How Fox Run Treatment Center Traumatized Troubled Children | The Marshall Project
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It Was Supposed to Be a Haven for Troubled Teens. They Risked Everything to Escape.
At Fox Run, one of Ohio’s largest youth residential treatment centers, kids and former staff detail a litany of trauma.
By Brittany Hailer and Ilica Mahajan
Clockwise from top left: Paitin Pahoundis, who spent time at the Fox Run Center for Children and Adolescents; a view of the Fox Run facility; Isabella Ramirez, who also spent time at Fox Run; and a view of the sign for the facility.<br>Bethany Mollenkof for The Marshall Project
Additional reporting by Rachel Dissell
Republish
Cleveland ·
Filed<br>07.30.2026 6:00 a.m. EDT
ST. CLAIRSVILLE, OHIO – Paitin Pahoundis jolted awake, a siren blaring in her ears. Her friend Samantha Primeau was in her room. It was time. The other girls, Samantha told her, were gone. They had jammed a sprinkler, triggering the fire alarm and filling the hallway outside with water.
Their escape plan was working. But there was a problem: Paitin didn’t have shoes.
The checkered Vans and the white Jordans with the bright orange stripes that her father had bought her before he went to prison, the ones she meticulously kept in mint condition, had been taken by staff and locked in another room, along with the rest of her possessions. She was on “no personals” status for not following the rules.
But, Paitin wanted out, and this was her chance.
As they walked out of the building and into a snowstorm, Paitin remembers a staff member standing in a doorway. She looked at Paitin and said, “If you want to go, just go.”
Over the five years reviewed, law enforcement officials visited the Fox Run facility, on average, once every 21 days. They went for 52 assaults and 17 sexual assaults.<br>Nate Smallwood for The Marshall Project
Both teens said they dreamed of escaping the staff members who forcibly held them down hard enough to leave bruises, the blood in the hallways from kids cutting themselves, the girls strangling themselves with bedsheets, the adults who insisted no family wanted to adopt them and who looked through them like they were already gone.
On that January night in 2022, the girls careened down the hill below the Fox Run Center for Children and Adolescents, their pumping adrenaline temporarily masking the frigid Ohio air. Not even Paitin’s soaking wet socks slipping off in the snow could deter her descent toward freedom.
Barefoot, Paitin crossed the highway that snakes along the back end of Fox Run’s grounds, dodging cars and climbing over medians. As they considered going to a nearby hotel, things started to fall apart.
Electric pain ripped through Paitin’s frozen feet. Samantha felt herself getting sleepy and slowed to a crawl, wishing she could pass out right there. They had nowhere to go. All they could do was turn back in failure.
At the top of the hill, police dragged Paitin into a squad car. She pounded the window, screaming in agony. Before she was hospitalized, Paitin recalls a staff member walking up and peering in. “I bet you will never do that again, will you?”
She would, she told herself. “I would rather be dead outside in the snow.”
Samantha Primeau spent time in and out of residential treatment centers as a teenager. She escaped together with Paitin Pahoundis from the Fox Run Center for Children and Adolescents during a snowstorm in January of 2022.
Bethany Mollenkof for The Marshall Project
Paitin spent three years at Fox Run in St. Clairsville, Ohio. She escaped multiple times and once made it across the state line from Ohio into West Virginia.
Bethany Mollenkof for The Marshall Project
Paitin and Samantha desperately wanted to escape what was supposed to be a therapeutic haven for kids with mental health and behavioral issues. Instead, they found themselves confined for months — in Paitin’s case, years — inside an institution where they witnessed kids routinely attacking and sexually assaulting each other, anarchic riots by children pushed to the breaking point, and suicide attempts using makeshift weapons fashioned from scraps of metal or bedsheets, according to police and state records and numerous interviews.
They endured violence from some of the adults charged with their care, medically unnecessary sedative...