 My whole entire life, my plan was to become a professional soccer player. I was a good pro. I was playing soccer, and I tried to hit the ball, some guy pushed me from behind. I ran my knee, just blew it out. Soccer was a big part of my life. And then, like that, it's gone. What am I going to do now? I needed to pay my bills, so I figured I do enjoy working with kids. I wanted to do something that I would feel good about. I wanted to be proud of what I was doing. So I chose to apply for families first at that point. It's a level 14 group home for emotionally disturbed kids. At that point, it was all boys. It was the last option for these kids. Families first was one of more than 60 level 14 group homes in California. It was one of the largest, with 72 children at its peak. Level 14 is the highest level of group home within the state system. Only the most troubled youth end up in these facilities. Suleyani Baba worked as a counselor at families first for almost five years. It was 11, maybe 12, but it was built like a linebacker. This particular boy goes from 0 to 80. He can go from smiling with you to becoming an animal in about 10 seconds. He was physically abused by his father. Dad just beat him up. So that's how he dealt with anything. He's anxious. He wants to hit somebody. You make him smile. He's going to punch you. If he sees any fear in your face, it will run right over you. I remember one incident. We had a secret call, because if he knew that you were calling for help, then he was going to target whoever you could get to. You could see a male or a sandwich on the radio. And the staff knew to start around him. You need to be there as soon as possible. So when I heard the call, I rushed over there. I got there late. When I got there, there were already five adults, trained staff, waiting outside his door. They looked terrified. He was breaking things apart, tearing up his bed like an animal. I remember thinking, oh, my God, this is not the same boy I've known for the past four months. I've never seen rage like that. He ripped off the entire windowsill. At the end of it was a sharp metal sticking out. He made a shank. He was holding the shank and swinging it in his room. I was probably the strongest of the staff there. I told myself if I didn't do something, somebody else would have to do it, and they might get hurt. So I told myself it was a challenge. Once I step forward, it slams his door. I'm knocking on the door, probably engaging with him. We are not trying to fight you. We're just trying to make sure you're safe. But he wasn't listening. The supervisor told me, Suley, we have to force the door open. We counted, one, two, three. We pushed him. The door opened up. There was the boy with the shank over my head. I tackled him. We both landed on his bed. And then other staff jumped in, pulled him down, flipped him over, and put him on the floor. It took eight adults to safely contain this kid. Everything went by so fast. But it felt like slow motion. I remember holding one of his shoulders, and blood was dripping. Someone said, who's bleeding? I'm not bleeding. My drain line was already pumping. I didn't even know what was going on. I was just glad we were safe. Someone said, Suley, your head. I flipped my hand, and blood was gushing out of my head. It gushed two inches in my forehead. That was my first official injury. I found this first demanding. I went home, just telling myself, wow, is this what I signed up for? I still had a lot to give at that point. I thought I could handle it. If you had the support of your coworkers, you almost felt like a family. You could be two men, and you feel like a mother and a father. These boys didn't have that growing up. We could be an example. That's what drove me for a long time. Many things happened. For years, families first operated under severe financial distress. In 2009, they merged with a larger social services agency, Eastfield Ming-Kwang, or EMQ. It mainly came from upstairs, from the admin, the offices, people that didn't deal with the boys up front. They didn't know what it was like. There were changing rules. Most group homes didn't want girls, but there were more girls that had been put into the system. More girls being abused, it's very unfortunate. So, somehow, upstairs, they decided taking in girls was going to bring in money. Beyond then, that was going to be a disaster. And, you know, with the girls, just telling myself, oh, my God, it's so different from the boys. The way they interacted, the way they were talking, the amount of provoking that was going on. There's just so many un-racing rules that I did not know. I was in training to deal with girls. Later, the new management made other policy changes. They cut the on-call support staff. Counselors were told to physically restrain children only as a last resort. From there on, it was like a snowball effect. The boys and girls knew that we were on the staff. The kids can smell the fear. They can smell the fatigue in staff. It became worse when the new administration implemented a rule that we were not allowed to stop the kids anymore from living in campus. From going AWOL, you could not physically touch them. We were supposed to shadow, meaning follow them around the community, keep an eye on them. We run into staff with nine kids, leave eight of them to go shadow one. That is ridiculous. I'm not sure what was going on in their mind at this point. The impact, going around terrorizing the community, I got calls, yeah, dude, Suley, I'm pretty sure we just saw some of your kids. I'm like, how could you tell? Well, one of them was pretending to be someone else's mom. We could tell that she was the same age, but she was lying, trying to borrow a cigarette. There's a train station in Davis. Homeless people hanging out. And they were friends. And these kids were providing that. These kids could relate to them. And I remember being told they're doing drugs. These kids needed supervision. That's why they ended up at level 14 group room. Now you're telling them they can go in the community and do whatever they want. Most of them didn't come back and sleep. They would sleep out. Some of them might come back. It was like a hotel. They would sleep, eat, recuperate. Boom, they were gone. They're rising to town. Some of them ended up in Sacramento, 45 minutes away. Every day I went to work, I was thinking, what will finally be the breaking point? It was very dangerous. It was a bad place. I could not even act in self-defense. I couldn't even protect myself. Towards the end, this really young girl arrived. She's nine. She told me she used to live in Utah and her mom moved there because she met some guy online. The dude ended up abusing her. I was called to come in and watch her. I was sitting there. She was a very sweet girl and she's talking to me. She had these high heels that she had gotten from somebody and she was trying to walk around in them and she's falling over, trying to impress me. I'm saying, you don't have to try so hard. You are only nine years old. I remember the shoes was almost like a sign. She's willing to try things that adults would do. She was going to copy whatever the older girls were doing. You have other girls in the house who are 12 and 13 running away into town. They will come back and tell stories about all the drugs they're doing. Of course, she's going to want to go after them. I was like, oh my God, she's going to get in trouble and there's nothing I can do about it. I felt worthless. That was my breaking point. I turned in my resignation letter. A couple days later, I was coming to do my exit interview. I remember her. As I was driving in, she was running off. I told myself, someone needs to stop this girl. But then I told myself, no, don't do it because you've been told not to stop anybody anymore. That's the rule. That was the day she overdosed and almost died. That last week in May, 2013, turned out to be the breaking point for the entire facility. There were 86 calls to police in a week for assaults, sexual abuse, runaways, drug use and other problems. It turned out the nine-year-old girl had been at a local park with some other kids, drinking and doing drugs. Someone said she turned up naked and drunk on the doorstep of a nearby house. She ended up in the emergency room. More than a dozen kids went AWOL. That same week, an 11-year-old girl from family's first told staff that two teenaged boys from the facility held her down and raped her in a local park. And these boys, I worked for my house. So I felt responsible. Once I got to the police, that was it. It was all over the media. Family's first was shut down. I don't know what happened to all the kids. They sent them away. Some to group homes, some to driven out house, some went out of state. I hope they are getting the help they need. We used to preach being accountable to the kids. It's sad that we kept preaching that and we were just not doing it. They have no self-control at all. I don't blame them, I don't. They're damaged and we refuse to do our jobs. That's all. They're damaged kids and we refuse to do our job to keep them safe.