No Matter How Loud I Shout (32 page)

Lately, George has been gripped by a repetitive dream of playing with the sister he never knew, chasing her into a street, only to be hit by a car. He tearfully recounts it for Janet, describing for her the ache he feels each time this dream renews the grief he feels over his shattered family, torn apart and raised by the state. He wakes up at night, sobbing in the darkness, unsure if this dream is a memory or a trick played on him by his mind, turning his long-lost sister's recent death in a car accident into his fault.

“Oh, God, I don't have much hope, Sister,” George says, tears squeezing out of his eyes as she embraces the boy, pulling him close.

They talk for a long time about his background. George is candid in admitting he made mistakes and poor choices. At the same time, he shrewdly assesses the juvenile system's priorities.

“The system didn't do much for me, but I'm still responsible for my predicament. I did the crime. It was just so easy. When I first got arrested, Juvenile Court was just a wrist slap. I knew they were sucking me in, that it was almost like a setup, so I would do something worse. Then they could get me. I knew it, but I still couldn't stop. I fell into the trap.”

“Why do you think that is, George?” Janet asks. She is always trying to get kids to examine why they do things, to ask the questions they tend never to ask themselves.

“Trouble,” George says after a moment, “was funner. I felt free.” He shakes his head, bitterness welling up in him. “Now I can't remember what free feels like.”

A short time later, the book of poetry George had put together turns up in the unit. He clutches his poems tightly, then asks Janet to make and keep some copies—just in case.

She flips through the booklet. Many of the poems are odes to adolescent love dedicated to one of two twin sisters who work as teachers in the hall, and who spent their off-hours typing up, printing and binding his work into a booklet. That someone would take the time and trouble to do this for him seemed so extraordinary to George, he has imagined an entire relationship out of this simple act of kindness. But some of the poems are poignant, angry self-portraits, and it is to one of these Janet turns. “This is the boy our system has created,” she says, and begins to read aloud.

“Should I care about you,

do you care about me?

Should I care about a person,

that I've never seen?

Should I care about a mom,

who left me all alone?

Should I care about a dad,

that I've never known?

Should I care about a sister,

I never really knew—who died on Christmas Day?

Should I care about my uncle,

who died of AIDS cause he was gay?

I guess I should, but I don't,

if you were to die, you'd think I'd care,

no I won't.”

“I fear for him,” Janet says. “I fear he is about to be lost forever.”

·  ·  ·

Janet is also working on Geri Vance's case. She retreats to her office to call his lawyer for the third time in a week, trying to get through to the man before Geri's case goes to trial. Geri has been complaining for months that his public defender in adult court, Al Johnson, seems disinterested in him. Geri thinks he might want to go to trial rather than accept the plea bargain and the lengthy prison sentence Johnson has recommended. But making and receiving phone calls at the hall is often hard, and Geri is having problems getting him on the phone to discuss his options.

Geri has adamantly clung to the same story since his arrest. He does not so much claim to be innocent as he insists there were extenuating circumstances. He says he was forced to participate in the armed robbery of a motel by two drug-dealing gangsters in his neighborhood. The older criminals had recruited him to deliver drugs for them, Geri says, but when he was ripped off and lost several thousand dollars' worth of cocaine, they told him he had two choices: pay them back by helping in the robbery, or die. He agreed, accepting a pistol for the job, and doing what he was told to do. But the robbery went awry, and one of the drug dealers was killed by an intended victim. The law allowed Geri to be charged with his murder.

There was no hard evidence to contradict Geri's story, except for the fact the victims saw only Geri and the dead man, though they could not say for sure that the third man had not stayed in the car as Geri claimed. And even
they agreed that Geri was mostly passive during the robbery. But four things cut against him: Geri would not testify to the identity of the other man, because, he said, he feared reprisals against his younger brother or his grandmother if he named this criminal. (The police said the reason was the third man didn't exist.) Secondly, Geri had a long record of delinquency, dating back to age eleven, including numerous counts of petty theft and car theft. His repeated sentences to probation and placement in foster homes had not convinced Geri to go straight, and they made him a less than credible witness. Then there's the fact that Geri fired his gun, pointing it blindly over his shoulder as he fled into the motel parking lot with the mortally wounded ringleader behind him. The motel clerk had kept up a steady barrage of bullets as the robbers fled, and “I just wanted him to stop shooting,” Geri says. “I didn't aim or anything.” This seemed true—Geri's shot went far astray, hitting nothing—but just the fact that he fired at all looked bad and undermined his story of being coerced. Worst of all, his lawyer told him, completely apart from the evidence, was the fact that the conservative jury he was likely to face in Pomona, the suburb in which the crime took place, in all probability would not believe him no matter what he said. Just as his lawyer in Juvenile Court had told him, so did this attorney: “You are the jury's worst nightmare. Young black male with a gun.” In all likelihood, a trial would end with him convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years to life, the lawyer warned during their one face-to-face meeting. After that, lawyer and client hardly talked, and Geri was a nervous wreck. “Please see what you can find out,” he asked Janet.

She finally connects with the lawyer, and begins to explain how special she believes Geri to be, how he came into Juvenile Hall and made a genuine effort to take advantage of any program available to better himself, intent on proving he was anything but a lost cause. He was about to earn his high school equivalency degree, she told the lawyer, he had written a play that had been produced in Juvenile Hall, he was participating in writing classes, computer classes, music classes. “Teachers and detention officers at the hall love him,” she says. “This boy deserves special consideration. He deserves some special effort.”

The lawyer admits he had been unaware that Geri has amassed such an exemplary record, and he agrees to renew talks with the District Attorney's Office to see if he can coax a better deal for Geri.

A few days later, he calls back, ecstatic. Prodded by Janet and armed with the information she gave him, Johnson had gone over the head of the prosecutor assigned to the case, and convinced a DA supervisor to plead Geri's case down to attempted murder with a twelve-year maximum
sentence. (The attempted murder charge would be based on Geri's blind shot over his shoulder as he fled, rather than the death of the robbery ringleader.) With time off for good behavior, Geri could be out by the time he turns twenty-six or twenty-seven, maybe sooner, Johnson says—which isn't much more time than he would have done in the juvenile system. Most if not all of his time could be served in CYA. All he has to do is accept the deal, go to CYA for the mandatory three-month evaluation, behave himself, then come to court to get his sentence, the lawyer says.

“It's a fantastic deal,” he says. “Twelve years is unheard of in a case like this where, quite frankly, the odds of acquittal are very slim, and the probability that Geri could get a life sentence is very high if we go to trial.”

Janet feels Johnson is probably right, that the courts could be—and often are—much tougher on kids like Geri. But she is fairly certain Geri will be far less thrilled than his lawyer with the plea bargain, and she is right.

“I know I needed to chill for a while, that I needed to get my life together,” the sixteen-year-old says after getting the news. “Being here has been good for me—I know that. Three, four more years even, that would be okay—I'd have a shot at getting an education, at making something of myself. But twelve years, damn, that's a long time. I'm afraid I'll get like some old con, you know, all buffed out on weights, crazy, institutionalized.” He begins thinking out loud, puzzling out his options. He could take the deal and hope that he gets the coveted YA number. Or he could go for broke and plead his case to a jury. He shakes his head, overwhelmed by the decisions a sixteen-year-old must make, on his own. He locks his eyes on Janet's. “What do you think I should do?”

It's a question Janet hears often, and one she can rarely answer. How do you tell a kid he has to give up twelve years of his life? Especially a kid like Geri, who Janet feels strongly could walk out the door and into a group home and a junior college and do just fine today—but who, after another decade behind bars, could be broken and bitter, stripped of the optimism and desire to succeed that he has found through a year in Juvenile Hall.

She wants to say the system is wrong to have given up on you and shipped you off to adult court, where punishment and retribution are the goals, that you deserve better. But that would relieve her own anguish, not Geri's, and so Janet instead says, “I think if the judge can hear everything you've accomplished here, hon, he'll give you every break he can.”

Geri shakes his head. “Who's going to tell him? Not my lawyer.”

“I'll tell him,” Janet says without hesitation.

Geri stares at her a moment, then slowly nods.

The beeper rouses Sharon Stegall just in time to see the alarm clock blink from 4:56 to 4:57. Her first thought—a familiar one, which is the real hell of it—is that one of her kids has been shot. Or had shot someone else. “Couldn't be anything else at this hour,” she mutters to herself. “Couldn't be.”

The number on the beeper confirms it: Hawthorne PD—the 'Thorn, home to some of LA's bloodiest gang wars, kids killing kids, seven dead in the space of a month. Two of Sharon's probationers have died, with another on the run. She had just sent one kid—a witness to one of the murders, street name “Blur”—into hiding in Florida, dodging a contract on his life at age fifteen. “He better turn up soon,” one of the teenaged gangbangers stalking him had told Blur's terrified mother a day earlier—shortly after her house had been ventilated by a round of nine millimeters. “One way or another, somebody's gonna die.”

Sharon expects that prophesy has just been fulfilled. She dials Hawthorne PD, waiting for someone to pick up, then croaks, “What?” In her circles, this early, niceties are a waste.

“Jefferson, Donny William, aka Li'l Dondi,” a man announces, as if he were calling the lineup at a baseball game. The voice belongs to Hawthorne detective Jimmy Royer, a regular in Juvenile Court. “He's one of yours, isn't he, Stegall?”

“Yeah, he's mine,” she says. Dondi is one of her probationers, a sixteen-year-old graffiti tagger, Blur's homeboy. He had nothing to do with any of the murders. If anything, he represents a success story in Juvenile Court—still hanging with a street gang, he nevertheless has stayed clean for months. “What about him?”

“Shot in the head at his apartment building by three Hoovers,” Royer says, pausing a moment at Sharon's sudden, sharp intake of breath. She had thought she was prepared for it, but you never are. You never get used to children killing children.

“He's not dead, but he might as well be,” Royer continues gamely. “Half his head's gone. He's on full life support, brain-dead. But they're still getting a pain response. You know, when they stick a pin in his leg. So they're not ready to pull the plug.”

The Hoover Street Crips, a powerhouse among LA's street gangs, had put the contract out on Blur and one of his friends—who, just to confuse matters, was also known on the street as Blur. Sharon had taken to calling him Blur II. The Blurs had been together on Christmas Day when Blur II shot and killed a Hoover who had tried to jump them. Blur II vanished, Sharon's Blur went to hide in Florida, and the Hoovers went hunting. Last night, Royer says, they shot the wrong kid in their zeal for retaliation. Poor, unsuspecting Dondi, whose worst deed in life had been stealing cars and spray-painting freeway overpasses, had put down his Nintendo to answer the door, and walked into an ambush.

“Sweet Jesus,” Sharon sighs, rubbing her face with her hands.

Sharon hangs up a short time later, makes some coffee, gets ready for work. This is how all too many of her mornings begin these days. When she started as a probation officer nine years ago, her principal piece of equipment was a notebook and pen, tucked into her handbag with her gold badge. Now she dons a bulletproof vest for the field, a can of Mace and a pair of stainless-steel handcuffs in her purse. Some of her fellow probation officers pack guns in violation of a loosely enforced department policy, but Sharon refuses to take that step. The day she has to use a gun to control her kids, that's the day she'll quit.

A few hours later, she sits in her cubicle at the grimy Centinela Probation Office. Today is client day, a procession of kids marching to her desk all day, with their endless excuses and screwups and, every now and then, tiny triumphs. Li'l Dondi had just been in a week before, a pleasant, husky kid slowly but definitely pulling back from the brink. He had been making it. Now his fate has left Sharon in a foul temper—she had tried to save one kid,
and another had paid the price with his life. It made her want to crawl back into bed and never leave. Instead, when a short, bashful kid named Randy comes in wearing an odd smile and a big chrome belt buckle emblazoned with a gang insignia, Sharon goes ballistic.