Greylock Group Home Horror Exposes Systemic Failures in Child Welfare
Greylock youth home in Springfield was run by the Northeast Center for Youth and Families (NCYF), a nonprofit based in Easthampton. It housed up to 12 girls in state custody until its closure in 2025 amid a scandal that underscored deep flaws in Massachusetts’ child welfare system.
A Terrified Girl’s Escape and a Wake-Up Call
On a Sunday evening in Springfield, Massachusetts, parishioners at a local church were startled when a barefoot, frightened teenage girl burst into the sanctuary crying for help. The 14-year-old had fled Greylock, the nearby state-run group home where she lived, after being beaten and restrained by a staff member. Witnesses noticed red marks and scratches on her back, neck, and arms, injuries from an attack at Greylock that night. A 2023 state investigation later confirmed the staff’s use of force was completely unjustified. For the girl, running to that church was a desperate bid for safety: “Please, help… Lock the door, please,” she begged.
This harrowing episode was not an isolated incident. In fact, it was part of a larger pattern of failures at Greylock, one of about 130 group homes in Massachusetts that collectively house roughly 1,500 children. Many of these children have already experienced trauma and were placed in group homes by the state under the belief they would be safer there than with their original families. Instead, what happened at Greylock has become a wake-up call, shining a light on systemic issues in the child welfare system that put vulnerable kids in harm’s way.
Greylock’s Pattern of Abuse and Neglect
Greylock’s troubles were emblematic of broader shortcomings in the system. Even among an imperfect network of foster care and group homes, Greylock stood out for its chaos and dysfunction. Children ran away from Greylock almost daily, and local police were summoned to the home constantly due to various crises. Over a recent five-year period, state authorities confirmed 10 separate incidents of abuse or neglect by Greylock employees, including episodes so serious that if a parent committed them the state likely would have removed the child from the home. In one egregious case, a Greylock staffer slapped and manhandled a special-needs girl, the same teen who fled to the church, leaving her bruised and terrified. Yet Greylock remained open, continuing to house children despite its mounting record of harm.
Official records reveal a litany of misconduct and mismanagement at Greylock. The Department of Early Education and Care (EEC), which licenses group homes, cited Greylock 132 times for failing to meet required standards between 2016 and 2025, one of the worst records of any group home in Massachusetts. Documented incidents included a staff member encouraging residents to vandalize a colleague’s car, another chasing a child with a taser for laughs, and medication errors so severe that children were hospitalized. These examples underscore a culture of negligence and abuse at Greylock. Shockingly, despite persistent violations and what the state itself described as “persistent noncompliance,” the home was not shut down until very recently. What finally forced action was a bombshell criminal case, the February 2024 indictment of a Greylock staff member for the repeated sexual assault of a child in his care.
The Xavier Cruz Case: Red Flags Ignored
That staff member, Xavier Cruz, is now the face of the Greylock scandal and a symbol of how a broken system can allow a predator to slip through. Cruz, 33, was indicted on six counts of aggravated rape and related charges, accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl at Greylock numerous times in 2023. He has pleaded not guilty and is currently jailed awaiting trial. The allegations are horrifying: the victim says Cruz groomed her over months, starting with extra attention and inappropriate touching, and eventually escalated to rape. She described how he would give her lingering hugs and even expose himself to her in areas of the home without security cameras. The girl tearfully recounted being abused “so many times,” including in the facility’s relaxation room and even in her bedroom while her roommate slept. Investigators later found semen in multiple locations around the group home, including the girl’s bedroom, evidence consistent with her account. When confronted, Cruz offered the dubious excuse that he suffered from a “spontaneous ejaculation” medical condition. His lawyer has claimed that no DNA tests have definitively tied him to the semen found.
Equally disturbing is that Cruz’s predatory behavior did not come out of nowhere. There were ample warning signs that were apparently ignored or minimized by those in charge. Former residents and staff told investigators that Cruz was unusually close with the girls. He would invite the Greylock residents to watch his amateur basketball games off-campus, and many of the teenage girls openly adored him. Some girls even started having crushes, changing into nicer clothes and asking for face-to-face hugs whenever Cruz was on duty. This crossed professional boundaries, and at least one supervisor did warn Cruz in fall 2023 that these hugs were inappropriate. Multiple reports about Cruz were made to state authorities before the rape indictment. Staff and even a state social worker raised concerns after seeing him touch or rub girls’ backs and give excessive attention. In fact, three separate misconduct reports involving Cruz and female residents were filed in the months prior, but state officials later said they could not substantiate those reports and took no action. The red flags were there, but the system failed to stop him.
Perhaps most baffling is how Xavier Cruz got hired and re-hired to care for vulnerable kids in the first place. Cruz had a prior criminal record that should have given any employer pause. In 2022, he pleaded guilty to larceny for stealing jewelry from an elderly resident at a different care facility where he worked. He was on probation for those theft charges when NCYF re-hired him in July 2023 to work at Greylock. Cruz had actually worked briefly for NCYF in 2020, left, then was brought back in 2023 and quickly promoted to an acting night supervisor role covering Greylock and another home. Hiring someone with any recent criminal conviction to supervise children is questionable. In this case it proved disastrous.
Legally, Massachusetts does impose background check requirements for group home staff, but there are loopholes. Federal law bars individuals convicted of serious violent or sexual crimes from child-care jobs, and Massachusetts adds its own restrictions for certain offenses. However, many crimes including larceny are not automatic disqualifiers. A person with such a record can still be cleared to work with kids after a discretionary review. We do not know exactly how Cruz’s screening was handled because those records are not public, but state officials insist that “proper” background checks were done in Cruz’s case. Even if that is true, the situation at Greylock suggests the vetting process is deeply flawed. A 2024 state audit found almost nine percent of sampled group home employees had incomplete background checks on file. In fact, state oversight reports in 2020 and 2023 dinged NCYF for failing to adequately screen some Greylock and Kidbuilders staff. Two Greylock employees were found to have been improperly vetted, and those two ended up involved in the violent restraint of the teen who ran to the church. All of this points to a systemic failure in basic safeguards.
Lax Oversight and Understaffing: A Perfect Storm
How could Greylock rack up 132 safety violations and multiple abuse incidents, yet continue operating until it became a public scandal? The answer lies in a mix of lax oversight, bureaucratic inertia, and chronic staffing shortages that plague the child welfare system.
The Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) and EEC are the two agencies jointly responsible for these kids. DCF oversees the care of children in group homes, and EEC licenses and regulates the facilities. Both agencies maintain that they were actively working with Greylock to fix problems even before the scandal. DCF Commissioner Staverne Miller defended the state’s actions, saying “We want kids to be safe and we are using all of our processes to ensure programs are following our guidance.” EEC Commissioner Amy Kershaw noted that her department had done unannounced visits, extra monitoring, and demanded corrective action plans from Greylock as issues mounted. Officials point out they imposed temporary admissions freezes on Greylock after Cruz’s arrest, and that they finally negotiated Greylock’s closure in spring 2025 once it was clear the home remained noncompliant.
But from another perspective, it looks like too little, too late. Greylock was allowed to limp along for over a year after the rape allegations surfaced, housing vulnerable girls for 14 months after its own night supervisor was indicted as an alleged child rapist. Only when the Boston Globe started investigating did the operators finally agree to close Greylock in April 2025, calling it a “voluntary” shutdown. One cannot help but ask: if journalists had not gotten involved, would this home still be open today?
One reason regulators may have been hesitant to close Greylock sooner is the dire shortage of alternative placements for these children. Massachusetts, like many states, faces a workforce crisis in social services. There simply are not enough qualified people willing to do the tough, draining job of caring for high-needs youth at the current pay and conditions. Group homes across the state struggle to maintain the minimum staffing levels required by law. At Greylock and its sister programs, filling shifts was a constant challenge. Staff burnout and turnover were sky-high. Former employees described entry-level caregivers with minimal training, working 16- to 24-hour shifts and still not getting all duties done. In one documented case, a Greylock staffer was so exhausted from back-to-back shifts that she fell asleep on the job, unfortunately on a night when, according to allegations, Xavier Cruz took advantage of the lack of supervision to assault the 14-year-old resident.
Why is it so hard to retain good staff? A big factor is low pay and difficult working conditions. Massachusetts actually spends a lot of money on congregate care, about 210,000 dollars per year per child in a group home, one of the highest rates in the nation. At Greylock specifically, the state was paying the nonprofit operator roughly 794 dollars per day for each child’s care. Yet very little of that money made it to the front-line workers’ pockets. Former staff say they earned only 17 to 20 dollars an hour to manage extremely challenging kids. Meanwhile, the NCYF executive director drew a six-figure salary of about 200,000 dollars in 2023. This imbalance, underpaid overstretched caregivers at the bottom and well-paid executives at the top, led to resentment and high turnover.
Internal emails show that in late 2023, before the rape came to light, at least two NCYF managers begged the director, Meredith Lagoy, to stop taking in new children at Greylock because they did not have sufficient staff or training to keep kids safe. One vice president, Nikkia Burch, wrote a blunt resignation letter in early 2024 criticizing leadership for continuing to accept new placements despite the dire staffing situation. Others felt the nonprofit was reluctant to turn away the state-funded placements that brought in revenue. “It really seemed more of like a money thing,” said Jordan Craigwell, a former program director, suggesting Greylock was kept full even if a child was not a good fit or the home was short-staffed, because each occupied bed meant funding.
A Child Welfare System in Crisis
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Greylock saga is that it is not just one bad apple in an otherwise functional system. Rather, it lays bare system-wide failures in Massachusetts’ approach to protecting at-risk kids. Statistics show that the state’s child welfare system has been overwhelmed and underperforming for years, even by national standards.
In Massachusetts, foster children experience higher rates of abuse while in state care than in almost any other state in the country. One analysis found that Massachusetts’ foster kids suffer maltreatment at a rate nearly four times the national average, placing the state among the bottom ten for keeping children safe in foster care. Likewise, Massachusetts struggles with placement stability. Children in DCF custody are shuffled among multiple placements more often than in most states. Frequent moves from home to home inflict additional trauma and make it nearly impossible for a child to heal or trust caregivers.
Massachusetts also relies heavily on privately run group homes like Greylock compared to other states. About nine percent of the roughly 14,000 children in state custody end up in group home placements, which is the fifth-highest rate of congregate care use in the nation. State officials argue that having more group home “beds” available is not inherently bad, but as Greylock shows, quantity does not equal quality. Without rigorous oversight, training, and support, a group home can devolve into a nightmare scenario for kids.
Indeed, Greylock’s parent agency NCYF had multiple troubled facilities. One, called Empire Group Home, was closed by the state in 2019 after numerous violations and a freeze on admissions. Another, Kidbuilders Group Home, remains open but racked up 74 cited violations from 2016 to 2025 and is under intensified monitoring now. This suggests a pattern of systemic issues not confined to one home or one rogue employee. As one 15-year-old who previously lived at Greylock put it, “I thought the Springfield streets were safer than that program.”
Demanding Accountability and Reform
The story of Greylock and Xavier Cruz has sparked outrage and demands for change. Advocacy groups and lawyers are calling for a top-to-bottom review of Massachusetts DCF and the private contractors it entrusts with children. How was a facility with one of the worst compliance records allowed to keep operating? Why were earlier reports of misconduct not taken more seriously? Who will be held accountable for the suffering of the children at Greylock, not only the alleged rapist but the supervisors and officials who failed to stop the abuse?
Some steps are already underway. In the wake of public outcry, the Department of Early Education and Care announced it is revising regulations for group homes to strengthen oversight. There is talk of tightening background check policies and improving staff training requirements. Yet Massachusetts is a state known for progressive values and relatively high social service spending, and it has repeatedly fallen short in safeguarding its most vulnerable children. Even a Massachusetts Appeals Court judge recently voiced frustration at DCF’s failures, saying in open court that if the Commonwealth cannot protect these children, he is not sure what the constitutional basis is for taking them away from parents. In other words, removing a child from a neglectful or abusive home only to subject them to abuse in foster care or a group home is an unacceptable betrayal of the public trust.
Real reform will require not just new rules on paper, but real investment in the people who care for these kids day to day. That means better pay, training, and support for child welfare workers. It means holding private contractors like NCYF accountable. It also means DCF must improve how it monitors placements and responds at the first sign of danger, rather than the last.
Most importantly, the voices of youth and families who have experienced these failures need to be heard. The Greylock scandal is a painful reminder that we, as a society, owe these children better. A group home is supposed to be a refuge for kids healing from trauma. Turning it into yet another place of trauma is unforgivable.
In memory of the courage of that 14-year-old girl who ran barefoot to find help, and on behalf of all the kids still in the system, we must demand change. Greylock should never happen again. Only by exposing these ugly truths can we begin to ensure a safer future for children in state care. The time for DCF and our leaders to act is now, before the next tragedy unfolds.
