at a facility that, he maintains, was not equipped to protect her.

"They willfully and knowingly dropped her off at that place. She's a 15-year-old girl with mental health issues ... they knew that place has a reputation as a clearinghouse for child sex traffickers," the grandfather said.

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, whose Division of Child Welfare Licensing oversees and licenses Davenport, could not comment on individual cases citing privacy issues.

But the sex trafficking incident has triggered action.

The day after the girls were rescued, the Division of Child Welfare Licensing at DHHS announced "a special investigation of Davenport Shelter as a result of the information that surfaced on Jan. 17. The department will conduct an expeditious and thorough investigation."



The investigation is ongoing.

In a statement to the Free Press this week, the agency said: "MDHHS takes very seriously its duty to protect the safety and well-being of children and thoroughly investigates child safety issues at licensed facilities. Human trafficking of vulnerable children is a national problem that is of extreme concern to the department."

911 calls imply neglect, lawsuit alleges

The city's main issue with Davenport is the large volume of 911 calls they generate: Police are called to the center every other day, records show, which puts a huge strain on Detroit's short-staffed police force, The majority of those calls are for missing persons — girls who leave the center and don't return when they're supposed to.

“Placing 24 troubled teenage girls in a facility not far from downtown Detroit, where they can come and go essentially as they please, is a recipe for disaster,” city attorneys Charles Raimi and Philip Hiltner argue in court records. "The facility ... is unsafe for its residents, consumes scarce DPD resources and therefore interferes with public morals and public peace."

The city claims the center has been warned about excessive runaways and police calls, but that nothing has been done. Now, it has asked a judge to issue the center a 30-day deadline: Come up with a plan to clean things up, or face closure.

According to dispatch records from Jan. 1 2017 - Nov. 30, 2018, 502 emergency calls were made on behalf of residents of the shelter. Over that 23-month time frame, here's what the 911 calls were for:

315 missing persons

12 rapes

66 assaults

31 Suicide attempts

22 Ambulance calls

Spectrum Human Services says the problems that the city is complaining about are out of the center's control for two main reasons: State law prohibits Davenport from locking in girls, and, the law requires management to call police when someone goes missing.

"By law, our staff is trained to immediately notify law enforcement when our youths’ safety is at issue. The needs and safety of every girl placed in the shelter is of utmost importance," attorney Gregory Bater said in a statement on behalf of Spectrum.

On Feb. 19, Spectrum filed an emergency motion in Wayne County Circuit Court, asking Judge Timothy Kenny to dismiss the case, claiming the city filed "an incomplete factual scenario, robbed of context, and peppered with irrelevant information."

Spectrum's lawyers lambasted the city for claiming that Spectrum is violating child protection laws because it doesn't lock residents in.

"The City is apparently unaware that Spectrum is not allowed to lock its residents in ... the city should be well aware of this prohibition," Spectrum lawyer, Cameron Getto, argued in court records, noting Davenport is a short-term, 30-day program that is "open and community based."

"Under Michigan law, 'open' programs cannot be locked against egress," Getto wrote.

As for the city's complaints about the excessive calls to police, Spectrum says it's only doing its job.

"When a child is determined to be 'AWOL,' Spectrum is required to 'immediately notify law enforcement,' " Getto wrote. "It is further required to 'Immediately file a missing person report with law enforcement.' "

Essentially, Getto argues, the problems that the city is complaining about are due to requirements and rules established by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees state-licensed child care facilities.

"It is the State of Michigan ... not Spectrum, that requires that the facility remain open and unlocked, and that law enforcement be immediately notified when a resident goes AWOL," Getto wrote, adding that Spectrum has been working with law enforcement over the last year to address these issues.

Spectrum, Getto wrote, also thought that its relationship with the city was moving forward in a productive and constructive manner. But then came the lawsuit.

'It still haunts me'

Several people with past ties to Davenport took to social media to vent about the center. One woman said the sexual abuse of teen runaways is a long-standing problem at Davenport, known formally as the Elizabeth Davenport shelter.

January's sex trafficking case has triggered an outcry from people identifying themselves asformer Davenport residents and their families, who are venting about their experiences at the center and calling for change.

"This is not new. I was in the Elizabeth Davenport shelter when it was located on Woodward in Highland Park," the now-grown woman wrote on Facebook. " There would be men hanging around the building, waiting for girls to run. Some girls would run a few times a week, or stay on the run just long enough not to lose their bed. They would come back bragging about what they did and ate while out. Some of these men and boys had the girl participating in group sex and activities."

One woman, now 44 and a mother of four children, believes Davenport needs to shut down, calling it a "torture chamber" that subjected her to "pure hell" in 1990 when the state placed her there because of her abusive home life. She said she was molested by her stepfather, and that her mother didn't want her.

"I always told myself if I ever had children I would never do them the way my parents did me," the woman, who asked to be identified as Miss Daniels, told the Free Press this week, saying she lived in multiple homes from age 5 until 16.

"Davenport shelter was a place that I was in once I got older," said the woman, who is biracial and recalled physical and verbal abuse at the girl's home.

She stressed: " I never did anything but look for love. And I looked for love in the staff hoping to find a mother figure that I never had."

"I was an innocent child but one thing I can tell you is my children will never experience what I’ve been through," Miss Daniels said. "Sometimes, it still haunts me."

Neither DHHS nor Spectrum, which owns and operates Davenport, could not comment on individual cases involving current or past residents citing privacy issues.

A hearing in the city's lawsuit against Davenport has been scheduled for March 6 in Wayne County Circuit Court.

Contact Tresa Baldas: tbaldas@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @Tbaldas.