Date: Monday, December 31, 1979
Section: RUN OF PAPER
Page: ?
By Gayle Pollard Globe Staff
A 19-year-old Medfield woman thought that for $20
she was buying a bus trip to Florida and a week of fun in the sun.
But her parents claim that Deborah Block instead
was kept at "brainwashing" sessions over the weekend run
by the Collegiate Assn. for the Research of Principles (CARP), followers
of Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
A CARP leader said the group is independent of Rev.
Moon, and described the camp seminar as simular to a Christian retreat.
Deborah's parents were concerned about any connection
to Rev. Moon. They were also concerned about their daughter's medical
condition. "She has temporal lobe epilepsy," said her
father, Robert Block, and she had chest surgery in October. "She
was in a pretty weakened state," he said yesterday.
The parents called Florida authorities, who went
to the McConnell Camp, a former YMCA camp about 15 miles south of
Gainesville, a college town in the north-central section of the
state.
As Alachua County sheriff's deputies escorted the
woman and four others from the camp in the flat, wooded marshlands
before dawn Saturday, Ann Block flew to meet her daughter Deborah.
"My wife met Debbie at the police station and
they talked for a while. She still had some doubts so they went
to a deprogrammer in Tampa. They're going to Disney World and will
come home Tuesday night," Robert Block said yesterday. He said
he paid close to $500 for his wife's round-trip airfare and his
daughter's passage to return here.
"We had to borrow some money, but I figured
we'd worry about the bills later," Deborah's father said. The
father of five, two of whom still live at home, he works as a sales
engineer for an optical filter firm in Burlington.
"The thing down in Florida is a highly effective
and efficient brainwashing event," he said of the camp. "The
way they do it, as soon as they get there they start these orientation
sessions. They only allow the kids to get a couple of hours sleep.
They keep pouring the philosphy into them. By the time they get
through a short session, the kids are brainwashed." He said
his daughter was there only one day.
Alachua County sheriff's deputies acted after Block's
parents called, according to shift commander Sgt. John Nobles. "The
sheriff went out and checked on a girl that was possibly sick -
Deborah Block - and five people wanted to leave. We escorted them
out of there," Nobles said in a telephone interview.
An investigator with the sheriff's office told Terry
Woods, a reporter for the Gainesville Sun, that deputies had confronted
the camp leaders. "After a long argument, they brought out
Debbie. The deputies explained they couldn't hold people against
their will. Another person approached them, quite scared, and wanted
transportation out," an investigator told Wood.
Deborah was one of an estimated 200 people attending
the six-day seminar that began Saturday, according to Wood. "It
was advertised as a $20 trip to Florida for fun in the sun. They
bused down all these people. The majority of people are from the
North - Boston and New York. Most are college students."
"They claim they are not affiliated with the
Unification Church," she said, referring to an unidentified
camp spokesman quoted in a local news account.
No criminal complaint has been filed in Florida against
the group and there have been no other complaints by parents, according
to Gainesville authorities.
No charges have been filed in Massachusetts either.
According to a report aired by WBZ-TV yesterday, however, the state
attorney general's office has an "open file" on CARP.
The television report, filed by Nancy Fernandez,
also quoted a former Moonie, now leader of an "anti-Moonie"
group. Steve Hassan of Lincoln described what happens at such camps.
"People's thoughts are definitely reformed. They are changed.
They are altered," he said.
During that same report, a volunteer leader, Jan
Ockerman, described CARP as a student group separate from the Unification
Church. She said, however, that the "ideas stemmed from the
Rev. Moon. The essence of CARP is to inspire students with the love
of God and humanity, investigate basic Christian ideas . . . spirit
of patriotism," she said. Ockerman described the Florida trip
as a "spiritual revival of the '80s." The program she
said is "set up very much like a Christian retreat." No
leaders of CARP could be reached by The Globe.
Deborah Block's family discovered that she was going
to Florida after speaking to her Boston landlady last week. "We
were going to celebrate Chanukah on January first," a family
tradition, Block said. "We called up Debbie, and the landlady
said she wasn't there. She was at the CARP home."
Deborah is scheduled to start her first year in college
Wednesday at Northeastern University. "She wants to work with
handicapped people," her father said. "She's a nice kid.
She wants to help people."
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The fact that a person’s name or group appears on our website
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They appear because we have received inquiries and have established
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