Carson City Rural Child Advocacy Center co-founder Jan Marson signs agreements and bylaws with District Attorney Garrit Pruyt during the center’s first board meeting March 13, 2025.
Photo by Jessica Garcia.
The Carson City Rural Children’s Advocacy Center has established a partnership with a new nonprofit, Sierra Healing House, to provide mental health services for traumatized victims or witnesses to crimes.
The CAC held an event March 13 at its location at 412 N. Division St. to celebrate the agreement. The center was opened last year by Dave and Jan Marson and supported by Carson City Sheriff’s Capt. Craig Lowe. It supports children who have experienced domestic violence or abuse or were exposed to criminal acts.
“If you give some early mental health services, then you're less likely to have severe post-traumatic stress,” Jan Marson said. “So we formed another organization for mental health and dealing with support services, and we have to keep them separate because of the legal cases. So then we decided we wanted to do something there.”
Marson’s advocates have been holding forensic interviews at the Carson City Sheriff’s Office.
Carson City District Attorney Garrit Pruyt said the CAC offers an invaluable resource. Pruyt said it’s vital to hold offenders accountable.
“Having prosecuted all types of child abuse cases and child torture cases, there's a lot of damage that's done to a kid,” Pruyt said. “And so be able to have a part in the Child Advocacy Center in this way to ensure that we can conduct forensically sound interviews from now on and going forward to the benefit of our kids, that’s a really big deal for me.”
Kristin Miller, child and family advocate, is working with families as they enter the CAC’s doors to help them navigate the criminal justice system, she said.
“From day one, you’re meeting and greeting them and making them feel safe,” Miller said. “You’re ensuring them just being here is really important and then building that rapport and that relationship with them so they can rely on you if needed and then you can hand them off to your community advocates.”
The center has conducted 60 interviews. The average wait time for a family when the Washoe County center served Carson families almost exclusively was five weeks, which makes a difference in the details children can recall in a case. With Carson’s CAC, now it’s down to about a week.
“Washoe CAC’s doing a wonderful job, but they were inundated,” Miller said. “So we just wanted to help.”
Barbie Barrett, professor and a member of Stanford University’s emergency department, has worked with the incarcerated and called prisons a place of distress if not dealt with properly early in life.
“What we’re doing here is a microcosm of what’s going to happen if we don’t do this,” Barrett said. “I look at these guys in prison. Half of them don’t have parents, half of them don’t know their daddy, their mom is dead at 16. I just don’t want a repeat performance. And the best way I know how to avoid that is to get them when they’re little.”
Marson said a goal is to establish agreements with nearby counties to make services available. She also wants to provide support with Child Protective Services and continue training partnerships.
“It’s not hearing the whole story,” she said. “You only want those kids to come here and just tell the story once.”
Marson said the process has been enlightening as she’s helped organize the CAC and built partnerships and teams.
“It’s the people that are doing this work that are really nice and they’re fun … and we’ve been blessed,” Marson said. “I mean, they’re all just awesome humans.”