A former student of a North Carolina wilderness camp where a 12-year-old boy recently died is suing the program, alleging staff members dismissed her claims of sexual assault by another camper and denied her basic necessities when she attended in 2016.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina over the weekend, accuses Trails Carolina of creating “an environment where troubled children have and do sexually assault other children” and of failing “to provide adequate medical care, food, and shelter for the children in its custody.”
The suit comes a week after a child died the morning after he arrived at Trails Carolina, a camp for troubled youths in Lake Toxaway, North Carolina. Authorities have said the boy’s death “appeared to not be natural.”
A public relations firm for Trails Carolina said Monday afternoon that it had not yet been served the lawsuit and did not yet have a comment. Trails Carolina’s owner, Wilderness Training & Consulting, which is also named as a defendant, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In statements issued in the days after the boy’s death on Feb. 3, the camp cautioned against speculation and said through the PR firm that its priority “has been to acknowledge and respect the unfathomable impact on this family’s life and maintain the integrity of the investigation.”
Saturday’s suit was filed on behalf of Gertie, a 20-year-old woman from New England who attended Trails Carolina for three months at age 12, and who asked NBC News to identify her by her first name only for her safety. NBC News does not typically identify survivors of sexual abuse without their consent.
The lawsuit says Gertie was assigned to live with a group of girls at Trails Carolina in which one student sexually assaulted another a week after Gertie arrived. The student who was assaulted told staff members and the rest of the group about the attack, but staff members did not remove…
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