Lucas Greenfield was prepared to scale the razor-wire topped fence surrounding Restoration Youth Academy if it meant his freedom.

While an instructor was busy, Greenfield seized his chance. He was nearly out the door when another student ratted him out.

His punishment for the attempted escape was "isolation," an empty 8x8 room lit by a lone bulb that burned overhead day and night.

He was clad only in his underwear. That was the rule. Instructors let him out, briefly, twice a day to use the bathroom. Sometimes he got to take a shower. Mostly he just sat or slept.

Greenfield, then 14, spent two months in isolation.

"When you're inside a tiny room where all you can see is four walls," he said, "you start - I won't say hallucinating, but you start going crazy."

His thoughts ran in dark circles: "What's the best way to kill myself? Is there any way out of this? This is ridiculous. I hope I die."

Restoration Youth Academy in Prichard, Ala. is shown in this file photo from April 5, 2012. (Press-Register/John David Mercer)

Restoration Youth Academy was a Christian bootcamp-style residential school for troubled youth, squatting in one of the grittiest neighborhoods in Prichard, the worn-down working-class city on Mobile's north side. Owner and Pastor John David Young and instructor William Knott tightly controlled how the "cadets" - boys and girls ages 10-17 - ate, slept, learned and exercised.

Despite multiple investigations by the Mobile County district attorney's office and the Alabama Department of Human Resources, and despite complaints of abuse from some students - vehemently denied by Knott and Young - it took officials five years to close down the school.

"This kind of program should not be allowed to exist," said Greenfield, who finally made it out when police showed up in 2015. "All because you put a cross on top of a building and call it a Christian program, we're supposed to overlook all that happens in those places?"

Young shuttered the Prichard school in 2012, after being ordered to pay $27,000 in back rent to the city.

Within weeks he reopened in Mobile, renaming the school Saving Youth Foundation and Solid Rock Ministries.

Police raided that school in March 2015, and the Alabama Department of Human Resources removed 36 children following allegations of child abuse and deplorable living conditions.

Five months later, Knott and Young, along with school counselor Aleshia Moffett, were arrested on multiple counts of aggravated child abuse. They'll be tried together beginning Oct. 17, 2016.

Keith Blackwood, Mobile County assistant district attorney, declined to speak in detail about the case, other than to explain that arrests came after police conducted "an extensive investigation" into abuse allegations. Young's defense attorney, Marcus Foxx, declined to comment. Attorneys for Knott and Moffett did not return calls or emails from AL.com.

The case has become a glaring example of how it's possible to exploit the loophole in Alabama law that allows church schools to operate without regulation or oversight. As the trial looms, several former students of Restoration Youth Academy and Saving Youth Foundation have given AL.com extensive accounts of abuse they say was rampant.

"I just wanted one person to understand what happened to me," said Angelina Randazzo, who spent 18 months at the school in Prichard. "But there was no hope and nobody listened, nobody listened."

Hard questions

One of the first people who did listen was Capt. Charles Kennedy, an officer with the Prichard police department, now retired. His initial encounter with the Restoration Youth Academy was in October 2011, when a parent called police, concerned her son was being mistreated at the school. She asked if an officer would do a check to see that he was safe.

Her son, despite appearing terrified, told Kennedy a nearly unbelievable story of beatings, verbal bullying and being exercised to the point of exhaustion. The boy's mother came to get him.

After that, Kennedy began visiting the compound whenever he could, talking to the kids there and chatting with the instructors. The kids - when instructors weren't around - told him similar stories of physical and mental abuse.

Messages scrawled on the walls of isolation rooms at Solid Rock Ministries in Mobile, Ala. are shown in this March 2015 photo. (Sharon Steinmann/ssteinmann@al.com)

On one visit, he was in Knott's office and saw, on a video monitor, a naked boy crouched in one of the isolation rooms. Knott and Young assured Kennedy that he was only in isolation for a couple of days, to correct his behavior.

"I said, 'Can he get some clothes?'" Kennedy said. "The next day I went back because I was concerned about him." The boy was still in the room. Someone had given him underwear.

Knott and Young said the boy had threatened to commit suicide and had mental problems. Kennedy said he told them they needed to contact the Mobile County Mental Health department and the boy's parents.

"I went back the next day and he's still in there," said Kennedy.

The boy's name was Richard Austin Schuler. He was 14. He'd been sent to the school by his father and grandmother after his mother died, according to his other grandmother, Frances Henderson.

When Kennedy asked to speak with him, Schuler said he hadn't been allowed to attend his mother's funeral and the staff had made fun of him.

Kennedy and Henderson both said Schuler told them about one of the instructors handing him an automatic pistol and suggesting that he kill himself.

Schuler is 19 now and lives with Henderson and her husband. He has trouble controlling his anger and will disappear for days at a time, she said. He never finished school and does not have a job. Henderson said he rarely speaks to her.

"Austin will never be the same," said Henderson. "They took his life away from him. I think now he just tries to forget what happened."

The church school loophole

An investigation of Restoration Youth Academy in 2012 by the Mobile Press-Register found that multiple school employees had criminal records. Prior to joining the academy in Prichard, Knott was a drill instructor at a similar troubled-teen boot camp in Lucedale, Mississippi, that was plagued with lawsuits and allegations of abuse and torture. It was eventually closed.

Restoration Youth Academy and Saving Youth Foundation were affiliated with churches pastored by Young. As church schools, they were exempt from state regulation or oversight. The state kept no records on them. State law didn't require they file any registration papers to show that they existed.

Alabama law (Code of Alabama 16-1-11.1) says state regulation of any religiously affiliated school would be an unconstitutional burden on religious activities and directly violate the Alabama Religious Freedom Amendment. State law also says the state has no compelling interest to burden nonpublic schools with licensing or regulation.

While Alabama does have a few basic reporting requirements for private schools, it exempts those that are church schools in every instance. Teachers do not have to undergo background checks and schools do not have to be inspected. While many church-affiliated schools do choose to pursue licensing or accreditation by outside agencies, it's not a mandate in Alabama.

Now retired from a 44-year career as a police officer, he has made it his mission to prevent schools like Restoration Youth Academy from operating with no oversight. The 72-year-old spends his time gathering data and contacting state and federal lawmakers, advocacy groups, law enforcement and anyone else he thinks could help change state law.

"This is not a church versus state issue," he said. "The state has the right to tell these people that they can't hurt kids. They're causing these children lifelong damage and we allow it."

He said, "If I get these children declared as domestic animals, I could get them protection I can't get them as human beings," said Kennedy.

'Pray nobody got killed'

All of the students interviewed told of boxing matches at the school. Knott or one of the other drill instructors would frequently force two cadets to box each other, sometimes in the middle of the night.

Students said the fights were often mismatched by design, pitting a small boy against a much larger boy. Neither had the option to refuse.

"They'd have the bigger kid beat the [expletive] out of the other kid," said Greenfield, the boy who spent two months in isolation. "They'd make us form a big circle. You can't get out and you can't get back in.

"They would always have somebody, normally me, pray before we'd have the boxing match. Will (Knott) told me to pray nobody got killed. I was like, really? You're the one making them fight.

"So I would never say 'die' in the prayer; I'd pray nobody gets severely bashed up."

Physical abuse from Knott, Young, Moffett and other instructors was common at the schools, according to Greenfield and others.

In this file photo from Friday, April 6, 2012, John Young, director of Restoration Youth Academy and William Knott, youth director, show the chow hall. (Press-Register/Victor Calhoun)

"Basically everything revolved around a beating," said Angelina Randazzo, who was sent to the Prichard school when she was 14. "They made people kneel on rocks to cut up their knees. Made people be out in the sun all day, out in the mud, didn't give anybody water. I've gotten shoes thrown at me, hit in the face, thrown at a wall."

Greenfield bears scars on the backs of his ankles he said are from being forced to wear shackles.

"They would handcuff and shackle us, kids who were at risk of running away or harming another person, and make us wear it all day," he said. "They handcuffed this one kid to his bed."

Destani Pakrovsky remembered the shackles, too. She was sent to the academy when she was 13.

"There was a 10-year-old girl, she'd have to wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning and get (physical therapy) three or four hours before school. They made her wear shackles the entire time she was there," said Pakrovsky, now 19. "They'd give her the top bunk and yell and laugh at her if she wasn't getting in it fast enough. She was overweight and they'd make fun of her for it. It was really hard to watch."

Turning a blind eye

In the absence of concrete evidence of abuse at the schools, investigators were left with the students' word against the instructors'. The students were "troubled teens" and many had strained relationships with their parents or guardians. Students interviewed by AL.com said if they tried to tell anyone about mistreatment at the school, the instructors would call them liars.

In 2012 Knott told the Press-Register that complaints of abuse were inevitable when dealing with troubled youth: "They are going to say anything they can to get away from here."

"It's crazy that all the cops are hearing basically the same story from all these kids and these people got away with it because they used the troubled teen excuse," said Randazzo. "No one was successful in trying to get justice ... They just said 'they're troubled teens, trying to manipulate.'"

Many students were from out of state. The students who spoke with AL.com said their parents and guardians found the schools through online searches.

Beds in the Solid Rock Ministries youth residential facility on Spring Hill Avenue near Ann Street in Mobile in this file photos from March 11, 2015. (Sharon Steinmann/ssteinmann@al.com)

"These people recruit children from out of state," said Kennedy. The motivation, he said, is to keep parents in the dark and out of easy reach. A parent who suspected abuse by instructors would have to be willing to make trips to Alabama to try to find out the truth and to pursue any criminal complaint or civil claim. For all practical purposes, said Kennedy, "Their chance of being prosecuted is zero."

Once Kennedy began visiting the compound and collecting statements from students alleging abuse, he contacted various agencies about the alleged abuse. According to Kennedy, the Prichard police, the district attorney's office and the Department of Human Resources all investigated the academy when it was in Prichard, but concluded there was no evidence of abuse or neglect. In 2012, Knott showed the Press-Register two letters from DHR that indicated the school had been investigated and cleared.

"All of these responsible people should have stepped forward to say 'What is happening here?' And they did nothing," he said. "They knew the evil going on out there and yet they turned a blind eye."

Pakrovsky recalled a time when a local TV news crew came to do a story on the school. "An hour before they came, Will (Knott)had us practice the whole routine like we were really disciplined," she said. The routine involved standing and moving about in perfect lines.

During the holidays, when some students' parents would visit, "(School leaders) would completely change the way everything worked," she said. "Down to the tiniest detail they would change everything. And we had a little bit of freedom so it looked like we were having the greatest time."

Mental and emotional abuse

According to Restoration Youth Academy's website, each child received "weekly counseling with a licensed certified counselor on a regular basis." The Press-Register's 2012 investigation found that the school's counselor, Aleshia Moffett, was not on record at any of the four Alabama agencies that license counselors of at-risk youth, nor did she have credentials from the National Board for Certified Counselors.

"She used everything you told her in confidence to embarrass you," said Randazzo, who said she had to meet with Moffett regularly. "She made me stand up in front of everybody and made them scream at me, call me a slut.

"She had other staff members call me names and basically treat me like [expletive] thinking it would teach me a lesson.

"Not only did they try to embarrass and hurt these kids with their own insecurities," said Randazzo, "but they made sure everybody laughed and threw stuff at them. If you cried, it was over. You were going to get beat up and thrown in the (isolation) room."

Pakrovsky, meanwhile, said the restrooms had no toilet paper, which meant students had to ask instructors for it. She remembered one 10-year-old boy who started to smell bad and the instructors made fun of him. He smelled, she said, because he wasn't cleaning himself after using the toilet. He was too scared to ask for the toilet paper.

Pakrovsky said she avoided most of the physical abuse at the school by always doing what she was told. But the mental and emotional abuse was impossible to escape, she said.

"I lost my personality. At one point I just stopped talking unless it was absolutely necessary," she said. "It was like the last few months I was there, I was just a blank person. I didn't have anything going through my mind. It was like a survival thing."

She remembers the instructors playing mind games with the students, ordering them to do something and later asking them why it hadn't been done.

"A lot of it was emotional abuse," she said. "They would make us question whether we were sane or not."

Learning lessons

John David Young stands in the classroom at the Saving Youth Foundation youth residential facility in Mobile on March 11, 2015. (Sharon Steinmann/ssteinmann@al.com)

The educational component of Restoration Youth Academy and Saving Youth Foundation involved the students sitting at desks and filling out workbooks from the ACE (Accelerated Christian Education) curriculum, a self-instructional Bible-based program.

"No teacher taught you a lesson," said Randazzo. "You had to teach yourself."

There was one facilitator, who Randazzo and Pakrovsky remember as being kind, who was responsible for helping all of the students in every grade level.

Pakrovsky said she once told her mother over the phone that she didn't think she was learning anything at the school. Moffett grabbed the phone from her, she said, told her mother she was lying and then told Pakrovsky what to say to her instead.

Because neither Restoration Youth Academy nor Saving Youth Foundation were accredited, they could not issue diplomas that would be recognized by any of the state's two- or four-year colleges. Students transferring into public K-12 schools would have to rely on the discretion of school officials for grade placement because the boot camp's unaccredited ACE credits would not transfer.

After Greenfield left the academy, he was sent to live in Florida. Based on his age, he should have been in 10th grade but his Florida school placed him in seventh grade based on his educational ability.

Speaking up

Randazzo spent 18 months at the academy before running away when she was 16. When she and another girl saw a staff member occupied with another student, they ran out the door and climbed over the fence.

They spent four or five days on the streets in Prichard.

She was eventually picked up by the police and returned to her parents' home, where her relationship with them deteriorated further. She used drugs heavily, including heroin, and drug addiction led her into prostitution.

"I wanted to take my own life," she said. "This place left such an emotional scar on me to the point I wanted to take my own soul because this place took my soul."

She was diagnosed with depression and PTSD, and spent time in and out of rehab centers until she was 18. Now 19, has been clean and sober for a while and is working to put her life back together, she said.

Greenfield, now 17, has found a support system in another state after spending the majority of his teen years in religious boot camps and foster programs in Alabama and Florida. He's finishing school now and has post-graduation plans.

Pakrovsky, now 19 and a college student, hopes to get the chance to give her testimony at the October trial of Knott, Young and Moffett.

"It really bothers me that I didn't stand up for myself while I was there," said Pakrovsky, "and this is my last chance to do it."

Randazzo hopes sharing her experience could make a difference for someone else.

"A lot of us, we still feel like we're in a mental jail from there. We can't escape it, we haven't healed from it. A lot of us got arrested, put in rehab, were out on the streets because nobody wanted us anymore and everybody thought we were crazy. A lot of us didn't make it to freedom."