Kathleen: We walked on eggshells. Anything could make him blow up. "Clean your room." "I don't want to. I'm not gonna do it. I hate you guys." He would talk about hurting himself, and that caused us alarm.

Alan: And about that same time, the mother of the girl that he had been seeing was an attorney, and she issued a...

Kathleen: Filed a temporary restraining order.

Kathleen: we realized that we had to do something.

Kathleen: He would call us, and "I need to come home. I'm done here."  

Aaron: I remember Chris pulled me aside after my phone call and said, "You're not going to go home. You gotta fix your stuff here." So, I took that to heart. My family-teachers Chris and Laurie are honestly the greatest people in the world, to me. Chris is like...I always considered him like my second father.

Kathleen: That's like the pinnacle of why this program works. You have people that...I have a term I call Boys Town which is discipline with compassion. So, you've got a house with parents, your teaching parents. But they care about you and there's discipline. The kid's in charge, really, the kid knows what the process is, and they know what they need to do, the people are here to help and support them, and it's really up to them.

Kathleen: you make those decisions without knowing for sure what's gonna happen. But Boys Town luckily had the answer. Now that we're past it, now that he's home, we know we made the right decision.