Eighteen years ago, counsellors at a church camp run by Raphael Warnock, the Christian minister and Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate in Georgia, doused a 12-year-old boy with urine and forced him to sleep outside at night.
Victim Anthony Washington described the sickening brutality in an interview with Washington Free-Beacon. The webzine recently detailed Warnock’s arrest for interfering with cops who were investigating the camp in Sykesville, Maryland.
Nothing came of the arrest. But state records not only describe Warnock’s effort to keep the abuse hidden, but also depict a poorly-run, dangerous place.
Washington, 30, settled a lawsuit a few years after the abuse, and told the Free Beacon that Warnock is unsuited to be a senator.
Big Settlement
“Washington’s account of the 2002 events provides the first direct insight into the alleged abuse and neglect that transpired at Camp Farthest Out, which Warnock oversaw as senior pastor of Maryland’s Douglas Memorial Community church, and raises new questions for the Democrat, who is currently vying for a Senate seat in Georgia,” the Free Beacon reported.
The abuse Washington described suggests that a visit to the camp was less a shared bonding experience with other kids than a frightening term at a prison farm in a low-budget horror movie.
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The punishment for Washington’s enuresis, or nighttime bedwetting, was sleeping outside on the camp basketball court, and then suffering an even greater indignity, he told the Free Beacon:
“I’m like, ‘Hell no I’m not, it’s cold out there,’” he said. “[The counselors] wouldn’t let me in the house, not at all.… Shut the door to the cabin, locked it,” he said. “It was dark. There wasn’t nothing out there but the basketball court. I ain’t never experienced nothing like that. Like, you’re not in a tent, you’re not in nothing. You’re just out, God knows where.”
Counselors also threw urine on him from a bucket they used when there wasn’t a bathroom nearby, he added.
“I went through that experience myself. I don’t even like talking about this s**t. That s**t happened.… It was like in a bucket. They would keep that s**t in a bucket,” he said.
Washington’s sister also attended the camp and confirmed his story and the large financial settlement his family received.
Washington also saw counselors “grab kids,” he told the Free Beacon, but didn’t how much abuse occurred:
Campers were prohibited from calling their parents, he said. When he was finally able to tell his mother what happened, she was furious at the camp. “I can hear her in there, screaming at them,” Washington said. “Next thing I knew, my mother was going to court.… I thank my mother for doing what she did. She is a life saver.”
Said Washington, “I just wanted to get the hell away from that camp. I didn’t want to spend another day there.”
Warnock and the Arrest
Unsurprisingly, Washington was shocked when he learned Warnock was running for Senate. “I don’t think nobody like [Warnock] should be running for damn Senate nowhere, running a camp like that,” he said. “He should not be running for government.”
Indeed.
[wpmfpdf id=”113004″ embed=”1″ target=””]“When inspectors from the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene visited Camp Farthest Out in 2002, they also found multiple health and safety violations,” the Free Beacon reported:
“Staff are not supervising campers,” wrote a health inspector in a July 31, 2002, report. “Conversations w/ medical staff & pool staff indicate that this is routine among the counselors. It was observed during inspection today.”
In June 2003, the Department of Health denied Camp Farthest Out’s certificate to operate a youth camp. One reason for the denial, according to the records, was that the camp failed to report at least five findings of child abuse levied against its director, Brian Carter, by the Department of Social Services.
Cops arrested Warnock and another camp official for “hindering and obstructing” because they repeatedly tried to stop cops from talking to counselors about the abuse, as the Free Beacon reported in early December.
The two “interfered with a criminal investigation by interrupting interviews and directing people not to talk to investigators,” police said, and despite a warning to back off, the two continued to obstruct the police.
One of the two even “grabbed the camper by the arm and directed him away from these investigators,” then “told the camper that he was not to talk to these people,” police said.
Prosecutors dropped the charges.
That episode isn’t Warnock’s only brush with the law.
As The New American reported last week, Warnock’s estranged wife claims he ran over her foot with his car. Video shows the two speaking with cops outside her home after the domestic squabble.
H/T: Legal Insurrection
