New Hampshire man who brought decades-old youth center abuse scandal to light testifies at trial

BRENTWOOD, N.H. — David Meehan, whose allegations of abuse at New Hampshire’s juvenile detention center prompted nearly a dozen arrests and more than a thousand lawsuits, finally took the witness stand Wednesday, seven years after he first told his wife, “They got me.” raped.’

“I think I’m more ready now than anyone in this room to do this,” he said.

Meehan, 42, spent three years in the Youth Development Center, where he claims he was repeatedly beaten, raped and kept in solitary confinement in the late 1990s. He went to the police in 2017 and sued the state three years later. His trial went to trial last week and he began testifying Wednesday, describing his early years and arrival at the facility as a 14-year-old in 1995.

His lawyers showed a photo of him as a smiling toddler with a football in his hand as he testified about physical abuse at the hands of his parents, including his mother’s habit of putting her cigarettes out on his face. They later showed a close-up photo of Meehan’s face, taken when he arrived at YDC, and asked him to describe what he saw.

“It’s hard to describe this scared little boy, who at the same time feels safe,” he told jurors as he recalled being handcuffed to a wooden chair during the intake process at YDC. “I don’t worry about where I’m going to sleep tonight, I don’t worry about what I’m going to eat. It’s hard to explain that amount of emotion and sadness.”

Since Meehan came forward, authorities have arrested 11 former state workers and more than 1,100 former residents have filed lawsuits, arguing that the state’s negligence enabled six decades of abuse. The state states that it is not responsible for the actions of ‘rogue’ employees.

Meehan was the first to file a lawsuit. In his testimony, punctuated by long pauses, he described running away, breaking into homes to steal food and clothing, and once a gun he hoped to sell. He said he and another teen escaped from a police car on the way to court after the older boy warned him about sexual abuse at YDC, and he spent time in a pretrial detention center in Concord, where he was involved in an escape attempt. resulted in a riot.

Earlier Wednesday, Michael Gilpatrick, another former resident whose time at the facility overlapped with Meehan’s, continued to testify about the “ongoing horror.” An employee strangled him until he lost consciousness and he woke up to see another man sexually assaulting him, he said. In another attack, two staffers beat and raped him, he said.

“I remember sitting on my bed crying,” he said. “I blamed myself for being there, felt ashamed and wondered what I had done in this world to deserve this.”

Each attack “seemed like it lasted forever, because it did,” Gilpatrick said.

Gilpatrick was just released at the age of 17 and said he soon found himself in the adult criminal justice system, where he spent 12 years behind bars for drug-related crimes. For years he didn’t realize he had been abused as a child, he said.

Now a married father of three and the owner of a waterproofing company, Gilpatrick said the only thing he learned at YDC was how to become a hardened criminal, take a beating and keep his mouth shut.

“I normalized everything I experienced there,” he said. “I think this is how life should have been. When I got out, through 2015, I was in and out of prisons because I thought that’s where I needed to be.

Gilpatrick also confirmed to state attorneys that he had no personal knowledge of Meehan being physically or sexually abused.

The men accused of abusing both Meehan and Gilpatrick have pleaded not guilty to criminal charges but have yet to appear in court. The attorney general’s office has both prosecuted suspects and defended the state in civil cases, creating an unusual dynamic in which they will rely on the testimony of former residents in the criminal cases while undermining their credibility in the civil cases.