Once held out as a national model, a politically connected Chicago center for troubled youths was quietly shut down by state officials in June after allegations of sexual assault by staffers, sex trafficking of young girls, thousands of reports of violence, and years of failed oversight.
This story was produced by Injustice Watch, a nonprofit newsroom in Chicago that investigates issues of equity and justice in the Cook County court system. Sign up here to get their weekly newsletter.
Soon after Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker took office in 2019, his administration elevated Aunt Martha’s Integrated Care Center on Chicago’s South Side as a model for how Illinois would serve abused foster children with mental health diagnoses.
The fortress-like red brick building was touted by his administration as a haven for court-supervised youth scarred by family abandonment and physical or sexual abuse — vulnerable children who needed sanctuary.
But in a stunning move this summer, the Pritzker administration abruptly shut down the facility amid well-publicized allegations of sexual assaults by two staffers beginning as early as August 2023.
Now, an Injustice Watch investigation has found the reasons for the sudden closure extend far beyond several allegations of heinous sexual abuse, revealing oversight failures at the facility dating back to its launch.
The list of alleged transgressions — many seemingly overlooked by state officials for years — includes: sex trafficking of minors; staffers who should never have been hired in the first place because of disqualifying prior arrests; overlooked claims of guards using sexual innuendos with children, sleeping on the job, and sharing pornographic videos among themselves at work; and thousands of reported violent attacks among young residents.
Throughout the short life of the politically connected 33-bed facility, the state agency whose job it was to place and protect these abandoned children instead dropped them off at a program it repeatedly failed to monitor.
Finally in May — nine months after the first report of sexual assault by a staffer — officials at the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services began to monitor the facility with 24-hour on-site supervision, records show. Within weeks, the place was shuttered.
The closure came after Pritzker’s top aides spent years promoting the center and working to stave off negative media reports and complaints from child advocates, according to internal email communications obtained by Injustice Watch.
Even after the facility closed in June, records show, a 34-year DCFS veteran tried to persuade center officials to backdate critical child protection plans amid an independent investigation by the agency’s inspector general. It was a move DCFS officials now acknowledge was a “misstep” made in a “sheer panic.”
The nonprofit Aunt Martha’s Health and Wellness, one of the state’s leading child welfare providers, collected more than $50 million to run the center since it opened — with millions more in taxpayer money paid to a long-troubled private security company. Employees from both are implicated in the scandal.
An Injustice Watch examination including dozens of interviews, internal government emails, contract documents, confidential child welfare records and court files reveals a new breakdown within Pritzker’s social services apparatus at a time when the governor’s national profile is at its peak.
It follows previous scandals at DCFS, as well as physical abuse by staffers and cover-ups at adult mental health facilities and the mishandling of veterans care resulting in dozens of unnecessary deaths at state-run homes.
Pritzker and his top aides declined to be interviewed about Aunt Martha’s, and a top spokeswoman for DCFS cited an ongoing investigation as the reason.
“Sharing or making public additional details at this time is likely to adversely impact the investigation,” the spokeswoman said.
The closing of Aunt Martha’s underscores a critical, unmet need in Illinois for wards housed improperly at psychiatric hospitals and juvenile jails for lack of a better place to live.
The need is so dire state officials this spring authorized a $14 million, 20-bed expansion at Aunt Martha’s even after the sexual assault scandal emerged. That plan is now scuttled.
A history of violence
Among the hundreds of young wards sent to the center by judges and state social workers was a 13-year-old girl with a thin scar below one eye.
At age 10, when she stood just 5 feet tall, she was declared missing and was soon being sex trafficked on Chicago’s streets, police and juvenile court records show. Finally, in 2021, authorities found the girl and placed her at Aunt Martha’s.
There, she became prey again.
She was allegedly targeted this time by a uniformed guard assigned to protect her.
Antonio Hopkins, 33, was charged in February after a six-month Chicago Police investigation with four counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child. He is now a fugitive after failing to appear at an August court hearing.
Hopkins was an employee of the private security company working at the center, A-Alert Security Services Inc.
He was hired to guard children despite a prior felony conviction for a $12,000 theft from a DuPage County armored truck depot. In Chicago, Hopkins also had prior arrests for domestic violence and child endangerment. And when Hopkins worked as a Joliet Job Corps security guard in 2019, he was charged with making a sexual proposition to a trainee while exposing himself.
All of the Chicago and Joliet cases were dropped for reasons not stated in court records.
Following Hopkins’ arrest, two other staffers came under police investigation for allegedly abusing at least four other youths. One has not been charged.
But a second center staffer — who was hired despite spending 60 months in federal prison for an armed robbery — went on the run in May after police issued warrants accusing him of 15 counts of predatory criminal sexual assault of a child at the center
Trulon Henry, 39, had been a football standout at the University of Illinois who spoke publicly about his incarceration as a redemption story. He was employed by Aunt Martha’s as a direct care service provider.
Henry was apprehended in Maryland on June 26 and extradited to Chicago to face trial. He has pleaded not guilty.
The problems at the facility went beyond these allegations of sexual abuse.
During the center’s five and a half years of operation, DCFS quietly logged 3,850 unusual incident reports when young residents displayed “physically aggressive behavior” against their peers or staff, records show.
While the notices were filed nearly twice per day on average, Injustice Watch found no evidence state officials were analyzing the stream of reports to address potential patterns of harm.
Chicago police records show officers were continually called to restore order during brawls. Police reported 175 cases of alleged battery at the center since 2019, making 65 arrests.
One teenager with serious mental illnesses was arrested seven times after fights with staff and peers at the center, police and court records show.
Though the center was billed as a “short-term, transitional living arrangement,” this teen and many others languished there for more than a year despite making little visible therapeutic progress, according to police reports, juvenile court records and interviews.
When he was finally discharged to a relative’s home in 2022, he was soon arrested for pulling off a screen door then arrested again for punching a family member in the face, records show. Today, he is wanted on a court warrant, and his whereabouts are unknown.
Child welfare workers told Injustice Watch several girls were sex trafficked while on brief runs from the center by men who met them on the streets outside. “I know of five girls,” said one child welfare worker who spoke on condition of anonymity.
A DCFS spokesperson told Injustice Watch the department “was not aware of any instances of sex trafficking taking place” at the center.
But during one two-month period last year, four girls aged 13 to 17 were put under 24/7, one-on-one guard supervision to prevent them from being sex trafficked, according to internal state records reviewed by Injustice Watch.
Amid these conditions, Chicago police were called to the center four times when youth attempted suicide during the first six months of this year, in addition to four times last year, records show.
Aunt Martha’s in 2006 purchased a former nursing home on South Michigan Avenue for $2.3 million and then put it to use as a temporary shelter for teenagers.
As Pritzker took office in January 2019, the building was remodeled to address one of Illinois’ most glaring child welfare shortfalls: a lack of suitable placements for foster children as young as 10 with acute mental health diagnoses stemming in part from their abuse.
Connections at the top
In January 2019, days before Pritzker took office, DCFS and Aunt Martha’s signed the center’s contract to provide intensive stabilization services and help youth transition into permanent foster homes.
Three months later, in April 2019, Pritzker selected Marc Smith — a longtime top executive at Aunt Martha’s — as Illinois’ new DCFS director.
Asked at the time by a Springfield television reporter whether the potential conflict would preclude Smith from overseeing state contracts with his previous employer, Pritzker dodged.
“I don’t think that has been decided yet,” Pritzker responded. “But suffice to say that there is a general counsel at DCFS. There are senior personnel at DCFS, all of whom will be looking at those contracts.”
State officials later said Smith would designate aides to oversee Aunt Martha’s contracts. Smith’s elevation — which coincided with the transformation of the shelter — jolted child welfare advocates who questioned the building’s new designation as an “Integrated Care Center.”
“It’s something DCFS made up,” Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert told a reporter at the time.
The criticism prompted Pritzker’s top deputy at the time, Sol Flores, to organize several “open house” tours of the center with lawmakers and child welfare specialists, interviews show. Flores said in an interview she saw no indications of safety breaches at the center during this time.
The administration also used the center as a rebuttal to criticism about foster children being improperly housed in jails and psychiatric hospitals.
The practice was criticized by a 2021 state auditor general report and by a Cook County juvenile court judge who tried to hold DCFS in contempt of court for failing to place wards in less restrictive settings.
In Judge Patrick Murphy’s courtroom, DCFS officials described the center as a “state-of-the-art” program designed to provide quality services for those children, according to one court order Murphy later wrote. DCFS said the services were “compassionate” and “delivered by a child care staff specially trained to work with children and youth who have been traumatized.”
As recently as February, Heidi Mueller, the current director of DCFS, described the center in an email to top Pritzker aides as “one of our most reliable placement sites for kids who are ordered into placement by Judge Murphy.”
Murphy told Injustice Watch he could not comment on the center because it houses youths with cases pending in his court. Juvenile court records show he repeatedly questioned whether the place was safe and therapeutic.
Smith, who left DCFS at the end of last year and now runs a consulting business from his Will County home, did not respond to a letter and phone calls requesting comment.
Aunt Martha’s political connections didn’t stop with Smith.
The nonprofit also hired lobbyist Annazette Collins, a former state representative from Chicago’s West Side who was implicated in the ComEd bribery scandal that took down longtime Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, who has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. Named on a list of Madigan-approved lobbyists, she was sentenced in June to one year in federal prison after pleading guilty to unrelated tax fraud charges.
A security company with troubled history
The center was run under a patchwork of state contracts, creating muddled lines of authority. Government officials and contractors fired off emails questioning which of them was in charge of staff background checks, security guard assignments, and bill payments.
To this day, emails show, officials at DCFS and Aunt Martha’s disputed which of them brought in A-Alert to guard children who presented a danger to themselves or others.
Injustice Watch found Aunt Martha’s had occasionally used A-Alert for exterior perimeter patrol starting in 2016 when the building was a teen shelter. But Aunt Martha’s did not contract with A-Alert to protect individual youths until March 2022 and says it did so only after being directed to do so by DCFS, records and interviews show.
The protection of state wards was a precious assignment for a company with a record of controversy.
Company owner Ricky Martinez unsuccessfully sued the City of Chicago in 2006 for not hiring him as a cop after police officials argued he failed to disclose an expunged 1991 assault conviction and that he was questioned by the FBI about his position with a charity designated as a terrorist organization.
In 2015, A-Alert denied civil court accusations its guards harassed and wrongly detained tenants at a far South Side affordable housing complex. In 2022, the company was sued by a former guard at a separate DCFS facility — not run by Aunt Martha’s – who alleged colleagues boasted on internal communication channels about beating children in care.
“Hell yeah bro I’ll drop kick them little kids quick asf,” wrote one officer, according to screenshots of text messages included in that pending case. A supervisor responded with a smiling devil emoji: “Take him to the dark side of the room under the camera. N mop his ass lol.”
By May 2024, DCFS had directly paid A-Alert a total of $2.3 million to guard youth at the Aunt Martha’s center and other facilities.
Martinez did not respond to requests for comment.
When A-Alert’s unpaid invoices at the center mounted to $124,000 in February 2022, accusatory emails flew between DCFS, Aunt Martha’s, and A-Alert.
Smith, then the DCFS director, resolved the matter by signing a no-bid DCFS contract with A-Alert. But this February 2022 state contract covered services with a “begin date” five months earlier, in October 2021, enabling the state to compensate A-Alert for previous invoices.
In contract documents, DCFS justified the new $60-per-hour security services by saying they were “ordered by a juvenile court judge to provide security for three DCFS youth in the custody of the department.”
Starting in 2022, Aunt Martha’s complained about A-Alert to state officials, claiming in email correspondence the company’s guards behaved unprofessionally and disrupted therapy.
“We respectfully request the ability to move away from utilizing A-Alert services,” wrote Aunt Martha’s chief operating officer to DCFS in August 2023.
Aunt Martha’s also asked DCFS to stop admitting youths to the center until A-Alert could be replaced.
Aunt Martha’s alleged A-Alert guards were caught making sexual innuendos to youths and sharing pornographic videos among themselves, according to state emails.
Finally, Aunt Martha’s told DCFS the security contractor wasn’t doing proper background checks of its guards.
“None of A-Alert’s staff have been cleared through the DCFS background check/clearance process,” wrote Raul Garza, Aunt Martha’s CEO, in a three-page letter to Mueller in March.
Brian Dougherty, DCFS general counsel, fired back his own four-page internal response to Mueller saying Garza was unfairly criticizing the state’s background checks.
“This is not true, but DCFS acknowledges that a misunderstanding likely existed,” Dougherty wrote to Mueller. “The department is now requiring a full CANTS and LEADS check” — a reference to checks of Illinois’ Child Abuse and Neglect Tracking System and the Law Enforcement Agencies Data System.
A former Walmart worker, Hopkins was hired as an A-Alert guard despite prior arrests for domestic violence and child endangerment, as well as an order of protection by his wife, court records show.
‘It was sheer panic’
A month after Henry was apprehended, in July, one DCFS official asked Aunt Martha’s to backdate “protective plans” for several youths who had interactions with Henry and other suspected staffers.
Copies of the plans had been requested by the DCFS inspector general as part of an ongoing investigation into the oversight failures at the facility. Aunt Martha’s refused to backdate the plans, according to emails reviewed by Injustice Watch.
DCFS licensing representative Renardo Johnson on July 22 sent a vice president at Aunt Martha’s three protective plans with his signature and that of a DCFS supervisor. Their signatures were dated May 22 and May 28 — before the facility closed.
“Please sign the three protective plans for the dates issued and return. I have to get this to the OIG” — a reference to the Office of Inspector General, Johnson wrote in his email to the Aunt Martha’s executive. The nonprofit’s leadership discussed the backdating request and refused, records and interviews show.
Contacted about the backdating of records, Mueller declined to be interviewed, but her top spokeswoman at first defended the actions as proper.
“We want to address the question about ‘backdating of a protective plan,’ which insinuates that something improper occurred,” said Heather Tarczan, DCFS director of communications, in an emailed response to questions. “This is not the case.”
She said in one of the three cases, a similar protective plan had been put in place on the previous date, and the backdating of a new version was a way to “consolidate investigation numbers.”
Pressed by Injustice Watch for details, Tarczan acknowledged in a later interview the request to backdate records was a “misstep” by Johnson, who has worked at DCFS since 1990. Johnson also declined to be interviewed.
“Sometimes people hear the words ‘inspector general’ and they panic. It becomes a very scary scenario,” Tarczan said. “There wasn’t anything nefarious he was trying to do.
“He just panicked. It was sheer panic,” she said. “It was that moment of him panicking that resulted in this misstep.”
A version of this story was published by the Chicago Sun-Times. This article first appeared on Injustice Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
