SNOQUALMIE, Wash. — Senior administrators at Echo Glen Children’s Center were warned of a possible escape in the days before seven teenagers with violent criminal backgrounds escaped earlier this year, a KING 5 investigation found.
As they made their escape, the teens ambushed a staff member and stole her car to flee from the state-run juvenile rehabilitation facility on May 28, according to police. The incident led to a regional manhunt for the boys - two of whom were serving time for murder.
But in the aftermath of the incident, some employees who were working that night complained their bosses at the Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) failed to do enough to prevent it, according to a review of police interviews and body camera recordings.
One warning of a potential breakout came from a parent of a teenager inside the Snoqualmie-based detention center. The parent notified officials that the youth were hatching an escape plan, according to a review of law enforcement records and internal emails from DCYF.
Around the same time, Echo Glen leaders became suspicious of a security breach at the front gate of the medium-maximum security facility. Emails show on May 24, a staff member reported that a group of outsiders parked next to the Echo Glen gate and waved a gun at the departing employee before flashing their lights and speeding off.
The incident prompted an associate superintendent at the facility to notify local police of a potential threat – two days before the seven teens broke out. The manager warned the Snoqualmie police chief via email on May 26 that a teenager in Echo Glen’s custody “may attempt to escape today or this weekend,” according to a copy of the record obtained through a public disclosure request to the Snoqualmie Police Department. The teenager named in the email was one of the seven who successfully escaped days later.
The same day, Echo Glen’s superintendent notified staff of the intel. She asked them to keep an eye out for suspicious activity and pledged to implement enhanced security protocols near the front gate, according to an all-staff email obtained by KING 5.
DCYF Secretary Ross Hunter, who leads the state agency that operates Echo Glen, said the escape warnings were “vague” and “nonspecific.”
“There wasn't really a specific action you can take other than to ask people to be vigilant,” he said. “That clearly was not sufficient.”
‘It’s just a messed up situation at Echo Glen': Guard left alone with escapees before assault
Echo Glen employees who were working that night noted that staffing levels were critically low, with just one security guard and a trainee roving the campus while other staff members were supervising teenagers in cottages alone.
Megan Krause, the 36-year-old security guard who was assaulted and locked in a cell for almost an hour as the kids escaped, told a King County Sheriff's Office detective she was frustrated that her bosses left her working in a cottage with 14 boys by herself.
“It’s just a messed up situation at Echo Glen,” she said in a recorded police interview after the incident. “I mean, why would you have just one security officer and a trainee if you supposedly knew about this?”
Krause was badly bruised and suffered a concussion during the event – telling police that two of the teens punched her in the head and face around 40 times while others worked to steal her belongings and help more youth break out.
Krause still hasn’t returned to work. She declined an interview request but said in a statement that the entire situation has been a “nightmare.”
An Echo Glen rehabilitation officer, who reported the May escape to 911 and met police when they arrived looking for the missing teens, also spoke candidly to deputies about her concerns.
“We’ve gone round and round with the administrators telling them, ‘You need to get more staff. We don’t have the ability to deal with this,’” she told a King County deputy who was recording their May 28 exchange on a police body camera. “They just, you know, ignore us as usual.”
Hunter said DCYF conducted a review of the May escape and identified “serious procedural breakdowns.” But he maintained there wasn’t a staffing shortage that night.
“We had a tired staff,” he said. “We did not have an understaffed facility that day, but we lived in a milieu where we were depending on mandatory overtime to keep the shift staffed, and that just isn’t sustainable.”
He said he didn’t bring in additional employees on that shift because the state’s intel didn’t include specifics about who might escape and how it would play out.
“If I had 400 more people on staff that night and something happened, I’d get the same question, ‘Well, why didn’t you have 600?’ We had unsubstantiated information that maybe something would happen,” Hunter said. “Do we just staff up every time we get something like this to say, ‘Wow, let’s call a bunch more people in on mandatory overtime to respond to something? I’m not sure that’s really productive.”
‘We didn’t react adequately’
Before state officials were tipped off about an escape plot in May, they were repeatedly warned of Echo Glen’s security failures.
The juvenile rehabilitation facility, which is surrounded by wetlands instead of a fence, has grappled with escapes for more than a decade. In fact, one of the teenagers accused of escaping from the facility in May pulled off a nearly identical escape last year.
In January 2022, Timothy Hernandez-Ebanks was one of five teens accused of escaping from Echo Glen in a plot that involved assaulting two staff members, locking them in cells and driving away in a staff member’s car.
The striking similarities between the two incidents alarmed many in the community and the union leaders who represent Echo Glen staff.
“It’s a signal that management isn’t really invested, doesn’t really care about the outcomes there,” said Mike Yestramski, president of the Washington Federation of State Employees. “Staff are concerned. They’re concerned for their safety.”
On April 15 of this year, about a month and a half before the seven teens escaped, another Echo Glen escape involving five teenagers prompted a multi-agency response, according to a report of the incident from the Snoqualmie Police Department. Police said all five teenagers were quickly recovered near the facility.
Hunter admitted that DCYF didn’t do enough to make Echo Glen safer after the January 2022 escape.
“We didn't react adequately quickly 22 months ago to make enough change in there, and we are reacting today,” he said. “It's hard for me to go back and say, ‘Well, boy on that Tuesday, I should have made a different decision.’”
He said in order to help improve staffing levels and retention at Echo Glen, DCYF has reduced mandatory overtime and boosted pay. He said they've also increased training, hired more security workers to patrol the campus and adopted new policies like requiring staff to lock up personal property such as car keys when on the job.
Earlier this year, DCYF received $8 million from the state legislature to make security improvements at Echo Glen. Hunter said part of that funding will go towards building a perimeter fence around the facility.
“The biggest challenge is the lack of physical security on the campus,” he said. “It was designed decades ago.”
He added that the department has to secure special permitting and follow a complex process before it’s allowed to break ground on the fence, but the process is underway.
“This is not like, 'Call, you know, whatever the first fencing company in the Yellow Pages is,'” he said. “It takes a long time to build big pieces of physical infrastructure. We are very focused on building that as fast as possible… I can only build things so fast.”
Yemstraski said he's concerned the state's security improvements haven't gone far or fast enough.
"This should have been handled years ago," he said.
Yemstraski pointed out that, until recently, Echo Glen went a significant amount of time with a broken front gate. He added that the facility regularly has problems with some of its security cameras, and it lacks a command center to monitor surveillance video.
"There still has not been the true dedication needed to prevent it again. We're still completely understaffed. The physical plant is still nowhere near where it needs to be to fully."
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