The Mystery of 18 Twitching Teenagers in Le Roy - NYT

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March 7, 2012

What Happened to the Girls in Le Roy

By SUSAN DOMINUS

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/magazine/teenage-girls-twitching-le-roy.html

Before the media vans took over Main Street, before the environmental

testers came to dig at the soil, before the doctor came to take blood,

before strangers started knocking on doors and asking question after

question, Krautwurst, a high-school cheerleader from Le Roy, N.Y.,

woke up from a nap. Instantly, she knew something was wrong. Her chin

was jutting forward uncontrollably and her face was contracting into

spasms. She was still twitching a few weeks later when her best friend,

Thera , captain of one of the school's cheerleading squads, awoke

from a nap stuttering and then later started twitching, her arms

flailing and head jerking. Two weeks after that, Lydia , also a

senior, erupted in tics and arm swings and hums. Then word got around

that Chelsey Dumars, another cheerleader, who recently moved to town,

was making the same strange noises, the same strange movements, leaving

school early on the days she could make it to class at all. The numbers

grew --- 12, then 16, then 18, in a school of 600 --- and as they

swelled, the ranks of the sufferers came to include a wider swath of the

Le Roy high-school hierarchy: girls who weren't cheerleaders, girls who

kept to themselves and had studs in their lips. There was even one boy

and an older woman, age 36. Parents wept as their daughters stuttered at

the dinner table. Teachers shut their classroom doors when they heard a

din of outbursts, one cry triggering another, sending the increasingly

familiar sounds ricocheting through the halls. Within a few months, as

the camera crews continued to descend, the community barely seemed to

recognize itself. One expert after another arrived to pontificate about

what was wrong in Le Roy, a town of 7,500 in Western New York that had

long prided itself on the things it got right. The kids here were

wholesome and happy, their parents insisted --- " cheerleaders and honor

students, " as one father said --- products of a place that, while not

perfect, was made up more of what was good about small-town America than

what was bad. Now, though, the girls' writhing and stuttering suggested

something troubling, either arising from within the community or being

perpetrated on it, a mystery that proved irresistible for onlookers,

whose attention would soon become part of the story itself.

*Le Roy's East Main Street *displays an impressive row of grand

ns and Federalist-style homes built in the 19th century,

testament to the flour mills and salt mines that made the town a

comfortable place to live. After that came the Jell-O years, when that

company and several others employed thousands of people in the area. But

Jell-O and most of the rest of the factories took their work elsewhere

by the 1960s, and now a good number of those historic homes have been

divided into two- or three-family rentals, with peeling paint and rows

of crooked mailboxes inside the foyer. Some houses look so beaten down

by weather and disrepair that it comes as a surprise to see a light on

inside. Le Roy is a working-class community with good schools that

attract people who work in nearby Rochester. But it is also a

manufacturing town whose prosperous days are behind it --- the kind of

place where local politicians are always talking about how to bring back

the good old days....