The Oregon Youth Authority failed to follow through on complaints directly tied to the safety of young people in its custody, including sex crime allegations, drug smuggling, attempted suicide and assaults, according to a newly released state investigation. The investigation revealed that at leas t two complaints involved allegations of an employee sexually abusing a youth and that the youth authority had not bothered to refer the matter to Oregon State Police. The unit charged with investigating the complaints also was slow to respond to a 2024 complaint about staff forcing two youths to kiss “for a food reward” earlier that year, the investigation said. The report notes that parents, too, noticed the agency under Director Joe O’Leary was failing their kids. “Parents of youth have emailed O’Leary with concerns … asking why their son is still being beat up,” wrote Travis Hampton, who conducted the review into O’Leary and Raymond Byrd, chief investigator for the agency’s Professional Standards Office. Youth authority workers interviewed as part of the investigation described deep frustration over the inaction and the consequences for youths — “makes my stomach hurt,” one told Hampton. “The kids deserve to be safe,” another said. The investigation, released late Thursday in response to a public records request from The Oregonian/OregonLive, sheds troubling new light on the crisis within the youth authority and provides employees’ first-hand accounts of the dysfunction. The agency has been hit with numerous civil rights lawsuits regarding the abuse of young people in its custody and claims that supervisors failed to intervene and report abuse. The report, while offering broad descriptions of the nature of some of the allegations that went unaddressed, does not provide details of those cases or how the agency is currently handling them. The inquiry is one of two major investigations this year into the agency’s management of complaints about youth safety. The other, carried out by a pair of veteran Oregon Department of Corrections administrators, focused on untangling the massive backlog of complaints handled by the youth authority’s Professional Standards Office. That review found Byrd had failed to review his unit’s investigations into an estimated 3,000 abuse complaints spanning seven years. It also revealed that investigations had not been completed in another 733 cases dating to 2018. Byrd resigned earlier this year when confronted with initial findings of the review. Last week, one day before the state released additional details showing the scope of the crisis, Gov. Tina Kotek fired O’Leary. The youth authority, which employs about 900 people, is part of Oregon’s juvenile justice system. It oversees about 900 youths and manages nine locked facilities, including the state’s youth prison, MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility in Woodburn. The records released Thursday detail a separate Department of Administrative Services investigation into O’Leary’s leadership and Byrd’s management of the Professional Standards Office. They show that the former director had for years failed to properly supervise the operation of the Professional Standards Office, creating “a safety risk to youth and staff along with undermining the credibility of the agency’s efforts” to hold people accountable for misconduct. The investigation noted that O’Leary was Byrd’s longtime supervisor. O’Leary, who was paid an annual salary of $225,342, told the investigator that he had no idea the unit was faltering until this year and that Kotek’s staff shut down his efforts to bring the problem to light. Byrd opted for what is known as a name-clearing hearing, which the Department of Administrative Services held in public late Friday afternoon. He defended his performance and said he told agency leaders he was overwhelmed by the volume of complaints. He also said he was stunned to read in the Department of Administrative Services report the account of one former employee who said Byrd’s race — he is Black — was a factor in his hiring. According to the former employee, O’Leary sought a person of color for the position. The former employee said Byrd and another candidate were finalists and Byrd was hired even though the hiring panel preferred the other candidate. “I was deeply hurt when I read this in the report,” Byrd said during the virtual hearing, which was attended by nearly 80 people, including Kotek’s general counsel, Richard Lane. “The fact that this was openly discussed during my recruitment was a fact that was unknown to me until I read this report, but it clarified for me why I received a less than enthusiastic welcome,” he said. “This act of racial bias undermined my ability to establish positive relationships with my co workers.” Employees touched on their experiences working with Byrd and O’Leary in their interviews with Hampton, the Department of Administrative Services investigator. The state redacted the employees’ names. Some said reports about the treatment of youths often went nowhere. One staffer said Byrd ignored her efforts to assign complaints to investigators and that the “cases stacked up by the hundreds.” She said she went to O’Leary three times with concerns about the unit’s management. Another employee said O’Leary received a round of “ugly” audits in 2021 about the poor functioning of Byrd’s unit. Auditors told O’Leary they had “significant concerns,” Hampton wrote. One human resources employee told Hampton that a judge threw out a criminal case involving a youth authority employee, finding a previous review of the matter by the Professional Standards Office was not credible. The employee said dealing with Byrd’s unit “became so challenging” that she went directly to law enforcement “to move cases along.” Another staffer called Byrd’s hiring practices “atrocious,” saying the process took so long that “good candidates would move on.” The agency has confronted a series of lawsuits detailing abuse of young people in state custody. In the most recent suit, 10 men who were held as boys at MacLaren have filed a $51 million lawsuit against the state, alleging they were sexually abused by the prison’s longtime chief medical officer. At 5 p.m. Thursday, minutes before the state released the latest investigation into O’Leary and Byrd to The Oregonian/OregonLive, Jana McLellan, the youth authority’s interim director, sent a message to all employees, saying the report would likely include “some statements that leave some on our team hurting.” “I hope you can continue to support each other and keep our work focused on the youth committed to our care,” she wrote. “They rely on us to support them and help them develop into productive crime-free members of our community.” The post Complaints of sex crimes, drug smuggling and assaults largely ignored by Oregon Youth Authority leadership, state investigation says appeared first on Salem Reporter. ...read more read less