Six men, including two from Massachusetts, were arrested and charged on Wednesday in connection with an ongoing investigation into sex abuse at a New Hampshire detection center.
New Hampshire authorities said 54-year-old Jeffrey Buskey, of Quincy, and 51-year-old Stephen Murphy, of Danvers, were each charged with five counts of aggravated felonious sexual assault stemming from abuse allegations made by former residents of the Sununu Youth Services Center, formerly known as the Youth Development Center.
Four former residents of the Youth Development Center raised the assault allegations against Buskey, alleging the abuse took place between 1996 and 1999, according to New Hampshire Deputy Attorney General Jane E. Young and New Hampshire State Police Colonel Nathan Noyes. Three former residents of the facility made assault allegations against Murphy, alleging the abuse took place between 1997 and 1999.
Buskey waived extradition from Massachusetts. Extradition is pending for Murphy.
The other men arrested include Bradley Asbury, 66, of Dunbarton, New Hampshire; Frank Davis, 79, of Contoocook, New Hampshire; Lucien Poulette, 65, of Auburn, New Hampshire; and James Woodlock, 56, of Manchester, New Hampshire, prosecutors said. The men also face numerous sexual assault charges from allegations date from 1994-2001.
New Hampshire prosecutors said the probe into the child abuse allegations is still ongoing.
“The aforementioned arrests do not represent the culmination of the investigation but are merely a step forward in this comprehensive and multi-faceted investigation,” they said.
Sununu Youth Services Center has been under investigation since July 2019 after two former counselors were charged with raping a teenage boy 82 times in the 1990s, the Associated Press reports. Prosecutors dropped those charges last year to expand and strengthen the probe.
Several of the men arrested Wednesday were previously named in a civil lawsuit filed last year involving alleged physical or sexual abuse of more than 200 men and women when they were children at the Manchester facility from 1963 to 2018. That suit names 150 staffers as the alleged abusers, according to the Associated Press.
Attorney for the plaintiffs in the suit allege that children were gang raped by counselors, beaten while raped, forced to compete for food in “fight clubs” organized by counselors and put in solitary confinement for weeks or months, the Associated Press reports.