SPOKANE, Wash – A new lawsuit filed in Spokane County Superior Court alleges decades of abuse at the juvenile detention center, starting in the 1980s and extending to 2010.
The suit was filed Friday with the initials of 15 people listed as plaintiffs.
According to the lawsuit, “Spokane County employed multiple sex predators and granted them nearly unfettered power over children and adolescents helplessly locked in cells at the Juvenile Detention Center.”
The suit names several guards specifically.
The plaintiffs claim the abuse ranged from flirting to rape and that Spokane County showed a “continuing failure by defendant Spokane County to protect vulnerable kids within their care.”
The lawsuit says the named guards would groom the juveniles, then coerce them into sexual acts. Attorneys claim they then tried to silence them through retaliation and intimidation.
The lawsuit says the guards targeted boys and girls and that while most did not know each other, they provided “remarkably similar accounts” of abuse.
Several of the alleged victims report one of the guards coercing them after they had been released.
Public records show the two guards most prominently named in the lawsuit have since died.
The suit says “Spokane County… appears to have attracted pedophiles into employment at the Juvenile Detention Center.”
It says Spokane County failed to install cameras until 2020.
Attorneys say most of the alleged victims were scared to come forward, but that “some victims did report abuse to the staff at the Juvenile Detention Center, who did nothing.”
It goes as far as to claim that one person was being sexually abused in a closet when another guard saw it and simply closed the door. The next day, the suit alleges, that guard joined in on the abuse.
Connelly Law Offices, which filed the suit, wants a jury to hear the case and for the county to pay damages to those who have come forward.
Spokane County has not yet responded to the lawsuit.
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