When 16-year-old Nicholas Contreras' family got a phone call, they were told that their son had died after refusing to eat.

A hunger strike, they said.

But when the truth finally surfaced, it wasn't starvation that killed him.

It was something far worse.

It was torture, disguised as tough love. This is Red Rump. I upload episodes on Mondays and Thursdays, so make sure

you're subscribed so you never miss an episode. Nicholas Contreras was just 16, a quiet boy from Sacramento with a dream that felt bigger than his circumstances.

He wanted to be a firefighter.

His life, though, had already been very, very tough and marked by tragedy.

At just 13, he actually witnessed the drive-by shooting of his

father and his subsequent death, a moment that would ripple through everything that came after.

After his father died, stability became something that just wasn't in Nick's life. He ended up bouncing between foster

homes, eventually being placed in the care of his uncle Joe. Now we know from witness accounts that

he was polite, he was soft spoken, not the type of kid you'd expect would end up in trouble,

but even so, his small acts of rebellion started to kind of gain. He started

doing petty crimes, it began to accumulate, and he eventually ended up stealing a car. He really

was testing boundaries and it was becoming unmanageable. By early 1998, the courts decided that Nick needed more than what his home and local programmes could provide.

He was sent hundreds of miles from Sacramento to the Arizona Desert,

to a paramilitary-style facility called the Arizona Boys Ranch,

a place that promised discipline and rehabilitation,

but ultimately it would become the site of some unimaginable cruelty.

We know Nick wasn't violent, he wasn't hardened or dangerous. He was a troubled teen. He'd experienced loss and trauma. He was trying to navigate a system that wasn't set up for him. And look, I'm not saying he did everything right and made all of the right decisions. But it really seems like at this

point in his life, the system made a decision to give him to someone else to try and sort out.

...