Pearland child therapy clinic fires regional director over handling of worker's indecency charge

PEARLAND, Texas (KTRK) -- A Pearland child therapy clinic's regional director hid information from clients' parents, clinic owners, and staff in the wake of a former employee's arrest on a child indecency charge.

Those findings were the result of an investigation carried out by Essential Speech and ABA Therapy's owners, who informed parents they have terminated the regional director as a result.

Earlier this month, Eyewitness News spoke with parents and another former employee, who claimed the clinic forced her to sign a non-disclosure agreement to keep quiet about Zachariah Barineau, who was employed as a behavioral health technician before his arrest on July 6.

Parents told ABC13 they weren't aware about Barineau's arrest and termination for a month.

Barineau had access to children with autism, but the Alvin Police Department said the case against him doesn't involve any of the clinic's clients. Still, the clinic said those children are undergoing forensic interviews to ensure they were not victimized by Barineau.

In a letter that Eyewitness News obtained on Tuesday, the clinic's owners said they fired the regional director, who isn't identified, for hiding facts, misrepresenting information to the owners and staff, and using unauthorized confidentiality agreements with company letterhead to prevent staff from informing families about Barineau.

Was there a cover-up?

In ABC13's report on Aug. 7, Katie Cuellar, who worked as a billing specialist at the clinic, said she answered the phone the first time when Alvin police called on June 30 looking for Barineau. She said she included the then-regional director in that phone call and future calls with police.

They learned that he had a warrant out for his arrest for sexual abuse of a minor.

She doesn't believe he ever returned to work from the time of the first phone call until he was arrested on July 6.

"(The clinic) sent a letter to (Barineau), because he didn't ever show up for work letting him know that he was fired," Cuellar said.

According to her, she was presented with a confidentiality agreement by leadership at Essential Speech that prohibited her from speaking about Barineau with any parents or other employees.

"I did express to them I was not comfortable signing that paper, and then I was told that if I did not sign it, I would no longer have a job, so I signed it," Cuellar said.

Cuellar said she later became upset by how the situation was being handled. She submitted her resignation letter.

In an email response from human resources at Essential Speech, she was reminded about the confidentiality agreement.

"We work with children that have autism, so a lot of them are not verbal. So I just felt like that was just not who I am as a person to hide that," Cuellar said.

ABC13 presented several questions to the regional director of Essential Speech concerning information from Cuellar. The company responded by saying, "Unfortunately, you have been presented with false information on this matter by this former employee. Given the nature of this misinformation, we will have to hand the matter over to our legal team to address this more directly."

A follow-up email asking what specifically was false wasn't answered.

After ABC13 reached out to the clinic earlier this month, it issued the following statement, which was also sent to parents:

"The safety, well-being, and individual growth of each of the children in our program has and will always be our top priority, and we will continue, as always, to maintain a zero-tolerance approach toward any behavior that could potentially put their well-being at risk. In addition, we remain committed to transparency and upholding the highest standards of professionalism and ethical conduct within our clinics. While our facilities are very high security with continuous surveillance throughout and no opportunities for any staff to be alone with any children without surveillance and monitoring from supervisors, support staff, and administrators, we take staff incidents outside of our workplace just as seriously so as to never put our children at risk now or in the future.

We conduct regular background checks for all staff for this reason, and this former employee was background checked as recently as June 2023. When informed of the former employee's charges by the local sheriff's office in July 2023, we were told it was an incident with a minor and despite inquiring about the incident, no further details were provided. Despite the limited information, we made the decision to terminate the employee effective immediately. We have attempted since then to get more concrete information from the sheriff's office on the outside incident to avoid reporting inaccurate or misleading information to parents and other staff and, as of now, we have not been directly informed of the allegations against them. We pride ourselves on our safety measures for our children and are very thankful to our excellent leadership team for continuing to keep our children safe by taking swift action in this case while further investigation is conducted on the outside incident in question."