Chuck Long and the Tough Love Boot Camp

Walking Among the Pines

White Mountain terrain

Nobody saw Michael Villa duck into the shade of the ponderosa pines that June afternoon.

No one watched the boy pick his way along the well-worn mountain trail that led to the high mountain clearing where he retreated whenever he was sad or lonely or frightened. From up there, Michael could look out across the vast expanse of the White Mountain Apache Tribe's reservation. He could imagine that he could see Fort Apache in the distance, where, he said, he had been beaten and starved and dragged by the neck by drill instructors at the Buffalo Soldiers' tough love boot camp where he spent time the year before, until he lost consciousness. Ever since, he had been haunted by nightmares.

But up there on the mountain, Michael was invisible

Nobody saw Michael pick up the rope he had hidden there weeks earlier. No one watched him as he tossed one end of it over a low hanging branch. Nobody saw the 16-year-old boy slip the noose around his neck.

Nobody saw him die.

At about the same time that Michael was twisting at the end of a rope, Chuck Long, the self-appointed "Colonel" of America's Buffalo Soldiers' Re-enactors, was assembling his latest young recruits at a park in the sparkling suburbs of Phoenix.

A smooth-talking former Marine, who had never risen above the rank of corporal, the "Colonel" had promised the desperate parents of those boys and girls, troubled teens, kids much like Michael Villa, that he held the secret to bringing those kids back into line.

Charles "Chuck" Long mugshot

The parents were frightened that their teenage boys, most of them confused, many of them suffering from psychological problems or learning disorders, many of them having just experienced their first encounters with the law would soon be swallowed up by a juvenile justice system that increasingly treats teenage kids like hardened criminals.

But Chuck Long had promised in his brochure that in just a few weeks, through a mixture of tough love and thrilling adventure, their recalcitrant teens would be whipped into shape at his boot camp.

"Don't worry," one of the parents recalls him saying. "I've never brought a kid home dead. If I did, I'd be out of business."

Within a few days, Chuck Long would be under investigation by the Maricopa County Sheriff's department in connection with the death of a 14-year-old learning disabled boy named Anthony Haynes. A few months later, Long would be charged with second-degree murder in connection with the death of Anthony Haynes. Hearing impaired, and overweight, an immature kid who collected Beanie Babies and once got caught shoplifting a plastic action figure," Tony was far from a hard case. He was a kid whose worst adolescent offense was that he slashed his mom's tires with a kitchen knife. It was a desperate act, his mother later said, which he committed so that she wouldn't be able to drive him to an America's Buffalo Soldiers' weekend. It was, she would later say, as a result of that offense that Anthony died June 30, 2001 at Chuck Long's summer boot camp.