Sent Away · APM Reports, KUER and The Salt Lake Tribune

1: Second Chances

March 8, 2022·32 min·3 clips

In a dark Utah cave, Megan let go of Kylie's hand for a second and heard a horrific ruckus as her friend vanished into a 120-foot hole.

Megan starts by measuring the distance between who she is now and who she was then: sneaking out, sneaking boys in, mouthing off, and getting caught with drugs at school. Her parents moved fast. The next day, they sent her from the Dallas suburbs to a normal-looking Utah house near sagebrush and red mountains. The place did not announce itself as dangerous. That is part of what makes the host's setup land so coldly, because the next nine months would not match the plain exterior. The episode then goes underground. A remote cave at the end of winding dirt roads becomes the scene of an emergency with no room for delay. Mark ran toward the entrance. He and his partner squeezed through tight spaces, worked down steep slopes, and descended about a hundred feet to reach Kylie. They were too late. Mark says there was no chance to save her, though even the smallest chance would have had them throwing everything at getting her out. The death stayed with him. After thousands of ambulance calls, he still talks about it as an adventure that turned fatal. He knows Kylie fell. He still does not know why or how. Daniel Taylor carried a different burden. As the man who ran Integrity House, he had to tell Kylie's family what had happened. He calls it a bad time, then quickly says he did not believe his treatment center was responsible. His version leans on what he says an officer told him after the autopsy: that her heart quit and it was not anyone's fault. The hosts push back. They say the sheriff's office report found liver lacerations and blunt trauma, and that the fall killed her, not sudden cardiac arrest. So the episode stays in that uncomfortable space: a girl sent away, a cave trip, a responder still missing answers, an operator refusing blame, and an official cause of death that will not let the question close.

As heard by us

A sober account of a teenager sent far from home, and the months that followed.

Sent Away opens on Megan Kreider at 15, talking through a run of sneaking out, sneaking boys in, talking back to her parents, and getting caught with drugs at school before they packed her up and sent her a thousand miles away.

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Why you'd press play

You want a careful investigative story about a teenager sent away from home.

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