‘I feel so betrayed:’ Parents complained to Children’s Museum board weeks prior to July 1 incident

On Friday, it was revealed that a family of 7 were living inside of storage rooms within the Northern Nevada Children’s Museum in Carson City with weapons and drugs after the father of the family, Wilbert Calhoun, was arrested for suspicion of child neglect.

While the Children’s Museum Board stated it must have been a very recent development, and that they had never received any complaints and had no knowledge anything at the museum was amiss, parents have a different story.

Summer Camp

One parent is Jen Trotter, who has enrolled her children in the Children’s Museum summer camp for the past four years, and until this year, has loved the experience.

“In the past, when they’d sign up for a week of camp, they’d come back with tons of projects and they learned so much. It was a great learning experience.”

However, this year, from the beginning of camp Trotter said she noticed a significant difference.

“I was looking forward to it, but when I got them there, it was sketchy from the beginning,” said Trotter. “It just didn’t feel right. But I thought, ‘well, we’ll give it a try, since we’ve had such great experiences in the past.’”

Trotter said that when her children came home the first day, they told her they’d only played in the museum for the entirety of the camp, instead of engaging with lesson plans or educational programming.

“When I asked the manager, she said it was a ‘get to know you day,’ but my kids told me that ‘the lady was busy taking care of her baby and didn’t have time to teach us,’” said Trotter.

Trotter also stated that throughout the week, the cleanliness of the camp went downhill very quickly. By the end of the week, she said the bathrooms had become disgusting, with overflowing trash on the ground, no paper towels, and that the bathrooms hadn’t been cleaned once since their camp week had started.

However, the most disturbing aspect to Trotter seemed to be a lack of supervision.

“On Friday, I came to drop the kids off, and no (adult) was there,” said Trotter. “The front doors to the museum were open, but no one was upstairs with the kids. So I sat there with my kids while they played until someone finally came upstairs at 9:30. Camp started at 8:30, and we got there at 8:45.”

Later that afternoon when Trotter picked up her children, she learned that her daughter and the manager’s daughter and been allowed to go outside on the front steps of the museum with no supervision to play cards.

“After I heard that I withdrew them,” said Trotter. “I called and complained, it was completely unacceptable.”

Trotter reached out to someone who used to be on the children’s museum board.

“She knew someone on the board and spoke to them, and she forwarded me a message that said, ‘(The manager) is doing the best she can, she’s the only one on staff, so she got her friends to volunteer to help her out,” said Trotter.

Trotter called Board President Nathan Tobey on June 20. However, on Friday following the arrest, Tobey stated that the board had never received any complaints from parents or employees regarding issues at the museum.

“He knew and he didn’t go check in, and he just let more people go to camp,” said Trotter. “He offered me my refund, I still haven’t seen it. One week per child was $150.”

On Friday when asked if any complaints had been made, Tobey had stated there were not. However, after bringing forward the new information provided by parents about formal complaints being made to the board, Tobey admitted that he had received complaints from Trotter.

“Yes, I did speak to (Trotter). She didn’t like the way the camps were being run,” said Tobey. “I think she was expecting a higher level of education, perhaps, than what was going on.”

When asked if the board is involved in reviewing camp materials such as lesson plans, Tobey said they were not.

When asked if Tobey went to check on the camp in person after the complaint, Tobey stated that he spoke to the manager about it over the phone.

“She said she was really busy and hadn’t been able to keep up with the cleaning,” said Tobey.

Similarly to Trotter, Cassie McClain has sent her children to the camp for several years, and has convinced many other families to sign up as well.

This year, however, McClain said things were off from the beginning.

“My oldest knew something was off, and I kind of made her complete it,” said McClain. “I thought it was because of her age; she’s 12 now, and doesn’t really want to participate in much, so I chalked it up to that.”

An hour after dropping her children off, McClain got a call stating her daughter wasn’t feeling well and needed to be picked up.

“We have a code that, if you’re uncomfortable, you can say you’re sick and I’ll get you,” said McClain. “I learned later that they were left upstairs in the kid’s area which is for, at the oldest, 7-year-olds, for an hour and a half before going downstairs. There were no lessons, some cheesy crafts with no thought put into them. My oldest hated it.”

McClain also found out that, while camp was supposed to start at 8:30, the children weren’t taken downstairs until 10, and then the rest of the camp’s staff left at 2 o’clock everyday, even though camp was scheduled to continue until 3:30 p.m.

McClain enrolled her children for two sessions: June 20-24, and June 27 to July 1. She said that she had heard of the issues from Trotter, whose children had attended the week before. However, she thought that, because Trotter had spoken with the board president, things would be put back in order.

“I thought Nathan had taken care of it,” said McClain. “But clearly, not much had changed.”

By the end of the first week, McClain cancelled her second week and asked for a refund.

“Thank god I didn’t send them as second week,” said McClain. “I had a melt down, I was so angry. I’m very protective of my girls. I don’t let a lot of people watch them. I said to (my daughter), ‘You’re safe there.’ And come to find out we’re not? I don’t understand how this happened.”

“I feel sick, I try so hard to protect them,” said Trotter, who homeschools her children and is protective over where she allows them to go for activities. “I feel so betrayed. Every year I’ve sent them to the camp, it was because I thought they would make new friends, learn something new, make art; and then I find out I sent them into a really dangerous environment.”

After reading about the arrest, Trotter asked her children if she’d seen anything out of the ordinary, and if the children were living there.

“They said, ‘Yes! They had stuffed animals everywhere, they had things to sleep with, they had all there stuff there; they did live there, Mom.”

McClain’s children told her that the manager’s children never changed their clothes, and were often very dirty.

Trotter asked the children if they had ever seen any guns or knives, or if Calhoun ever spoke to them.

“My son said, ‘he was always carrying cases back and forth in through the art room’,” said Trotter. “And now I know that the storage area was located right next to the art room, and my son had seen it.”

A Birthday Party

On June 18, Michelle Hennessey held a birthday party at the Children’s Museum for her daughter. The family loves the children’s museum, and goes often.

“Every time we went in, (the manager) was at the desk, and her children were always running around,” said Hennessey. “They also had the children work. One of them had a key to the elevator, and after our party, they told the kids to go and help clean up the mess from our party. I just thought ‘They’re kids, does that have to happen?’ I understand responsibility, but it was strange.”

At the end of the party, Hennessey’s sister, Marci Wright, went into the storage area to find a broom to sweep up the glitter and confetti.

When she returned the broom to the storage area, she walked in on a strange sight.

“There was a man and a couple of kids eating in the room,” said Wright. “When we went back upstairs, there were other kids that weren’t part of my nieces party still there. They were playing on the steps and at the main doors. These kids were all over the place — upstairs, downstairs, just running.”

Wright said that, in retrospect, she probably shouldn’t have gone into the room because it was marked “staff only,” but she didn’t want to leave the party room a mess.

“The room was like a kitchen with a table and it was very dark, but we did see them all eating in there,” said Wright.

Hennessey said that the manager was very nice, and that she never noticed anything strange with her temperament, or any indication of drug use. She stated that, until the evening of her party, she never saw Calhoun and didn’t even realize he was the janitor.

“I’m angry,” said Hennessey. “The whole point of me having the party there was because I thought it was safe, and now I know I had almost 60 people exposed to that … I’m astonished.”

No Supervision

Every party spoken to stated that they had seen the couple’s children, including their two-year-old, unsupervised almost all of the time.

Trotter stated that once, while looking for her children downstairs, she found the toddler in a closed room labeled “Director’s Office,” where the toddler had access to scissors, heavy objects, and other dangers.

McClain stated that when she went in to cancel her second week, while speaking to the manager, the two-year-old walked past and went out onto the front street through the front doors, which were wide open.

“We both watched him walk out,” said McClain. “I looked at her, because she didn’t react, and I said, ‘Oh, is your husband out there?’ and then she acted afraid and we went outside. But she only reacted because a parent called her out. She didn’t think anything of this little baby going right out the front door.”

Prior Law Enforcement Contact

McClain also stated that she had heard from another parent that on Father’s Day, the police were called to the Children’s Museum because the 2-year-old and 5-year-old were out front alone.

She also stated that, a week before camp started, there had been an interaction between law enforcement and Calhoun in the desert, but Calhoun had not been arrested at that time.

In the police report following Calhoun’s arrest on July 1, it stated that Calhoun was known to deputies as being highly agitated and was known to have firearms, and that this was the second call involving Calhoun and one of his children.

Tobey also admitted that deputies had been called to the museum on Father’s Day.

“It seemed like it was sort of less of a deal, from what (the manager) told me,” said Tobey. “After talking to the cops, I know now it was a bigger deal.”

When asked if the deputies said it seemed like there were people living there, Tobey stated that he explicitly told deputies they were not living there.

“It seemed like they wanted more of an employment verification situation,” said Tobey. “I couldn’t really hear the person I was talking to, but I told them they weren’t living there, and as far as I know, they weren’t living there. I wasn’t excited that the kids were there all the time, but it also wasn’t a surprise the kids were there (after hours) because that’s when the cleaning occurred.”

All parties also stated that, contrary to the Board’s declaration that the doors to the storage areas were locked and could not be accessed by the public, the doors were never locked and could easily be accessed, such as when Wright went to search for a broom.

Also contrary to the board’s statement that the family’s living arrangements on Children’s Museum property must have been very recent, an ex-employee — who asked not to be named — stated that the issue with Calhoun, the manager, and their children has been occurring for almost a year.

They said that the manager had been hired a year ago around the end of summer, and that she and her family had been evicted from their apartment after not paying their rent.

They stated that another member of the board was a judge, and the judge had relayed that Calhoun had been instructed to find a job or be evicted, but he’d refused.

According to the employee, the family became homeless, living in a tent before they began living in their cars in the Children’s Museum parking lot.

“They’ve been there for months and months, and no one has cared,” said the employee. “It would have been impossible not to know they were homeless and living there.”

The employee stated that the family lived in two different cars in the parking lot alongside the museum, which were “packed with items.”

A few weeks ago, the employee said they’d heard Calhoun had “done something bad in front of small children.”

“Someone was trying to find a way to report an incident involving small children and the manager’s boyfriend, or husband,” the employee said. “I don’t know anymore than that.”

Tobey stated that the family was absolutely not living in their cars in the parking lot for months, and that it “sounds ridiculous” to him.

“If they were living there, it was very recent,” Tobey said. “It’s such a shock … thinking someone has a handle on what’s going on. I thought it was handled, and it turns out, it was not.”