Lawsuit accuses Delco youth prison staff of sexual abuse

Three people have filed lawsuits alleging they were sexually abused by staff at a Delaware County juvenile detention center, the latest in a series of lawsuits against similar facilities across Pennsylvania.

The lawsuit, filed late Wednesday night in Delaware County court, accuses staff at the now-closed Delaware County Juvenile Detention Center in Lima of perpetuating a culture of abuse, saying children there were assaulted by adults and coerced into silence.

The facility was closed by a judge in 2021 after county public defenders alleged widespread physical, psychological and sexual abuse of the children housed there and a grand jury in 2022 found a “dangerous lack of oversight” that resulted in the facility’s residents being left unprotected.

The new lawsuit comes a week after lawyers from the same New York law firm filed similar lawsuits against six other Pennsylvania juvenile detention centers on behalf of 66 people who said they were mistreated while in custody. The attorneys in the latest case, led by Jerome Block and Anna Kull, said in their lawsuit that their clients suffered “emotional and psychological trauma” during their stay at the Delaware County facility, abuse that “has haunted them throughout their lives.”

A spokesman for Delaware County, which operates the center and is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, could not be reached for immediate comment Thursday.

Two of the three people alleging abuse in the suit said that coworkers groped them while they were in custody. (The Inquirer does not name people who claim to have been sexually harassed without their permission.) One of those plaintiffs said she was about 14 when a male coworker attacked her while she was working out at the gym and eventually groped her in his office. The other plaintiff said he was about 17 when a male coworker groped him on two separate occasions.

The third plaintiff said he was forced to have sex or sexual acts with a male employee about 25 times when he was taken in and out of custody over a two-year period beginning when he was about 15 years old. The alleged perpetrator, who is not named, also “bribed” the teen “with food, gifts, money and special privileges,” the lawsuit says, and warned him not to tell anyone about the abuse. The lawsuit says the teen did tell two other employees, but the abuse continued.

The allegations in the lawsuit are similar to those filed last week against three state youth correctional facilities and three others that are or were privately operated. The law firm that filed the lawsuits, Levy Konigsberg, also recently filed similar complaints against youth correctional facilities in other states.

The Delaware County lawsuit is not the first against the youth correctional facility there. At least 10 lawsuits have been filed against it in federal court, including complaints in which people said they were raped by staff and, in one case, taken to private parties where they were given alcohol and drugs before being sexually abused.