Locked Away

It’s a 45-minute drive east on the 401 from the courthouse in Oshawa to Brookside, a juvenile detention facility, or what the Ontario government called a “training school,” for delinquent boys in Cobourg. I would have done anything to make the trip last longer. From the back of the police cruiser, I stared out at the frozen fields flashing by, turning over in my mind the ominous rumours I’d heard about Brookside. Many of the boys were there for serious crimes such as assault. My transgression had been hitching a ride in a Toyota I didn’t realize was stolen. The judge released the culprits—two teens—to the custody of their parents, but as a 13-year-old ward of the Children’s Aid Society, I wasn’t so lucky. The judge decided that the structure and supervision of a secure-custody facility like Brookside would do me good.

It was late on January 5, 1984, when the cruiser pulled up to the school’s towering steel gates. A guard granted us access, and we headed toward a white neoclassical building at the centre of manicured grounds. All my worldly possessions lay in a garbage bag at my feet. I shivered in my hoodie and jeans—I didn’t have a winter coat. As sure as I was that nothing I’d done justified dumping me here, I was also aware that a lot of people thought this was precisely where I belonged.

My arrival at Brookside almost seemed pre-ordained. My mother was just 14 and being held at a training school in the town of Lindsay when she found out she was pregnant with me. She escaped and ran back to Toronto, where she met an 18-year-old drug dealer in Parkdale. He got her hooked on speed, then married her shortly before I was born in 1970. They had a son soon afterward, my half-brother, Jimmy. At some point, my mother started doing sex work.

I was 11 months old when someone alerted the CAS about my family and a caseworker showed up at our rooming house to investigate if I was at risk of neglect or abuse. My parents were offered counselling, and I remained with them until shortly after my brother was born. In the fall of 1972, my mother left the apartment, and I never saw her again. My stepfather fought to hold on to Jimmy but told anyone who would listen that I wasn’t his child and he had no interest in caring for me, so I was placed with his parents in a tiny white clapboard house nearby. They didn’t want me either. For the next three years, I spent almost all my time with my step-grandmother, a bitter woman with bottle-blond hair and ice-blue eyes. Her drunken epithets about my mother and my dark complexion played on a loop: “You look like a half-breed Indian” and “Your mom is a whore,” she’d snarl.

My step-grandparents’ brittle tolerance of me was brief. Shortly before I started school, they stuffed my things into a garbage bag and drove me to a triplex in North York. When their son answered the door, they told him I was his problem now. I hadn’t been in the same room as my stepfather or half-brother in two years, and I didn’t recognize them. I didn’t know his new wife or the other two children in the apartment. But I knew immediately that I wasn’t wanted. My stepfather beat my stepmother, who in turn beat me. None of the other children, all blond-haired and blue-eyed, were touched—just dark-haired, brown-eyed me, the worthless so-called half-breed. Related: “My parents sent me to boarding school near Toronto. It turned out to be a perverse fundamentalist cult”

There were pockets of respite, however brief. A woman who knew my stepfather sometimes took me in for a few days at a time. She was a fan of hard rock and would blare music from her stereo. I was enamoured. Kiss, Rush, Aerosmith—they swept me away to another dimension, if only for a few minutes. One day an elderly Italian neighbour saw me peeking across our shared fence and waved me over. In his small garage, cluttered with wooden barrels and cured meats hanging from the rafters, I watched him make wine. Another time, a gangly teenager in the upstairs apartment brought me to the movies to see Star Wars, introducing me to a galaxy far, far away—one from which I never wanted to return. And there was school. My second-grade teacher made me feel intelligent, like a good student. She was the first person in a position of authority who cared about me and conveyed that I was worth her while.

Reprieves from my chaotic home life were fleeting. When I was nine, after police raided our place, my stepfather brought me along on a drug run to Montreal. He was avoiding the cops, but he was also looking for a new place to dump me. His solution: an apartment complex on Montreal’s south shore that housed a family of drug dealers and petty thieves he knew. He insisted he’d come back for me in a couple of weeks, but that was a lie.

The next three years were a maelstrom of confusion and pain. I was beaten regularly, and because I was small enough to slip between the steel bars covering the window of a neighbourhood hardware store, the family forced me to break in to steal money and tools. One of the teenage daughters started sneaking into my room to touch my private parts, an abuse of my body that bewildered and disoriented me. Then came repeated rapes by an older boy in the household. My teachers saw the signs of abuse—bruises, poor attendance, emotional withdrawal—and filed reports, and the police were a frequent presence in the home, yet I don’t remember any child protection authorities ever ­checking up on me. Eventually, I became numbly resigned to the fact that no one was coming to save me.

In the spring of 1982, when I was 12, for reasons only he knew, my stepfather took me to Wasaga Beach for a few months. One day in July, in the parking lot of an open-air market, he beat me and left me bruised and crying in his car. A witness called the police, who then contacted the local CAS. It was the first time in a decade that a child protective service had stepped in, but it was too late. I was no longer capable of trust. ­Everything and everyone felt like a threat. I was convinced that I would never be worthy of love. I was incapable of controlling my rage, which could be sparked by the most innocuous comment. I was broken.

The CAS sent me back to my stepfather’s parents, but I ran away, terrorized by the thought of staying at the place where my troubles all began. While other kids on the street sold themselves or robbed people to survive, I didn’t want to hurt anyone—I knew what that felt like. Instead, I panhandled to eat and buy tickets to heavy metal concerts at the CNE Bandshell. For $15, I could join the crush of metalheads, swaying and punching the air to Mötley Crüe, feeling like I belonged somewhere. I howled along to the songs from the band’s album Shout at the Devil, convinced that the lyrics “not yet a man but a punk in the street” were about me.

I slept among the spruce trees near Exhibition Stadium or in the bathrooms at Trinity Bellwoods Park. Then I started looking for empty houses with For Sale signs that I could sneak into for a quiet, dry night’s rest. One morning, I was awoken by a tap on the shoulder from a police officer who charged me with breaking and entering. The CAS got involved and placed me in a group home, just one of several facilities and detention centres across the GTA that I would escape from and be dragged back to. At this point, I was in a constant state of hypervigilance: I scanned my surroundings for kids and adults who might beat me up or sexually abuse me, and I always sat with my back to the wall, my eyes on the nearest exit. I avoided meeting anyone’s gaze and rarely spoke up. I wanted to be invisible. My only goal was to get back on the street, the only place I felt safe and in control.

The night I hitched a ride in that stolen Toyota, I was running away from yet another group home. But, instead of the streets of Toronto, I ended up in an Oshawa courtroom. Peering down at me over his glasses, the judge asked impatiently, “Well, Mr. Brown, what are we to do with you?” His question was both rhetorical and practical, and it filled me with dread. He saw me as adrift, unmanageable. I was a problem to be rounded up and institutionalized—the exact kind of kid training schools were made for.

At Brookside, I was ushered into the main building for intake. The clerk asked for general information, but I had nothing to offer—no fixed address, no phone number, no emergency contact. Next I was led, scared and exhausted, to my assigned unit. The night staffer there motioned for me to sit in the chair at the corner of his desk, within arm’s reach. In his mid 30s, short and stocky with blond hair swept into an almost-combover, he asked me if I would be expecting any visitors. When I said no, his face lit up. A few minutes later, he placed his hand on my thigh. It made me feel weird, like something wasn’t right. I told him I didn’t feel well, but he simply grinned and said, “That’s just Brookside sickness.”

The staffer guided me through the unit’s common space, past a TV, a pool table and a dining area. He pointed out chairs assigned to each resident, leaning against washed-out yellow walls—mine was in the far corner. His fleshy fingers gripping my upper arm, we headed down a long hallway lined with doors to single bedrooms. He’d set aside number 18, at the very end, for me. The room, painted hospital white, was made even starker by the fluorescent lighting. There was a small window, a single bed, a desk and little space left to move around. I lay down on the thin plastic-covered foam mattress, desperate to quiet my racing mind and sleep.

We were woken up at 7 a.m.—same time every day, even on weekends. There were 17 other boys in my unit, one of several at Brookside, which housed roughly 100 boys in total. There were 18 other training schools in Ontario, all run by the provincial government. The institutions’ official ­purpose—“to provide children therein with training and treatment, and with moral, physical, academic and vocational education”—sounded reasonable enough, and in theory it was. Each day began with us cleaning our rooms, making our beds (with the requisite hospital corners) and meeting in our unit’s common area. Antisocial behaviour (fighting or talking back, for example) or skirting chores (like vacuuming the hallway) were logged during shift changes. The kids who behaved were rewarded with chips, pop and other treats, and the kids who didn’t got nothing. The bulk of the day was spent in academic classes, and between 3 and 5 p.m., there was recreational time for activities such as broomball in winter or baseball and football in summer. Medical staff performed physicals, eye exams and dental checks—normal stuff that made it easy to forget why Brookside and the other juvenile detention centres were ever created.

The first Ontario Training School was opened in Bowmanville in 1925, and in 1931, the province passed the Ontario Training Schools Act, establishing the legal framework for these institutions. A Depression-era solution to what the province called “unmanageable” children, they housed kids under the age of 16. Girls and boys alike could end up at one of the sex-segregated schools for almost anything—begging, homelessness, truancy or because they had been orphaned, abandoned by their guardians or raised by parents with substance abuse disorders. Kids could also land there for being accused, though not necessarily convicted, of a petty crime. Not much had changed in five decades, I discovered. “Unmanageable” still covered a multitude of supposed sins, including drinking or running away from a troubled home. Granted, some of my fellow “students” (a feeble stand-in for “detainees”) at Brookside were bona fide gang members. That we were all thrown in together only hardened everyone. Each one of us had fallen through the cracks of a system that didn’t know what to do with us. Under the Ontario Training Schools Act, kids had few embedded rights. Our sentences were ill-defined. The courts, probation officers, CAS workers and school operators decided who came and how long they stayed. In short, this was jail for children.

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I told the night staffer I didn’t feel well. He grinned and said, “That’s just Brookside sickness”

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The training schools were almost always located in small towns, making it hard for family and friends to visit. This geographic isolation also meant that concerned parents—for the kids who were lucky enough to have them—certified child protection authorities and the provincial authorities that funded the schools had limited information on what was happening to students inside the walls. The schools became known for hiring whomever they wanted, including locals without relevant experience or appropriate background checks. Over time, the institutions became magnets for pedophiles and abusers.

Shortly after I arrived at Brookside, the staffer with the combover began stalking me. One night, after lights out, I heard his heavy footsteps travel down the hallway. A flood of light blinded me as he nudged open my door to look at me curled up in my bed. The assaults started after that. At first, he pressured me to give him handjobs, then he was forcing me to perform oral sex on him. Then he raped me, night after night. This went on for three months. It was a new level of trauma I couldn’t ­process—an adult, someone who was supposed to protect me, was exploiting me in the worst way possible. I was trapped in a place that was purportedly created to help me. How worthless was I that I could be treated this way?

With no clear sentence, I couldn’t focus on an endpoint. My feelings of powerlessness and rage had to come out. Exerting deep, painful pressure on my wrists felt good, so I began scratching, almost relentlessly. Even with open wounds, I dug deeper and deeper. When scabs formed, I picked and scratched until my fingers were covered with blood. This was a pain I could control. No one expressed concern about my wounds or incessant scratching until one day a staffer asked me what I was doing. I recognized him immediately: he was a former pro athlete. Maybe it was because of who he was or the fact that he even asked, but I let my guard down. We began talking, and I felt comfortable with him. So I broke my keep-your-mouth-shut rule and told him what had been happening to me, night after night, and who was responsible.

The athlete reported what I had said, but not to help me. The Brookside staff was largely from Cobourg. Most of them had grown up together, and they had each other’s backs. Besides, I’d seen my abuser lay on his country-boy charm, joking with ­colleagues—no one would ever guess that he was a predator. It quickly became clear that there would be no repercussions for him. I, however, became a pariah. The staff refused to talk to me, and any good behaviour of mine went unrewarded. Then came the real payback.

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We had few embedded rights. Our sentences were ill-defined. In short, this was jail for children

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It was mid-winter. The athlete found out that I loved hockey and suggested we head to the outdoor rink on the grounds. After we laced up our skates, he put me in goal. This was not a friendly game of shinny. Instead, he unleashed a barrage of slap shots that pelted the threadbare pads I was wearing and left throbbing welts across my body. Next he suggested some one-on-one, slamming me into the boards with the crushing weight of his colossal body. I knew he was capable of much worse—he was a panther toying with a field mouse. I wouldn’t make the same mistake again. I took what he gave and said nothing.

In May, four months after coming to Brookside, I learned I was going to be released in a few weeks, likely to a group home or foster care. I wanted nothing more than to be free of the place, yet a move to another unknown location filled me with dread, and I was overcome with an irrational urge to run. One afternoon, I was watching a bunch of kids play football when a boy started harassing me by thrusting his genitals in my face. Something inside me snapped. I saw an opening and took it, racing off the school’s grounds into the adjoining neighbourhood, sprinting from backyard to backyard with no idea where I was heading. Brookside staff soon cornered me under someone’s deck and hauled me back to the school, flailing and screaming.

I was relegated to a space called the quiet room, a form of supervised solitary confinement, but I didn’t mind. I was safe from both staff and my fellow students; I could read books and just exist in peace. The pause was temporary, though. Three days later I was returned to my unit, where I remained before being released in early June to a foster home nearby. There, I was welcomed by a woman and her father, who were both kind to me. They gave me my own room, let me swim in their pool, played baseball with me and brought me along on road trips in their Winnebago. My entire childhood, I’d been craving a real home—somewhere I belonged. But, at this point, even a kind family’s warmth and care weren’t enough to keep me tethered. Driven by instinct, I ran again, like I had so many times before.

While on a vacation with my foster family in upstate New York, I slipped away and got a bus to New York City, a place so busy and bright relative to my rural existence that it felt deranged. I was wandering around Central Park in a dirty sweatshirt, jeans and worn-out Adidas when an NYPD officer picked me up. The cop—who had figured out I was a runaway—barked into my face, “What the hell do you think you’re doing, kid? I’d put you in a group home here, but you wouldn’t survive.” If he only knew. He escorted me to the airport and put me on a plane to Pearson, where a CAS worker was waiting to deliver me back to Brookside. In total, I spent eight months at the school, in what felt like an unending loop of abuse. But things were about to change for me in ways I never could have imagined.

In January of 1985, after running away from another group home, I ended up at York Detention, a youth holding centre on Jarvis. Sunday was visiting day, and while other kids spent time with their families, I stayed in the common area alone, writing lyrics to rock anthems. That’s where I met Suzanne Thomson. She was a correctional officer, but she looked completely different from all the others. Instead of khakis and golf shirts, she wore a flowing black top with striped pants and combat boots. She had wild long blond hair. And when I told her that, no, I would not be having any visitors, her response was gentle and compassionate. She really listened when I talked, with no apparent judgment. She made sure I knew I was a person of value, just like her.

I started to look forward to Suzanne’s shifts. As strange as it sounds, I almost didn’t mind being in a detention centre. It’s not that the other staff were all bad, but Suzanne showed me genuine care and love. She taught me about art and drawing. She asked a friend in a metal band to read my lyrics and give me feedback. I started taking guitar lessons. Suzanne was devoted to her work—she believed that creativity could be healing and wanted to help me and others like me. She made me think there might be something to life beyond survival.

My next stop in the system—Syl Apps Youth Centre in Oakville—housed teens who’d been convicted of armed robberies and murder. It was the last resort for the kids training schools couldn’t handle. I was terrified, but this time I wasn’t facing the unknown alone. Suzanne rode with me in the police car for the drive to Oakville, and we talked through my feelings the entire time. She’d identified herself on my paperwork as my “volunteer probation officer,” which she wasn’t. But, between her and my actual probation officer, who was new to me and whom I also liked very much, I could now tell the intake staffer that I would be expecting visitors. And most importantly, I was never abused again—Suzanne made sure of it.

When I left Syl Apps a few weeks later, the director described me as a leader and role model for the other kids. I still had legal hurdles to deal with, but Suzanne asked a lawyer friend to help me, and it made a huge difference. With the lawyer by my side at my next court appearance, the judge softened his stance and said I could serve the remainder of my time on probation. For most of high school, I lived with one foster parent and focused on my studies at Lakeshore Collegiate Institute in Etobicoke. I met up with Suzanne several times a week, going to dinner or the movies. At the start of each school year, she and my probation officer bought me new clothes and hockey gear for the house-league team I’d joined. My teammates had parents who drove them to games. I was the only kid riding the subway with a hockey bag. But I didn’t care—I’d never been happier. The urge to flee, which had hounded me for years, finally subsided. For the first time in my life, there were joyful Christmases and birthdays, and I cherished every present Suzanne gave me, including a charcoal sketch she’d drawn of Vince Neil, the lead singer of Mötley Crüe. I held on to those mementoes for years, tangible reminders that I was worthy of love after all.

Creating a life of my own as an adult took years, but I carefully built on Suzanne’s gift of hope. I sought counselling, fell in love, got married, had children. And I worked with kids, running programs in schools and youth centres. I also received a formal diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, giving me a framework and new tools to deal with my past and to help me enjoy the simple rituals of daily life.

That’s what I was doing in January of 2018—relaxing while leafing through the Toronto Star—when one word in an article jumped out: “Brookside,” a name I hadn’t spoken aloud in decades. I read on. The story mentioned allegations of “cruel and sadistic” sexual, physical and emotional abuse by teachers and staff at Ontario Training Schools between 1960 and 1984. It talked about how 220 lawsuits had been launched by former students ready to share their accounts, previously kept secret by settlements and gag orders. In their stories, I saw mine. I noted the name of the lawyer in the article, Loretta Merritt, and looked up her number. The next day, electric with anxiety, I summoned the courage to dial. Loretta instructed me to write down every detail I could remember from my time at Brookside. It was the first time in almost 35 years that I ­intentionally ­revisited my experiences there. Putting everything on paper for someone who wanted to help me felt important. It was a starting point.

For months, Loretta and I persevered through hours-long phone calls—I told her things I’d never shared with anyone, not even my wife. She was firm and direct, an intense listener and deeply understanding. She encouraged me to focus on one incident at a time, working with me in a way that tamed the white noise in my mind. Gradually, I no longer felt the need to hide the horrible things that were part of my life story, of who I was. I could finally imagine that someone might be held accountable for what had happened to me.

Loretta also had me elaborate on the abuses in my early childhood and validated how profoundly abandoned I’d felt growing up. After assessing my case, she recommended that I apply for an award from both Ontario Victim Services and its equivalent in Quebec, IVAC, provincial organizations through which injured parties could be financially compensated for crimes against them. IVAC expressed neither empathy nor remorse, but within the year, I was awarded $36,000. OVS gave me its maximum compensation­—$25,000. More significantly, the OVS representative told me that there wasn’t enough money in the world to make up for what had happened to me. “The people who were supposed to care for you failed you,” she said. “I am sorry.” I clung to her words as Loretta and I headed into our next battle.

Our statement of claim against Brookside echoed those of hundreds of other cases filed against the government: intentional and negligent infliction of mental distress occasioned as a result of sexual assaults, physical assault and battery, and psychological and emotional abuse. Yet the province repeatedly denied my claim over the next five years, asserting that their records showed I was at Brookside for just two weeks, not eight months. Every time the province refuted the details of my stay, it was like being abandoned and abused all over again. The support of my family and my counsellor was critical, helping me through the daily, sometimes hourly, struggle to stay sane. Then, a breakthrough. After months of searching, I located the probation officer assigned to me throughout my time at Brookside. He wrote a statement corroborating the length of my stay. My case was resolved shortly afterward, and I found some peace in this final act of closure.

Around the same time, I ran into a former worker from a group home where I’d once been held. She saw me with my wife and four kids walking down a street in Toronto. There was beauty in the unvarnished truth of her words: “What you’ve accomplished after all this trauma—this is not how your life was supposed to go. This doesn’t happen.”

I am 54 now and have been retired since 2020. With my complex PTSD, I get a disability pension from the federal government. Even today, my mind races, and I sometimes find it hard to control my emotions. Like many people with this disorder, I have struggled with substance abuse. I’ve been married to my wife for 23 years, and we live in a rural community in the Maritimes with rolling hills and a winding river nearby. All four of our big-hearted, confident children have graduated high school and gone on to college or university. They are the centre that holds my life together. I can count on one hand how many times my wife and I have missed one of their volleyball, lacrosse or hockey games. I never wanted them to look up into the stands and not see someone they love cheering them on.

Suzanne became a registered psychotherapist and art therapist. She lives just a short walk from the Parkdale rooming house where my story began, the last place I saw my mother. We’ve always been close, but it’s only recently that I told her the full story of the abuse that brought us together. She listened with an open heart and mind, as she always has. When she talks about me to other people, she tells them I’m family. My youngest daughter calls her “Grandma.”

This past summer, the minor offences I committed in my childhood to survive were finally expunged from my record. With the severing of this last thread tying me to the system, I can walk through the world a little lighter, a little freer. And whenever I see a street kid, I wonder if they’ll be as lucky as I’ve been. The Young Offenders Act, which replaced the Juvenile Delinquents Act in 1984, embedded many new protections and rights for children under the law—rights that were fortified under the Youth Criminal Justice Act of 2003. Ontario’s training schools were shut down in 1984, but not enough has changed. The void created when the schools closed has been filled by detention centres and group homes, some of them subcontracted to third-party operators. People I know who work in the system say that issues around supervision and staffing standards persist.

Overall, so much more is known about the generational trauma, poverty, addiction, abuse, housing issues and other factors that pull children onto the streets and into the child protection and legal systems. We know better how to help these vulnerable kids, but our governments aren’t investing the time and money to make sure they get the support they need. So many of them won’t get to meet their Suzanne, to build a life where they finally belong.

The other day, my wife and I set off on a road trip to visit one of our kids. As the playlist shuffled to Mötley Crüe, I turned up the volume to sing along. My wife may not love my music, but she loves what it means to me. She knows that I struggle, even now, to believe I am no longer the boy-punk in the song. But when she glances over at me, smiling at my singing, I’m reassured that I deserve this beautiful life.

This story appears in the November 2024 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe for just $39.99 a year, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.