16-year-old restrained at treatment center dies

MANVEL, Texas — Brazoria County authorities and state child welfare officials Monday were investigating the death of a 16-year-old boy at a residential treatment center that's been under state scrutiny because of allegations of abuse.

Emergency medical technicians were summoned Friday evening to the Daystar Facility in Manvel, about 25 miles south of Houston, where CPR already had been started on the boy. He then was taken by ambulance to a hospital where he was pronounced dead, the Brazoria County Sheriff's Department said.

In a brief statement issued Monday, the department said a preliminary investigation showed "restraint techniques were used to subdue the child."

The nature of the techniques was not detailed but the preliminary cause of death "is thought to be asphyxiation," the department said. The Harris County Medical Examiner's office will provide a more specific cause later, the sheriff's department said.

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services assigned a state monitor to Daystar and refused to send foster children there after reports surfaced in June that some developmentally disabled girls at the center in 2008 were provoked into fighting to win after-school snacks. The fight, in April 2008, resulted in the firing of a supervisor and at least one other worker.

The boy who died was from Howard County in West Texas, was in the conservatorship of Child Protective Services and had been in state custody since June 4, 2008, agency spokesman Patrick Crimmins said Monday.

The death came a few days after the Department of Family and Protective Services informed Daystar management Nov. 1 its facility would be placed on probation because of "persistent concerns about the facility and the children in its care," Crimmins said.

Since June 11, the department has withheld placing foster children at Daystar. A special monitor was hired to work at the facility from June 21 until Sept. 30.

"We are going to do everything we can to find out exactly what happened, and if this death was, in any way, preventable," Anne Heiligenstein, the agency's commissioner, said. "We also are disappointed to be looking, yet again, at Daystar.

"We are going to ensure that this facility improves, quickly. Or, we are going to close it."

In a Nov. 5 letter to Daystar outlining the probation, Heiligenstein said Daystar "has a history of being placed on corrective action and then declining after it is lifted."

Daystar did not immediately return a telephone call Monday seeking comment.

Daystar Residential Inc. describes itself as an alternative to institutionalization. It offers services to "clients" between the ages of 3 and 22 who have pervasive developmental disorders, emotional disorders, are hearing impaired or mentally impaired.

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