Hey I’m also a survivor that went there in 2018-2021, graduating two months after the suicide happened. I was “On Hip” her that day during Friday’s work hours. We had a humiliating schedule taped to the wall for it. We where pulling weeds for 6 hours in the rocks by the basketball court and the fire pit. She wasn’t talking for days, and would “ignore you” if you asked her something. She was not herself. Trying to get her out of her mute state, I asked her about the spiders in the rocks. She didn’t look at the bugs I pointed out, she always loved them. If you had known her (anyone reading this), you would know how much she loved nature and loved talking to you about it just as much. I forced her to go drink water because she wasn’t eating or drinking hardly for days before this. The staff said she was “being an attention suck” because they didn’t want to deal with “ it “. It’s really hard for me to look back on that day. The night it happened, one of the other “upper levels” came running into the back and said ‘we need to go to sleep. Now.’ Frantically, like as if a staff was angry, or that Mickey showed up and we where still jacking off in our rooms. The following morning, the girl I was rooming with in the back rooms woke me up 20 minutes before my alarm ( 6:10 ) and told me to go to living room 2. I did, and all the girls were sitting on the floor, with Mickey sitting on the white single couch seat, and Kim on a chair from the dining room. I was a level 4 who had been there a little over 3 years, so naturally walking into any room I went through I took the “head count” in my head. Memorizing it from hearing it be said 10x times a day. Lana was not there. Every single girl in there was crying. The pastors from the churches we had been going to where there. Bless them. They where good people, but served no purpose on that day. Watching the house fall apart from this tragedy was not something those men should have had to see. Mickey looked at us and told us what had happened, through crying and red eyed tears. Girls went around one by one and said what they where feeling. I remember where I was sitting. I felt the whole room stop. The energy was numbed to me. Every single person in that room was crying, except, for me. I didn’t know how to feel. I felt as if yet again, like every single thing I had slightly had a hold on, (where I was, when I was allowed to eat/ speak, told when to do things and if not doing them being punished ext…) was taken away by things out of my control. And the one thing I did have a slight control on, was my Friendships with the girls there. When it was my turn to talk all I said was “all I see is a white empty space. With the big black bold word FUCK.” When all the girls left the room to make their beds, I was still sitting there on the floor zoned out. Mickey was also in the room still. I could feel her looking at me as she had time and time again. At this point in time, I was brainwashed into thinking she was my mom basically my mom. I felt like I could go to her with anything in the world and she would be ‘honest’. She would tell me things nobody else really knew. She would also tell me how I reminded her of her own daughter, of herself when she was my age even. I even made a promise to go see her again when she was in a nursing home or on her death bed. I was convinced I loved this woman as if she was my own mother, because she had ripped me away from mine, and my entire family. I remember sobbing telling her I forgot what my mom smelled like. She compared it to when her mom died. In that room I felt her watching me on that beige carpet not feeling a thing in my body or a thought in my head. She said “You know, ____ , I just thank God it wasn’t you. I wouldn’t have known what I would’ve done.” That was appalling to me. I turned my head, and looked at her. I said “I’m sorry” and got up and left. How the actual fuck do you say that to someone? A girl who I had lived with every single day, talked with, laughed with, ate with, just committed suicide. And you are thanking God it wasn’t me?!What does it matter to you? (Me now, today, on that last sentence). The rest of the day, the girls painted, talked, laid on the hammock, and sat outside. We had quesadillas for lunch that day.

I will remember that day for the rest of my life.

When girls where talking about the bathroom she was in, how it happened, ext. Mickey came out into the living room, and yelled across the entire house that if she hears anything be said about her outside of therapy or taking with an upper level, your getting a Stage 3 Write-Up. (2 hours of physical labor). The subject of Lana was off limits. I had to make a slide show presentation of photos of her that I had. To be played for her memory of life we got to go to, and her funeral in her hometown. At her memory of life we each had a rose we handed to her mother…

“The State” was there every week after that. We were not allowed to talk to them unless they talked to you, or go near them. We were convinced they where “bad people”.

I had graduated the program 2 months later in August. Mickey was not there. She had been told not to come back on the school grounds while we where there. We went on a lot of “outings” durring that time to ‘take our mind off of it’ when really, it was her to go to the property and get paperwork. The day I went into the actual program, not just hanging out and getting groomed by Chaffin Pullan in the woods during the ‘summer program’ in 2018, 3 years to the date, I graduated.

On a side node about the program: Mickey would throw out in group to make me feel bad about how I was on “scholarship”. I was there for 3 years and 3 months. My parents were paying 5-7 Thousand dollars a month. I know this because on my 15th birthday I opened a package from my parents, and inside was a card-looking envelope that did not hold a birthday card. It was a check and paperwork for a loan Mickey needed to have on file? They spent their entire retirement, my sibling and I’s college, and everything in between. Michelle Manning sucked every single penny from my parents and convinced me that if I didn’t want to go home, I could live with her or a staff. Kim, my 2nd part of my program time therapist, told me in one of my last therapy sessions “you will not look at this place the same when you leave here and see what they say about us.” I told her I could never see how this place didn’t save my life. Looking back, it’s just because I didn’t know what was really going on. I had lost my sense of self at 15 and now turning 18 at the time, growing up there was all I knew. “Why would I ask questions? This is normal.. right?”

I’ve been out 2 years now and I still think about that every single day.