For decades, social workers have maintained that children thrive in homes rather than institutions. And yet thousands of American kids spend their formative years in residential treatment, a multi-billion dollar business with locations in every state.

VICE News goes deep on this shadowy industry and one of its most notorious and profitable players, Sequel Youth and Family Services. We chronicle the company’s rise as a “last resort” for desperate child welfare agencies and parents, and investigate the circumstances that lead to the death of 16-year-old Cornelius Fredrick at a Sequel facility in Michigan in 2020.

Was Fredrick’s death an isolated incident? In a statement, Sequel told VICE News that “we take any allegation of abuse or negligence seriously.” The company says it is doing everything it can to reduce and minimize the types of incidents that led to Fredrick's death. But thousands of pages of FOIA documents, as well as interviews with former staff and students, tell a different story: an apparent pattern of neglect and abuse in the very institutions whose purpose is to protect our most vulnerable.

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