No Matter How Loud I Shout Read online

  Suddenly, Sisman looks away, and Peggy senses this case is not going to be appealed successfully after all. She sounds like an exasperated schoolteacher lecturing a wayward student when she says, “Hyman, we just had a meeting about this, about making a proper record at a fitness hearing. We knew this was going to come up with Dorn. Tell me you asked for a stay.”

  After a silence, Sisman says, “No, I didn’t. The minor pleaded to the 211.”

  “You let him plead?” Peggy is astonished. This is what Dorn must have been smiling about in court—he knew the prosecutor had made a fundamental error that left the ruling impregnable, no matter the legalities. “You didn’t object?”

  Sisman shakes his head. Unlike a defendant’s broad right to appeal anything and everything, prosecutors have a small window of opportunity to try to overturn a trial court’s unfavorable rulings. Sisman needed to stand up immediately and request a stay of all proceedings, which Dorn would have been compelled to grant. But by participating in John’s guilty plea, Sisman gave up that opportunity. John’s lawyer had cleverly locked in his conviction as a juvenile by immediately copping to the charge while Sisman was still reeling from Dorn’s decision—and before any appeal could wrest jurisdiction away from the Juvenile Court. Trying him as an adult now for the same crime would constitute unlawful double jeopardy. Dorn and the defense attorney had outfoxed the prosecutor.

  “Coming to me now,” Peggy says, “is like saying in adult court, the jury acquitted him, let’s appeal.”

  They discuss it further, and Peggy decides to pass the case on to the DA’s appellate section to see if there is some way around this hurdle, but she knows it is hopeless. Sisman trudges out, dispirited—and under orders to reread his DA’s manual, which clearly explains what he should have done in court that day. Even as other kids that same day were handed over to adult court on identically serious charges, John Sloan was guaranteed a far easier ride. Judge Dorn’s perception of what was right had won out over what the statutes dictate.6

  And with that, the war between the DA and the Juvenile Court judge had begun in earnest.

  CHAPTER 6

  Raised by the State

  George Trevino clasps his hands behind his back as if they are bound by invisible handcuffs—the required posture for detainees in Juvenile Court—and trudges ahead of the bailiff, walking from the stuffy, crowded holding cell he knew too well to the courtroom he had seen far too many times. In that moment, he would give just about anything to trade places with someone like John Sloan, to have had the same opportunities, the home, the family. Most of all his family.

  George spends much of his downtime—there is a lot of it in Juvenile Hall—trying to imagine what that would be like, having a mom and dad and his own bed that could never be taken away. Even as he walks that dismal hallway with its lumpy linoleum and odor of sweat and disinfectant—surroundings so familiar to him he had come to notice their absence more than their presence—he turns his thoughts once more to the sanctuary of What if?

  What if he had never been a 300 kid? George used to ask God why he had to live with that unlucky designation, praying for deliverance, but that had been a long time ago. As the years passed, he tells me, huge blocks of his early childhood had melted from his memory. He now could no longer remember being small or playing with toys, or even if he ever had any toys to play with. His mother’s face, his brother and sister—all had slipped into some black hole in his head. Thinking about that is too painful. The idea that your family could disappear, not just in reality, but inside you, too, was paralyzing. If he let it consume him, he would just sit and weep for hours. So he fills the vacuum with daydreams instead, about having a home with a mother and father in it, people who made sure he was dressed and fed, who praised him when he did something well, yelled at him when he was bad. As he emerges from the holding tank door to stand blinking in the courtroom, George wonders what it would be like to have a mom or dad who cared enough about him to yell. Strange, George thinks, that he would crave such a thing, but he did. Most kids didn’t know the riches they had. George knew.

  At age six, when a policeman found him abandoned in the filthy Dodge van that was his only home, his mother a fugitive later imprisoned for manslaughter, George Trevino became a “300 kid.” That’s what they called him, right there in court, one of those unintentionally dehumanizing verbal shorthands so common in the juvenile system. As he walked into court today, he heard the judge and the probation officer discussing his case in hushed voices. “Oh, he was in the 300 system before this happened,” the judge said with a knowing, sad sort of finality, and everyone kind of nodded as if to say, Oh, that explains it.

  The 300 kid is a synonym for a foster child, a dependent child, a beaten, battered, and abused child. The term is drawn from the California Welfare and Institutions Code Section 300, which empowers the Juvenile Court to protect abused and neglected children, to take them from their homes and put them in foster care as dependents of the court—with the court becoming, in essence, the child’s new parent. Some families are eventually reunited. Some, like George’s, are never made whole again. George was raised by the state.

  And the state made George what he is today: While under the Juvenile Court’s guidance and protection—as a victim, not a victimizer—a bright, law-abiding A student with a penchant for writing poetry was destroyed. For ten years, he was shunted from one temporary home to another. He was separated from his older brother and younger sister. He was entrusted to neglectful, drug-addicted guardians. He was allowed to roam the streets, to experiment with drugs, to drop out of school—all the while in the care and custody of the state. With each move, his pitifully meager possessions were packed into a disposable green Hefty trash bag, the foster child’s luggage, which George was bright enough to see as a metaphor for his entire life. He considered himself a prisoner.

  “I always wondered what it was that I had done wrong,” George says, “but no one would ever tell me. I just figured they thought I would turn out like my mother, and they were just getting a head start.”

  And when the inevitable finally came to pass, when this increasingly angry, rootless kid took solace in the streets and got involved in crime, the system geared up with all its power and programs to do what it always does in such cases:

  It is preparing to abandon him.

  THAT George Trevino’s juvenile fitness hearing is occurring in another courtroom on the same day as John Sloan’s is a good measure of how common this once unheard-of procedure has become: In Los Angeles Juvenile Court, a total of five kids will be sent into the adult system today. Nationally, the toll for this day alone will be forty-seven children branded unsalvageable.1

  “This case is more than sad,” Juvenile Court Commissioner Jewell Jones says—off the official court record, just discussing it with her staff while awaiting George’s arrival from the holding tank. “It’s a classic indictment of the system. He did not get what he needed, and that wasn’t his fault. And now we’re going to send him out.” She pauses, fingering the boy’s thick file absently, then sighs. “Oh, this one is giving me a terrible time.”

  “Would it help if I bring in the psychiatrist to testify?” George’s court-appointed lawyer, Anna Noriega, asks before the hearing commences. “He’s got a lot of good things to say about George. But I don’t want to waste his time or the court’s if it’s not going to make a difference. I’ll just submit his report.” The respected child psychiatrist who evaluated George said the boy would respond well in a stable, structured environment—something the Juvenile Court, in all the years it controlled George’s fate, never managed to give him.

  But the commissioner shakes her head. “Lord knows I think most of these kids would be better served in the juvenile system than in adult court,” she says. “But, unfortunately, that is not the criterion I must use to decide this case. The criteria are so rigid. I’m afraid I’ll have a hard time finding him fit.”

  Noriega nods. “Then I won’t call
the doctor. It’s just that it’s such a very sad case.”

  “Yes,” the commissioner says just as the black metal door to the holding tank opens and a tall, pale boy in green slacks and a sweatshirt enters the courtroom. “He was a 300 kid, you know.”

  · · ·

  When George Trevino’s mother abandoned him and he became a Section 300 ward of the Juvenile Court,2 the system had a goal: find him a stable, loving home as soon as possible. At age six, it was not too late for George.

  But he never knew that stability. The social workers kept moving him from one temporary foster home to another. His mother, wanted for a variety of theft and drug charges, refused to come to see him or to tell the dependency court where she lived. An aunt who stayed in touch with George’s mother while she was a fugitive kept promising to visit him, then failed to show up, bitterly disappointing George time after time. Predictably, his behavior grew worse. He began to lash out at his foster parents at various group homes, who would then ask that he be removed. Between the moves, he had long stays in MacLaren Hall, a lockup for abused and neglected kids—the closest thing to an orphanage in Los Angeles. He had caretakers, but no one to love or who loved him.

  George’s hopes rose again when an aunt and uncle in Colorado offered to take him, but the state agencies responsible for approving out-of-state placements dragged out the process so long, it eventually fell through. George fell into a deep depression after that, and he became very hard to handle, his temper explosive. “He sees himself as intrinsically bad and worthless, and feels tremendous guilt,” his social worker wrote when he was seven. Another tantalizing chance at a new life—and a marked improvement in his behavior—came a year later, when the dependency court inexplicably abandoned its opinion that George’s mother, Violanda, was unfit, and attempted to reunite the family—despite a social worker’s report that found Mrs. Trevino led “a life filled with violence.” Still, Violanda had surrendered herself to police, then struck a deal for probation, making her at least theoretically eligible as a parent. But on the eve of a sixty-day trial at living together, George’s mother was again arrested and imprisoned, this time for fatally shooting someone outside a liquor store.

  George’s mother stayed in prison until he reached his teens and was released after finishing her manslaughter term, only to be incarcerated again for forgery and parole violations. She never regained custody of him, and was mostly barred from visiting her son, though when she was out of prison, she sometimes sneaked in to see him at school or in his placement by using a false identity. She eventually died in the penitentiary. He had no memory of a father. He died of a drug overdose before George turned two.

  George’s little sister fared better. Because she was a cute and precocious toddler when she entered the system, she was easier to place and was almost immediately adopted. George never saw her after that night when they were all pulled from that stinking van with its moldering blankets and wadded fast-food wrappers. Her new name and address were kept confidential, even from her own brother.

  Growing up, George thought about her all the time, imagining the life she must be living, glad for her, jealous of her, grieving for her. After years of begging, he was allowed a fifteen-minute visit with her in a park in LA when he was fifteen, nine years after they had parted. They did not recognize or remember one another. It was awkward and silent, a meeting of strangers who shared blood and ancestry, but whose lives had nothing else in common. She belonged now to a solid, law-abiding family, stable and safe. She was a great student, a kid with a future George could only dream about.

  “It was the first time I met her, and the last time,” George would later say wistfully, eyes wet. Shortly after the meeting, the girl and her family moved to another county to escape George’s mother, who was out on parole at the time and attempting to take her daughter back. Not long after the move, on Christmas Day, George’s sister and two other members of her adopted family were killed by a drunken driver. George heard about it three weeks later, long after his only sister had been buried.

  Thinking about his dismembered family makes George weep silently, his eyes crimson, the injustice of it leaving him quaking with an angry despair. He has lost his older brother as well. They were initially kept in the same foster homes, so at least they had one another, but they always ended up running away together. George idolized his brother, clung to him as his anchor. George would do anything he said. But the older boy was even more angry and difficult than George, sometimes violent, sometimes weeping uncontrollably for hours, calling for his mother to save him. By the time George was eight, the social workers separated the two boys for good. His older brother telephoned him and wrote letters for a long time, but the calls and cards gradually slowed, then stopped. George doesn’t know where his brother is now. “He’s somewhere in the system, in prison somewhere, that’s all I know,” George says. “He’s a total loss. My sister, my brother, my whole family. Gone. Now it’s just me.”

  George had done nothing wrong to become a 300 kid. He had not asked for a murderous mother or a shattered family. He was just one of a daily procession of abused and neglected children, one of twenty-five thousand who occupied LA’s child welfare system with him in 1983—a system that, today, holds more than twice as many kids.

  Despite the uncertainties of his future, the loss of his family, the constant moves from one foster home to another, one school after another, George thrived for some of the time he was raised by the state. Like many abused and neglected children, the trauma of his early life left him in need of medication and counseling for psychological problems, hyperactivity, tantrums. They called him “SED” in court hearings, which George learned meant “severely emotionally disturbed.” For a while, he was heavily medicated. Then someone decided he wasn’t so disturbed after all. He began to receive more moderate treatment and, finally, he began to heal. By the 1990–91 school year, when George was in seventh grade—and he was allowed to stay in the same foster home all year—his grades were all A’s and B’s, with good attendance and good behavior. He became the top student and role model at the Helping Hands group home, dressing each day in bow ties and sweaters, after school diligently tutoring and counseling younger kids. The owner of the group home would have been happy to keep George indefinitely.

  But then the Juvenile Court made a fateful decision. In keeping with the system’s primary goal of bringing families, even abusive ones, together, the court took George out of the group home in which he was thriving and sent him to live with his aunt and uncle.

  For a while—even for a year or two—it seemed to work out. There was just one problem: George’s uncle was a drug dealer who later succumbed to addiction and who died of an overdose during George’s second year in the home. His aunt lost control after the suicide and began drinking and using drugs.3 She would leave George to go score, the house in shambles. George responded the only way he knew how: He began staying away from the house, then skipping school, his once excellent grades plummeting. Then he joined a street gang. All this took place while he remained a ward of the court, his upbringing still the legal responsibility of the Juvenile Court. The social worker assigned to track George’s case somehow never noticed any of this.4

  Eventually, an older gang member took George under his wing. The older teen was tough, confident, brash—everything George felt he should be, but wasn’t. This boy started a schoolyard brawl, and George leapt to his defense. George’s new mentor cut another kid with a broken bottle, the police were called, and everyone got arrested, George included, though he was immediately released. A short time later, another gang member offered George and several other kids a ride in his new car. Two policemen confronted them at a gas station and arrested them all. The car had been stolen. Of the passengers, only George was truthful with the police and admitted he had known the car was hot when he saw the jimmied ignition switch, though he had no hand in taking it.

  Despite George’s minimal involvement—by the police department�
�s own account, he was merely a passenger in the car and an unarmed latecomer to the schoolyard fight—he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and, thanks to his forthrightness, car theft, both felonies. He was taken to Juvenile Hall, then Juvenile Court. Not the supposedly protective Juvenile Court dependency branch he knew as a foster kid, but a very different, harder place, the separate, larger side of the court reserved for delinquents, where people like Judge Dorn and Commissioner Jones maintained order.

  He met his lawyer for the first time when he took his seat at the defendant’s table. The judge was talking to someone else, and the harried-looking young blond woman from the Public Defender’s Office whispered to George, “Sorry I couldn’t talk to you before the hearing. It’s been really busy. I’ll be representing you today.” She pulled a file from a large, messy stack of manila folders in front of her and studied it for a minute, reading it for the first time. Then she asked, “You are George, aren’t you?”

  The hearing passed quickly and without substance. There would be another pretrial hearing, but not for several months, thanks to the constant logjam of cases in Juvenile Court. The bailiff gave George a piece of paper with directions to the Probation Department, so he could talk to an officer about his case, and it was over.

  “Look at the bright side,” his lawyer had said. “Isn’t that your aunt in the back of the courtroom? You’ll be able to go home with her now.”

  Despite its brevity, there was a hidden subtext to George’s first hearing as an accused delinquent. It had transformed him—in the eyes of the law, at least—from a child in danger to a dangerous child. No one blamed the nameless bureaucrats who took an A–B student and sent him to a home troubled by drugs; there is no such accountability in the system. No one asked how a ward of the court could become a gang member without anyone noticing. Only George was held accountable. His status as a 300 ward had ended, his file in dependency court stamped with one large red word: “Terminated.” Officially, he was no longer a victim, he was a criminal, and that is how he would be treated forevermore.