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16 Yr. Old Girls....Why Do They Hate Us?
I try to picture what this 16-year-old girl looks like, who she is. I heard that when she was waiting for her case to be called in the Alameda County courthouse last week, she stood on tip-toes, peering through the door of the holding room to see if her grandmother and sister had arrived yet, as if she were backstage at a school play. Yup...just a typical schoolgirl here...nothing to see...move onThose who watched the court proceeding said the girl, who is charged with slashing the throat of a 75-year-old woman in Berkeley, seemed oddly energized, almost perky, You are probably already familiar with the story. The victim was walking with her husband, heading home from a film class. As they passed the girl on the sidewalk near the Berkeley Rose Garden, the girl allegedly took out a knife, cut the woman under the chin and fled in a convertible BMW with another youngish woman. The girl, by all accounts, did not know the victim, did not get any money and was not earning membership into a gang.Un Huh... The woman survived after six hours of surgery on her throat and hand, which was cut when she tried to fend off the knife. Yes, people are knifed and shot and clubbed every day. But generally not so randomly. And generally not by 16-year-old girls. That's why this story is so haunting and unsettling. We want to believe there is an explanation. There is ...bad seed.. Because if there's not, then we may have glimpsed the kind of amorality that some call evil, and everything in us says smooth-faced 16-year-old girls smiling at their grandmas cannot be evil. Walter Jackson, an assistant district attorney in the Alameda County juvenile department, is prosecuting the case. Susan Walsh works on the other side of the aisle; she is in charge of the public defenders in the juvenile department. They agree that the most unsettling aspect of this case is the fact we think it is unusual. Or that we think it has anything to do with evil. The only thing unusual about this case, they say, is its location. There hasn't been a violent attack "If you sat in Juvenile Court, you would see tragic stories just like this one every day,'' Walsh said. Neither she nor Jackson would reveal details about the girl because she is a juvenile. But they talked in general about the dearth of mental-health services in the county -- and throughout the state -- for troubled juveniles. Alameda County, Walsh said, has access to just five beds in the intensive, locked mental-health hospital, known as Level 14 facilities. The rest of the juveniles suffering serious mental illness are kept in the hall, sent home with medication and therapy, or given what are known as mental- health "shadows'' -- caseworkers who accompany the teen all or most of the day. The woman in the BMW with the girl has been identified as a mental-health worker, interesting therapy.. Go murder, it'll make you feel better but no other details have been released. "The mental health system for juveniles in this state is really broken,'' said Nancy Yalon, assistant chief of juvenile probation for San Francisco. Her department has access to fewer than a dozen Level 14 beds, all of them at San Francisco General. "Facilities are going out of business, and others aren't emerging to take their place.'' Boot camp anyone? Jackson, the prosecutor, says in his 30 years working in juvenile justice he has learned that no case is as straightforward as it can seem in the press. He is retiring at the end of the year at age 57, and he sounds tired. He is tired of kids like this girl coming into court without parents. He is tired of hearing rap lyrics that glorify self-centeredness and greed and brutality. Amen He is tired of seeing the strange disconnect between a juvenile detainee's casual demeanor and the seriousness of the crime being charged. "We see kid after kid after kid with no parental upbringing. Abandoned, neglected kids with no value system at all,'' he said. "They're 11, 12, 13 years old and they have no empathy, no nothing. To me that's scary. It's a huge, huge issue. They have no moral base, and then they have mental issues on top of that. It's getting scarier.'' Walsh suggested, when I asked about the random nature of the attack, that it wasn't so random. "You don't know the facts,'' she said. "You are making assumptions that are not necessarily true.'' Perhaps the girl was triggered by something having to do with the mental-health counselor she was with. Perhaps she had a psychotic break. Walsh won't say. I can say no more.. "There is a level of poverty, a level of despair, a level of rudderlessness,'' Walsh said. "These kids have no anchor, no support system, no parenting -- or very little. They are living in a world where they step outside their doors and see murders, drug use, drug dealing. It is godforsaken. Kids in East and West Oakland are living in a war zone that's every bit as dangerous and damaging as any war-torn country.'' Which explains slashing an innocent how? I don't know what this girl looks like, or who she is. But I have seen her before. I have heard her story a thousand times. The victims change. The location, the weapon, the action, they all change. But it always seems to be the same kid walking through the courtroom door in juvenile-hall-issued sweats. Over and over and over. How many more times do we need to see this kid before we figure out what to do? How about quit subsidising welfare births? Can we find solutions in more mental-health services, more parental accountability You Bet, better schools, safer streets? Do kids go mad because they live in madness? I don't have the answer. Nobody has the answer, at least not an all- encompassing, string-theory answer. But the jolting horror of a 16-year-old's attack on an old woman at least can raise critical questions that might inch us closer. Walsh has been around too long to get her hopes up. "In a month,'' she said, "nobody is even going to be talking about this.'' Joan Ryan's column runs Thursday and Sunday. You can e-mail her at joanryan@sfchronicle.com. Posted by: Warthog 2005-03-27 |
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