Therapist sexually assaulted in Harris Co. juvenile facility tells her story for the first time
KATY, Texas - For the first time, we’re hearing from a worker who was sexually assaulted by a teen inmate in a Harris County Juvenile Detention Center.
She was working as a therapist, trying to help the kids who were locked up in the Harris County Leadership Academy juvenile facility, and she ended up tortured and raped, she says by a 15-year-old patient.
"I couldn’t believe I was in a situation where I might be killed," she says.
It was at the Harris County Juvenile detention center in Katy. Elena, whose identity we’re concealing, worked as a therapist for about a year when a 15-year-old inmate, who was not her patient, repeatedly asked to see her. She wanted to make sure he wasn’t in crisis, so near the end of the day she accepted his request. But once in her office, he closed her door.
"I mean I didn’t even see the door get locked, and he’s on my face with his fists. He has light eyes, like green, not brown, but they turned like black, and he was coming toward me. He kept telling me I’m going to hurt you, and so all of a sudden he pulled my legs from under me and I fell flat on the floor," Elena explains.
The teenager ripped the batteries from her two-way radio, and she was violently being attacked in her windowless office.
The therapist says the 15-year-old choked her when she started to scream then picked up a piece of workout equipment.
"So he lifted it, and said if you say something I'm going to kill you. I’m gonna kill you with this." She was sexually assaulted. After about 45 minutes he walked out, threatening to kill her if she told anyone. Of course, she immediately reported him. That was July 2021, but the trauma is as raw as if it just happened.
"I can’t be around people and I can’t be alone either. I can’t be alone with anybody, a woman or a man, it doesn’t matter. I don’t even trust my husband," Elena explains.
She says she’s grateful to still be here with her grandkids, kids, and husband, and logically she knows he won’t hurt her.
"But my body is still in fear," she said.
In fact, Elena was once a woman who didn’t even take headache medicine. Now she has pills to sleep, anti-depressants, "I’m on anti-psychotic medicine, because I used to see him in the house."
Him, is teenager Auzavier Wartel, who is being charged as an adult.
Elena, who’s in her late 50’s, actually left a successful career in the oil and gas industry, because she thought she could help troubled kids.
"He’s the result of the life he had. His mother abandoned him. I feel sorry for him. I think he was made into a monster. I will pray for him, because to me, it’s not entirely his fault that he turned out this way. I think it takes a village to raise a human being, and his village failed him," explains Elena, who says it came out in a hearing that the teen has since exposed and gratified himself in front of female jail workers, and she learned he attempted to attack another therapist before her.
Elena says that's a big part of why she's speaking out now, to make sure absent parents know just how much harm they do to their children, and the community as a whole.
Wartel is in jail on a $750,000 bond. His trial date hasn’t been set yet.
Elena says it’s like a dark cloud hanging over her knowing she’ll have to tell the horrible things that happened to her in open court.
Harris County Sheriff’s Office says there have been several changes to beef up security since this happened. Elena, although she no longer works there, wants panic buttons installed to better protect the therapists.