A robot was on fire. Again.

It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there. This wasn’t ideal, as the plant was supposed to be churning out urgently needed artillery shells for Ukraine. The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week.

Only weeks earlier, defense officials and executives had touted the factory’s innovative new machinery, imported from Turkey, at a gala opening ceremony. But employees were already used to spectacular mishaps, fiery and otherwise. “After the second, third, fourth time, it just became almost normal,” one former worker said. “It got to the point where I was not surprised by anything that happened there.”

Instead of producing shells in an efficient and streamlined fashion, the pricey machines kept failing in bizarre ways. The robot arms would swing out of control, smashing into carefully calibrated equipment, and sometimes they would unexpectedly drop hunks of steel 5 feet down to the floor. The factory’s signature device, meant to precisely stretch the steel for the artillery shells, instead often cracked it beyond repair. Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer to function properly but still botched the shaping of nearly every shell. “We really didn’t have any standardized practice,” said Quantel White, a former employee. “It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night.” To workers, even the factory buildings themselves came to feel doomed, with acrid smoke hanging in 100-degree heat over foundations seemingly sinking into the earth.

The situation never improved. The U.S. Army, which funded the factory, ordered work halted on two of its three production lines in August 2025. By then, General Dynamics had blown eight deadlines. Work on the third production line continued, but the facility never produced a single usable shell, according to a report from the Department of Defense’s inspector general in July.

The fiasco has cost American taxpayers $533 million, according to the Army. But the Army has not held General Dynamics or a key Turkish subcontractor — which provided the factory’s much-hyped but little-proven equipment — publicly accountable for the failures. Nor has it made General Dynamics pay a penny back. 

Just the opposite: General Dynamics, one of the world’s largest defense companies, has been showered with new contracts, continuing its track record as one of the greatest beneficiaries of Pentagon spending. The company is still in charge of the factory. It recently announced that it will fix things there by bringing in another much-hyped but little-proven technology.

“It’s an absolute disaster,” said one former official in an Army office supervising the project. “The Army should’ve gone after recovering money from General Dynamics,” added the official, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity. 

Publicly, the Army has been tight-lipped about what, exactly, went wrong at the factory, located in a sprawling suburb called Mesquite. The inspector general report described the failure but offered few specifics. It didn’t name the companies involved, much less any of the individuals responsible. The report’s recommendations were tepid: The Army should determine whether the contract was “appropriately issued,” how “the money was spent” and whether it can recoup any of it. It should also “identify and implement a solution” for producing more artillery. Army officials deflected blame, telling the inspector general that they didn’t do anything wrong. 

In a detailed statement to ProPublica, the Army said it will recover funding for the project by getting unspecified discounts from General Dynamics on production orders. “The Army is exercising rigorous oversight to ensure every dollar invested delivers capability to the warfighter,” the statement read. “Where vendors fail to meet contract specifications, as seen at the Mesquite facility, we are evaluating contract performance, seeking recoupment of funds, and pivoting resources.”

As for General Dynamics, it has given no public explanation whatsoever. The company has said that it “met or exceeded requirements,” according to the inspector general report. General Dynamics declined an interview request from ProPublica. Company spokesperson Jeff Davis said ProPublica’s reporting “fundamentally mischaracterizes the circumstances and falsely impugns our record of employee safety and truthfulness with our customer.” He continued: “An article based on this foundation would be a materially false and misleading hit piece.” Davis did not respond to ProPublica’s request that he specify the alleged errors.

ProPublica reconstructed how the project went awry through interviews with 36 current and former employees of General Dynamics, the Army, the Pentagon and the White House. ProPublica also reviewed internal company documents as well as photographs and videos taken inside the factory. 

Those involved described a project that was rushed and ill considered from the start. Congress paved the way, removing government contracting guardrails — meant to ensure taxpayer money isn’t wasted — so that Ukraine-related defense projects could be funded quickly. The Army took advantage, handing General Dynamics lucrative no-bid awards without knowing whether the machines it planned to use could perform the desired work. The Army’s due diligence was inadequate, four former Army and General Dynamics officials told ProPublica.

Compared to the multibillion-dollar budgets of other DOD projects, the financial cost of the Texas debacle is small. But the lack of consequences for the companies involved, in the view of defense-spending critics, is symptomatic of a larger problem: a deep-rooted culture at the Pentagon and in Congress in which expensive failures lead only to more spending. Such critics fear that extreme cases like this one could become more common if the Trump administration succeeds in boosting the defense budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. The administration is also seeking tens of billions of dollars for its war against Iran and pressuring defense companies to quickly ramp up weapons production. 

“Too often the contractors have no accountability for their mistakes,” defense budget researcher William Hartung said. The Texas failure, he said, “is a foreshadow of what’s to come if the Trump administration gets the budget it asked for.”

The Pitch

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 felt like an emergency to the Biden administration. For General Dynamics, it was an opportunity. And Firat Gezen was ready with a pitch.

In six years running General Dynamics’ Ordnance and Tactical Systems business, Gezen had earned a reputation as a deft strategist and salesman. At 50, he wasn’t an engineer, and he had no experience running factories. He had spent decades working on the financial side of the weapons business. With a ready smile and a delivery as smooth as his perfectly bald head, he knew how to woo corporate leaders and Pentagon arms buyers alike. 

Gezen was also shrewd. In 2020, after the Army sought to diversify its artillery supplier base by contracting with a small Pennsylvania company, Gezen swooped in and bought that company. That allowed General Dynamics to maintain its stranglehold over the production of metal bodies for the standard American artillery shell, referred to by its caliber: 155 mm. “Firat throws his arm around you and talks to you nicely,” one former Army official said. “But he’s got, like, five things that he’s the sole provider of, and it’s exclusive. He’s got you locked up forever.”

That put General Dynamics in an ideal position. Russia and Ukraine were firing thousands of shells back and forth each day. The United States was a key supplier to Ukraine, but decades of disinvestment had left the U.S. artillery industry emaciated. In March 2022, Congress passed the first in a series of bills allocating billions of dollars for Ukraine-related causes, including boosting artillery production. The next month, President Joe Biden pledged to send shells to Ukraine, and he wanted to move fast. But first someone had to make them.

The 155 mm shell has been a military workhorse for a century, owing to its simple, lethal power. Packed with TNT, the 33-inch cylinder can travel 10 miles when shot out of the barrel of a howitzer and send fragments flying hundreds of feet upon impact. But decades of asymmetric warfare in the Middle East, in which the United States relied largely on drones and bombs, had led some to believe the days of artillery battles were waning. By 2022, General Dynamics was the only producer of 155 mm metal shell bodies in the country, mainly in a century-old facility in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Given that, the company was an obvious candidate to meet the sudden new demand. General Dynamics could simply replicate Scranton’s traditional manufacturing method, which dated back to the time of the Korean War. But in meetings with Pentagon officials in the fall of 2022, Gezen proposed an alternative: What if the Army funded a state-of-the-art production line that used a promising new technique?

Central to this proposal was a virtual unknown in the world of American defense: Repkon. The company had been operating in its home country of Turkey for decades, providing “turnkey production facilities in the metal forming industry.” (Coincidentally, Gezen himself was born to Turkish parents in the United States.) 

But Repkon had never received a Pentagon contract, and certainly not for its signature metalworking process called “flow-forming.” Whereas the Scranton method mainly involves molding ultrahot steel in giant forging presses, Repkon added a step in which a fast-spinning machine squeezes and rolls out the metal like clay on a potter’s wheel. The advantage, Gezen told defense officials, is that the same equipment could produce shells of various calibers. Most important, Repkon had a production line already available, meaning General Dynamics could start making shells faster than if it had to procure traditional equipment piece by piece.

Warning signs abounded. Army officials learned that the production line that Repkon wanted to sell had been designed to produce an older, simpler model of 155 mm shells, which was made with different steel. It wasn’t clear that the Turkish equipment could even work with the steel used to make the newer 155 mm model, as the equipment had never actually produced it, according to four former General Dynamics and Army officials. Repkon said other countries were using the machines to produce the older model. But the Army and General Dynamics could not inspect those active production lines, Repkon told them, citing customer privacy. 

The Army could have balked at all of this and insisted on learning more about the capacity of the Repkon machines to perform the desired work. But learning more would’ve taken time, and time seemed in short supply. “There was incredible pressure to go fast,” a former Army official said. Everybody moved forward.

In November 2022, the Army raced to give General Dynamics the first in a series of contract awards for the project that would ultimately be worth nearly $600 million if carried to completion. The next month, Congress granted the DOD extraordinary powers to award money for Ukraine-related causes without the usual contracting safeguards, dropping competitive bidding requirements and restrictions on so-called undefinitized contracting actions. UCAs allow a company to begin work even before finalizing the terms of its contract with the government. One defense executive compared them to “building the airplane as you’re flying it.”

The Army made the most of its expanded powers, awarding General Dynamics a number of UCAs without considering alternate proposals in a competitive bidding process. (The Army told ProPublica it selected the company because of its unique artillery production experience.) 

In fact, the Army was so enamored with the proposal that it decided to order even more than Gezen had pitched. Instead of contracting for one Repkon production line, the Army signed up to buy three. Without knowing whether any of them would work.  

Gezen had never overseen a project this ambitious. Until then, he had mainly presided over smaller expansions of existing factories that used traditional methods. But he was optimistic it would work. “He’s extremely aggressive, willing to take risks,” one former colleague said. 

Some of the Army’s scrutiny of the proposal occurred only after it began awarding contracts for it. The service and General Dynamics sent staffers to Turkey to inspect Repkon’s machinery, but they never inspected a full production line in action and there weren’t enough experts who could spot potential defects in the equipment, four former General Dynamics and Army officials said. Crucially, before greenlighting the deal, the Army did not require General Dynamics to demonstrate that it could use the Repkon equipment to complete the entire production process and make shells that met the Army’s specifications. (The Army told ProPublica that “formal testing could not occur prior to full machinery installation.”)

If the typical contracting safeguards had been in place, perhaps everything that followed could have been prevented. If the Pentagon had been forced to open the project to competitive bidding, it would have had to consider other proposals in a painstaking review process. If restrictions on UCAs had been in effect, the Pentagon would have had to slow down and finalize the terms of the deal before allowing it to proceed, which might have surfaced its fatal flaws. 

But one man’s due diligence is another man’s red tape. Soon, Repkon’s flow-forming machines were sailing across the Atlantic, heading eventually for Mesquite.

“This Is Actually Hell”

On May 29, 2024, the mood in Mesquite was triumphant. After two short years of planning, the factory was opening, and defense officials and executives gathered there to celebrate.

“Our nation’s defense relies not only on our soldiers and other servicemembers in uniform but on production facilities like this one,” then-Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told seated dignitaries. She stood at a podium branded with the General Dynamics logo, with two howitzers posed behind her. She thanked the company’s CEO, Phebe Novakovic, and Gezen by name. “It’s a pleasure to highlight the fantastic work you all have done,” she said.

But everything was not as fantastic as it appeared. Artillery shells displayed around the plant that day had been shipped in from elsewhere, three former workers told ProPublica. A worker picked one up and was startled to discover it was fake — seemingly made of plastic. General Dynamics had already failed to perform a scheduled first article test, meant to demonstrate the facility could produce shells that met the Army’s specifications. The facility was supposed to start cranking out shells soon, but machines were barely functioning.

Soon problems seemed to explode out of every corner, according to interviews with 12 former factory workers. For one thing, the flaming robot arms also kept smashing into things. They slammed into computer numerical control machines, breaking their windows and bending their doors. They knocked over shells. They bashed into safety fences. Workers talked about the arms going “rogue” and began calling one of them “Johnny 5” after a sentient military robot from a 1980s movie. 

Even simple equipment failed with slapstick regularity, six workers said. Conveyor belts broke down. Automated carts got lost. Safety gates meant to shut down machines when workers approached did not shut down machines when workers approached. A pipe exploded, spraying water up to the ceiling. Parts on Repkon machines deformed, leading a worker to discover that they were made with Chinese steel, possibly in violation of federal regulations. (The Army said it has no evidence of such violations.)

Smoke hung in the air; it rolled off the press machines when robots sprayed them with lubricant. Workers could feel the smoke in their lungs. When they blew their noses after shifts, their mucus was black. A worker complained to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about a “respirable hazard” at the factory, according to an OSHA record and spokesperson. The agency opened an investigation in October 2024, and an inspector visited the facility. The smoke-spewing press machines were scheduled to be operating on the day of the visit, but for some reason they weren’t running during the inspection, according to four former workers. OSHA issued no penalties, the agency told ProPublica. Staffers started to think it wasn’t just Repkon’s faulty equipment to blame for problems at the factory — it was General Dynamics’ management, too.

The plant could reach Sahara Desert temperatures when the furnaces or presses were on. “This is actually hell,” one worker thought to himself. It was hotter still inside cabinets containing drives that controlled critical machines, where it was regularly 140 degrees, two former workers told ProPublica. An outside inspector warned in an email reviewed by ProPublica that, at that temperature, “you would not only have drives failing but also human lives failing.”

Every day seemed to bring more of the same: another machine broken, another frantic effort to repair it, another batch of misshapen shells tossed into the discard pile. As 2024 became 2025, little seemed to get better.  

With so few shells passing inspection stations along the production line, many workers had nothing to do. A cat-and-mouse game ensued. Bored staffers spent endless hours gazing at their phones, leading supervisors to restrict phone use. So workers began bringing crossword books. Managers nixed those. Some workers were seen sleeping, so supervisors took away chairs.

“We sat around twiddling our thumbs, trying to find work, trying to figure out what was going on,” said Natashia Passmore, a former production technician in the plant. “It was a waste of government money, and it was a waste of our time.”

The Dumpster Fire

Tension rose between the Americans hired by General Dynamics and Turkish workers sent over by Repkon. The Repkon team was there to install the equipment, but it seemed equally flummoxed by the problems. General Dynamics workers found them evasive. They would give curt responses to questions in English but then be seen holding long, animated conversations in Turkish outside during frequent smoking breaks. A carelessly discarded cigarette butt sparked a real-life dumpster fire, three former workers said. 

Repkon was especially secretive about the flow-forming machines, refusing to answer most questions about their operations. General Dynamics workers could tell when Repkon was testing one of them, because they would find metal shards scattered on the floor around it later. The shards looked like alligator teeth. “Oh, the tooth fairy was here,” one worker would think to himself.

Paranoia set in. Repkon refused to share passwords needed to control important equipment, according to five former General Dynamics employees. Sometimes workers would be startled by the sight of a machine moving by itself and realize it was being controlled by someone in Turkey. Spooked, General Dynamics workers tore out hardware to cut off remote access to the machines, two former workers said.

Rumors swirled among the Americans that the Turks were purposefully sabotaging machinery — or perhaps even engaged in some convoluted form of espionage. “It was astonishing how little progress we would make, month after month, year after year,” one former General Dynamics worker said. “People started speculating, ‘I wonder if they’re spying on us.’” General Dynamics assigned someone to shadow the Repkon workers in the factory, two former staffers said. (The Army said it has no evidence of sabotage or spying.)

Even the buildings themselves — a trio of vast, anonymous boxes tucked into the crook of two freeways — were plagued with problems. Walls cracked, and daylight became visible around window frames. Doors began dragging on concrete floors. When it rained, water would flood in — “like a tsunami,” one former worker said. The foundations appeared to be shifting or sinking, six former employees said. It was as if the whole dysfunctional factory — its fires and smoke, its idle workers and haywire machines — was being slowly sucked down into the earth.

Faced with the kaleidoscopic array of problems, the response from General Dynamics managers always seemed to be to plow forward. “Every single time they opened their mouths, it was: ‘We need to get into production,’” one former worker said. “Production is the only thing that mattered.”

“Nobody Wins”

As the situation at the factory deteriorated, General Dynamics and the Army told a very different story to the public.

In April 2024, General Dynamics CEO Novakovic told investors: “In the U.S., we are rapidly increasing ammunition production with the opening of our Texas facility.” General Dynamics failed to conduct a scheduled first article test in Mesquite that same month.

That July, two months after the opening ceremony, Novakovic told investors that “the first line is running and producing as we anticipated.” In fact, the first line was not producing any usable shells, six former plant workers told ProPublica. 

In September Doug Bush, then the Army’s acquisition czar and a key figure overseeing the project, said “there have been no major delays” to the Army’s goal of producing 100,000 artillery shells each month — a goal for which the Mesquite factory was critical. “Any delays you’ve had have been measured in, I would call them weeks, not months, certainly not years,” Bush told reporters. He downplayed the problems, describing them as merely a matter of adjusting a machine “so that it puts out shells just so, versus a little bit off.”

The next day, a laborer in Mesquite photographed the work of a machine meant to begin giving the shells perfectly smooth noses; it had instead mangled the metal into something that resembled the swirl of soft-serve ice cream.

Also in September, Secretary Wormuth touted the Army’s artillery ramp-up at a conference, saying, “part of what’s enabling that are things like the brand-new plant that we opened up in Mesquite.” One month later, an Army contracting officer sent General Dynamics a letter of concern about its performance at the facility. The company missed the Army’s deadline for completing the first production line one month after that. (Wormuth declined to comment.)

Despite it all, Gezen remained optimistic through the fall of 2024. The issues in Mesquite were mere delays, he thought, and there were plans in place to fix them, according to a person familiar with his thinking. “If Firat’s guilty of something, it’s not wanting to see the truth in the matter,” a former colleague said. He “has a tendency to not want to listen to bad news.” General Dynamics announced Gezen’s retirement in January 2025. Some industry insiders believe he was pushed out in part over Mesquite. (Gezen denied that but declined to sit for an on-the-record interview.)

The split screen of blown deadlines and rosy public comments continued into the second administration of President Donald Trump. In April 2025, General Dynamics missed the completion date for the second production line. That same month, Novakovic told investors, once again: “We are rapidly increasing munitions capacity and production with the opening of our projectile facility in Texas.” The company missed another first article test two months later.

As the failures mounted, a sinking feeling took hold in Army offices. The service assembled a team to assess the situation in the factory, which produced a report that gave little confidence the problems could be fixed. Finally, in June 2025, the Army told General Dynamics it was considering terminating the contract awards for the plant, a defense trade publication reported at the time. Two months later, the service ordered work halted on two of the factory’s three production lines.

But the Army did not unilaterally terminate the contract awards. “A termination for default would’ve taken years through the legal system, because General Dynamics wasn’t going to accept that,” a former Army official told ProPublica. “Nobody wins except the lawyers.”

This would not be the last act of generosity from the Trump administration to General Dynamics. In December 2025, according to the inspector general’s report, the government paid the company $26.3 million in “progress payments” for the second and third production lines in Mesquite, although neither line had ever produced a usable shell.

A Novel Solution

Two months ago, General Dynamics made an announcement that conjured a sense of déjà vu. To fix the problems at the factory, the company would team up with yet another unheard-of partner promising technological innovation. The solution this time? Artificial intelligence.

A news release from General Dynamics and the new company, Deterrence, was filled with techno-business jargon. “AI-enabled capabilities” and “intelligence and connectivity” would be added at Mesquite and other General Dynamics factories, the companies wrote. “AI transforms production facilities into strategic assets,” Deterrence’s CEO said in the release. “We’re building autonomous manufacturing systems that learn, adapt, and scale in real time.”

These pronouncements have baffled former Mesquite workers. “What are they talking about? There’s nothing to learn or adapt or scale,” one said. “It’s all broken.” 

General Dynamics is doing this even as it replaces most of the Repkon equipment with traditional machines like those used in Scranton. How AI will wrest miracles from decades-old technology is unclear. But General Dynamics told investors it expects to be in production next year, and the Army told the inspector general that’ll amount to 20,000 shells a month.

Compared with Repkon, Deterrence is perhaps an even less conventional choice. Deterrence was established just three years ago and has never received a DOD contract. Its website gives no indication it has ever helped to manufacture anything. Its three founders have no prior defense experience. One of them worked at Tesla; the other two created a startup that enabled people to lock and unlock buildings with smartphones. Deterrence did not respond to a request for comment.

General Dynamics also pledged to put $200 million into the project. That’s a small sum for a company that generated more than $50 billion in revenue last year and gave CEO Novakovic a compensation package worth more than $25 million. (Meanwhile, the company furloughed or laid off most of the Mesquite workers.)

The Army says it won’t spend any more money on the project, but it has hardly blackballed General Dynamics. Since the Army shut down work on two production lines in Mesquite one year ago, General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems has received contract awards totaling $2.5 billion, the Army told ProPublica. (The service said this was for “distinct production lines and critical national defense requirements” unrelated to Mesquite.)

Repkon’s American offshoot is now at work setting up a TNT factory after receiving a no-bid contract from the Army worth $435 million. TNT is the primary explosive fill in 155 mm shells. Repkon Turkey’s CEO co-founded the American company, which was originally named Repkon USA. In March, it changed its name to Paligen Technologies. Some interpreted this as an effort to create distance from the Mesquite disaster. Paligen told ProPublica that it and Repkon are “different and wholly separate companies.” Repkon Turkey did not respond to requests for comment.

The one thing that key decision-makers appear to agree on is that they are absolutely not to blame. Gezen, the former General Dynamics executive, told ProPublica that the company and the Army did nothing wrong. In a brief conversation at his apartment door in a ritzy section of Washington, D.C., in May, Gezen maintained his sunny optimism. The Repkon equipment was a good option, and it may still be a good option, he said, holding an iced coffee in one hand and restraining a large dog with his other. In any case, he added, “it was the fastest option available.”

Bush, the Army’s former acquisition chief who had assured reporters there were “no major delays” to increasing artillery production, also declined to be interviewed. In a terse conversation in May, peering out from his half-closed front door in Northern Virginia, he told ProPublica: “All of this was done through appropriate procedures.”

Others who were involved, speaking on the condition of anonymity, engaged in mutual finger-pointing: The White House demanded too much too fast, Repkon and General Dynamics overpromised, the Army didn’t perform due diligence and Congress underwrote the whole thing. 

The United States still is not close to producing the promised 100,000 shells per month, a former Army official told ProPublica in June, although other investments to increase 155 mm production have turned out better. Ukraine still needs those shells, the official said, but attention has once again shifted. In the Middle East, it’s other munitions that the Trump administration has rapidly burned through during its war with Iran. Trump officials are now calling for ramping up production in those areas — and fast.

“Conventional ammo is back on the back burner,” the official said. “Everything now is about interceptors, missiles.” 

General Dynamics makes components for those too.

The post Fiasco in the Factory: Taxpayers Funded a $533 Million Artillery Plant That Made Nothing appeared first on ProPublica.

The video clip lasted less than two minutes, but Tonya Webb remembers every second as heartbreaking.

The grainy surveillance footage, dated June 29, 2024, showed a teenager in an anti-suicide smock being dragged violently by other teens across the floor at Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center. As guards watched, the teens pulled the smock over the boy’s head, exposing his naked body. Then they stuffed him, limbs flailing, into a cell.

One guard pushed the door closed, locking him in, and the boy pressed his face against the sliver of a cell window. The guard flashed the teens a thumbs-up.

Webb, a medication supervisor at the facility, saw the video when a co-worker showed it to her and knew she was looking at a serious violation of state policy. An incident like this one, in which employees encouraged youths to restrain another youth, would require staff to notify both the state and the boy’s family within 24 hours.

Webb said she raised questions about the incident with the compliance director for the facility. The director said she’d handle it, but after weeks went by with no sign of a state investigation, Webb confronted the deputy to the facility’s executive director.

“I know you’ve seen the video,” Webb recalled telling her. “Nothing’s being done about it.”

According to Webb, the deputy said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Webb found her response baffling, as word of the attack had spread rapidly among staff and the footage was stored on the facility’s own security system.

WPLN and ProPublica obtained a recording of the video; Webb did not provide it. We asked the state’s Department of Children’s Services if it received an incident report from the facility on or around June 29, 2024. The department confirmed it did not. Webb later reported the incident to DCS.

A Tennessee businessman named Jason Crews was the executive director of the private company that ran Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center at that time. He’s also the CEO of Wayne Halfway House, a separate company that had employees overseeing the detention center and that contracts with the state to operate other juvenile facilities. Crews did not reply to written questions about this incident, nor did his deputy and compliance director.

Interviews with dozens of former staff and youth, along with a review of emergency call logs, company records and state documents, reveal how Wayne Halfway House’s leaders failed to report suspected physical and sexual abuse to state officials across Crews’ facilities and prevented the public from learning about violent attacks by reducing the number of 911 calls. The state is now investigating incidents we uncovered.

According to Wayne Halfway House and Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center employees who worked closely with corporate executives, there was an expectation that serious incidents be kept secret, and the directive came from Crews.

“You always call Jason and nothing gets reported without his permission — and that’s wrong,” said Kim Watts, the company’s former human resources director. She was fired in 2024 when “the company decided to go in a different direction,” according to her termination paperwork.

Liz Ryan, who oversaw juvenile justice programs for the Biden administration, reviewed a detailed summary of the incidents WPLN and ProPublica compiled, the corresponding state laws and policies and the company’s responses. “Wayne Halfway House Inc. and its leadership, including CEO Jason Crews, appear to have demonstrated a documented pattern of disregard for state law, federal law and professional standards,” said Ryan, who provided training and guidance to state and local governments about best practices for youth in the system.

“They’re putting kids’ lives at risk,” she said. “Absent immediate and vigorous state oversight and intervention, this seems like a disaster waiting to happen as allegations of this nature are warning signs in need of immediate examination.”

In a statement, Wayne Halfway House said the company follows state policy and law and “vehemently denies” that Crews or his company have ever discouraged staff from reporting serious or life-threatening incidents to the state or 911. It described its former employees as “untrustworthy sources” with a “clear bias” against the company and their allegations as “substantially flawed.”

Crews briefly spoke with the news organizations in April during a guided tour of one of his facilities, but he subsequently declined multiple requests for a formal interview. Wayne Halfway House provided detailed responses in writing to three rounds of questions.

DCS said that confidentiality laws limit the agency from commenting publicly about specific youth or investigations, but that it is looking into these incidents. “DCS is comparing the information provided with Department and provider records to determine whether required incident and abuse reports were made, whether appropriate medical care and notifications occurred and what actions were taken in response,” the agency said in a written statement. The results of its investigation will not be made public, it said.

Over much of the last decade, Tennessee has pushed to expand juvenile prison capacity — and to do so, it turned to Crews. Most youth in state custody for committing crimes are held in his facilities, which accommodate nearly 300.

About six weeks after the incident with the teen in the video, the state gave Wayne Halfway House a more lucrative contract to turn Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center, located an hour south of Nashville, from a juvenile jail into a prison. Crews now runs all three of Tennessee’s highest-security youth prisons.

The youth in the video, Thomas Jarvis, recently turned 20. He recalls the attack as the worst ordeal of his years bouncing between facilities in Tennessee. Days after the incident, he said, he was taken to a hospital for an evaluation, then treated at a mental health crisis center.

Jarvis buried the trauma of the attack so deep that he never told his mother, grandmother or state caseworker, who was like a father to him.

His mother, Crystal Smith, heard about the incident for the first time in June, when we showed her the footage. Sitting at her dining room table in Northern Alabama, with laundry drying on the back of the chairs, she watched in horror as her son was dragged across the screen. “That’s my baby that they did that to,” she said. “That’s not right.”

Her elbows resting on the table and shoulders slumped, she wondered out loud what else had been kept secret.

---

For decades, Crews was a minor player in Tennessee’s juvenile justice system, running just two midsized facilities. But as the state sought operators for its youth prisons, he saw an opening, he told WPLN and ProPublica in April.

Crews’ facilities began accepting teens who other private providers lacked the capacity or desire to handle, becoming an important resource for the Department of Children’s Services. When the state needed a new operator for its largest private youth prison in 2020, it gave Crews the contract.

Mountain View Academy is a high-security facility surrounded by barbed-wire fencing that houses youth who have committed the most serious offenses, including rape and murder. The state also places youth there who have committed nonviolent crimes.

Under its previous operator, Mountain View had been plagued by riots that drew negative press and infuriated locals. Staff called police in the sleepy East Tennessee town of Dandridge regularly for months. In one news report, the town’s mayor said the situation was “not fair to the citizens of Dandridge.”

When Crews took over the Mountain View contract, he promised to get the facility under control. He called the facility a “beast nobody could tame.” Especially in the first months, Crews said, he was a daily presence at the facility, showing up every morning before the kids woke up and helping instill a sense of structure into their routine. But there were still riots, violence and life-threatening injuries inside the prison, according to a lawsuit and interviews with former staff and youth.

One major change was that under Crews, the facility’s problems were kept out of the public eye, former employees said.

The company’s written policy, in effect in early 2020, which WPLN and ProPublica obtained, stated that staff should call 911 “immediately” during a disturbance or riot, but multiple employees said leaders told them something different: Never call for outside help unless Crews or his deputies gave permission. This mandate pressured employees to handle many medical emergencies internally, without calling for help, according to interviews with nine former employees and youth.

WPLN and ProPublica obtained the 2024 version of the company’s emergency response plan for how to handle a riot or disturbance. The directive to call for help immediately was no longer in that policy. “Before law enforcement or emergency services enter our buildings at any time, Jason Crews, CEO must and will be called, no exceptions,” the policy read. It instructed staff to follow law enforcement’s instructions “if Law Enforcement has been called under the authorization of Jason Crews.” A new point was added that reads, “If possible, the disturbance is handled internally.”

In a statement, Wayne Halfway House denied that it ever prevented or discouraged staff from “initiating emergency response in life-threatening scenarios,” calling that allegation “categorically false.” The company pointed to other parts of the 2024 policy, like one for youth medical emergencies, which required staff to call 911 immediately.

The company also shared a new policy for how to handle riots, which went into effect in August 2025 and removes the mandate to call Crews. Now the policy says that staff should notify facility leadership and the company’s state director before police enter the building during a riot or disturbance. The purpose of the plan, the company said in a statement, is to ensure leadership is “simultaneously” notified about emergencies while staff call for help. “Our policies prioritize providing for the safety of all involved and putting our best resources into action when they’re needed the most,” the statement read. “In the rare instances that law enforcement response is required, our policies ensure appropriate staff are notified.”

Wayne Halfway House’s relationship with the police and the community has improved, according to law enforcement. In an interview with WPLN and ProPublica, Dandridge Police Administrative Sergeant Kevin Bunch said, “Call volume and the amount of time that a detective has to spend in this facility has greatly reduced since Mr. Crews’ company took over.”

Just nine months after Crews took over Mountain View, the company’s approach to 911 calls was put to the test.

Late on Nov. 21, 2020, guard Heather Boyd sat in the facility control room and received a radio call from a colleague begging her to call the police. Watching on the surveillance cameras, Boyd saw more than a dozen youth attacking a few guards. Following procedure, she tried to call her supervisor, according to a lawsuit that she later filed against Wayne Halfway House. When 20 minutes passed with no response, she called 911, which sent officers to quash the attack.

Days later, the company fired Boyd and at least two other guards, including one who was taken to the hospital. In an interview with WPLN and ProPublica, Boyd said company leaders told her they were firing her for “calling outside help” and breaking protocol. In the lawsuit, Boyd described the unofficial policy as “gross negligence and malfeasance.”

“I thought I’d done something to save somebody’s life,” she told us. “You shouldn’t have to choose a person’s life over your job.”

Wayne Halfway House denied many of Boyd’s claims in court, including that the company had a policy stopping staff from calling 911 during a life-or-death emergency and that she was wrongfully fired. Both parties quickly settled the case. The company said in a statement that it cannot comment about the settlement agreement due to its confidentiality requirement. It denied that any of the guards were fired for calling 911.

Two experts on correctional medical care said not every emergency at a facility like Mountain View requires a 911 call. But when it comes to injuries, medical staff should be involved in the decision.

In February 2024, however, Mountain View nurse Brandi Buchanan said she faced pressure not to call 911 despite her own professional judgment. She had witnessed teens attacking a guard in a dorm, smashing his ribs, pepper-spraying him and repeatedly kicking his head.

“We need to call the police,” Buchanan recalled telling other guards. “I’m sure he has internal injuries.” But the guards overruled her.

“I thought I’d done something to save somebody’s life. You shouldn’t have to choose a person’s life over your job.”

Heather Boyd, a former guard at Mountain View Academy who said company leaders told her they were firing her for “calling outside help” and breaking protocol

“We don’t do that,” she remembers one company veteran saying. Instead, employees called the operations manager, who was off duty and on a date. An agonizing 20 minutes later, she said, the manager arrived, and his date drove the injured guard to the hospital. The operations manager did not respond to a request for comment about this incident.

“At that point, I was like, ‘They care more about their reputation than their employee’s literal life,’” Buchanan said. She put in her notice shortly after.

Wayne Halfway House said in a statement to WPLN and ProPublica that the attack was “diffused before law enforcement response was needed” and “contained within a matter of minutes.”

The guard, Jason Zaske, suffered a lacerated spleen, a concussion and broken ribs, according to a GoFundMe set up on his behalf. “He thought he was dying,” Zaske’s wife told local media. The guard was unable to work for weeks.

Crews was angered by the wife’s public comments and wanted to fire Zaske, according to Watts, the company’s HR director at the time, who said she advised him not to. “I was like, ‘You can’t terminate somebody who just got injured at work,’” Watts recalled. Zaske wasn’t fired and went back to work at the company. He and his wife declined to comment for this story but confirmed he no longer works there. The company did not respond to Watts’ allegations but said it continued paying Zaske while he was recovering without putting him on workers’ compensation, which would have reduced his pay.

Several months after the Zaske incident, Watts was terminated by Wayne Halfway House. At first the company said her termination was for failing to meet job expectations, but Watts replied citing her latest performance review in which Crews said she was “a tremendous asset to the company.” The company sent her a revised termination letter saying it was going in a different direction. After she left the company, Watts filed a sex discrimination complaint against Wayne Halfway House with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which declined to investigate.

---

WPLN and ProPublica spoke with more than three dozen former employees of Wayne Halfway House and former residents who said they knew of serious problems that endangered youth and staff inside the company’s facilities. Of those, more than a dozen said that Wayne Halfway House failed to report grave safety failures as required, preventing the state from learning about problems in its facilities.

In Tennessee, juvenile justice providers are required to report abuse and other serious incidents in their facilities to the state Department of Children’s Services, which then decides whether to investigate. Facilities must notify the state of significant incidents — including serious injuries to youth, escapes or restraint use — within 24 hours.

Wayne Halfway House said it designates specific facility leaders to report serious incidents directly to the state, which the company said is “consistent with best practices.” But a dozen lower-level former staff members said they didn’t trust management to file reports or to do so thoroughly, and two former managers said they felt pressured by the company not to report at all even though they were authorized to do so. One of those managers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of career repercussions, said Crews told them to stop reporting as much to the state because it would make the company look bad.

Separate from a facility’s requirements to DCS, Tennessee law requires individuals to report any suspected child abuse, including physical and sexual abuse, to the department immediately. Nine former Wayne Halfway House staff members said they feared for their jobs if they reported serious incidents, including some suspected cases of child abuse, directly to the state. Several of them said they were pushed out after doing so. “The rebuke would be harsh and sometimes up to and including termination if we reported out,” said Mario Brown, a former therapist at Mountain View Academy. Brown was not fired from the company.

The company said that it did not fire staff for reporting abuse and that staff members have an individual legal responsibility to report child abuse and neglect to the state. Employees scared about retaliation could report anonymously to DCS, the company said. “WHWH is well aware that terminating an individual for them reporting incidents of this severity would create potential legal liability for the company.”

Webb, the former medication supervisor at Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center, said that around the time when Jarvis was forced into a cell by other teens, management failed to report another violent altercation to the state. A surveillance video from 2024 shows the facility administrator, Lynda Odom, grabbing a girl by her wrists, backing her into the corner of the room and pulling her into a headlock. “I’m grabbing your neck because you need to stop,” Odom yelled as the girl struggled. Two other staffers helped to break them up, and one dragged the girl away screaming.

WPLN and ProPublica obtained a recording of the video; Webb did not provide it.

Webb said she went to the company’s director of compliance, Kelly Banks, who was visible in the video attempting to hold Odom back, and asked her if she was going to report the restraint to the state. Banks said she would handle it, according to Webb. Banks did not respond to requests for comment.

Odom, who no longer works at the facility, said that she followed proper procedure in restraining the girl and that no one had reached out to her to investigate the incident. “There was nothing to report,” she said when WPLN and ProPublica reached her by phone.

WPLN and ProPublica played the video for leaders at Handle With Care, the restraint training company used by Wayne Halfway House. The company said it “does not teach headlocks as restraint techniques.”

Crews declined to respond to questions about the incident. According to Wayne Halfway House, Webb was later fired for creating a hostile work environment. Webb said company leaders asked in her termination meeting if she had kept the videos of youth being harmed; she believes the company fired her for insisting leaders report incidents to the state.

Sexual relationships between staffers and incarcerated youth are illegal under any circumstances, but nearly two dozen former employees and teens said they suspected abuse was taking place in Crews’ facilities.

Five former staff members said they did not report suspected sexual abuse as required under state law because they were scared of retaliation from leadership, and two said they didn’t know it was a requirement.

Two former employees, one from Mountain View and the other from Standing Tall Music City, a Wayne Halfway House facility in Nashville, recalled talking to company leaders about specific cases of staff suspected of sexually abusing youth. They said they were not aware of the incidents being reported to the state.

The former Standing Tall employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation from the company, described confronting a female guard after finding her in a room with a youth alone. The former employee said they suspected the guard was sexually abusing the youth and reported it to the facility administrator, hoping he would begin an investigation. But a federal report that tracks sexual abuse in prisons showed no employee abuse or harassment of youth was reported to or investigated by the state in that facility in 2021.

Wayne Halfway House said it reported this incident to the state last week after WPLN and ProPublica asked the company about it.

Brown, the former Mountain View therapist, recalled a separate incident of suspected sexual abuse, which he did go on to report: a child whom he watched deteriorate session after session. Eventually, Brown said, the boy told him that a nurse at the facility had sexually assaulted him. Although Brown worried about getting fired, he reported the alleged abuse to the state. Shortly after, the child was moved out of the facility.

Wayne Halfway House said in a statement that it has documentation that rebuts Brown’s version of events but cannot comment further because of confidentiality reasons.

Brown eventually resigned. “It got to the point where this had weighed heavily on my mental health,” he said.

His main regret, he said, was leaving behind youth who trusted him.

Brown later returned to work for Wayne Halfway House, he said, because of his dedication to the kids. He no longer works for the company.

---

Years before Jarvis was dragged across the floor of Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center, he was badly injured inside another Crews facility, according to Jarvis’ DCS case file. That time, too, the facility failed to report the incident to the state as required.

Jarvis landed in September 2021 at Hollis Academy, Wayne Halfway House’s flagship facility in rural Middle Tennessee. He had been there for several weeks when the company requested DCS move him to another provider. Right after, his case manager picked him up and took him to a routine doctor’s appointment at the health department. His file, which his family shared with WPLN and ProPublica, states that a medical provider discovered he had bruises in various stages of healing covering 80% of his body. Jarvis said the other youth had assaulted him.

“With this amount of bruising staff had to be aware,” a child abuse report submitted to DCS read.

A DCS investigator looked into the case and interviewed facility leadership. The facility, he said, never reported the injury to Jarvis’ state case manager or to the state as required. The documents don’t mention any repercussions for the facility, and DCS said it cannot comment because of juvenile confidentiality laws.

Wayne Halfway House declined to comment about this specific incident, citing a youth’s right to privacy. The company said it was not able to file a report for a youth no longer at the facility. But documents show that Jarvis had been at the facility for weeks when the bruising occurred.

Jarvis spent nearly three and a half years in state custody after being charged with arson for lighting his stepdad’s three-wheeler on fire. He was released from Mountain View in March 2025 following a court hearing.

Incarceration seems to have only worsened his trauma, said his grandmother Chris Stone, who took him in to live with her. Jarvis still seems angry, Stone said, and sometimes he threatens suicide. He never discusses what happened to him inside.

Inside her dimly lit brick home in Northern Alabama, with curtains drawn against the summer heat, Stone wept while recalling the assault her grandson endured while he was already at a low point. She still struggles to understand why the facility never informed her or other family members — and she wrestles with anger and guilt.

Sitting on the couch, she turned to her grandson, her blue eyes fixed on him. “Thomas, with my temper, something would have went down,” she said. She told him she never would have let the company hide what happened.

He sat silently beside her, without meeting her eyes.

The post “They’re Putting Kids’ Lives at Risk”: How Abuse in a Tennessee Businessman’s Juvenile Prisons Remained Under Wraps appeared first on ProPublica.