What was supposed to be a "tough love" sort of boot camp teaching discipline to troubled teenagers from across the country became a staging ground for horrors and abuse, investigators said.
Two of the 30 youths at the Flat Tops Wilderness Area Camp contracted a flesh-eating infection, and a girl had to have a finger amputated.A hospital set up a triage center in a high school to treat the children from the Pathfinder Wilderness Program, the Rio Blanco County sheriff's office said.
The youths complained that counselors spit in their faces, made them eat their own vomit, challenged them to fight, screamed racial and sexist slurs at them and made them carry human feces in their pockets, authorities said.
The teens said they were not allowed to bathe and ordered to tell outsiders that everything was OK.
Counselors were being investigated for abuse and neglect, but no arrests have been made, Sheriff Phil Stubblefield said.
The children, who came from 17 states and British Columbia, were returned to their parents after a judge ordered them taken into protective custody.
Investigators traveled by horseback Monday to the camp located roughly 100 miles northwest of here after learning about the children who were hospitalized.
Stubblefield said another teenager suffered from trenchfoot, others had "injuries from their boots" and still others were "covered with insect bites that were scabbed over."
The children spent between two and 12 weeks at Pathfinders because their parents "had problems with them and wanted them in a regimented environment," Stubblefield said.
The Colorado Department of Human Services ordered Pathfinders to shut down its state operations.