---

It started with candy.

Ja’Zavier Martin, then 15 years old, said he found the gummy candy in his locker at the state-run youth treatment center in Kearney. He said Martha Ruiz Palacios, a 27-year-old frontline employee, put it there.

She had been asking Martin to play games away from the other boys in his cottage. She set the stakes: If you win Jenga, I’ll bring you something — the gummies, powder to flavor drinks.

“She’d let me win on purpose,” Martin said, sitting beside his mom in a recent interview. When he ate the candy from his locker, he felt strange. His vision blurred, he said. He felt tired. High. 

Learning this, his mom shook her head: “She brought you edibles, boy?”

Add it to the growing list of offenses — the black eyes, the wound on his knee — that Jennifer Martin has tallied since her son went to Kearney in early 2024. 

On that list, Ruiz Palacios represents the ultimate betrayal. She was also touching Martin. On his leg, his groin. The abuse lasted about two months, he said. It stopped only when someone caught them kissing on surveillance footage. 

“It makes you think, like, how could I stop it faster?” said Martin, now 17. “How could you have told somebody faster? Like, why didn’t they see what was going on? Because, me … I didn’t understand what she was doing was wrong until it was too late.”

The Youth Rehabilitation and Treatment Center in Kearney is one of Nebraska judges’ last resorts for teen boys in the juvenile justice system. It’s often used when other options for their rehabilitation — group homes, Boys Town — have been exhausted. 

That last resort has become the site of dozens of allegations that range from grooming to sexual assault. Thirty-seven boys made 44 allegations against 19 staff members in a year, according to a state child welfare watchdog. 

Four ex-employees have been arrested. Ruiz Palacios was the first. Her lawyer declined to comment for this story. She now sits in jail, serving a two-year sentence for third-degree sexual assault and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The charges reference Martin, by initials and birth month.

State leaders have ousted the center’s administrator and her boss who oversaw all three youth centers for the Department of Health and Human Services. The state has restructured the center’s administration and made operational changes even as DHHS has denied that the YRTC had a deep-seated cultural problem.

DHHS did not respond to the specific allegations about youth in its care, though department spokesperson Jeff Powell said it “disputes some details of the allegations” in this story.

Meanwhile, boys at the center of this scandal are now grappling with the fallout from the abuse they allegedly experienced, two of them told the Flatwater Free Press in extended interviews. 

They are inside systems, and a larger society, that aren’t primed to treat teen boys — especially those with criminal records — as victims. And there’s not a clear path for the state, which employed their alleged abusers, to directly address the harm its employees caused. 

“The system isn’t set up to handle this,” said Lawrence Gendler, former Sarpy County juvenile court judge. 

‘She’s out of your league’

DaVontae Helmstadter was 16 years old in 2023, living in a different cottage, with a different staff, months before Martin got to YRTC. But the pattern is familiar: Snacks, games, conversations, alleged abuse.

He remembers asking Jessica Camacho, then 34, what she would do if he told people about their relationship. And he remembers what she said in return: “I’ll make sure you stay here.”

He remembers that the state employee who led his unit must have realized the relationship was out of line. She raised it with him more than once, he said, and told him he could tell her if he “had a crush” on Camacho. Nothing changed, he said.

He remembers a meeting with Cindy Krolikowski, who then ran Kearney’s YRTC, where he says he told her he thought his relationship with Camacho was inappropriate. 

“She’s out of your league,” he recalls Krolikowski saying. Camacho wouldn’t do that. The former administrator didn’t respond to attempts to contact her for this story. 

Helmstadter tried to ignore Camacho, he said, but she started writing him up for misbehavior, prolonging his time at the center. After he began spending time with her again, the abuse turned physical in areas out of surveillance cameras’ view, he said.

She would hold his hand, ask him to hug her or grab her butt, he said. In the most extreme case, he said, they had oral sex.

He told another adult after the abuse turned physical, he said — a male state employee, who Helmstadter recalls laughing it off. 

Helmstadter was released from the YRTC in 2024 but ended up back in the system on new allegations. He went to a Lincoln center for several months, then back to Kearney. By then, he said, Camacho had developed a similar relationship with a boy from Douglas County. 

In March 2025, Camacho was suspended for sharing a drink with a boy and inappropriate boundaries, according to a watchdog’s investigative report. The Inspector General of Nebraska Child Welfare didn’t name staff or children in the report, but this and other details align with interviews and court testimony referencing Camacho. 

Before she left on suspension, Helmstadter said, Camacho told him and the Douglas County boy where they could find a cellphone: In a mop bucket, in an area where they often cleaned. 

She asked them to send photos, videos. She FaceTimed the phone 12 times in three days, according to the IG report’s findings. The two boys would go to adjacent bathroom stalls and pass the black iPhone back and forth, Helmstadter remembers. She would masturbate and ask them to masturbate for her, he said.

Camacho resigned after staff found the phone. It had “sexually explicit content” from two adult women, including one who didn’t work at YRTC-Kearney, according to the IG report. It had videos of Camacho masturbating and inappropriate messages between her and the Douglas County boy. 

There were escape plans on the phone, too. A lawyer for the Douglas County boy’s family previously said his client was placed in the center’s version of solitary confinement after the phone was discovered. Helmstadter said the same thing happened to him. 

It felt like he was punished for something Camacho had done, he said: “It felt like torture.” (While DHHS leaders said they could not speak to specific cases, spokesperson Powell said confinement is “not allowed to be used as a punishment.”)

In Ruiz Palacios’ case, state employees appear to have notified the Nebraska State Patrol, child abuse hotline, Martin’s mom, his probation officer and attorney following video review. But Helmstadter’s case went differently: Employees in the compliance department, which looks into allegations like this, reported the phone to “numerous parties,” including the hotline and State Patrol, according to the IG report. But they didn’t mention the phone’s sexual content to the inspector general, judges, the boys’ lawyers or the boys’ parents.

While in confinement, a staff member Helmstadter identified as Katrina Fewkes had inappropriate conversations with him, he said, including telling him what color underwear she was wearing. He also recalls Fewkes telling him that higher-ups were sharing and looking at the photos of him from the phone. It made him cry. 

“It just made me feel less of a man,” he said. 

Fewkes, 45, was arrested in March. The charge, second-degree sexual abuse of a protected person, does not reference Helmstadter. Her lawyer on that case said he had not heard these specific allegations. She has pleaded not guilty and previously told Flatwater that she reported misconduct at the YRTC multiple times while working there.

Helmstadter said Camacho was contacting him as recently as last fall when he was at a halfway house in Omaha. Around that same time, a judge and lawyers in the Douglas County boy’s case questioned Krolikowski and other state witnesses at court hearings about Camacho’s behavior. 

Camacho was arrested in June and faces six felony charges, including first-degree sexual abuse of a protected person. One of the charges, alleging intentional child abuse, references Helmstadter by initials and birth month. She has pleaded not guilty. Her attorney declined to comment for this story.

Helmstadter has since aged out of the juvenile justice system. He talked to a reporter this summer from behind glass at the Saunders County Jail, where he was held on adult charges.

‘The perfect conditions for abuse’

When an adult showers a vulnerable child with praise and gifts, that child starts to be confused about the relationship and the adult may methodically move into sexual abuse, said Gene Klein, CEO of Project Harmony in Omaha. Klein said his organization often sees children who have experienced this same pattern of manipulation.

But in YRTC cases, there’s an amplified power dynamic, he said: For one, these were women in caregiving roles in an institution away from family. And they influenced — in fact had some control over — how the boys moved, or didn’t move, through the system. 

These were also women allegedly abusing boys. The public often has a tough time seeing women as offenders and boys as victims, said both Klein and Carrie Gobel, a therapist who works with children who have been sexually abused. 

YRTC staff, in fact, often talked about the teen boys as manipulators themselves, according to the inspector general’s report. That reflects a culture of mistrust that Gobel said creates “the perfect conditions for abuse and harm.”

One staff member, Alex Johnson, told the Flatwater Free Press that there is a complex dynamic between staff and youth at the YRTC. Johnson started working there in 2014 and is currently a youth security supervisor. 

Often, the youth do attempt to manipulate staff, he said. But that doesn’t excuse the way leadership allegedly dismissed some of these reports, he said.

“My impression is that, at the base of this is an attempt to make sure that youth who are being manipulative aren’t getting claws in to continue to show manipulative behavior,” he said. “And that led to complacency that allowed overlooking of what wasn’t manipulative behavior.”

In the eyes of the public, the boys’ involvement in the justice system is another strike against them. But people shouldn’t see these boys as “pseudo-adults that got engaged in the sexual act,” Klein said. 

“When you have an adult that is sexually acting out on a teenager, that’s abuse,” he said. “So as a culture, we have to see that as abuse. And then the response to these young kids would be access to therapy, access to counseling, helping them process this in a way that is focused on the trauma of this event.”

Katie Nungesser with Voices for Children Nebraska said she hears victim-blaming language even from state senators. She has started challenging them to consider if these were girls or their 14-year-old sons, grandsons or nephews.

“They have nothing to say, because they know in their gut: That place would be shut down,” she said.

‘I felt stuck’

At one point while he was at the YRTC, it all became too much for Helmstadter. He’d had friends die while he was in state custody. His grief and the sexual and emotional abuse had become overwhelming, he said. 

“I felt stuck … I tried to escape, I tried to tell people about the relationship, and every time I tried to run I would get caught,” he said.

In early 2024, Helmstadter noticed that the office in his cottage was unlocked. The medical cart was inside. He saw an opportunity. He took Trazodone, Sertraline and other pills — over 20 of them, he said. Then he went to class at the YRTC’s school.

He awoke in a hospital bed, his stomach pumped. 

He’s physically better now but still feeling the effects of the abuse. He’s suspicious of jail staff, even if they just ask how his day is going. He wonders daily: What do they really want? 

Martin’s mom once believed YRTC-Kearney could help her son. Instead, he’s more anxious. He has fraught relationships with his siblings. He has a hard time trusting authority figures.

The night after he wrote a letter to the judge in Ruiz Palacios’ case, he had a nightmare and shut down, Jennifer Martin said. He refused to go to school. 

“That is the hardest thing for a mom, to see your child struggle — knowing that the child that you sent in there is not who you got back,” she said.

The center is meant to rehabilitate kids, but this abuse would reinforce criminal behavior, said Gobel. She would expect the boys to show more of whatever behaviors they already were struggling with, whether that be anger, aggression or withdrawal. 

Ja’Zavier Martin’s anger is one reason he decided to share his story.

“I can’t keep holding it in,” he said. “… When I hold stuff in, I just get mad about situations that ain’t even making me mad for real. … If I don’t talk about what I need to talk about, I’m not gonna learn how to control my anger.”

Surviving ‘hell’

Both Martin’s mom and Helmstadter described their experiences with the YRTC as going “through hell.” 

“Now I know what that feels like. I never want to go back to it,” Helmstadter said. “So I’m going to just try and do everything I gotta do to stay out of places like that.”

The support they and other boys will get from the state to address the abuse they allegedly experienced will vary. The role of DHHS, which provides individualized therapy at the YRTC, ends when they leave the center. 

State Probation Administrator Gene Cotter said that, to his knowledge, judges have ordered behavioral health services for all boys who have alleged abuse and are still in the court system. But even while they’re still on probation, the courts aren’t built for this situation.

“I think the courts are trying, but I don’t know that we are super well-equipped to deal with an offender who is also a victim,” said Nicole Tegtmeier, a Douglas County juvenile public defender.

Martin is in court-ordered therapy, though he said they haven’t yet talked about his abuse. His 19th birthday isn’t for another two years. He would like to be off probation before then.

Once he is, he’ll likely have to find his own therapy. That’s the case for Helmstadter, who — 19 and aged out — hasn’t had therapy to address the abuse, he said. He said he’ll seek it once he’s out of jail. But he also said he doesn’t know where to start.

His first goal once he’s out: Find a job, probably in construction. 

There are state efforts to bolster re-entry support for kids in the juvenile justice system. The Legislature approved a related bill last year. Its sponsor, Sen. Terrell McKinney of Omaha, said he hopes it can help these YRTC boys connect with services. 

“First, I mean, the state needs to take full accountability for dropping the ball and letting that happen to those youth,” McKinney said. “… I don’t know if the state has enough empathy within the systems and understanding of those youth to actually provide the right, adequate services.”

Some boys “may qualify” for a state program called Bridge to Independence that provides services for people ages 19 to 21 who meet certain criteria, Powell said. There’s also a pilot program to help kids leaving the YRTC — two kids have participated since early 2025, he said.

For now, Martin is back in Lincoln, looking forward to playing football and basketball. He likes video games. He’s going to school, building upon the sole part of his experience at YRTC-Kearney that still makes his mom beam with pride. 

He’s a high school junior now, eyeing the finish line.

“Even in the face of adversity, he came out of there with 127 credits,” his mom said. “I am very proud of that, because — while he was going through hell — he still did that.”

---