Meyer acknowledges that all the policy changes were too much too fast, but she also said the staff fought every attempt to reform the campus, even her efforts to have them learn alternatives to restraints.

Staff members insist that what was happening on the ground was much different from what Meyer saw from her office — that the workforce cuts, the belated training, and the new restraint policy had dangerously reduced the quality of care. From their point of view, it was a question of trust. They didn’t believe that emq was committed to keeping the facility open. Just look at its history, they said: This was a company that had downsized its two group homes after it had decided that wraparound care was the future. For many of the staff, every budget cut that Meyer enacted was a precursor to emq shuttering the place; every policy change was setting them up to fail. According to Meyer, the staff’s fears were not entirely off base. emq ’s executives never said so outright, but it was clear to her they were considering closing the campus.

Some staff were sympathetic toward Meyer. “I liked her,” says Vivienne Roseby, a consulting psychologist at FamiliesFirst from 2000 until November 2012. “I think she was trying hard to do what emq wanted her to do, which was to get it tightened up, more efficient, more coherent. I do think that the pressure that she was under and the speed that she was being asked to make these changes made it difficult, if not impossible.”

Roseby’s, though, was a minority view. Most of the staff came to regard Meyer as distant and negligent, and the flash point was her policy on children leaving the campus. At staff meetings, Meyer repeated the message she’d been trying to get through from almost the moment she had arrived: The children, young and vulnerable as they were, were going to have to examine their own decisions about why they were leaving and what they were doing while they were gone. What happened to the children outside its walls was not the home’s responsibility. California law, she said, was clear on this. Meyer assured the staff there was a logic to her thinking. If the children came to harm, the home could document the problem and perhaps get the children placed elsewhere. “Failing up,” she called it.

“There is something wrong with this woman,” says Kim Rowerdink, the dorm supervisor. “The police kept asking us, ‘What is Audrie doing?’ And we’d say, ‘They keep telling us we’re not responsible for what the kids do off campus. We can let them go.’”

Meyer, for her part, came to regard the staff as too emotionally involved. “It seemed completely foreign to them,” she says, “that any program would not be able to stop a child from leaving the program. But you can’t. I think the staff felt like it was the program’s fault if the girls put themselves in harm’s way, and I just don’t think that’s a fair statement.”

Michael Weston of the Department of Social Services says Meyer’s view amounts to a misguided understanding of a home’s role. “The group home,” he says, “is responsible for care and supervision, regardless whether the children are on campus or not.” Referring to FamiliesFirst’s policy guidelines, he says, “Read it right here. It talks about when a child goes off campus, we are responsible for their care and supervision.”

In truth, that’s not quite what the home’s guidelines say. Rather, it states that staff will shadow children who leave the campus and will try to persuade them to return, employing restraints or calling police if they begin to harm themselves or someone else. The problem for the Davis home was that if its staff shadowed all the children who were leaving in the winter and spring of 2013, there would not be enough staff to supervise the children who remained on campus.

Between October 2012 and the beginning of May 2013, records show that Sinclaire and other licensing investigators visited the facility on at least 15 occasions. In late February, Sinclaire did bring up with Meyer the number of children leaving campus and the police’s involvement in returning them. But Meyer says Sinclaire told her that she couldn’t prevent children from leaving the campus by restraining them. (Michael Weston says that the Department of Social Services has no record of Sinclaire giving this directive. Sinclaire declined to comment, saying that she’d been instructed not to talk.)

Every group home in California must file a report to the Department of Social Services for a range of incidents, accidental or deliberate, alleged or substantiated. The roughly 500 reports that the home filed during the first four months of 2013 paint a picture of a facility whose staff and administration were overmatched. Meyer says that by April and May there were likely hundreds more reports that were never filed, in violation of state rules. “The volume went from 300 a month to 1,000 a month,” she says, “and we didn’t have enough trained people to file them.”

From February to May, at least six counselors, therapists, and social workers resigned. “They were quitting faster than we could fill the jobs,” Meyer says. According to people who had worked at the home for years, there’d never been a time when so many staff quit or took stress leave within such a short period. In May, the police received 252 calls, five times as many as they had received in January.

When Meyer made her superiors at emq FamiliesFirst aware of the problems on campus, she says, they were “very slow to grasp the seriousness of what was going on.” She recalls several disconcerting conversations with Gordon Richardson: “When I relayed staff concerns about not having enough people, his reflection was, ‘Well, maybe that’s why restraints were down, and that’s a good thing.’”

By late spring, Meyer says she became convinced the situation was hopeless. “I was very, very impacted by what was going on with these kids,” she says. “I was not OK. I saw that it was horrible. When I realized the police weren’t going to respond, and the staff was not getting support, and the kids were getting free rein — that was a horrible situation. I couldn’t see a way to recover at that point.”

Meyer was right. On the morning of June 6, she was sitting in the conference room once again listening to her staff express their frustration when she took a phone call. It was the front desk. Fifteen Davis police officers in bulletproof vests were in the lobby.

Epilogue

On January 9, 2015, California’s Department of Social Services issued a 56-page report to the legislature outlining what needed to be done to care for the kinds of children who lived and suffered at the Davis home. The report called for increased minimum qualifications and training for group-care workers; more-varied therapeutic services; and better screening of children to more appropriately determine their needs and where they should be placed.

Most dramatically, the report called for group homes to be eliminated, or at least limited to offering short-term stays. “It is well-documented,” the report states, “that residing long-term in group homes with shift-based care is not in the best interest of children and youth. Not only is it developmentally inappropriate, it frequently creates lifelong institutionalized behaviors and contributes to higher levels of involvement with the juvenile justice system and to poor educational outcomes.”

As long as group homes exist, they will still present challenges of oversight. The Department of Social Services report says little about improving its own performance in inspecting and investigating the homes. To many, the department has long been poorly positioned or equipped to monitor Level 14 group homes. Inspections are required only once every five years, and records show they are perfunctory, mostly involving a review of physical conditions, food supplies, and water temperatures. The inspections typically do not include interviews with residents and staff or extensive examinations of records. The department employees charged with performing the inspections are not required to have backgrounds in social work, even though they are often called to look into what for an experienced police officer are the most sensitive kinds of cases — sex crimes and battery involving minors.

The state attorney general’s office appears to recognize the responsibility for better protecting these children. In February, California attorney general Kamala Harris set up the Bureau of Children’s Justice, a new division of the Department of Justice that will focus on holding counties and state government agencies accountable for crimes that concern child welfare.

When it comes to taking care of the state’s most damaged children, the California legislature has too often been slow to act and reluctant to spend money. But Carroll Schroeder, the executive director of the California Alliance of Child and Family Services, thinks this time it could be different. “I feel much more optimistic [about it] than anything else I have seen,” he says. “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get it right.” The report’s proposals have been drafted into a formal bill that is expected to move through several legislative committees. It could be signed into law as early as July 1.

Today, the Davis campus is a ghost town. Its classrooms are empty, its hallways silent. For months food rotted in the refrigerators, bedding was piled up in the dorm rooms, and rules on restraints were still tacked on the walls.

emq FamiliesFirst, accused by the state of having failed to safeguard the children at the home, signed a stipulation conceding widespread violations. It continues to be one of the largest providers of social services in California. Gordon Richardson, who insisted to the state that he was not aware of the depth of the home’s problems, remains a senior executive at the nonprofit.

Audrie Meyer was asked to resign in July 2013. Two months later, she signed a stipulation with the Department of Social Services. Without admitting to any of the allegations against her, she agreed never to work for another entity overseen by the department “for the balance of [her] life.” She now runs a private therapy practice in Sacramento.

Andrea Guthrie was laid off in early August 2013. She now has her own family-therapy practice, working primarily with older teens, young adults, and couples. After more than ten years working at the Davis campus, she’s reluctant to work with children.

Jeff Beasley retired in August 2013, two months after the police raid.

Alex Barschat-Li was sent to another Level 14 facility after the raid. He was soon kicked out and moved to still another Level 14 residence. He graduated to a Level 12 facility. This past February, he returned home, and he now attends public high school, where he has joined the wrestling team. Wendy says she feels hopeful, but she’s felt that way before.