Fateful trip to Boys Ranch
Bad breaks charted Nick's course early on
By Jim Sams
Record Staff Writer
On the day before his father's funeral, Nicholaus Contreraz
slipped away from his family and didn't return until the services were over.
Mark Paul Contreraz was killed March 1994 by a gunman in a small,
red sports car who fired a spray of bullets in the family's north Sacramento cul-de-sac.
The next day, 12-year-old Nicholaus, whose family called him Nick, watched the doctor turn
off the life-support system that pumped air into his father's lungs.
And then Nick disappeared.
"He just took off," said Nick's uncle, Joseph
Contreraz. "I think that might have triggered something in Nick. From that day on,
anytime he came across a problem in his life or something he couldn't handle, he
ran."
Nick would keep on running from his family, juvenile hall and
group homes until exasperated Sacramento County probation officers finally sent him to
Arizona Boys Ranch, a private reform camp that promises to rehabilitate the most-troubled
juvenile delinquents with no-nonsense discipline and tough physical conditioning.
When Nick talked about running away from there, his caretakers
slammed him into walls and pushed him through military-style drills, according to witness
accounts. When he complained he was sick, they called him a faker and made him do push-ups
or run up and down a hill. When he collapsed, they dragged him.
Nick died March 2 while staff members were forcing him to do
barrel rolls in the sand of a volleyball court.
Since then, Nick Contreraz has become a symbol of failure for a
juvenile-justice system overwhelmed by thousands of delinquents who shrug off all attempts
at reform. The lawmakers and agency heads who call the shots in state government are
beginning to question whether California should be using federal foster-care money to send
hundreds of delinquents to out-of-state reform camps.
Boys Ranch President Bob Thomas apologized for his institution's
treatment of Nick and fired the staff members he said were responsible. He said the abuse
was an isolated incident.
Investigators for the state Department of Social Services,
however, concluded that abuse at Arizona Boys Ranch was so widespread and scrutiny by
Arizona authorities so lax that California cut off funding for the ranch effective Aug. 1.
Prosecutors in Pinal County, Ariz., where Nick died, say they are making slow progress in
a criminal investigation, and the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating to find if
Nick's civil rights were violated.
Those official inquiries, however, have paid little attention to
the series of tragedies that brought Nick to Arizona Boys Ranch in the first place.
He lived all his life in institutions or a neighborhood consumed
by drug abuse, poverty and random violence, passing from family member to group home to
family member. He refused to accept the authority of any adult other than his father, who
was dead.
Mark Phelps, executive director of Stockton Children's Home, said
the juvenile courts deal with thousands of children like Nick every day. He said most of
the troubled youths filling up juvenile halls and group homes come from "tragically
dysfunctional" backgrounds. They are born to parents who are often little more than
children themselves and then are neglected because of selfishness or ignorance, while
society doesn't step in until they turn to crime, drugs and gangs to mark the senseless
passing of time.
"I don't think we're really showing any interest in these
kids," Phelps said. "What we do is we wait until these kids victimize someone,
and then we express an interest. Sometimes it's too late. That's when the system says
'There's not much we can do with this kid short of protecting the community.' "
Nick's Uncle Joe fears that the public will remember his nephew
as just another young punk who died because some well-deserved discipline got out of hand.
"I just want to get across to people that the story of Nick
could happen to any of them," Joseph Contreraz said. "You don't have to come
from a drug-infested neighborhood or somewhere low-income. He was just a lonely, lost kid
who needed love and needed guidance.
"You never know what decisions your kids are going to make.
No matter how hard you try to raise your kids, they are just one decision away from
getting into the system, and they could end up where Nick did."
The love affair that spawned Nick failed before he was out of
diapers.
Nick's mother, Julie Bartholomew, met Mark Contreraz when she was
14. He was a 22-year-old unemployed carpenter who had moved back in with his mother and
sister after separating from his wife. She was a friend of Mark's sister, Margot
Contreraz, and often spent time hanging out at Margot's house after school.
Bartholomew said it didn't matter to her that Mark Contreraz was
eight years older, already had a son and was still married. She didn't listen when her
mother tried to forbid the relationship, or when her stepfather threatened to call the
police.
Bartholomew was pregnant before she got out of 11th grade. The
couple rented a house together, and she dropped out of high school. She gave birth to Mark
Contreraz II when she was 18 and got pregnant again with Nick only a few months later. He
was born Jan. 15, 1982.
And a few months after that, Bartholomew kicked Mark Contreraz
out of the house. She said he had come home drunk one time too many.
Bartholomew found another man, a sometime mechanic and full-time
heroin addict. He borrowed a lot of money from her but never paid it back. Bartholomew
walked in while he was shooting up one day and decided she wanted to see where her money
was going. The boyfriend tried to talk her out of it, but she threatened to cut off the
supply of cash.
He decided they would share the next fix.
Bartholomew and her boyfriend slipped into the bathroom as her
sister watched little Mark and Nick in the living room. The young mother, who was deathly
afraid of needles as a little girl, stuck a syringe into her arm.
Within two or three months, she was injecting heroin nearly every
day.
And a few months after that, Bartholomew decided she shouldn't be
raising two boys.
When Nick was 2 she took him and his big brother to their
father's house, jotted a brief statement on a piece of paper and asked Mark to sign it.
"I, Julie Bartholomew, will let Mark Paul Contreraz have
physical custody of our children, Nicholaus Contreraz and Mark Paul Contreraz II, with
agreement of visiting rights," the note said. "He must let me know where they
are at all times and when I am all together and financially able I will get them
back."
Nick would not see his mother again for five years. By all
accounts, he lived happily with his new, patched-together family.
Mark Contreraz Sr. lived with his
oldest son and a new girlfriend, Cecelia Edwards, who had three children of her own. Nick
was the youngest in a household of six children. He started to call her "Mom."
"Nick insisted he came from his dad's stomach," said
Mark Contreraz Sr.'s mother, Anna Contreraz. "He was the baby, and he always acted
like a baby."
Family members said Nick was a sweet boy who was always looking
for hugs and attention. He sometimes talked back but would freeze like a deer caught in
headlights any time an adult had cross words. His cousin Sunshine called him a
"sissylala" who talked a big talk but would rather run than fight.
Nick and his family lived on Lane Drive in north Sacramento, a
small cul-de-sac that was a notorious hangout for gang members. While Nick was at a nearby
convenience store one day, two teenagers in a small, red car cruised down Lane Drive and
opened fire. Police say the Contreraz house was not the target but was hit as the car
moved down the street.
One of Edwards' sons started to step outside to find out what was
happening, but Contreraz jumped in front of him. A bullet entered Contreraz's head below
the left temple.
He lay bleeding on the lawn for half an hour, his brain stem
severed, because emergency dispatchers got the wrong address. Nick came running home just
as paramedics were loading his father onto a helicopter. And the next day, he gathered
with the family when doctors cut off the life support.
"My father was Nick's life, and when my father died, Nick
died, basically," said Nick's older brother, Mark II.
Mark Contreraz Sr. was one of 67 homicide victims in Sacramento
in 1994. And he would be one of three siblings to die violently.
His sister Margot died in a motorcycle accident in 1991. In
October 1997, Nick's uncle and godfather, Frank Contreraz, would become the next victim of
gang violence.
A gang member seeking revenge broke down the door of Frank
Contreraz's apartment and opened fire, killing him and one of his friends. Police say the
gang member got the wrong apartment.
Nick stayed with his grandmother after his father died, but she
said he refused to obey her and started getting into fights at school. When teachers
disciplined him, Nick skipped classes. And when Anna Contreraz tried to correct him, Nick
told her she wasn't his father and walked away.
One day Nick packed his clothes into a plastic bag and demanded
to be taken to his mother's house. Anna Contreraz refused at first. But when Nick started
walking down the street with the bag slung over his shoulder, she borrowed a friend's car,
told him to get in and set out to find Bartholomew.
By that time, Nick's mom had been arrested for drug use, gone
cold turkey in jail and gotten hooked on heroin again. She also had two daughters from
separate fathers and a new last name, Vega, from a failed marriage to a man she had met in
a bar.
The family drifted from place to place in Sacramento, sometimes
with family members, sometimes in apartments and sometimes in motels. Julie Vega said her
drug use was obvious, and after a while she stopped trying to hide her addiction. When her
older son, Mark, got a summer job, she borrowed money from him to buy heroin.
Vega said Mark seemed to understand her problems, but Nick never
did. And he wouldn't listen to his mother any more than he did his grandmother.
Nick was smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol even before his
father died, according to a report by state investigators. By early 1995, he was using
methamphetamines too.
In April 1995, Nick was arrested for shoplifting and placed on
probation. Two months later, he and two boys were arrested for beating up a boy so they
could steal his skateboard.
Over the next two years, the court sent Nick off to eight group
homes, but he would run away each time, get picked up at his mother's or grandmother's
house and then run away again. His court-imposed sentence grew longer and longer.
Mark II said he tried to talk some sense into his little brother,
but Nick did whatever he wanted. Nick could not stand to be away from his family. And
whenever the boys talked about their futures, Nick would just say he wanted to be with his
father.
For a time Nick stayed with his father's brother, Joseph
Contreraz, a telephone company lineman who lived in a big house on a big lot and had four
children.
Joseph Contreraz said Nick was amazed when he took him to the
mall and bought him all new clothes. Nick modeled each outfit for his cousins. He would
chatter excitedly about the menu before family meals were served, play happily with his
younger cousins and eagerly take part in family meetings.
But Nick could not control his impulses. One day he cut off the
ankle bracelet probation officials used to monitor his home detention. The court ordered a
mental-health evaluation.
"Although having set upon a course of anti-social
delinquency behavior in this past year, this boy still impresses me much more than the
shellshocked victim -- of both recent emotional abandonment by his mother, and of his
father's murder -- than the hardened pre-criminal," a court-appointed psychologist
reported in February 1996.
The court sent Nick to a group home in Napa. He did well for a
while but got kicked out for smoking marijuana.
In July 1997, Nick started up a stolen car that had been
abandoned in the carport of his neighbor's house. When a police officer attempted to pull
him over, Nick fled and crashed the car into a house. He was convicted of car theft and
sentenced to 38 months at the Warren E. Thornton Youth Center in Sacramento.
Nick walked away from the low-
security institution after serving about a month's time and showed up at his mother's
house. Vega was on probation at that time for petty crimes and couldn't afford to be
accused of harboring a fugitive. So she turned in her
son.
Nick went along quietly at first, but once in the patrol car he
tried to kick out the windows.
"Why didn't you get here this fast when my father
died!" he screamed at the officers.
Sacramento County probation officials were unsure about what to
do with Nick next. They would have liked to have sent him to a drug-treatment program in
San Diego, but Nick was a Northern California Latino with gang ties and might have become
a victim of Southern California rivals, Chief Deputy Probation Officer Michael Elorduy
said.
In November 1997, the department decided to send Nick to Arizona
Boys Ranch, a 50-year-old, nonprofit institution that had a reputation for transforming
smart-mouthed juvenile delinquents into respectful, model citizens. San Joaquin County,
like Sacramento, also was using Boys Ranch as a last-chance stop before commitment to the
California Youth Authority.
Elorduy said Nick wasn't the type of hardened young criminal his
department usually would send to the Boys Ranch, but Nick had run away from so many
programs that there weren't many options left.
A Boys Ranch representative visited Nick at juvenile hall to tell
him about the program. Nick asked his mother for advice, and she told him the reform camp
may be just the thing he needed to turn his life around.
"I caution staff to be patient and clear and get to know
this young man," the employee wrote in a report about Nick. "He will be shocked
by the male influence of the Arizona Boys Ranch program, but it is what he needs to modify
his pattern of
behavior."
Sacramento County probation officials say they didn't know it at
the time, but the tough discipline at Boys Ranch had long been the center of a dispute
within the agency that licenses child-care programs in Arizona.
State inspectors had complained for years that the ranch refused
to cooperate with their investigations and was hiring poorly trained staff members who
sometimes abused residents, but the Department of Economic Security continued to issue
annual licenses to the camp. In fact, the state Attorney General's Office decided
licensing officials should give the ranch 48 hours' notice before making inspections.
Elorduy said he had no idea Arizona officials had concerns about
the ranch's treatment of wards. He said his officers visited every four or five weeks and
never saw a sign of trouble.
After Nick died, investigators for the California Department of
Social Services discovered that Arizona officials had investigated dozens of abuse
allegations, but none had been resolved. Those allegations have since been turned over to
prosecutors with the Pinal County, Ariz., Attorney General's Office.
Spokesman Charles Ratliff said the investigation is so
overwhelming that the department needs a budget increase to handle the extra work. The
office has applied for a $100,000 grant to hire additional staff.
The U.S. Justice Department confirmed recently that it is
investigating civil rights violations at Boys Ranch.
On a Friday, three days before Nick died, two staff members with
Arizona Boys Ranch called Vega's mother, Connie Woodward, and told her they were having
trouble with her grandson.
She asked what kind of trouble. "All we asked him for was 10
push-ups," one of the staff members said.
Then they put Nick on a speaker phone.
"He was gasping for breath, and he couldn't put two
sentences together," Woodward recalled. "I said, 'Nickie, baby, why can't you do
what they want you to do?' and he said, 'It hurts too bad.' And I said, 'Where does it
hurt?' He said, 'My chest hurts.' "
Woodward said her grandson was coughing and struggling to get
words out. He could speak only a few words at a time, but managed to tell her that he was
cold and wet because counselors had been throwing water on him. She heard one of the
counselors say: "That's right, every time he pretends to pass out we throw water on
him."
"We want him to do these push-ups," the counselor
continued. "This is what he's supposed to do, and he won't do it."
She knew right then that something was terribly wrong.
Woodward said the counselors told her they had been taking turns
forcing Nick to do the push-ups he refused to do on his own. She said she couldn't believe
that a reform camp staff member would tell a grandmother such a thing.
Vega was more stern with her son. When the counselors called her
house later, she believed their story -- that Nick was faking his illness to get sympathy.
After all, she said, they were the authority figures, and Nick had exaggerated his
troubles before.
"I told him he was 16 years old and you have a long time to
live," Vega said during an interview later. "You are going to be a father and a
grandfather someday, and you'll look back at this situation and laugh."
Woodward said she worried about her grandson all that weekend. On
Sunday, she went to a bingo parlor where a friend who worked at Sacramento County juvenile
hall ran charity games. He gave her the telephone numbers of Chief Deputy Probation
Officer Michael Elorduy and Nick's probation officer, Don Berg.
Woodward said she called Monday, but they weren't in. That night,
two strangers pulled up in front of her daughter's house.
It was Elorduy and Berg, and they had come to tell Vega her son
had died of a heart attack that afternoon.
"I just ran across the street and I went in, and Julie was
standing there, and she was crying," Woodward said. "She said, 'Nickie's gone to
be with Mark,' and I said, 'What?' She said, 'Nickie's gone to be with his daddy.' "
An Arizona Boys Ranch staff member who visited the house told
Vega that Nick had died of a heart attack. Woodward didn't believe it. And after Vega flew
to Arizona and saw all the scrapes and bruises on her son's body, she called a local
television station to tell them Boys Ranch staff members had beaten her son.
Later, a coroner found more than a half gallon of pus in his
chest. Nick had suffocated because for the past two weeks, an untreated bacterial
infection had produced so much fluid that it collapsed most of his left lung, the coroner
said.
The family buried Nick in a plot as close to his father as they
could get. Mark Paul Contreraz Sr. lies in a grave next to his sister, Margot, in an older
section of St. Mary's Cemetery in south Sacramento.
All the plots near their grave sites have been occupied, but the
family's church donated a grave site next to Nick's Uncle Frank in a newer section of the
cemetery.
In that area, all of the headstones are installed flat on the
ground to accommodate mowers and lawn equipment. Frank has no headstone because, according
to the cemetery, the family still owes $312 for his grave site.
Vega and her mother have come to know some of the other families
that visit their relatives' graves. Just two headstones over lies the body of Michelle
Renee Montoya, an 18-year-old Rio Linda student who was killed in May 1997, allegedly by a
high school janitor. A grave across the road holds the body of a 19-year-old man who was
shot in the head because he refused to give up his Cadillac during a carjacking.
In the months since Nick's death, state lawmakers have been
considering legislation that would force out-of-state reform camps to follow the same
rules against physical discipline as group homes in California.
Vega, who is 34, said she's also doing everything she can to set
things right with her family. She quit using heroin two years ago. Three times a week, she
visits a methadone clinic and swallows a dose of pink fluid that lets her slowly withdraw
from the addiction.
Vega filed a wrongful-death suit against Arizona Boys Ranch and
is hoping for a settlement large enough to buy her family a new house outside the inner
city and set up trust funds for her three remaining children. She also has signed a
contract with a producer to make a cable-television movie about Nick's life. She said 27.5
percent of the profits will go to the Nicholaus Contreraz Foundation, a nonprofit group
that will be created to run a center in north Sacramento where teenagers can get advice on
vocational training or where to get a job.
In the brutal honesty of contract language, the agreement for the
movie deal grants "full exploitation rights of Nicholaus Contreraz" to
International Media Group of Encino. Vega said her attorney also advised her not to talk
to the media because she might say something that could damage her case against Arizona
Boys Ranch.
But Vega isn't following her lawyer's advice, and she wouldn't
sign the movie contract until she was assured she could continue talking to the media.
Vega said nobody is going to tell her to shut up about her son's
death.
She wants Nick's story to be told.
End of article
Does being born on the wrong side of the tracks grant
you eternal acts of defiance without bearing any responsibility ? |
