Tucked inside a neighborhood in a small town just north of New York City, Hawthorne Cedar Knolls was on idyllic, green grounds. It was landscaped to give some peace and stability to the emotionally troubled teenagers who were placed there.
But in recent years, Hawthorne, located in the town of Mount Pleasant, began experiencing unusually high rates of teenagers going missing from its campus. Staff, law enforcement officials and advocates for children said they knew that some of the missing residents had fallen victim to sex traffickers. Many of the girls in the rehabilitation center had been
placed there in the first place to rescue them from the sex trade.
On Thursday, the breadth of a pipeline carrying young women out of Hawthorne and into prostitution became clearer. Nineteen people were charged in a sex-trafficking ring that exploited young women and girls as young as 13 years old, federal prosecutors said.
At least 15 victims were in the child welfare system, including nine who were residents of Hawthorne, the prosecutors said.
The defendants named in a series of indictments unsealed this week face charges including sex trafficking of a minor and conspiracy, which carry maximum sentences of up to life in prison.
The indictments do not name the residential center in Westchester County, referring to it only as “Facility-1,” but it is Hawthorne, an official at the center and two other people briefed on the matter said. Some of the defendants are in their 20s; the two oldest are 59, prosecutors said. None of the defendants were staff members of Hawthorne.
One defendant, Hubert Dupigny, 34, recruited a 16-year-old girl from Hawthorne who worked for him as a prostitute until he was arrested in December 2016, prosecutors wrote. At that point, the girl went to work for his brother, Hensley Dupigny, 29, who posted advertisements for her on
Backpage.com and collected most of her earnings, the prosecutors said.
A prosecutor said at a court hearing in August for Hensley Dupigny that the alleged conspiracy was “particularly egregious” because the defendants sought out minors in the social services system, often children with behavioral or emotional problems who had become wards of the state.
The Jewish Board announced it would close Hawthorne earlier this year, following pressure from state legislators, severe sanctions from the state child welfare office and growing complaints from residents of Mount Pleasant about teenagers wandering the town, particularly as they headed to trains back to New York City.
In 2016, the town began charging the Jewish Board and another nonprofit that runs a nearby residential treatment center $250 for every call about missing children in an effort to push the nonprofits to beef up security.
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