Inside of Somerset Hills, when we were around 10 years old we used to have sex with each other. If you got caught you were dragged down the stairs, down the hill, and then put in a booth for a week – a booth without back support. You sat here from the time you woke up until the time you went to bed. I was actually caught once.
I was in Somerset Hills residential treatment facility from the age of 7 until I was 12 years old. After, I was sent to Bonnie Brae until I was 14. In Bonnie Brae we didn’t have to worry about the staff abusing us, it was the other kids you had to watch out for. There were a lot of fights, sometimes the bigger kids would pick on you. There were a few occasional assaults that went past just normal fighting. In Bonnie Brae, a kid hit another kid in the forehead with a rubber mallet. I remember an ambulance coming and taking him out on a stretcher.
One friend that I was in Somerset Hills with had his arm broken at the elbow. The details are a little fuzzy but I believe they broke his elbow while they dragged down the stairs – he was in a cast for a while. I was in a similar situation where I was dragged down two flights of stairs by my hair, dragged a little bit on the carpet once we got to the bottom which gave me rug burn, and then finally flipped over and choked out. We were picked up above adult’s heads and slammed on our backs. I’ve been slammed on the corner of a couch and flipped over then had a knee in my spine and had my arms pulled backwards. Sometimes we were beat like this just for talking back. Cornelius Frederick was killed for throwing a sandwich.
I came from a home with a mother who had a drug problem and she dated men who abused me. One guy she dated used to whip me with the rod you use to close the blinds. Another boyfriend she had once threw me across a room onto a bed and then threw a 5 gallon bucket at me and said that if I had to shit and piss that I had to do it in that bucket. He told me that if I got off the bed that he would beat the shit out of me. This man also frequently called me retarded.
They drank a lot and I believe at this point they were smoking crack. They ended up letting someone in the house who ended up molesting my sister and forcing me to watch and participate when I was around 7 years old. He later made me touch his penis. With all of this going on I ended up in a few pediatric psychiatric hospitals. I was also in and out of trouble. When finally I ended up stabbing a babysitter in the arm.
This is where DYFS(CPS) became involved. They took me from my home and placed me in Somerset Hills. Not only was Somerset Hills government funded but government workers were placing children in these homes that were abusing, raping, and killing them. On top of that all of this was being ignored while it was happening.
Once you’re released, there’s no reintegration training, there is no training of any sort on how to live in normal society as a normal person. All you know is the dysfunctional family that you came from and the life of being abused by adults. Your entire childhood filled with nothing but physical, mental, and sexual abuse. This is what caused me to be extremely violent to everyone around me once I was released.
I end up with five felony convictions – two of them are violent. One being weapons possession and the other being aggravated assault. I have been diagnosed with C-PTSD. Which is something that you couldn’t even begin to fathom living with. I tell people what it is and I still don’t think they get the gist of what I’ve had to live with all of these years.
I’ve had such a long journey picking up the pieces and trying to put everything back together again. I shouldn’t have to do this and what was done to me was not my fault! There is no one to answer for what they did to us because there is a statute of limitations. What concerns me the most is getting this limitation removed! This way all of the children who were wronged can finally make our abusers answer for what they have done to us.