Plea deal in the works for boarding school owners in child abuse case

BEATTY — An attorney for the married owners of a now-shuttered private boarding school at the center of a child abuse case said they are “on the doorstep” of a plea agreement with Nye County prosecutors.

Details of ongoing negotiations between the defendants and the Nye County district attorney’s office were disclosed Monday in Beatty Justice Court during a brief pre-trial hearing, which had been continued numerous times over the span of nearly two years.

An announcement was expected during Monday’s hearing about whether they had struck a deal — a decision that could have eliminated the need for a trial in the case, first filed against Marcel and Patricia Chappuis in August 2019.

But instead, their attorney, Thomas Gibson, asked Justice of the Peace Gus Sullivan for more time.

“I believe if we get one more pre-trial hearing, we’ll have a deal down,” Gibson said, “because right now we’re on the doorstep of an agreement.”

In response, the judge expressed frustration over the case, which has moved slowly through the court system.

“Let’s set a date. Let’s get it done. Let’s just be over with this. It’s been going on and on and on,” Sullivan said. “You know, I’m really having a tough time swallowing this, but I am going to go ahead and do it in the interest of justice and fairness to them. Just try to make this the last time.”

The defendants were present in court on Monday but did not speak during the hearing. Afterward, they rushed out of the courthouse as they hid their faces from a Las Vegas Review-Journal photographer.

Marcel and Patricia Chappuis are expected back in Beatty Justice Court in February. They have been free on bail since Valentine’s Day 2019 following their arrests on 45 counts each of child abuse or neglect. Their school, Northwest Academy, closed the day after their arrests.

No other details about the possible deal were revealed in court Monday, although John Friel, a deputy district attorney, told the judge: “There’s 2,300 pages of discovery, which is a lot, and there’s like 45 charges. So we need to narrow it down as far as we can.”

The felony counts, which center around contaminated water at the school, represent each student enrolled at the academy between February 2018 and February 2019. The students ranged in age from 11 to 17, according to a criminal complaint.

Northwest Academy and its owners first made headlines in January 2019, after the Nye County Sheriff’s Office announced it had opened an investigation into reports of abuse at the boarding school.

The Review-Journal launched its own investigation into the school, and in May 2019 published a four-part series, titled “Deserted in the Desert,” which uncovered multi-agency failures in Nevada that allowed problems at the school to go unaddressed for more than two years, including claims of child abuse and issues with its tap water.

Over the years, the newspaper’s investigation found, the school racked up dozens of violations from the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection after the couple had stopped treating its tap water in October 2016, leading to high levels of arsenic and fluoride.

The former Northwest Academy campus, located along state Route 373 near Mecca Road, is now the site of Never Give Up, a youth residential psychiatric facility. Last December, about a year after the investigation was opened into Northwest Academy, the Sheriff’s Office announced it was investigating physical and sexual abuse allegations at the new facility.

Contact Rio Lacanlale at rlacanlale@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0381. Follow @riolacanlale on Twitter.