An oasis of support for youth in crisis at Timothy Hill Ranch

To casual observers, Timothy Hill Children’s Ranch might sound like trouble. In recent years, headlines about a bankruptcy and lawsuits involving decades-old sexual abuse claims have clung stubbornly to the 86-acre working ranch on Middle Road in Riverhead. About the only other time the youth foster care facility makes local headlines is when one of its young residents runs away.

Yet according to interviews with family court judges, ranch graduates, local employers who have hired them and ranch leadership, the facility is an oasis of structure and support for many deeply traumatized youth whose lives have been devastated by poverty, abuse, broken homes and, sometimes criminality.

“I’m a local. I live in Riverhead,” Suffolk County Family Court Judge George Harkin said in an interview. “I’ve seen those articles, too, for years, about the kids that run away. But I’ll tell you this: For every kid that you see running away, there’s probably 100 success stories coming out of Timothy Hill.”

Judge Harkin and other local officials associated with the ranch said that it often takes in children who have been rejected by dozens of other agencies.

“Some of these kids are coming from some of the most neglected, heinous situations that you could think of,” the judge said, pausing. “Actually, you couldn’t think of the situations that some of them are coming from.”

Many of the kids who end up at Timothy Hill are victims of severe physical and emotional abuse. Some have extreme disabilities that require special care and attention. Many have nowhere else to go.

In a separate interview, veteran Suffolk County Family Court Judge Fernando Camacho said the ranch is committed to its principles.

“They dare to take in kids nobody else will,” he said. “They’re not afraid of any child. They understand and appreciate what these children have been through.

“A lot of these kids have never trusted anyone,” Judge Camacho continued. “People in their lives have let them down. They’ve betrayed them. So they lose trust and the ability to trust people. They’re angry. They feel betrayed … A lot of these kids have never had anybody care about them, so [caring for them] really, really resounds with them.”

‘We’re not playing games here’

In the early 1970s, former Riverhead Church of Christ minister Jerry Hall and his wife, Fern, were taking in and acting as foster parents for troubled children. Their work left an indelible impression on their young son Timothy, who began saving up his paper route money to buy a ranch to take care of more wayward children, according to the nonprofit’s website. In 1972, when he was 13, Timothy was hit and killed by a truck while riding his bike. Eight years later, his parents opened the Riverhead ranch in his honor.

Since then, the ranch has launched residential campuses in Tennessee and Arkansas and a retreat center in Massachusetts. In addition to the ranch itself, the organization owns several properties in the Riverhead area — including a separate campus for girls, many of them victims of sex trafficking and drug abuse. The ranch offers “Christ-centered residential and workforce development to troubled youth and young adults,” according to the website.

Timothy’s brother, current executive director Thaddeus Hill, said that spirituality is a vital component of the program and that — while children of other faiths are free to opt in or out of any Christian services — if they opt in, it can become an integral part of their individual growth.

Mr. Hill said he sometimes grows frustrated with the headlines: “What’s never reported is what is happening here in terms of the day to day, and the kids that are here. I had six kids graduate Riverhead High School last year. Most of the kids are usually a year or two behind when they come to us, educationally. The fact that we can get them up to speed, and that they can graduate with Regents diplomas, is an awesome thing.”

Mr. Hill said many residents are initially referred to the ranch by family court judges.

“So that gives us some teeth to reinforce that when they come in — that we’re not playing games here, and it is a privilege to be here and we want this to be a good experience. What we’re offering is, for a period of [up to] a year, a life where — 24/7 — food, clothing, shelter, transportation, recreation, counseling and education are all taken care of.’”

As a youth group home that counts roughly 60 residents ranging in age from 13- to 25-years old, he said, the ranch is unique.

“We bale our own hay, we split wood,” Mr. Hill said in an interview. “We [harvest] about nine dozen chicken eggs a day. We have a garden. We have honeybees, an apple orchard … And we maintain about 15 horses on this property, which was part of Timothy’s dream: to have horses and wide-open spaces here. So it’s always been an integral part of the program — that the kids get to be around the animals, and how that impacts them.” 

(Courtesy photos)

The ranch is slowly steadying its reputation after several years of bad headlines.

In July, Timothy Hill Children’s Ranch emerged from a Chapter 11 bankruptcy prompted by the settlement earlier this year of a trio of lawsuits from former residents who claimed that staff negligence resulted in their being sexually abused by older residents — one in 1981 and the other two in 1994 and 1995.

In 2019, New York state passed legislation that allowed victims of alleged child abuse a one-year window in which to file lawsuits in cases where the statute of limitations had expired. The three men, represented by the same firm, all filed claims during that grace period.

Mr. Hill said in an interview that, of the three cases, “we only had knowledge of one of them going back in our records, 30-plus years ago … the other two we had not even knowledge of.”

In April, the ranch settled with the three men for a total of $1.7 million.

Mr. Hill said the bankruptcy was simply a reorganization.

“We didn’t do it because we were financially insolvent, “ he explained. “We did it because 95% of our debts were mortgages on properties across four states.” 

For all the structure and support offered, some kids simply can’t or won’t abide by ranch rules. The Riverhead Police Department was called to the Middle Road location 131 times last year, according to police records, compared with 81 such calls in 2021, and 119 in 2022. As of Nov. 21, police have logged 98 calls to the ranch so far this year. Many of those calls are in response to a child running away.

‘Light bulb moment’

Chief operating officer Will Ashley came to the ranch through his work as a Christian minister.

When he started there in 2015, he recalled recently, “I prided myself on loving people in my ministry well. I always had an open door … I was there for our people … baptizing people, doing weddings, funerals, counseling marriages … I really felt I had a pretty good handle on loving people well.”

His first two months at Timothy Hill were miserable, he said. On his very first day, he was physically threatened by one boy and was then bombarded for weeks with constant vitriol.

“I got into situations where I got royally cursed out by a different kid every week,” he said.

But two incidents sealed his commitment to the ranch.

One night, Mr. Ashley was overseeing the girls’ residence when he was confronted by an extremely angry girl, who was told she was not allowed to enter the residence until she calmed down.

That infuriated her, Mr. Ashley said. When he pulled his car up to the residence, the girl had a baseball bat and started smashing his windshield. He eventually called police, who came and arrested her.

The next day, the minister went to see how she was doing. Mr. Ashley said the girl looked at him like he was crazy.

“Why are you being nice to me?” she kept asking him.

“She was dumbfounded,” he said. “She didn’t know what was going on, and then she said to me, in genuine confusion, ‘I don’t understand this love thing.’ ”

Another time, Mr. Ashley overheard a mother talking to her son, a ranch resident.  “I know you’re doing good and everything’s going well with you with Timothy Hill and all that, and you’re about to come home, but you can’t come here: I don’t want you.,” Mr. Ashley quoted the mother as saying. 

“It was the second time I’d heard a mother tell their child they didn’t want them,” he said. “It was one of those light bulb moments for me, where something hit me — and all my anger and frustration just flipped to love and compassion for these kids. It was night and day.”

‘Safe, engaged and respectful’

Mr. Hill said the ranch is the only congregate care facility in the area to mandate that everyone have a job — including part-time jobs for the school-age children from 13 to 17, and full-time jobs for the “transitional” 18- to 24-year-old residents — who are housed separately and either work on the ranch or have a job in the community. 

“What’s really important to me is that every young person should have instilled in them the value of a good work ethic,” Mr. Hill said.

For young adults in the transitional program, the ranch also offers instruction in financial literacy.

“We really try and work with them to help them manage their money so that they can understand how to get out on the road … ‘This is what a budget looks like, this is what bad credit looks like. This is what compound interest looks like,’ ” he said. “I’ve got guys that walk out of here with $10,000 or $20,000 in their bank account because they’ve been able to save and build a nest egg.”

Mr. Hill estimated that between 60% and 75% of the residents in the youth program “graduate” within a year and return to their families.

He said the staff sets a high standard for behavior on the ranch.

“We use the acronym S.E.R.: safe, engaged and respectful. If at any point you’re not all those three things, then it’s a problem. If you’re consistently that way, you’ll be dismissed … So if there’s disrespect, I have them write down and reflect on communicating with words of respect. It’s not ‘bro,’ [or] ‘yo.’ We say ‘sir.’ ”

It’s an attitude that prompted Peconic Bay Medical Center to hire two transitional ranch residents for full-time jobs several months ago — one in food services and the other in environmental services.

PBMC president Amy Loeb said last month that the two young men were vetted and interviewed by personnel managers before receiving jobs offers.

“The feedback they shared with me after the interviews was that each of the two young men who came to interview were some of the top interviewees that these managers had ever met,” Ms. Loeb said. “Their responses were mature and well thought out. It was clear that they would be hard workers and really committed to doing a good job. And that is exactly what we have seen so far. They’re great hires.”