Beware the Grace of God
Missionaries at a Baptist home for troubled boys so loved their young charges that they chained them to beds, kept them in leg-irons, and locked them in stocks.
will says: i was one of the boys they were talking about in this story. (June 25th, 2009 at 10:50am)
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Carol Walt, a DHS licensing investigator, handed Provorse a copy of the child care licensing law and a copy of the law regulating child care administrators. The missionary showed no interest. “My standards are higher,” he said. “My standards are the standards of God.”
Walt asked Provorse if he understood that child care facilities had to have a license. “I know about your license,” replied Provorse. “I know all about the state of Texas. All you’re going to do with these boys is take them somewhere and lock them up in cages.” Provorse denied that he was abusing children. “We only use gentle restraints,” he said, to keep the boys from running off. He never kept any boys in stocks. Search the property, he challenged them—you won’t find any stocks. The boys you’ve talked to are criminals. They’ll tell you any story you want to hear.
The other caseworkers fanned out, one to each boy, and took statements from them, while officers from the Nueces County Sheriff’s Department and the Corpus Christi police searched the scene for evidence of abuse. There were no stocks by the shed, only two wooden posts. Not one of the officers found any handcuffs or paddles. Not one of the boys looked battered. And although a few of the boys pointed to the chains that were wrapped around the gates and claimed that they were the chains used as leg-irons and to confine them to their beds at night, how was one to know for sure? They looked like regular chains.
Some of the boys were running through the hallways, rejoicing that they had been rescued. But others appeared confused, and others still were crying. While Brother Provorse bellowed on about the intrusions of the state, Brother Kurt was hugging the boys. “Be good,” he told them, tears in his eyes. “Remember what we taught you.”
The boys were ushered into the state vehicles, where they were driven to the regional DHS office in Corpus Christi. Each boy was taken into an office and asked to sign his statement. Thomas looked at his affidavit, then up at his caseworker. “Would this in any possible way hurt Brother Kurt and Brother Provorse?” he asked. When told that it might hurt them, he refused to sign it and began quoting the Bible. A second boy began writing Scriptures on the office blackboard; his behavior, according to the DHS report, “became so agitated that…police officers arrived and removed the one boy to [a] psychiatric facility in a squad car.” A third boy was taken from the office by his mother, who worked at People’s Baptist Church and had heard that something terrible had happened at the Grace of God.
Most, though not all, of the other parents were contacted by DHS officials but were not told exactly what had happened or exactly where their boys were, only that if the parents wished to retain custody of their children, they had better get to Corpus Christi right away and enlist the services of an attorney. Many arrived only to find that their boys were not in Corpus Christi. Several of the mothers were in hysterics. What had happened to their boys? Why wasn’t the state telling them anything? In the meantime, the Provorses were fanning the flames. They were burning up the phone lines, spreading the word all over the nation. “The state has come in,” Nancy Provorse told one mother, “and kidnapped your son.”
Eventually each parent was told by DHS officials that there had not been enough shelter space in Corpus Christi to accommodate all of the boys, that many of them had been transferred to shelters in other South Texas towns. The parents went off to retrieve their boys. Some asked their children about what had happened. Others did not, for they didn’t completely trust their sons’ word, just as they placed little trust in the bureaucrats who had given them the runaround for the past few days.
These sentiments were echoed by Nueces County law enforcement officials, who didn’t altogether respect the gatherers of the evidence. The caseworkers weren’t real cops, after all. Who was to say they didn’t ask leading questions? Who was to say they didn’t swallow every lie the boys fed them? These weren’t little angels; as one officer on the case pointed out, “They weren’t in there for singing off-key in choir practice.” True, each boy had been interviewed in isolation by different caseworkers. True, their affidavits were remarkably consistent, though not so much as to suggest that the stories had been rehearsed. Maybe the boys were playing it straight; if only some of the officers could interrogate the boys and hear for themselves. But now that was virtually impossible: DHS had scattered them all over South Texas. To Nueces County officials, that diminished the possibility of criminal charges against the missionaries. With no physical evidence of abuse and none of the punishment devices found, who were they going to believe?
In declining to pursue a criminal investigation, the county officials were willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the Provorses, who did seem a little overzealous but whom many of the parents had met and found to be sincere, dedicated Christians. To the county, and to the parents, it looked as if the state was still nursing its grudge against Roloff: DHS was punishing the Provorses and Brother Kurt Gross for refusing to succumb to state control. And as if to dramatize their martyrdom, the three missionaries finished up their phone calls on the evening of Sunday, August 25, and then packed their belongings and rolled out of town, not to be seen in Texas again.
THEY WILL NOT RETURN, NOT as caretakers of troubled children. The state attorney general’s office saw to that this past October, when the Provorses and Kurt Gross were permanently enjoined from operating in Texas. The injunction represented the end of DHS’s interest in the Grace of God. But others have not forgotten the three missionaries.
The boy who was slapped around while his hands were cuffed behind his back is reportedly a Christian now, as is the boy who was swatted 32 times. Mitchell, who says he spent a week in stocks and a month in leg-irons, has “turned his life around,” according to his mother. He still shows signs of aggressiveness, but he also spends a great deal of time in church, where he assists in printing pamphlets on matters such as the evils of Halloween. Another mother reports that her boy, who was “headed for prison,” is now on the honor roll and goes to church. “What they did for him,” she says, “is unbelievable.”
A mother in Euless says that her son now makes A’s in school and can recite Bible chapters by heart, but she stops short of saying the boy is saved. He still has lots of problems, she says, and already he has run away from home. It is this, says Thomas, that is especially regrettable about the state’s closing down the Grace of God. “Some of the kids were ready to go home, but the majority of them weren’t,” he laments. “They’re going to go right back out, and they could get killed and go to Hell, because they didn’t know Jesus Christ.”
But Brother Kurt has not given up on his boys. He still writes them letters, exhorting them to pick themselves up when they fall. The postmark on some of the letters is from Austin, and the return address is that of the Roloff farm. For now, the Provorses are in Arcadia, Louisiana, working at the New Bethany Baptist Church.
The Provorses have told a few of the parents that they are planning a new facility. Whether the parents, having now heard the stories of stocks and chains, will feel so inclined to return their children to the Provorses remains to be seen. It is uncertain if Brother Kurt will be there when they arrive. His senior pastor at the First Baptist Church of Pine Hills in Florida, Brother Gene Pritchard, has ordered Brother Kurt to disassociate himself from the Provorses and move on to other holy tasks. “There is plenty of good to be done out there,” the pastor told his missionary, “without getting in trouble with the law.”
And so dissolves a curious family, the 25 of them scattered across the country, each now plodding through a world of sin and beauty. At the old Yorktown convent, there is little to remind us that they were all here, under the same modest roof. There are only a few apple cider jars by the side porch, with the name “Provorse” written on them in felt-tip pen. And on a back window of the dormitory, the handwritten names of four boys still somehow remain, the letters shining like ghosts through the soot.
And then there are the chains on the fence, fastened there by padlocks. On the back of each padlock are two little blots of paint, red or yellow. Somewhere out in the world beyond 715 Yorktown Boulevard are 25 people who know that there were similarly color-coded keys that matched the padlocks and that these were used to ensure that the black sheep could not stray into the wilderness. But to the next tenant of this building, the little beads of color on the padlocks will be a matter of trivial mystery, like old candle wax or the bones of forgotten dogs.
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