Home founder says he's sheltering youths

St. Petersburg Times

Associated Press

WHITFIELD, Miss. - Several children ordered removed from a boarding home under investigation for abuse were still missing Sunday, authorities said, and the home's founder said he was sheltering some of the youths.

The Rev. Herman Fountain, a former drug addict who is now a preacher, said he was sheltering four or five youngsters who fled Bethel Home for Children in Lucedale before state welfare workers armed with a court order arrived to take them into protective custody Friday.

''I've still got a few soldiers left, and I'm trying to work back to what it was before,'' said Fountain, 38, who established the fundamentalist Christian home 10 years ago as what he calls a last refuge for troubled kids. He says he is a former New York City heroin addict.

Chancery Judge Robert Oswald of Pascagoula ruled Friday that children at Bethel, ranging in age from 10 to 17 and mostly from outside Mississippi, were subjected ''to physical abuse, medical neglect and detention amounting to imprisonment.'' He ordered their immediate removal. But before officials arrived at the home, a number of children fled, some into nearby woods. A total of 66 children had been taken into custody by Sunday, including a runaway brought to a state mental institution early Sunday morning.

After interviews Saturday, 10 children were released to their parents. The parents were required to sign agreements not to return the children to Bethel, said Welfare Commissioner Thomas Brittain.

Brittain, who supervised the children's removal from the home, said Saturday that medical examinations of some children showed excessive use of corporal punishment.

There have been estimates that 120 to 160 children were at the home. Fountain refused to provide the court a list with names and addresses of the children and their parents.

He vowed Saturday in a telephone interview from Lucedale to keep Bethel's doors open and said he had taken in another resident, a teen-age boy.

Charges that he enslaved and beat children are half-truths, Fountain said. The children were brought to him precisely because they needed strong discipline and hard work to set them on a spiritual path. ''The parents have lost control. Kids today are such manipulators, such cons,'' the independent Baptist minister said. ''They need a little discipline, a little bit of hard work. ... They are going to do work when they are here.''