By Judith Meyer,Staff Writer

The Junior ROTC program at Lewiston and Auburn high schools is being closely examined because of a hazing incident this summer against a black Auburn student that resulted in the disciplining of five other Lewiston-Auburn students.

Lewiston schools Superintendent Leon Levesque said if he is not satisfied with changes to the program to prevent further hazing, he will pull the school from the program. The action would also remove Auburn from the Junior ROTC program.

The incident occurred during training at the Bog Brook National Guard Training Site in Gilead. According to an account confirmed by a Maine attorney general’s office investigation, Martin Houston, a junior at Edward Little High School, was chased down in the middle of the day, hogtied, dragged out of his barracks and left yelling for help.

One of his attackers, after leaving the boy facedown on the ground, came back and pushed a knee into the boy’s armpit, straining the electrical tape that bound his hands and bruising his wrists.

Houston continues to be a member of the school’s Junior ROTC program, which is administered at Lewiston High School. According to the investigation, his attackers – four boys and one girl, all from Lewiston or Auburn – were fellow ROTC cadets participating in the post-school field training camp during the last week of June.

Thomas Harnett, assistant attorney general for civil rights education and enforcement, said the hazing incident has been investigated and the attackers disciplined by the schools and the court, but his office has not closed its investigation into what Houston and his family claim is the racial motivation for the attack.

The hazing happened June 30 during an after-lunch rest period at the camp near Bethel, a time when students are supposed to be tidying up their bunks and doing other chores. When a senior cadet – one of the students later disciplined in the case – entered the barracks and called the troops to attention, Houston complied. Then, he remembers, the senior cadet cracked a joke and the boys’ attention relaxed.

“Two kids from the front door started running toward me,” Houston said, and he scrambled over his bunk to escape them. Then, “two kids from the back door started running,” and the four of them pinned Houston to the floor. “They started taping up my wrists. They started taping up my ankles.”

None of the other boys in the barracks intervened because they were still supposed to be at attention, Houston said. They stood and watched.

As he was being tied, Houston remembers the female cadet yelling his rights as if he were under arrest. When she was done, the boys dragged him outside, but ran off when they heard someone coming. Moments later, they came back and dragged him toward the woods between two barracks, taunting him along the way, before leaving him alone. Houston doesn’t know how long he laid in the grass calling for help before someone found and untied him, but he estimates it was several minutes.

Houston said he and a couple of buddies made plans to retaliate against the attackers that night, but a counselor who took the initial complaint about the hazing found out about their plans and warned them against doing anything, assuring them he would handle the discipline.

Levesque, the Lewiston superintendent, is so upset about the incident, which he considers a serious breach of school policy, that an evaluation of the ROTC program and whether its programs and practices can be tightened up has been started. If changes can’t or won’t be made, Levesque said the program would be shut down. “We just won’t do it anymore.”

The only ROTC cadet attacked that day, Houston is the only black member of the Auburn/Lewiston ROTC program. “I don’t know why they did this,” Houston said. He has attended this training camp for three years and has never seen or heard of another student attacked like this, which forces him to believe the attack was racially motivated.

In addition to the pending investigation at the attorney general’s office, Houston and his family have lodged a complaint with the Boston-based Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education.

Levesque said he and Auburn Superintendent Barbara Eretzian take Houston’s complaint very seriously and, as soon as they were told of the attack, launched their own investigation.

Maine public schools are required, by law, to punish hazing. Levesque and Eretzian both said their respective school districts, starting in mid-summer, disciplined four of the students involved. The fifth student transferred to St. Dominic Regional High School for the 2005-06 school year.

Details of the discipline is confidential, by law, to guard students’ privacy.

Of the five involved in the attack, four have also been disciplined by the state Department of Corrections’ Division of Juvenile Services. In each case, the hazing was determined to be a first offense and the students were each required to write essays or reports on hazing and its affects on others.

Although Levesque and Eretzian both said they are satisfied with their investigations and believe the punishment assigned to the students is adequate, Houston and his family do not believe the school districts have done enough to punish his attackers.

Houston said he finds it difficult to see his fellow cadets every school day in the hallway and believes “they got away with it.”

Houston and his mother, Marlene Walton, plan to meet with Levesque, Lewiston Assistant Principal Michael Hutchins and Junior ROTC Col. Robert Meyer today to talk further about what the family sees as insufficient punishment of the ROTC officers.

“I don’t have trust in my principals,” Houston said, asking “How do you have trust in them if they don’t do anything?”

Houston, a good student and quarterback for EL’s junior varsity football team, continues to feel under attack at school and is seeing a counselor to help make him feel more comfortable. Students whisper things to him in the halls and, although he wants to make the military a career and hopes to obtain an ROTC scholarship to attend college, he’s considering dropping out of the Junior ROTC program because he has become so miserable learning and training with his attackers.