A New Hampshire judge declared a mistrial Tuesday in the sex abuse case against Jeffrey Buskey, a 60-year-old former youth detention center staffer accused of repeatedly raping a teenage boy at what was then known as the Youth Development Center in Manchester. The mistrial came on the second day of testimony, after jurors heard testimony that should never have reached them.
According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, accuser David Meehan testified that Buskey was not the only staff member who sexually assaulted him while he was held at the facility. Judge Will Delker had instructed jurors to disregard testimony about allegations involving other staff, but when that testimony was repeated, Delker declared a mistrial rather than let the case continue. Prosecutor Thomas Velardi, an associate attorney general, said the judge found that inadmissible evidence had been heard by the jury, though Delker denied the defense's own request for a mistrial earlier in the proceedings.
Velardi said the state will now consider its options, including retrying the case. Buskey, who lives in Litchfield, New Hampshire, is charged with 21 counts of aggravated felonious sexual assault tied to Meehan and still faces separate charges involving three other former residents of the state-run youth facility, meaning Tuesday's mistrial does not close out his legal exposure.
A Case That Triggered a Statewide Reckoning
Meehan was 14 years old when he arrived at the youth facility in Manchester in 1995, and testimony from his earlier 2024 civil trial detailed how Buskey allegedly groomed him with soda, snacks, and the chance to play basketball with a local high school team before subjecting him to near-daily sexual assaults, according to WSOC-TV. Meehan publicly identified himself as a victim of sexual assault and described the facility as hell. Prosecutors said in opening statements this month that Meehan intended to keep the abuse secret until 2017, when he finally reported it to police out of fear that one of his own sons might end up sent to the same detention facility, per the Washington Times.
Buskey was arrested alongside another former staffer in 2019, according to the New Hampshire Department of Justice. That arrest opened a criminal investigation. New Hampshire has since made nine additional arrests connected to the facility, now called the Sununu Youth Services Center, and the alleged abuse there is said to have spanned six decades.
Co-Defendant's Trials Show How Hard Convictions Have Been
The struggle to secure convictions has played out most visibly in the case of Stephen Murphy, who was arrested alongside Buskey in 2019 and faced allegations from four separate former residents. Murphy's trials have included a mistrial, a partial acquittal and a hung jury, according to Click2Houston. Not every case has ended that way: former supervisor Bradley Asbury was convicted in November 2024 and sentenced in January 2025 to 20 to 40 years in prison as an accomplice in the 1998 stairwell rape of a 14-year-old resident, one of three former staffers convicted alongside James Woodlock and Stanley Watson, the Manchester Ink Link reported. Court records made public in January 2025 showed Asbury had been fired from a different state youth facility in 1994, but was reinstated and transferred to the Manchester facility under a settlement agreement before the 1998 assault, exposing what the outlet described as systemic oversight failures.
Billions in Claims Now Weigh on the State
Meehan's lawsuit, the first filed and the only one to go to trial so far, resulted in a jury awarding him $38 million in May 2024 after he testified that the facility was hell. The verdict form has since become a flashpoint: jurors wrote “one” to signify a single PTSD diagnosis stemming from more than 100 assaults, and New Hampshire is now seeking to reduce Meehan's award to $475,000 under a state sovereign immunity law, a dispute the state Supreme Court took up in oral arguments in November 2025, according to ClickOrlando.com. Jurors were reportedly unaware of the $475,000 per-incident statutory cap when they delivered their verdict.
Beyond Meehan's case, New Hampshire faces more than 1,100 lawsuits alleging physical, sexual or emotional abuse at the facility. The state also established a settlement fund to compensate victims outside of court. Victims who choose that administrative route instead of suing can seek compensation through the fund. With Buskey's own case now headed back to prosecutors for a decision on retrial, and Meehan's award still tied up before the state's highest court, the financial and legal reckoning over the Manchester facility remains far from settled.
