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The youth residential center where kids would do anything to escape
Fox Run is one of Ohio’s largest youth residential treatment centers, a privately operated, 100-bed facility housing boys and girls as young as 5 from as far away as Alaska for intensive mental health and behavioral treatment. County governments across Ohio have paid Fox Run millions of dollars to house children who have complex mental health or behavioral needs, according to county contracts.
Police reports obtained through public records requests show that children fleeing Fox Run have run into cornfields, sprinted into traffic, and attempted to hitchhike. Former Fox Run staff members interviewed by The Marshall Project say young people resorted to violence inside the facility because they were pushed to their limits. Many eventually ended up in juvenile detention as their behavior escalated. Former Fox Run residents told The Marshall Project that ending up behind bars was an improvement over Fox Run.
Read our full investigation.
Were you in residential treatment as a child? We want to hear from you.
Want to investigate a treatment facility you were sent to? Here’s how.
At second glance, state inspectors say the jail failed, again
After we made them aware of previously unreleased video evidence, state inspectors reexamined the February 2025 death of Jennifer Wade inside the Cuyahoga County jail. During their first look, the inspectors only had footage from faulty surveillance cameras that county officials had failed to fix for years.
But body camera video originally withheld from state inspectors, and later released to the media, showed CPR starting 20 minutes after staff and nurses found Wade, a mother of two, unresponsive in her locked mental health unit cell. At least nine corrections officers and several nurses — all trained in CPR — struggled to pull Wade from her cell, load her onto a gurney and strap a chest-compression machine to her body. She died of heart failure after being taken to a hospital. In the damning video, the guards in charge of the housing unit admitted that Wade had been laying half-naked on the concrete floor for hours before they decided to call for medical help.
The state inspectors’ second review found that jail staff failed basic standards for medical care and emergency responses. Eleven of the 20 deaths at the jail since 2020 have involved these and other underlying failures.
The new findings also highlight a potentially fatal flaw in basic life support: Corrections officers, according to jail policy and their union president, are only required to call nurses and wait for them to arrive, not to immediately perform CPR. Starting CPR as soon as possible significantly increases the chances of survival, medical experts say.
Around the 216
- Cuyahoga County voters will not get the chance to vote for a sheriff in the upcoming November election, keeping it the only county in Ohio with an appointed sheriff. That system has been in place for over 15 years. Cleveland.com/PlainDealer Related: TMP - Cleveland reporter Mark Puente discusses why Cuyahoga County decided on an appointed sheriff on the “Sound of Ideas.”
- More transparency is coming to the process of building a new jail in Cuyahoga County. WKSU/Ideastream Public Media
