An 18-year-old incarcerated at a Los Angeles County juvenile probation camp suffered a serious neck injury earlier this month in a racially motivated attack that took place the day after a scathing federal report criticized unsafe conditions in the facilities, probation officials said Friday.
Details of the Nov. 1 attack at Camp Fred C. Miller in Malibu came to light after children's advocates heard about the incident and began asking county officials whether the victim was receiving medical care. The 18-year-old required surgery, which left him with two fused vertebrae in his neck, probation officials said.
The victim, who is African American, was attacked by a group of Latino youths, said Los Angeles County Probation Department spokeswoman Kerri Webb.
Probation officials reported that the assault was racially motivated but did not appear to be gang-related.
Webb said she could not release the victim's name or hometown, or disclose why he was at the facility. He turned 18 while in detention, and since he is still in juvenile custody, juvenile confidentiality laws apply.
He was hospitalized until Nov. 13 and then returned to his family. He will remain on probation at home, his medical care covered by the Probation Department. Webb said Friday that he was "doing fine," was conscious and was not paralyzed.
The report of the attack comes at a time when the probation camps are under increasing scrutiny. This week, county supervisors approved plans to hire independent monitors to force the Probation Department to comply with its own standards for, among other things, staffing and prevention of youth-on-youth violence.
Probation Chief Robert Taylor said Friday that his office has made strides in addressing federal concerns at the camps. About 2,000 youths are held at county detention camps at any given time.
"The camps are safe. You're going to have incidents like this in any facility our size with the kind of offenders we have," Taylor said.
But U.S. Department of Justice officials, in a report issued Oct. 31, said probation staffers routinely failed to protect youths in their care from attacks by other detainees.
"We learned that fights occur not only within the staff's field of supervision, but many occur out of staff's line of sight, in places that could not be well supervised given the small number of staff," federal investigators wrote, based on interviews with youths, reviews of probation records and visits to camps.
