12 June 27 - July 3, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents With many renters in the area, displace- ment could also be an issue if much develop- ment comes to Kleberg-Rylie. If nothing new gets built there, displacement won’t be a problem, but then no new money would come into the neighborhood to support its infrastructure needs. “So, that’s kind of a tough situation,” Clark said. Still, community advocates try. Carranza said he’s toyed with the idea of running for City Council to represent the community, but he’s not quite ready yet. “I’m just learning all of this stuff now,” he said. “But if someone doesn’t come in this next time that is going to work with this community, then I feel like I have no choice but to do something.” Carranza said he recently sent a letter to every City Council member and the mayor about the community and some of its griev- ances. Not one responded, he said. Now, he’s working on another letter to invite the City Council and mayor out to the community to see their problems first hand. He’s still working on the details, but he’s hoping for a big turnout. If the City Council doesn’t show up, it’ll just prove his point: The city of Dal- las doesn’t care about Klerberg. A retired real estate agent, Carranza said advocating for Kleberg-Rylie is now his full time job. “I don’t get paid but, hey, it’s my neighborhood,” he said. “I came here to re- tire, to have a nice time, to enjoy my chick- ens and my cows, and to have a good life. That’s what I’m here for.” ▼ CRIME ‘SYSTEMIC SPIRITUAL ABUSE’ AS THE DALLAS EVANGELICAL COMMUNITY IS ROCKED BY A CLOSE-TO-HOME SEXUAL ABUSE ALLEGATION, SOME SAY THEY SAW IT COMING. BY EMMA RUBY G rowing up in the Dallas evangelical community felt like living in “a small town,” Ashley Squires says. Every- one knew everyone, and everyone especially knew the Harmons. The family’s patriarch, Hank Harmon, coached football and taught the high school Bible class at Trinity Chris- tian Academy (TCA) in Addison, which Squires attended in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Harmon was also a spiritual leader at Camp Kanakuk, a Christian summer camp in Missouri that is popular with “affluent” North Texas families. Hank Harmon, Squires remembers, was a man considered to have “near God-like au- thority.” So she immediately recognized the mug- shot of Hank’s son, Matthew Harmon, when it was published by media outlets earlier this month. Matthew, 46, was arrested by Dallas police for sexual assault of a child in 2007. According to police, Harmon had access to “thousands of children” through his time teaching and volunteering at Dallas-area private schools and Camp Kanakuk. For Squires, who spent years “decon- structing” the rigid ideologies she grew up learning as a TCA student, Matthew Har- mon’s arrest was a “bombshell.” “This is a big deal,” Squires, now a Kan- sas City-based English professor, told the Observer. “... I’m back and forth between ‘Oh my God, I was right. Something was deeply wrong here.’ But also just very sad, and very angry.” According to Dallas police, Matthew worked at Providence Christian School of Texas from 2004 to 2007, at Camp Kanakuk from 1995 until the mid-2000s, and he vol- unteered at TCA, where both his parents taught, for an unspecified number of years. TCA declined to say which years Matthew Harmon was involved with the school, but a TCA email shared with the Observer states Matthew most recently joined students on a trip to Israel in 2016. “We grieve for anyone who has experi- enced assault or abuse. Although Matthew Harmon was never an employee of TCA, he did attend some school-sponsored trips along with his parents after his 1996 gradua- tion from TCA,” the school said in a state- ment to the Observer. “We have made our community aware of this arrest and are in the process of conducting our own indepen- dent investigation with a third party.” Several individuals associated with TCA and Camp Kanakuk told the Observer that the Harmon family’s influence as commu- nity spiritual leaders would have granted Matthew “unfettered access” to young peo- ple, even as red flags were raised about his alleged misconduct with minor girls. It’s a side effect of the “systemic spiritual abuse” that ran rampant in the tightly knit Dallas evangelical community, Squires said. “It just wouldn’t surprise me at all if the folks at Providence and the folks at TCA said ‘Oh, Hank and Diane’s son? He’s fine,’” Squires said. Buckets of Failures According to a statement by the Provi- dence Christian School of Texas, worries about Matthew Harmon’s misconduct with minor girls existed before his hiring in 2004, but an internal investigation found his back- ground and reference checks were never completed. Matthew’s ex-wife told Dallas police that Matthew had once admitted to kissing a camper at Camp Kanakuk, and she had heard rumors of his being moved be- tween camps as a result of an inappropriate relationship with a camper. Camp Kanakuk and Providence Chris- tian School did not respond to the Observer’s request for comment. The incomplete background check is only the first of several “big buckets of failures” Providence committed during Matthew’s time with the school, Dallas attorney Zeke Fortenberry told the Observer. Fortenberry is representing the female victim of the 2007 assault Matthew was arrested for in a civil in- vestigation into Providence’s actions. “Once he’s hired there are multiple ac- counts of behavior that is inappropriate with other girls predating my client. And they weren’t handed appropriately; they weren’t taken seriously,” Fortenberry said. “He was allowed to continue having closed-door ses- sions with young girls. No one even changed the way they treated him. Nothing was done.” According to an arrest warrant affidavit, Providence administrators held a limited, internal investigation into Matthew’s rela- tionship with the minor, who by then was no longer a Providence student, after he re- signed from the school in 2007. They found evidence that Matthew was engaging in late-night phone calls with the victim and buying her gifts. But, after determining the relationship was not sexual, the behavior was not reported to the police, Camp Kanakuk or the victim’s parents. Fortenberry believes Matthew’s behav- ior was indicative of grooming, and, by not notifying the girl’s parents, Providence al- lowed the abuse to continue “for several more years.” An email shared with police stated Providence administrators decided not to report Matthew’s behavior to Camp Kanakuk out of concern they were “sticking their noses where they don’t belong.” “Providence had so many opportunities to prevent a predator from taking advantage of a young teenage girl and they failed to do so,” Fortenberry said. “There’s these allega- tions of misconduct, they’re credible, you know her age, and then you know exactly where he’s going to work at [Camp Kanakuk] dealing with the exact same de- mographic. I can’t imagine not reporting it.” According to the warrant, Matthew was “heavily involved” in the Branson, Missouri, summer camp, which has now been tied to dozens of cases of child sexual assault. “I don’t even know what Matt did [at Kanakuk],” Rachel Attwood, who attended TCA and Camp Kanakuk in the late ’90s and early 2000s, told the Observer. “I would just see him driving around on a four-wheeler. He was allowed to go wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted.” The names of Attwood, as well as George Mesh and Candace Riggs, who are quoted later in this story, are pseudonyms given to three interviewed individuals who asked to remain anonymous because of their ongoing involvement in the local evangelical com- munity and their fear of possible retaliation. A Culture of Deference Attwood was a TCA student on one of the many overnight 8th Grade Wilderness trips that Matthew Harmon chaperoned. Even as a preteen, she remembers being confused why a man who wasn’t a faculty member and wasn’t a student was there. “He gave me the heebie-jeebies, and I stayed far away,” Attwood said. “I remember thinking, ‘That guy, there is something off and I don’t know why he’s here.’ And the an- swer was because he was Coach Harmon’s kid.” Since Matthew’s arrest, Attwood has been “disappointed” to see Hank Harmon’s “instrumental role” at TCA and Kanakuk underrepresented in the media, because of the freedom she feels it gave Matthew. While Camp Kanakuk has five different campuses around Branson, she remembers noticing the Harmons’ influence while at- tending K-2, a sports-focused teen camp. A cabin adjacent to the camp is known as the “Harmon cabin.” The camp strictly enforced a culture of purity while Attwood attended, with female campers undergoing dress code checks while being instructed to “not even look” at the boy’s half of camp “in case they were running around naked,” she said. (One Kanakuk abuser, counselor-turned- director Pete Newman, has over 50 victims and was repeatedly reported to camp leaders for misconduct, including engaging with campers while naked. Newman is serving two life sentences, plus 30 years, at the Jeffer- son City Correctional Center in Missouri.) The camp encouraged a “boys will be boys” culture, Attwood said, going so far as to describe the needs of young boys as “ani- malistic.” “Now, as a grown-up, I see that oh, that shouldn’t have been happening at all,” Attwood said. The “modesty and purity culture” at Camp Kanakuk also thrived at TCA, multi- ple sources told the Observer. Squires at- tempted to speak out against it while a student. During her junior year, she ap- proached administrators about her concerns regarding some of the teachings in Hank Harmon’s Bible class. After that, she said, nothing changed. An Unquestionable Figure “I’m not at all surprised to hear that fe- male students have been talking to you about [Hank’s] classes,” George Mesh told the Observer. Mesh, a TCA student in the early 2000s, was one of the alumni identified by TCA as being present on an eighth-grade trip with Matthew Harmon. He remembers the trip, and at the time, he saw the man as a role model. “I just remember thinking to myself, ‘Matt is so cool,” Mesh said. “I wanted to be like Matt.” But as Mesh got older, he remembers no- ticing odd relationships between male teachers and female students at TCA. It was not uncommon for male coaches to ap- proach female students in the hallway to “work on their form,” Mesh said, touching the girls’ legs, feet and arms between classes. And he remembers some male teachers, in- cluding Hank Harmon, held one-on-one tu- toring with female students. Hank Harmon did not respond to the Ob- server’s request for comment. Several female students, whose times at TCA span multiple decades, have described a culture of harassment, sexism and intimi- dation dominating their high school experi- Unfair Park from p10 Matthew Harmon is accused of sexual assault of a child. Dallas County Sheriff’s Office
