SEATTLE — Most of the time, Ashlie Bunch seemed to be a normal teenager, enjoying friends, soccer and family trips.
At other times she struggled with worsening mental problems, threatening to kill herself and those around her.
Last year she hanged herself at a prominent, well-regarded home for suicidal children.
On Thursday, her father, Steven Bunch of Sultan, sued the McGraw Residential Center, a program of the Seattle Children’s Home, and three employees at the time of her death for unspecified damages.
Bunch’s daughter was 15 when she was found dead on Jan. 29, 2008, after hanging herself from a cabinet with shoelaces a staff member had given her. According to the King County Superior Court lawsuit, she was not supposed to have shoelaces because she had tried to kill herself previously.
Investigators from the Children’s Administration in the state Department of Social and Health Services also determined that she had not been checked by a staff member every five minutes as her treatment plan directed.
“The whole idea (of the lawsuit) is never let this happen again,” Bunch, a crane operator, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
Gena Palm, executive director of the children’s home, said her organization had not been served with the lawsuit and would not comment on it.
Palm confirmed that three staffers were fired in 2008 after investigators found they had falsified logs to indicate that the required five-minute checks had been made although they had not. She would not say whether anyone was disciplined for granting the girl’s request for shoelaces.
DSHS may later be added as a defendant, said Sarah Spring, a lawyer for Bunch.
According to a 236-page investigation report on the death, the agency received 340 reports of potential problems at McGraw and found 64 worthy of onsite visits that established each of those complaints was either unfounded or that no conclusion could be reached, Spring noted.
Many of the complaints dealt with resident monitoring and staff training and performance, the lawyer said.
Seattle Children’s Home, a nonprofit organization founded in 1884 by the Ladies Relief Society as an orphanage, receives public money as well as private donations from the likes of Microsoft Corp. founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the McCaw family, the Nordstroms and the Boeing Co.
Ashlie Bunch, born to a drug-addled woman in Connecticut, was adopted at age 4, along with her younger sister, by Bunch and his wife at the time. Years later the couple divorced.
Bunch moved to Seattle and remarried in 2002. Ashlie joined the couple just as her mental problems began escalating from short attention span, separation anxiety and defiance to more severe problems, he said.
She talked of hearing voices telling her to kill her mother, Bunch said.
She got into fights in school, threatened teachers and fellow students, was suspended and then expelled, cut herself, ran away and was treated by various therapists and institutions.
She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, fetal alcohol effects, attention deficit disorder, defiance disorder and attachment disorder, Bunch said.
For all that, she made friends and enjoyed soccer as well as family outings for camping, fishing and a visit to Disneyland, Bunch said.
“She was a typical 15-year-old child 80 percent of the time,” he said.
After she brought a knife to Sultan Middle School in 2007, a judge ordered her hospitalized and she was admitted to McGraw, one of four long-term children’s psychiatric residences in Washington state.
In six months, according to the lawsuit, she tied clothing and other materials around her neck eight times in apparent suicide attempts or to get attention. Two weeks before her death she stabbed herself with a broken radio antenna.
Nonetheless, state investigators found, she had not been checked by staff for 11 hours before she died. She had been dead more than three hours before her body was found.
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