I'm Roberta Glass and you're listening to my true crime report.

My guest today is Todd Nielsen.

He's a documentary filmmaker and a graduate of Full Sail University.

Todd now works in Manhattan as a film editor and he's joining me today to talk about his powerful documentary,

The Last Stop, about the Alon School.

So welcome, Todd Nielsen.

Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview.

My pleasure.

So what was Alon?

So Alon was a behavioral modification boarding school,

inpatient program for kids that were having trouble in life, you know, anything from drugs to

family issues, to crime, from, you know, something as little as, you know, petty theft all the way up to, you know,

there were kids there that had committed murder. And it was a way to, I would say almost an

experimental way to rehabilitate troubled kids. Yeah, your film starts with the alumni talking about

the details of their behavior that landed them in the lawn. Why did you make that choice?

Whether you like it or not, everybody was sent to Alon for some reason or another, whether it was,

you know, looking back, whether it was an invalid reason. You know, kids could be sent there for

as little as just like smoking a joint. You know what I mean? If their parents were scared enough

that the kid was going to, you know, go down a bad road, then, you know, Alan would take them.

So, you know, I thought it was important that everybody kind of explains what led up to their initiation into the program.

And also to contrast that at the end of the film with how they did afterwards.

It's very interesting because some of the reasons some of those kids were in there was pretty

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