Months before a Long Island girl went missing, her desperate family sent her to Minnesota for help. She was abused there too.

ST. CLOUD, Minn. — Seven months before a 14-year-old Long Island girl went missing for 25 days, before her dramatic rescue in a dilapidated yacht anchored in Islip in early January, her family became so desperate to address her drug addiction and sexual abuse that they sent her to a treatment facility 1,300 miles away in Minnesota.

The girl’s family had exhausted all other local options, partly because the girl needed specialized treatment that wasn’t available on Long Island, said her stepgrandmother, Michelle DiDio.

DiDio also had written to Suffolk County Executive Edward P. Romaine, who made reforming the county’s Child Protective Services unit a priority, but never received a response. Two months later, she attended a county legislative committee meeting with Jill Porter, who was then a county probation officer trying to help the family. She offered the letter to legislators, but there were no takers.

The family also sought help from the girl’s school district, therapists, medical doctors and programs for troubled youth with no success. She was put on waiting lists by nearly a dozen psychologists.

"No one has done anything to help this child, she was always discharged and sent back home to start the nightmare all over again," DiDio’s letter said.

DiDio estimates she called nearly 200 places across the country. Finally, the family settled on Newport Academy in St. Cloud, Minnesota, a small city about an hour north of Minneapolis.

The East Patchogue girl’s case highlights the struggles with adolescent drug addiction and sexual abuse, and the obstacles families encounter finding places covered by insurance, with beds to spare and the ability to treat specific cases in urgent bids to get help. Even in a state like Minnesota, renowned for its treatment programs and recovery culture, success can be a long shot. And teenagers in general are a group especially resistant to treatment, experts say.

Surrounded by a 12-foot-high fence, Newport Academy, a residential treatment center for teens, appeared secure. It offered an array of therapies and accepted her father Frank Gervasi’s insurance. Best of all, it was "in the middle of nowhere," away from bad influences back home, DiDio said.

At least, that is what she thought.

Four days after the girl checked into Newport, a 60-bed youth treatment center on a 40-acre campus overlooking the Mississippi River, she was gone again. This time, in early May 2024, she was in an unfamiliar Midwestern town. Within days, at least four men capitalized on her vulnerabilities, according to court records.

Newsday is not naming the girl because she is a minor and the victim of alleged and adjudicated sex crimes. Nearly two dozen people are facing charges on Long Island and in Minnesota in connection with her cases.

The girl’s family placed their faith in Newport Academy, which operates teen residential treatment centers in eight states. They chose the facility in St. Cloud because it has a program tailored for girls between 12 and 18 years old who are experiencing anxiety, depression, substance use disorder or other mental health conditions.

The heightened security appealed to the girl’s family. Running away seemed less likely there.

The girl arrived at Newport Academy on April 30, 2024, family members said.

Newsday sent reporters to St. Cloud to better understand what happened to the girl there. Officials with Newport Academy denied several requests for an interview. When Newsday reporters arrived at the facility in April, they were asked to leave. Gervasi declined to comment.

Land of recovery

Minnesota is known for its drug treatment centers. The presence of the Hazelden Betty Ford treatment center since the mid-20th century in Minneapolis has made it a destination for individuals seeking care.

"It is the land of 10,000 lakes and it is the land of 10,000 treatment centers," said William Cope Moyers, vice president of public affairs for the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation.

The Minnesota Model, rooted in the treatment philosophy shepherded at Hazelden, is the prevailing method of addiction treatment in the United States. The idea is to create a humane and therapeutic space for addiction treatment. Drug and alcohol addiction is treated as a disease, best treated in multiple phases by physicians, drug counselors, therapists and social workers in collaboration to treat the body, mind and spirit.

"Addiction is a stigmatized illness, so people don’t really talk about it and they don’t know where to get help like you do for cancer or for heart disease," said Moyers, a recovering addict who came to Minnesota from Long Island when his parents bought him a one-way plane ticket as a young adult in the late 1980s. Minnesota "really is the birthplace of modern treatment. As we now understand treatment ... for an illness of the mind, body and spirit. You gotta deal with all three of those components."

Treating teens with drug addiction is more of a challenge, experts say.

Teenagers are impulsive, said John Venza, vice president of residential services and provider relations of Outreach II in Brentwood. "They do run out the door against clinical advice."

Youngsters can be a very difficult group to treat for addiction because their brains are still developing and that’s where substances affect "decision-making and risk taking," Moyers said.

"You have to be sensitive to the fact that these are still children or early teens who are developing," he said. "They need a lot of supervision. They need a lot of patience. And a lot of them don't believe they have a problem."

Susan Henaghan, of Shirley, said her daughter was diagnosed with several mental health disorders when she was 13 years old and she began abusing drugs and alcohol over the next several years.

"It became my full-time job trying to find my daughter help," said Henaghan, a single mom. "I’ve made so many phone calls, so many different interviews with different places to try to get her help. Unfortunately, a lot of them come with a huge price tag."

Access to addiction treatment for teens is scarce, experts say, with costs and the availability of beds being the major prohibitors.

Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University found in a January 2024 study supported by the National Institute for Health that only about half the residential treatment centers available to treat adolescents had beds immediately available, with waitlists of approximately 28 days. A month’s stay at the 160 treatment centers surveyed across the country typically costs more than $25,000, with about half the facilities requiring at least partial payment upfront.

"There's a lot of obstacles for families to try to get their child in, and unfortunately, a few months can change the trajectory of a young life," said Venza, who lost his 21-year-old son to a fentanyl overdose. "It could end a young life if they don't get that help quick and immediately."

It became my full-time job trying to find my daughter help.

—Susan Henaghan, of Shirley

Ultimately, a Suffolk family court judge referred Henaghan’s daughter to Outreach, after she was designated a "Person in Need of Supervision," which enabled the teen to receive drug and alcohol treatment and mental health services. Even getting a PINS designation was a challenge, Henaghan said. The school district said it could not help, since her behavioral issues were not apparent in the academic setting. And she had to first show the court other methods had failed before receiving her referral.

"Parents are very often left on an island," Venza said. "It’s a really frightening, scary place."

After her daughter went to Outreach, Henaghan learned the full scope of the dangers her daughter faced. She went through the girl’s phone and found times men had reached out to her on Snapchat or offered to send her money through Venmo for pictures or to meet at the mall.

"If she didn’t get help, I’m scared to know how far that could have gone," the mom said.

The East Patchogue girl’s story gives an indication of where things might have ended up. She had already left Outreach herself before heading to Newport Academy.

Missing in St. Cloud

Just five days after arriving in Minnesota, the East Patchogue girl’s disappearance made the local news.

"Police are asking for the public's help to find a girl from St. Cloud who is missing and possibly endangered. Investigators say [the girl] was last seen on Friday in St. Cloud and she may have been looking for a ride to the Twin Cities," anchor Jake Judd reported May 5, more than 24 hours after her disappearance. "She's 14 years old and was last seen wearing a black tank top and black sweatpants with Betty Boop on the back."

The girl never made it to Minneapolis or St. Paul. The first indication that she was still in St. Cloud, 65 miles northwest of the Twin Cities, came from a phone call placed by a teen the girl left Newport Academy with shortly after midnight May 4.

Over the next 29 hours, they met various men across the city.

The father of the other girl, whose name Newsday is withholding to protect the identity of his daughter, said it isn’t hard to escape from Newport Academy.

"Newport won’t stop you," the father said in an interview with Newsday. "The staff can’t do anything but call 911 if you try to run. The fence? You can crawl under the fence. You can go down by the river. There’s ways out. It’s not a prison, right?"

Police found the other girl inside a third-floor St. Cloud apartment rented by Robert Bernard, a 32-year-old who relies on public assistance to make his rent.

The Long Island girl had already moved on by the time police arrived. She wouldn’t be found for 30 more hours.

In the three days the girl was gone, Bernard, and at least three other men, had sex with her.

An active investigation

They were each arrested and charged with criminal sexual conduct. While each of the men have already pleaded guilty, St. Cloud law enforcement considers the case an active investigation, and they have denied Newsday requests for interviews, body camera footage and records outside what is already publicly available in Stearns and Denton County criminal courts.

"We still have active investigations and active cases regarding this victim," said Janelle Kendall, the top prosecutor in Stearns County, where three of the men were charged. "We cannot speak about it to ensure those proceed as they need to."

Documents show shortly after leaving Newport, the two girls met up with 26-year-old Andre Sudor, a St. Cloud resident with a seven-year history of misdemeanor convictions, including a 2022 gun charge. Sudor told Newsday he was homeless and staying at a Salvation Army shelter in St. Cloud when the girl approached him at a gas station and asked him for a cigarette and help finding drugs.

Investigators searching for the girl spotted her in surveillance camera footage, where she was seen in downtown St. Cloud with Sudor and another man.

Police located Sudor the following afternoon. He let police search his phone, which revealed nude images of the East Patchogue girl being touched by him. He told police he didn’t know the girl was underage. Prosecutors charged him with multiple counts of criminal sexual conduct and child pornography.

Sudor, who said he was raised in Chicago and moved to St. Cloud hoping to find a better life for himself, pleaded guilty to criminal sexual conduct in Stearns County criminal court and can avoid prison time if he stays out of additional trouble.

In an interview, Sudor said the girl had told him she was 19 years old and had just arrived in Minnesota from New York, never telling him she had been at Newport Academy. He said they spent about three hours together but he left both girls after he sensed something was wrong with the situation.

Unable to afford retained counsel and facing charges with no obvious defense, Sudor, who now resides in a St. Cloud halfway house, said a guilty plea was his only path forward. He still has trouble reconciling the events of that day.

"It doesn’t make sense," Sudor said. "I’m a homeless guy."

Of the four defendants in Minnesota, only Bernard is still awaiting sentencing. He is trying to rescind an earlier guilty plea. He has maintained in court filings and at a March hearing that childhood trauma and other disabilities make it difficult for him to see beyond the moment and he regrets having pleaded guilty.

"I did what I thought was best," Bernard told Stearns County District Court Judge Heidi Schultz of his decision to plead guilty. "I don’t even know if that was the best anymore."

Paula Bernard said before she adopted her son Robert at 4 years old, he had been abandoned for more than a week, left strapped in a car seat in a locked and unlit closet with a bag of cookies by his birth mother in an apartment in Texas.

When he was discovered, the boy was covered in sores, had trouble seeing in light and could not crawl or walk. Investigators determined his birth mother, an addict, had used a car seat and the closet to contain the boy, so his leg muscles never developed correctly. To this day, his gait appears awkward.

"The worst thing is he never cried or laughed," Paula Bernard recalled from the living room of her split-level ranch on the north side of St. Cloud, where she relocated with Robert more than five years ago.

Robert Bernard told Newsday he met the Long Island girl after she and the other teen knocked on the door of his third-floor apartment at night. He said he only pleaded guilty initially because he was terrified of being in jail and missed his cats.

"I still maintain my innocence fully," he told Newsday.

Prosecutors in St. Cloud filed charges against Bernard and fellow St. Cloud resident Yasin Abdulkadir, 24, who they allege took the 14-year-old to the Rosebud Apartments on the north side of the city, where they had sex with her on May 5. Surveillance footage showed the two men and the girl entering the building and going up a staircase at 1:16 a.m.

Abdulkadir pleaded guilty to criminal sexual conduct and his prison sentence was stayed in January. Reached by phone in June, he said: "Leave the girl alone. Leave people alone."

A fourth defendant, Deandre Hooker, 46, is the only person in prison for raping the girl in St. Cloud. He met her after she arrived at Lincoln Center, a 25-bed homeless shelter three miles from Newport Academy.

The homeless shelter is in a city where encampments are prohibited. Lincoln Center executive director Harry Fleegel said many people arrive in the mornings high or hoping to make a connection to find drugs.

The girl ended up at Lincoln Center on May 6, nearly 60 hours after she left Newport Academy.

Hooker was homeless, with his own room at the shelter, where he stayed each night for about four months before his arrest.

He had had hopes for a new life, he told a judge in a letter:

"I came to Minnesota for a new start to continue school, get my business management license and start my own business unfortunately things haven’t been too easy for me."

Fleegel said Hooker suffered from paranoia and had an addiction to methamphetamines.

Prosecutors allege Hooker gave the girl drugs in exchange for sex after she arrived at the shelter.

Hooker was charged with criminal sexual conduct and is currently serving a 2-year prison sentence at the Stillwater Correctional Facility in Bayport, Minnesota, after pleading guilty last year. He did not respond to letters from Newsday requesting an interview.

'Big targets'

Twelve of 16 defendants charged in incidents involving the girl since her return to Long Island are in jail awaiting trial. Three of them, and two others from earlier cases, face sex trafficking charges. Two of those charged on Long Island worked in facilities where she was receiving treatment.

Runaways become "big targets" for sex traffickers, said Cynthia Terlouw-Kvistad, executive director of Terebinth Refuge, a trafficking counseling center in St. Cloud. The Long Island girl had been certified a victim of trafficking just months before arriving in Minnesota.

"Traffickers are skilled, they’ve been trained to know how to sniff out those vulnerable kids," Terlouw-Kvistad said.

"Once a child is used in that way, they feel ... they’re told, often by their trafficker, that this is all you’re good for," Terlouw-Kvistad said.

Rachel Foster, co-founder of the antisex-trafficking coalition World Without Exploitation, said men like the defendants in Minnesota who take advantage of a vulnerable child by trading for sex need to face stiffer penalties.

We have a society that's ... allowing men to purchase the bodies of very vulnerable people, mostly with impunity.

—Rachel Foster, co-founder of World Without Exploitation

"We have a society that's ... allowing men to purchase the bodies of very vulnerable people, mostly with impunity," Foster said. "How do you curtail the demand piece? You have to hold people accountable, because there really are harms that come from it."

Foster said from her experience interviewing sex trade survivors around the country, the Long Island girl faces a long path to recovery. Physical harms and the unseen damage of disassociation are among the biggest obstacles to overcome. It also becomes challenging to have healthy relationships after being exposed to so much trauma, she said.

One path to success she sees comes from trafficked people who meet and learn from other women who have survived similar experiences. They are trained to become trainers themselves in programs she believes need to be expanded and better funded to meet the need for rehabilitation.

"Some of the hope comes from really talking to people who manage to leave and have built lives, because there are many of them who are educators, social workers, policy experts," Foster said. "They're able to take this hard-earned experience from so much hardship and be able to change laws and policies, and there's a lot of empowerment that comes from that."

Family support also is crucial, experts say.

"Addiction is an illness that affects much more than a person who has it," Moyers said. "It affects the entire family and so decision-making is oftentimes compromised and unless the family is willing to be a part of the treatment process oftentimes that leaves the young person particularly vulnerable."

Venza said the best way to find proper treatment is to ask questions of the available programs to ensure a good fit.

Questions he recommends asking: What is the design of the program? What does the daily schedule look like? What are the credentials of the clinician?

"I would ask to get a tour of the facility," Venza said.

Seeing where the kids eat and sleep is important.

"No different if they were getting ready to make decisions about college," he said. "That same level of scrutiny should be applied to a treatment program."

And success is never guaranteed the first time around.

"A lot of families have to go through multiple programs and other things to try to get there," Venza said. "There’s a lot of obstacles for families to try and get their child in, and unfortunately, a few months can change the trajectory of a young life. It could end a young life if they don’t get that help quick and immediately."