Aunt Martha’s Sexual Abuse Lawyer

Aunt Martha’s Integrated Care Center operated as a residential foster care facility in Chicago for roughly five and a half years before closing in mid-2024. During that time, DCFS logged nearly 3,850 unusual incident reports involving the facility, a number that raises serious questions about how closely these children were being protected.

According to a lawsuit filed by Levin & Perconti, Yadira Escamilla was placed, at age 17, in an isolated basement room with no windows and no cameras, cut off from the other teens upstairs. On her first day, another resident warned her that overnight manager Trulon Henry had expressed interest in her. When she reported this to staff, the lawsuit says employees instead put her in a room with Henry and made her repeat what she’d heard in front of him, then told her the other resident had been lying. Escamilla said that taught her to stay quiet.

From January through April 2024, Henry repeatedly sexually assaulted Escamilla during his overnight shifts, often after staff or guards were asked to step away, despite her being a “high-needs resident” who required supervision at all times. The suit alleges that on at least one occasion, a staff member walked in during an assault and still did not report it. Security footage showed Henry escorting Escamilla to off-limits areas, and she developed symptoms of an infection that should have prompted an investigation but did not.

Henry, 41, a former University of Illinois football player hired despite a prior felony armed robbery conviction, was found guilty in March 2026 of multiple sexual assault charges, including against Escamilla. A separate A-Alert security guard at the facility, Antonio Hopkins, who also had a prior felony conviction, faces multiple counts of criminal sexual abuse of a minor; he has pleaded not guilty and the case is ongoing.

An Injustice Watch investigation found Aunt Martha’s had received complaints as early as 2022 that A-Alert guards made sexually inappropriate comments to children and lacked proper background checks. Chicago police reportedly responded to the facility roughly 175 times for alleged battery before it closed. This was not the first time Aunt Martha’s faced such allegations; in 2000, the Cook County Public Guardian’s office sued the organization after children in its care reportedly suffered severe abuse while staff failed to monitor them.