Six girls and women are plaintiffs in a lawsuit that accuses a Dearborn Heights residential facility of permitting rampant abusive behavior for decades.
Vista Maria is a housing and treatment center for girls who are in foster care or the juvenile justice system. They’re referred there by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.
The lawsuit claims that instead of providing safety and protection, Vista Maria staff regularly committed acts of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse on the girls in their care.
“Plaintiffs were minors at the time that they were placed into Vista Maria, and had no reason to suspect that Vista Maria would become a house of horrors, and its respective employees…would cause them injury,” the lawsuit reads.
Like all the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Alaina Bennett spent time in Vista Maria from 2020-2025 after running away from multiple foster homes. She still doesn’t like to talk about what happened to her there.
“I remember feeling like I was never going to leave,” Bennett recalled. “It just felt like a constant, repetitive bully system. And I was being bullied by people that were supposed to protect me.”
Allegations in the lawsuit range from unsanitary or inadequate living conditions, to improper use of restraints, to physical and sexual abuse, said Moose Scheib, one of the attorneys behind the lawsuit.
One common tactic Vista Maria staff used, according to Scheib, was to put girls as young as 12 on unnecessary psychiatric medication, claiming they were suicidal. Then they would strip the girls of their clothes and lock them in a room, supposedly for their own protection.
“This was a very common theme that they did to a lot of the girls that they perceived they could take advantage of,” Scheib said. “And in many of the cases when they did that, the girls were inappropriately touched as well, in private places.
“[This was] just to strip them of their humanity, strip them of their dignity, and basically psychologically terrorize them. To make them think that they're owned. And this is the kind of treatment that was pervasive at Vista Maria.”
Scheib said this was allowed to continue despite numerous complaints and investigations into Vista Maria—at least a dozen since 2020, state records show. The facility shut down its residential treatment late last year, and is currently operating under a state provisional license.
The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. A public relations firm representing Vista Maria also could not be reached for comment.
Alaina Bennett said she wants “to see not just the girls involved with the case, but every single girl that ever went there get their justice they've finally been looking for.”
Bennett added that for her, justice would look like Vista Maria “never opening back up under any circumstances ever again. Personally, I hope it gets burned to the ground. But that's just me.”
