No Matter How Loud I Shout Page 14

  The child welfare system failed miserably in George’s case, but this caused no consternation. The public remained unaware of it, because, in the name of protecting children, the Juvenile Court zealously guards the confidentiality of 300 cases (not even delinquency court judges get to see these files). And within the system, none of the initiates much noticed, because what happened with George is so shockingly common. Every year, ten thousand cases are dropped from the dependency system in LA. A third of them get termination stamps because kids being raised by the state turn to crime.

  That’s more than three thousand kids in Los Angeles, every year.

  It was downhill from there for George. Because of the confidentiality that swathes 300 kids, his first probation report does not even mention the fact that he was a ward of the dependency court for eight of his fourteen years. It reads as if he suddenly turned to crime at age fourteen for no good reason. The regular counseling and therapy he had received as a victim of child neglect ended. No one noticed: Now he was just a bad kid. He was released to his aunt, who, subsequent probation officers reported, had been jailed on drug charges. George ran away and never showed up for his court hearings, hoping the system would just forget about him.

  And then, something incredible happened. The mother of one of his friends took him in. Her home was small and rather shabby, her income was meager, but Kathy Reveles offered George something he had never experienced: kindness, support, acceptance. She treated him like a son, got him reenrolled in school, gave him chores, a small allowance. When he misbehaved, she told him so, and George would apologize, begging her not to send him away. “That’s not going to happen,” she would always say. “This is your home now.”

  He never really dared to believe that, not completely anyway, until that day he shyly showed her a poem he had written, and she had hugged him and thanked him, as if it was actually worth something. Then George had said, “Thank you, Mom,” and it felt right. Kathy had given him a big hug, and he didn’t stiffen or push away or anything. George wasn’t sure, but at age fourteen, he thought he finally loved someone. And maybe, just maybe, that person loved him back.

  For a year, George stayed in school and out of trouble while in the Reveles home. He eventually returned to court and got probation for his old auto theft and assault charges, and Commissioner Jones allowed him to stay with his new “mother.” But a few months later, a member of Reveles’s household burglarized a home in the neighborhood. A stolen VCR turned up in George’s room, and he was arrested and charged, too. A new probation officer assigned to the case decided Kathy Reveles’s household was a bad influence, that her home was too crowded and unkempt, and that George should be removed. “She’s all I have; please, I’ll be good and study harder,” George begged, sobbing wildly during their interview. “Please let me go back home.”

  But the probation officer was adamant, and Commissioner Jones agreed. George was sent to a group foster home in an LA suburb, many miles from the Reveles home. At the time, notations in George’s court file show someone finally noticed his need for counseling, that he was alternately consumed by anger and depression, hurling profanities at schoolteachers one moment, then weeping uncontrollably the next. The probation officer reported that George became “hysterical” during their interview. His school counselor begged the court to put George into some in-depth treatment program before something terrible happened. The Probation Department runs such a residential program, with secure space for a hundred kids and a waiting list of up to six months to get in. But George was never even considered for it. He received no counseling there, or anywhere else.

  George hated his new group home. He was the only Hispanic kid; all the others were black and George felt like a misfit, unwanted and picked on. After a few months, George ran away. He returned to his old gang turf and soon fell in with a twenty-two-year-old gangbanger named Frank Villa. Villa and George recruited two other juveniles on probation to participate in a home invasion robbery. Their target was a used-car salesman named Shorty, reputed to keep large amounts of cash in his home.5 Villa was to arm himself with a revolver, George with a .22 rifle, and one of the other juveniles, JoJo, with another gun. The remaining kid, Bambi, was told to knock on the door and to ask for one of Shorty’s sons by name. As soon as the door opened, the others would storm the house, hold Shorty and his family at gunpoint, then make off with the money, Villa ordered.

  Instead, Shorty shot Villa in the leg, the rest of the family pounced on him, kicking and punching, and the three kids working with Villa ran off.

  Once behind bars, Villa quickly informed on the others, placing much of the blame on George and hoping to get leniency in return for cooperation. The police found George at Kathy Reveles’s house; his other partners in crime were in the same neighborhood. The charges were extensive: There were six people in the house, including an infant, which meant six counts of attempted armed robbery. Because Villa fired his gun, attempted murder charges were under review as well.

  George had reached his sixteenth birthday by then. The court system that had always given him such short shrift studied his record in minute detail now. In order to justify treating him as an adult, a new spin was put on his background by yet another probation officer assigned to his case—the sixth since he had entered the system. In the past, George’s criminal involvement—in the assault, the car theft, and the burglary—had always been seen as minimal, which is why he stayed on probation and received virtually no supervision or services from the Juvenile Court. But now, the new probation officer wrote, “The minor appears to have a rather serious previous delinquent history. There is a previous assault with a deadly weapon. . . . It is clear that he is a threat to the safety of others.”

  As before, there was no discussion in this latest report of his childhood entrusted to the state. There was no mention of the unheeded pleas that George receive psychological counseling after he became a delinquent. There was only a harsh recommendation: Transfer him to adult court. Prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law.

  Now it was up to Jewell Jones to decide.

  · · ·

  In court, George shifts in his seat and glances mournfully at the empty chair next to him, the one marked “Parent.” The bailiff speaks into the public address system: “Parents of George Trevino, please follow the yellow line to Department 251.” Then, after a whispered command from Jones, he adds, “Guardian of George Trevino, please report to 251.” After a moment, Kathy Reveles walks in, blond and plump with a wrinkled, kind face. She sits down heavily next to George, then begins to pat his shoulder as he wipes his tears on a sleeve. “I’m all he has,” she tells the court.

  George’s lawyer, Anna Noriega, pleads with Jones to find a reason to keep George in the juvenile system. Unlike a John Sloan, who had so many advantages in life before he became the leader of a botched armed robbery, George has never been much more than a bystander to crime, his lawyer argues. He has never physically hurt anyone. He was an unsophisticated, minor player in a foolish robbery planned and directed by an adult, she says, and he is consumed by remorse.

  “He has been a victim of the system. It’s too soon to give up on this minor. He wants to accept the consequences of his actions. He doesn’t want to go home. He wants to do better. That’s the mind-set we need more of in Juvenile Court. Let’s give him that chance.”

  The fact that he possessed a gun doesn’t mean much anymore in Los Angeles, she adds. “If the crime statistics are to be believed, weapons are all too readily available to our children.”

  George tugs at her, whispering urgently. “Tell her it was unloaded. I told the police that. It was unloaded. I couldn’t have shot anyone.” But Noriega sits down. She had made exactly the same pitch to Jones that John Sloan’s lawyer made to Judge Dorn. But this was a different court, a different day.

  The deputy DA on the case rises, looking uneasy. She is not an uncaring woman, but she represents a certain point of view in the system, one that supports the n
otion that punishment should fit the crime. She looks at George, ignores the knot in her stomach, and does her job. “Yes, everything that happened in his life may have been terrible,” she says. “But there comes a time when it’s on him. . . . The boy did need help. He’s had a terrible life, I’m not contesting that. But on that day, he made a personal choice. On that day, he showed criminal sophistication. He is responsible, not the system. He committed the crime, not the system. . . . Those people in that house were terrorized. There was a baby in that house when the bullets started flying. If that’s not a grave offense, I don’t know what is.”

  It is a familiar argument, and a true one. Even George concedes that. “I made the choice, that’s true,” he says later. “I was there. I went in. Nobody forced me: I chose trouble. But you got to understand. They were my friends. They were all I had. I never hurt anyone. I never wanted to hurt anyone. But you just don’t walk away from your friends.”

  It took a long time sitting in Juvenile Hall for George to articulate these thoughts. But in the courtroom, the words in his head are just a jumble. When the prosecutor sits down, he wants to yell out to Jewell Jones, to plead with her, to explain, to rail. He wants to tell her he is not hopeless, that he is not filled with hatred or violence, that he is not a number, a 300 or 600 or any hundred, but just a kid with no one and nothing, and who would do anything to make it otherwise. Just tell me how, he wants to scream. He wants to tell her what it’s like to have the same dream night after night, that he’s playing tag with his little sister, laughing, happy—then waking up and not knowing if the image in his head is a dim memory, or just something his mind cooked up to fill the black hole. Do you know what it’s like to have no past? he wants to ask. And behind it all, like a ringing in his ears, is the question that really nags at him all the time, the one that has haunted him since he was six years old and his family evaporated. He wants to ask it, then and there and for good: What did I do wrong back then? What did I do to deserve this life?

  But he says none of these things. How could he? And what would it matter if he did? As the prosecutor sits down, he just stares downward at the tear-spattered table, the words lodged in his throat like bile. He begins to sob again, silently, with Kathy’s warm, large hand gently rubbing his back.

  Commissioner Jones is silent a moment. She is a compact woman in her mid-fifties, with tousled auburn hair and a fondness for bright lipstick, brighter nail polish, and large, dangling earrings that sway hypnotically as she speaks. She greets everyone who enters her court with a cheery hello rather than insisting on judicial decorum. All the chairs in her courtroom are labeled with block-lettered strips of manila paper—one chair for the defense attorney, one for the prosecutor, one for the “minor/defendant.” The parents get a pair of chairs, right next to the accused at the defense table—so they become part of the process, rather than being relegated to the audience, as in Dorn’s court and most others in the juvenile system. A former probation officer, Jones is, unabashedly, what other judges refer to snidely as a “social worker on the bench.” She spent most of her judicial career in dependency court dealing with 300 kids, so she is well aware of the forces at work in George’s short, sad life, and she hates sending such kids to adult court. But prosecutors have tried to cow her liberal leanings of late by “papering” her—filing legal papers to have her removed from cases whenever transfers to adult court were at stake. Blanket papering of Judge Dorn by public defenders on every type of case had paralyzed the undermanned juvenile system years earlier, eventually forcing Dorn out of Juvenile Court until his recent return. In Jones’s case, the DA relented after a few months, but prosecutors still treat her like a kid on probation. Decisions vary wildly from one courtroom to the next in Juvenile Court, depending on the judge, the prosecutor, the defense counsel, even the size of the docket or the space available in some program or home. There is no consistency—only luck of the draw. Today, it just so happens that the pressure on Jewell Jones to take a hard line is enormous.

  “This case does indeed come down to responsibility,” Jones says, picking up on the prosecutor’s train of thought. “And the people with responsibility for George, myself included, did not make the right decisions for him. . . . God knows the facts of his life are horrendous. . . . God knows the system should have done better.”

  It seems, then, that the commissioner is about to find George fit for Juvenile Court after all. The prosecutor tenses—perhaps her office gave up on papering Jones too soon. She picks up her pen, ready to jot down anything Jones says—for use on appeal. The defense attorney, meanwhile, leans forward in her seat. Even George looks up for a moment, his sobs stopping. Jones is clearly grappling with what she has to do, right there in open court, the social worker in her battling with that five-prong test that makes it so hard to give a kid like George a break.

  Then the moment passes. Jones looks directly at Kathy Reveles and says, “I’m sorry.” The DA relaxes then, and Jones keeps her eyes averted from George, whose sobs have resumed. They are no longer quiet. His shoulders are heaving now in a mad shrug, his head resting on the scarred wood of the defense table. The DA hands him a tissue.

  “Mistakes have been made,” Jones continues, “but, unfortunately, that’s not enough. The law is very, very tough. If there was some way we could give credit to kids for the crappy things adults have done to them, there would be a lot of credit in that column for George. Unfortunately, I cannot do that.

  “George is sweet, he’s compelling, he’s dear, and he begged me to send him to you,” Jones says, still looking directly at Reveles, wanting her to understand. “I did it, and I probably shouldn’t have. Maybe I should have bitten the bullet and sent him to camp then. Maybe we wouldn’t be here now if I had. Believe me, I lie awake at night wondering about things like that.

  “I’m sorry,” she says again, and now she is looking at the sixteen-year-old boy before her. “I have no choice.” George must be tried as an adult, she rules.

  “That is the order of the court,” Jones says wearily. It is the expected outcome. It is what the law requires. No one will try to appeal it. If Jewell Jones can’t be convinced, no appeals court is going to give George a break. Yet the lawyers, clerks, probation officer and judge, even the DA, all look as if they’d just been punched in the stomach. It is one of those Juvenile Court cases: no one wins.

  Of the four people involved in the failed robbery of Shorty’s house, George has fared the worst. Bambi and JoJo, whose criminal records were no better or worse than George’s, were under sixteen; she got straight probation, he went to a Probation Department camp in the mountains outside of LA for six months. The adult, Villa, entered a plea bargain and got an eight-year prison sentence. That leaves George for the District Attorney’s adult office to hammer, to pursue as a gang member, a violent felon, a sixteen-year-old danger to society. In adult court, he will face a potential sentence of twenty-nine years to life in state prison if convicted of every possible charge against him.

  As the bailiff escorts him from Jones’s courtroom, George, eyes puffy and wet, remembers something and turns to his lawyer. He says, quietly and without a trace of irony, “Thanks for your time.”

  Everyone else files from the courtroom without a word.

  CHAPTER 7

  War

  The surreally violent landscape of Los Angeles street gangs has been transformed this month as if by an earthquake. A deadly and notorious prison-based gang with tentacles throughout Southern California, the Mexican Mafia, has ordered something no cop or prosecutor or social worker has ever been able to muster:

  A truce.

  There will be no more brown-on-brown gangbanging, this gang of gangs has declared. No drive-bys, no hits, no contracts. Latino gangs constantly at war with one another, accounting for thousands of shootings and hundreds of deaths every year, would have to set aside their differences. It was time to work together, to build something greater, the prison gangsters had decided, and there would be no excep
tions. Violations of the truce would be punished by death, quick and without appeal. And unlike the puny threats that emanate from the Juvenile Court, when the Mexican Mafia promises to come to your barrio and hunt you down, you take it seriously. Or you die.

  When law enforcement catches wind of all this, skepticism runs high. There is some hope at first that this truce, however unexpected and rife with ulterior motives it may be, will still bring about a decrease in shootings and murders in Los Angeles (statistics later prove this to be true, at least temporarily). But it soon becomes clear that the motivation behind the truce is not altruism: The purpose is to assemble an army.

  With rival factions united and no longer letting one another’s blood, a lucrative block of the drug trade currently controlled by black street gangs—the Crips and the Bloods—could be wrested away. Gangbanging against black gangs was to continue under the Mexican Mafia truce, and police intelligence uncovered a secondary directive to young gang members to stir up racial confrontations at schools, in Juvenile Hall, in the probation camps, and at CYA. The truce is a cover for a power struggle of epic proportions for the streets of LA.

  A huge meeting has been called in Venice to hand down these directives. Delegates from every major Latino gang in the area are being dispatched to hear about the new order. In response, police patrols have been stepped up, with orders to use any pretense to stop and interrogate gang delegations. This is not precisely legal, but the gangbangers are in no position to assert their constitutional rights. It is part of the game.