In early August 2022, 17-year-old Nathanael Royal called his parents and begged them to bring him home before he got attacked.
At the Freestate ChalleNGe Academy, an Aberdeen Proving Ground boot camp-cum-GED program for at-risk Maryland youth run by the National Guard, Royal thought he’d be getting a second chance after failing ninth and 10th grade. He had withdrawn from public school to attend the program, a requirement.
But within a few weeks, Royal wanted out.
Royal told his parents in his one weekly allowed 10-minute phone call that other cadets were hitting teens with “rock socks” and “lock socks,” a type of homemade blackjack. He was scared and didn’t feel safe.
He asked them to pick him up, but they refused.
“We honestly didn’t believe him because the sergeants, when we first went, told us that the kids would say anything to come home and to not believe them,” mother Shayna Royal said. “So we didn’t.”
Gov. Wes Moore’s office declined to comment on Royal’s experience at the camp, directing The Baltimore Sun to the National Guard.
The Maryland Military Department declined multiple requests for interviews with the program director and the state’s adjutant general; however, Public Affairs Manager Chazz Kibbler provided a statement.
“The Maryland Military Department’s top priority has always been, and will remain, the health, safety, and well-being of the cadets entrusted to our care at the Freestate ChalleNGe Academy,” Kibbler said.
“We are aware of concerns raised about incidents at the Freestate ChalleNGe Academy,” Kibbler said. “We take any allegation of misconduct or unsafe conditions seriously. In cases where investigations substantiated misconduct, appropriate actions were taken to address the matter.”
The following week, around 3 a.m. on Aug. 16, Royal said he woke up to four or five teens, wearing black T-shirts tied over their faces, holding him down on his bed while others punched and slammed him in the head. At times, he told The Sun they hit him in the head with their fists; at other times, that he thought it might have been a lock sock.
They hit him so hard that they knocked him unconscious, he said, but not before threatening him with further harm if he snitched.
The next morning, around 5 a.m., Royal, afraid to be honest with program staff, told a sergeant he’d been stung by a bee.
The sergeant took Royal to the nurse, who called his mother, Shayna Royal. Shayna picked him up that morning and drove him to the E.R., where doctors diagnosed him with a contusion, a possible concussion and recommended a follow-up with a brain injury association in Virginia, according to medical records The Sun reviewed.
“You are at very low risk for having any bleeding in your brain,” his discharge paperwork reads. “You may also have a concussion [and] feel nauseous, have difficulty concentrating.
“Please follow up with your PCP in the next few days.”
“He was very lucky,” Shayna said, thankful that it wasn’t any worse.
But Royal didn’t feel lucky.
Although things have been getting better over the past year, he can’t shake what’s happened to him — and his parents want to make sure this doesn’t happen to another teen.
Sleepless Nights
Royal can’t remember much of the attack, and doesn’t remember a lot of what happened at the hospital, where he was diagnosed with a possible concussion and a contusion. What he does remember is the sleepless nights he endured for months after — night after night where he lay awake, terrified. He couldn’t fall asleep until the sun came up.
The concussion symptoms were severe, too, but he didn’t want to seek follow-up treatment. Instead, his mother said, he stayed in bed or shut himself in his room for most of the following year.
“Everything in my mind was in a different place,” Royal said. But, he said, “I like to deal with things on my own.”
Royal’s family said they reached out to Freestate, pursuing accountability but said Freestate swept the attack under the rug. The staff implied they didn’t believe Royal had been assaulted in conversations after the event, and the program didn’t even cover the cost of Royal’s E.R. bill, the family said.
Now, Royal is 19 years old, and still struggling.
“He’s not who he was before,” Shayna said. “I just want them shut down.”
‘BEWARE! BEWARE!’
In the aftermath of the attack, Royal’s father, Jason Royal, said he reached out to Freestate leadership seeking justice for his son, but found then-director Keith Dickerson’s responses unhelpful.
“He kept saying ‘your son was allegedly assaulted,’” Jason said. “‘Allegedly.’ ‘We don’t even know if that’s true or not,’ and ‘we don’t have cameras in the room so we can’t see what happened.’ He pretty much was just brushing the whole thing off.”
Dickerson, who stepped down from Freestate in April 2024, said Royal had called and written his parents daily, “begging them to disenroll [him] from the program…”Based on the initial story we were told [regarding Royal’s injury] and the story told at the hospital, naturally, there was some doubt that arose; particularly because the youth had been trying to get out of the program since it started.”
Dickerson said in an email he expected to hear from the Royal family after the hospital visit, but that he and his staff “never heard from the family again.”
Frustrated, Jason posted to Google Reviews, leaving a one-star review of Freestate. He recounted his family’s experience with the program and included photos of Royal’s head after the attack, swelling clearly visible through his bootcamp buzzcut and wrapping around his forehead.
In the photos posted, taken the morning after the attack, Royal looks away from the camera, his hand curled in front of his mouth, and a little expression on his face. A visible dent can be seen at the back of his skull and about half his skull, including his forehead, is heavy and swollen.
“BEWARE! BEWARE!” Jason wrote. “Do not send your kids to Freestate ChalleNGe Academy. The kids’ safety is not the number one priority. Many kids are being assaulted, hit with locks in socks and the sergeants are doing nothing about it. … Last night my son was assaulted by 2 other cadets and has a dent in his head and a lot of swelling and a concussion. … My son is in fear of his life being there and has no trust in the staff. This happened while staff [were] there. The director will give the run-around and will not admit any wrongdoings that are going on under his watch. Please parents spread the word and do not allow your child to become a victim.”
Dickerson told Royal’s parents to bring him back to the camp, Shayna said. Instead, they removed him from the program and reached out to Bel Air’s public school district, hoping to re-enroll him as a high school freshman. The district, however, refused to take him back, Shayna said. He was already 17, and wouldn’t graduate until he was 21.
They reached out to a military lawyer, Shayna said, but didn’t know what steps to take next.
‘Blowing Smoke’
Royal blames his parents for the attack he suffered at Freestate, and everything that followed. The sleepless nights, the inability to think, and the fear he couldn’t let go of.
“They didn’t believe me,” Royal said, referencing his telephone call home. “It was their fault. I stand on that.”
Before the attack, he had been set to graduate with his GED a year earlier than his peers. After, he was frozen, he said.
It took him another year before he could even start to work on his GED again, and he didn’t get his diploma until December 2024, a full year after he would have graduated high school. He now works the overnight online order shift at the local Target.
The blame hurts Shayna, who picked him up from the camp, who met with every district administrator she could to try and get him back into public school. She is still upset that she didn’t bring him home when he first called them, but thought she was doing the right thing, she said.
Jason, however, is less bothered by the blame. He developed PTSD after an active duty tour in the Army in Iraq in the early 2000s, and said he sometimes struggles with empathy for others. But he’s frustrated at the lack of response from Freestate and program accountability after what was done to his son.
“They preach how it’s supposed to be very safe,” he said. “They were just blowing smoke.”
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