Reylan Cortes-Garnier, 28, a registered behavior technician who had worked with the boy for roughly a year, now faces a felony charge of child abuse without great bodily harm following the February 20 incident at Maximum Achievers, a therapy center in Lake Clarke Shores in Palm Beach County. Authorities say the footage shows Cortes-Garnier throwing a ball at the child “at high velocity,” then striking him repeatedly during the session.
“You’re supposed to be taking care of my kids. I put my kids in your hands.”
The case came to light after the boy’s mother, Diana Hernandez, noticed unusual injuries when her son returned home from therapy.
“The first thing I noticed, I saw he was shaking,” Hernandez told local CBS affiliate WPEC. Concerned by his condition, she examined him more closely and discovered bruising on his torso, with what appeared to be a bite mark on his shoulder. Doctors later determined that the injuries were “consistent with physical trauma,” according to investigators.
Hernandez then asked to review the recording of the session at the therapy center. What she saw prompted immediate alarm.
According to police, the footage shows Cortes-Garnier “engaging in multiple intentional acts of child abuse,” including striking the boy with several objects commonly used in therapy activities. Hernandez told reporters the discovery left her devastated.
“I just want justice. I just want justice for my son,” she said. “I honestly wanted it to be a lie. I wanted it to not be true. I wanted it to be something else.”
The facility’s director told investigators the conduct shown in the video violated company policy. According to news reports, Cortes-Garnier apologized when confronted with the footage and was subsequently fired.
Lake Clarke Shores police launched an investigation after Hernandez contacted authorities. Investigators reviewed the surveillance footage, interviewed staff and examined medical documentation of the child’s injuries before Cortes-Garnier turned himself in and was booked into the Palm Beach County Detention Center.
A judge set Cortes-Garnier’s bond at $7,500 and ordered that he have no contact with the child while the case proceeds. His next court appearance is scheduled for March 29.
For Hernandez, the incident has reshaped how she views a system she once thought she could trust with her son.
“Why are you risking your whole business for this man?” she asked the facility’s director. “You’re supposed to be taking care of my kids. I put my kids in your hands.”
The Lake Clarke Shores allegations echo concerns documented in a recent international review published in the medical journal BMJ Open, which examined 61 studies from 17 countries—including the US, Britain and Japan—to map abuse by healthcare professionals in psychiatric settings.
Across the studies reviewed, up to 21 percent of patients reported some form of abuse by mental health staff, while some datasets found that as many as 79 percent of participants described psychological abuse or neglect. Physical abuse appeared in up to 65 percent of reports depending on study design, and sexual abuse was reported by up to 21 percent of participants in several datasets.
“We found that abuse was reported in multiple forms—physical, psychological, sexual and economic abuse, neglect and human rights violations,” the researchers wrote in summarizing their findings.
The risks vulnerable patients face in psychiatric facilities have drawn wider scrutiny. A recent white paper by the mental health watchdog Citizens Commission on Human Rights found that as many as 45 percent of psychiatric inpatients say they experienced sexual violence in treatment facilities. Advocates say the figure reflects egregious systemic failures that leave patients dangerously exposed, especially when they have limited ability to communicate what happened to them, as in the Lake Clarke Shores case.
The risks are even more acute for families of autistic children, where trust in specialists is essential and nonverbal children may have no way to report abuse themselves.
For Hernandez, the stakes remain intensely personal. Her son is slowly recovering from the ordeal, she told reporters, though the emotional toll lingers.
For families who entrust children to behavioral health providers, the deeper question extends beyond a single defendant—to how systems that claim to protect vulnerable children have failed that trust, and what we can do to ensure it is never broken again.
