A state inspection report offers new details on the hours leading up to a 12-year-old’s death at Trails Carolina, a camp for troubled adolescents.
Staff at a North Carolina wilderness therapy camp failed to check that a 12-year-old boy was breathing during his first night at the facility, a state report released Tuesday found.
The boy, who has been identified in law enforcement records only by his initials, CJH, was found unresponsive around 7:45 a.m. on Feb. 3 at Trails Carolina, a camp for troubled adolescents in the western part of the state.
This sounds like a bivy style tent… a bivy sack is just a waterproof layer your can put your sleeping bag inside of to stay warm and dry.
A bivy tent is kind of just a smaller one person tent that is not usually big enough to sit up in like a regular two man style tent.
That said, it sounds like on the past they used the tarps as a waterproof layer but switched to the bivy tents.
One weird thing is they put alarms on the zippers of the tent to go off if anyone tried to get out of their tent which seems odd to me.
Obviously he suffocated so it’s some kind of equipment failure, but in general bivy tents and bivy sacks are really good lightweight gear that can shelter you from the elements. If you don’t have one you generally need a tarp or a regular tent to protect from rain or other water leaking in from the ground.
I just mean to say their doesn’t sound like anything nefarious in just letting kids sleep in a bivy sack or bivy tent. Locking them in though seems kind of weird. If adults are sleeping nearby you would hear any zippers in the middle of the night etc.
just a regular bivy set up wrong, or gotten into wrong like if you really misunderstood the instructions and went head first could create those conditions.
More likely guess would be hypothermia from it being set up wrong.
It’s also not entirely clear to me this was a proper bivy. plenty of camps like this just throw the poor tortured child a tarp and tell them to figure it out. That’s why my guess goes to hypothermia.
Thank you for the explanation and differentiation. That makes me feel slightly better.
I want a bivy sack or a bivy style tent myself but they are a little out of my budget at the moment.
Locking the kids in the sack or the tent is the questionable action in my opinion.