No Fire, No Food

Aaron Bacon was sixteen, a Phoenix high school student whose parents had grown frightened by his drug use. In early 1994 they paid just under fourteen thousand dollars to enroll him in North Star Expeditions, a wilderness therapy program that marched teenagers through the red rock canyon country southeast of Escalante, Utah. Staff collected him from his bedroom and drove him north.

Instructor Craig Fisher enforced a rule he called “no fire, no food,” withholding meals from students who could not light a fire with a bow drill. Over twenty days Aaron went without food on at least eleven of them, slept fourteen nights without a sleeping bag, and dropped from 131 pounds to 108. He vomited, fell and begged for help while staff wrote him off as a faker. A perforated ulcer went untreated. He was flown to Page, Arizona, and died of acute peritonitis on March 31, 1994.

Nine employees were charged. Owners Lance Jaggar and Bill Henry, medical technician Georgette Costigan, and instructors Sonny Duncan and Jeff Hohenstein pleaded guilty to negligent homicide and in November 1996 received probation, community service and fines. Only Fisher went to trial. A jury convicted him in November 1996 of felony abuse or neglect of a disabled child, and that December he was sentenced to a year in the Garfield County jail. North Star closed rather than meet new state conditions.