The US Attorney General must launch a federal RICO investigation by the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division into Diamond Ranch Academy (soon to be re-opened as RAFA Academy), its owners, its former staff and the circumstances surrounding the preventable death of Taylor Goodridge, a 17-year-old Native American girl, who was deliberately denied access to lifesaving medical care while held in their custody.

• No criminal charges have been filed in state court. Utah will likely try to bury the scandal; whitewashing it as just an isolated tragedy instead of a symptom of the larger, ongoing “troubled teen industry” (“TTI”) phenomenon.
• TTI programs like Diamond Ranch Academy (“DRA”), are defined by inseparable business and treatment models which both promise (to the paying customers) and require (of the program) a complete lack of accountability to the teens whom they are paid to seize, detain and "treat." 
• This “treatment” is invariably within the context of a power imbalance engineered and maintained to be both all-encompassing and absolute. In such a context, abuse is the logical, predictable and inevitable outcome; and must be regarded as both knowing and intentional. 
• The abuse is not just a pattern. It is a policy.
• The TTI is disproportionately concentrated in Utah, disproportionately owned and staffed by members of the Latter Day Saints church and brings tens of billions of dollars to both church and state every year. Besides parents paying out-of-pocket or via insurance, this includes Medicaid for foster-care children and local tax dollars from out-of-state school districts for teens placed as part of an Individualized Education Plan.
• The TTI also proliferates in states where laws prioritize parents' rights over their children's rights but Utah still hosts far more TTI programs than any other individual state.

Taylor Goodridge was entrusted to Diamond Ranch Academy by her father and the Stillaguamish tribal authorities so that she could receive psychiatric and behavioral therapy.

Instead, Taylor was deliberately stripped of literally every human right she had and killed via knowing and intentional denial of access to lifesaving medical care for the sepsis that ultimately proved fatal. 

Typical of the TTI, DRA cited delegated parental authority on disciplinary, educational, medical and psychiatric decisions as their legal justification for treating teens’ human rights as obstacles to therapy and intentionally denying teens those rights.

Standard TTI practices rest on the belief that a teen can be so "troubled" or "manipulative" that they forfeit their right to their own identity; making that identity fair game for the TTI program (like DRA) to attack and destroy.

• DRA’s brand of “therapy” did not require the institution to earn the teens' trust, inform teens of their rights, respect teens' boundaries, require that participation from teens be voluntary; or give consideration to their own stated therapeutic goals or to their own senses of self.
• Instead -- for reasons stated above -- it consisted of isolating, attacking and overpowering teens, both physically and psychologically, to force a change in personality. 
• Pharmacological abuse is variously used preemptively and punitively to shackle teens' central nervous systems -- inhibiting cognitive, cardio-metabolic, endocrine, thermoregulatory and motor functions --  to weaken teens' resolve to resist and to demonstrate to them that no part of their being is safe.
• Teens' complaints about side effects like weight gain, Parkinsonism, sedation, emotional numbness and difficulty thinking are easily ignored by staff.
• The damage from these drugs is often permanent and their prolonged use can reduce life expectancy by as much as 15 years.
• The teens' experience is of a program and its staff constantly demonstrating their unlimited power over them: to intrude, to deprive and to inflict an endless and often unavoidable series of draconian punishments for even the most petty (or imaginary) infractions in the hermetically sealed environment to which they are confined. The effect is to instill learned helplessness.
• This therefore required DRA to nullify teens’ human rights and precluded any accountability to them. Adults on death row literally have more rights than Taylor Goodridge had.
• DRA’s approach, while standard for the TTI, was not standard of care for any recognized mental or behavioral disorder; invalidating DRA's legal justification for its nullification of human rights.
• DRA’s practices were identical to the thought reform (“brain washing”) practices of re-education camps in totalitarian states and would be recognized as unethical and abusive in literally any other context.
• Brain washing is not therapy. Its function is to break people in order to gain compliance, not to heal them.
• Ethical and effective therapy requires the patient’s consent. This includes being informed of one's rights and the option to withhold or withdraw consent without fear of retaliation.
• To repeat: the abuse is not just a pattern. It is a policy.

DRA intentionally cut Taylor off from every lifeline she had.

• Like black sites used by authoritarian regimes, the forced disappearances of teens to the TTI place the teens beyond the ability of the law — or anybody else they know— to protect their rights.
• DRA and other TTI programs forbid all communication with anybody outside the program except for the teen's (potentially abusive) custodial parents. This is a privilege that is granted or withheld at the staff's pleasure.
• Possession by teens of mobile phones or internet-capable devices is out of the question.
• Approved communication is limited to heavily censored handwritten mail and infrequent phone calls via landlines requiring staff to input a code to dial out. These calls are strictly monitored and will be abruptly cut off if the teen speaks ill of the program or says they want to go home.
• Like other TTI programs, DRA preemptively warned parents that their children would try to "manipulate" them with complaints of abuse and that any such complaints should be categorically disbelieved. This arguably constitutes mail and wire fraud against the parents (which are federal crimes) and demonstrates consciousness of guilt.
• TTI programs often censor incoming mail, redacting references to friends or non-immediate family members to cut the teen off from even the memory of external systems of support.

Taylor died after begging for over a month for permission to see a doctor.

• DRA’s staff accused Taylor of “faking it” in order to speak privately with an independent mandated reporter like a nurse or doctor who would recognize DRA’s treatment as abusive; potentially empowering Taylor and other teens held there to challenge their detention. (A basic human right called "habeus corpus.")
• To DRA and other TTI programs, Taylor's pleas for professional emergency medical attention effectively constituted an escape attempt.
• DRA staff physically prevented Taylor from contacting first-responders with the credible threat of physical, pharmacological and psychological abuse limited only by their discretion; something she would have almost certainly witnessed on a regular basis.
• DRA staff cancelled Taylor's scheduled video call with her parents; citing her alleged misbehavior. Taylor's parents were kept from seeing their daughter's visibly swollen and inflamed abdomen; and left unaware of her illness.
• Two days later, Taylor died of peritonitis, an infection of abdominal tissue, followed by sepsis, which caused her organs to fail. This was all entirely treatable. 
• This was not medical neglect due to inattentiveness but medical denial due to rigorously enforced policies prioritizing teens' dis-empowerment over their safety and dignity.
• All teens held at DRA and other TTI programs are treated like this without exception. Taylor’s case was otherwise not unusual.
• Countless thousands more survivors carry with them long-term skeleto-muscular, nerve, organ and brain injuries from their programs that went untreated and will never properly heal.
• Survivor accounts of complex post-traumatic stress disorder lasting well into adulthood are near-universal.

DRA’s use of its legally delegated parental authority for the purpose of violating the rights of others (“deprivation of rights under color of law”) is a federal crime.

• Because this was DRA’s principle mode of generating income, DRA was a “racket” as defined by law.
• Deprivation of rights under color of law is also a capital crime (eligible for the death penalty) when it results in death.
• The RICO Act would allow for prosecution of not only the line staff but everyone at DRA up to, and including owner Rob Dias, director Ricky Dias et, al who had set policy and profited from using the violation of human rights -- the attack on a child's humanity-- as a business model.

Literally no teen in the US is safe from the TTI. Any teen can be trafficked into the TTI without even the barest semblance of due process. Literally every right they have ceases to exist the instant that their parents sign the papers.

• Taylor's death demonstrates that this is not an exaggeration.
• She was stripped of her right to take any meaningful action, pursue any meaningful avenue that would have allowed her to preserve her own life. Therefore, she was stripped of her right to life itself. 
• People with rights do not have to spend their final five weeks on Earth begging for their lives.

Even though DRA was forced to close, TTI programs like DRA can often rise from the grave under a different name but with the same location, owners and staff.

*Taylor Goodridge cannot.*

• DRA is expected to reopen as RAFA Academy.
• RAFA will occupy the same physical location.
• The property was sold to a shell company for $10 in December of 2023.
• The mailing address was changed by renaming and re-numbering the street so as to obscure RAFA's connection to DRA.
• Such a change of address is not possible without action from the local government; demonstrating its complicity in Taylor's death and its commitment to protecting the Dias family's ability to victimize children for profit in the future.
• Because of state and local governmental complicity, the federal government must get involved if there is to be any accountability.

Only an aggressive, thorough and unsparing federal investigation -- unhindered by misplaced pity and unswayed by the TTI's humanitarian facade -- can bring accountability.