US jury convicts once powerful Haitian gang leader in kidnapping of US missionaries
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — A U.S. jury has found a once powerful Haitian gang leader guilty of organizing the kidnapping of 16 U.S. citizens in 2021 and holding them hostage for more than two months.
Germine Joly, whom authorities said led the 400 Mawozo gang in Haiti, will be sentenced later this year following Friday's conviction at a federal courthouse in Washington, D.C.
Joly, who has denied involvement with the gang, was sentenced to 35 years in prison last year after pleading guilty to weapons smuggling and the laundering of ransom related to the mass kidnapping.
Haitian police arrested Joly in 2014, and he was sentenced to life in prison in 2018. Authorities said he still directed gang operations from prison, including the October 2021 kidnapping of 16 Americans, including five children, and a Canadian who worked with the Ohio-based Christian Aid Ministries . The children were ages 6 and 3 and 8 months old.
The gang initially demanded $1 million each for the hostages or, alternatively, the release of Joly from prison. The first hostages were released in November 2021, with a $350,000 ransom eventually paid for the release of the remaining captives.
The Haitian government extradited Joly in 2022.
Joly, known as 'Yonyon,' was co-leader of the 400 Mawozo gang, which translates roughly to '400 simpletons.' It controls part of Croix-des-Bouquets, a neighborhood in the eastern region of the Port-au-Prince capital and surrounding areas. The gang also operates along a route that connects the capital with the border city of Jimaní in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti.
The gang is still led by Joseph Wilson, best known as 'Lanmò San Jou,' which means 'death has no date,' and it is an ally of G-Pep, a gang federation that is now part of a powerful gang coalition known as 'Viv Ansanm.'
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D.C. juvenile court's reliance on ankle monitors had deadly outcomes
The boys were in trouble. Maurice Jackson Jr., 15, and Mylaki Young, 16, had both missed too much school and were suspected of committing crimes. By late 2022, they were living with five other teens in a vacant apartment in Southeast Washington. The place was strewn with ghost gun parts and bullets. After police raided the apartment, both boys were arrested. In D.C. Superior Court, Mylaki was charged with being a habitual runaway, while Maurice was already facing criminal charges from a prior arrest. The teens were outfitted with GPS ankle monitors to track them while they were free in the community, awaiting the resolution of their court cases. 'Youth installed on device 22-028488,' noted Mylaki's court record on Dec. 9, 2022, when Judge Sherri Beatty-Arthur ordered him released. '... Charger and instructions were provided.' It was Mylaki's first time on 'the box,' as many teens called it. But for Maurice, the box was nothing new. He had worn one just a few weeks earlier. The monitors were supposed to help authorities keep watch over them. From left: Tyshaune Young; her son, Mylaki Young; Maurice Jackson Jr.; and his mother, Brittney Malloy. (Family photos) But a Washington Post investigation reveals that D.C. juvenile court officials have lost track of at-risk young people at critical moments, as they have perpetrated crime or fallen victim to it, according to a trove of confidential documents and interviews with parents, guardians, former probation officers and court-involved teens. Rather than a secure way to track those suspected of crime, The Post found, it is a flawed system that relies on children as young as 12 to charge and maintain their own devices and that has been slow to act when they go dark. Five young people died while wearing ankle monitors under court supervision during a six-week span in the fall of 2023, according to previous comments from court and local officials. Also in 2023, a teen wearing a GPS monitor with a dead battery was charged in connection with the shooting death of another teen. Last summer, a 16-year-old boy wearing an ankle monitor was arrested after he allegedly shot and wounded three women. And last fall, a 12-year-old boy went missing after a judge admonished him for failing to charge his monitor but released him anyway. Some teens told The Post they have to sit with their monitors attached to an electrical outlet for hours to receive a charge that, until recently, would last only about 48 hours. One teen said the device is uncomfortable to charge while he is sleeping so he often lets the battery die, usually with no repercussions. 'What happens? Nothing,' he said. 'There is no point.' Others said they don't want to charge a device that will track them and possibly link them to crimes. One 17-year-old boy told The Post that wearing a charged monitor was not a deterrent: He said he robbed several people while being tracked. 'It's ridiculous to say to these kids, 'Charge these devices,'' said a former juvenile probation officer who, like several others, spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential proceedings. 'Why would I charge a device that's going to connect me to a crime? It's crazy to me.' Yet by the time Mylaki and Maurice were each ordered to wear an ankle monitor, the technology had been widely embraced by the D.C. juvenile court system. About 125 to 150 youths a day wear GPS monitors under D.C. juvenile court supervision while facing charges arising from robberies, auto thefts and possession of weapons, among other offenses. By contrast, in the mid-2000s, an average of 40 juveniles a day — mostly nonviolent offenders — wore ankle monitors under court supervision, annual reports show. One D.C. juvenile judge recently told The Post that he estimates 4 out of 5 youths under court supervision will at some point wear the devices. D.C.'s juvenile justice pipeline This series examines the District's juvenile justice system, a constellation of agencies tasked with preventing children and teens from becoming caught up in crime and rehabilitating those who have violated the law. Click on the tabs to learn more about key parts of the system, including public schools, the police and the youth detention facility, which are overseen by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D). Schools Police Courts Detention Rehabilitation Once arrested, a teen may face charges in court The Metropolitan Police Department, or D.C. police, is often the first agency that juveniles encounter in the criminal justice system. Juvenile arrests reached record highs in 2023, leading to an outpouring of community concern. In April, Police Chief Pamela A. Smith launched the Juvenile Investigative Response Unit to improve how police respond to youth crime. The court's reliance on ankle monitors has followed a broader national embrace of the technology as an alternative to juvenile incarceration, with a growing body of research finding that jailing youths does not improve recidivism rates and can cause long-term harm. D.C. judges often require ankle monitors for juveniles who have been arrested and released, allowing them the benefits of staying in school and being with their families until their next court hearings. The monitors are rarely, if ever, used in isolation; youths are often ordered to abide by a curfew and report for after-school programs and other services. The job of supervising these teens falls to probation officers who work for the Family Court Social Services Division, a small agency that is part of the federally funded D.C. Superior Court system and provides updates in an annual report to Congress. These officers keep notes on good and bad behavior for each youth under their watch and can recommend that judges loosen or tighten the rules. In some of the cases reviewed by The Post, however, judges continued to release D.C. teens on GPS monitors despite records of poor compliance. And some experts say the practice has exploded in popularity despite no evidence that it acts as an effective behavioral deterrent or rehabilitative tool for developing adolescent brains. Kate Weisburd, a law professor at the University of California College of the Law in San Francisco, said that she understands the appeal of ankle monitors, but it's a 'false narrative' to assume that they improve safety or lead to better outcomes for youths. 'It puts the onus on the young person to abide by all these conditions, and it shifts the responsibility away from institutions, systems and officials whose job it is to support young people,' said Weisburd, a former juvenile defense attorney who has studied the rise of GPS monitoring. 'A monitor is just a black box. It doesn't educate young people, it doesn't rehabilitate them, it's not a substitute for going to school or getting counseling or things like that. … It's like a poor, Band-Aid solution, if you will.' GPS ankle monitors like this one are used to track young people suspected of crime. (Valerie Plesch/For The Washington Post) Terri Odom, the longtime director of the Court Social Services Division in D.C., left her position at the end of February, two days after The Post requested an interview with her to discuss the deaths of juveniles under her agency's supervision. Odom, who said she had previously announced her intention to retire after 20 years of employment, referred questions to current court officials. Court spokesman Doug Buchanan declined to make any court officials, including the chief judge of D.C. Superior Court, Milton C. Lee Jr., and the interim director of the Court Social Services Division, Tamira Roberson, available for interviews. Buchanan issued a written statement that the division 'continues to direct extensive efforts to increasing the safety of youth under our supervision in collaboration with local stakeholders.' In addition to GPS monitoring, the agency conducts home and school visits, facilitates family group conferences, provides tutoring and mentoring services, and does curfew checks in person and by telephone, the statement said. Buchanan suggested that The Post had focused only on cases with tragic outcomes. 'The Court and our staff make rulings and reach difficult decisions every day — and we will continue to do so — as we play our part in helping to pave a path to a brighter future for the District and all of those we serve,' he wrote. The Post asked the spokesman if court officials have any research showing that electronic monitoring improves outcomes in the juvenile justice system. None was provided. A spokeswoman for Securus Monitoring, the company that provided ankle monitors for D.C.'s juvenile court until 2023, said that the technology supports public safety efforts and referred questions to local officials. Lindsey Appiah, the District's deputy mayor for public safety and justice, said she believes GPS can be an effective tool for certain teens, but only when used with extensive safeguards. 'When they violate those conditions, there really does have to be escalating levels of reaction and response and consequence,' said Appiah, whose office has no oversight over the juvenile court system. '... I don't think that it is working the way that it was intended.' As Mylaki and Maurice each walked out of the courthouse in early December 2022, the monitors strapped to their ankles gave them a chance to start anew. It was a familiar gamble of sorts, with court officials relying on the devices to help reform the boys. The stakes, as it turns out, would be life or death. 'To hell and back' How the boys became friends is unclear, but Maurice and Mylaki (pronounced MAL-uh-kai) certainly had much in common: They were both raised by young, single Black mothers in Southeast Washington neighborhoods where gun violence was common. 'The District of Crime,' Brittney Malloy, Maurice's mother, quipped in a Post interview, shaking her head. Neither boy had a close relationship with his father. Maurice's was locked up in 2008, when his son was an infant, and stayed behind bars for all of his son's childhood — first for armed robbery in D.C. and then for murder in Maryland, records show. The identity of Mylaki's father is uncertain, said his mother, Tyshaune Young. Both of the men who possibly fathered him were shot and killed in separate homicides in Southeast Washington, she said. Tyshaune, Mylaki and his little brother stayed at homeless shelters and friends' apartments before securing a housing voucher for an apartment on Savannah Terrace, a stretch of road in Southeast notorious for shootings. The family often heard gunfire. One day, bullets from a drive-by shooting pierced their neighbor's wall. Tyshaune wanted out. In 2018, she and her boys moved into an apartment on Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington. 'Mylaki went to hell and back with me,' Tyshaune said of his early years, in an interview with The Post. 'I was a teen mom who took care of my children. Even with or without their fathers, I took care of them.' Tyshaune Young with her son's belongings at her home in the District. 'Mylaki went to hell and back with me,' she said of his early years. (Valerie Plesch/For The Washington Post) At Alice Deal Middle School, teachers praised Mylaki's reading skills. He told his mom he would be the first in his family to go to college. When Mylaki started high school at what became Jackson-Reed in Tenleytown, he made new friends. In 2022, during the spring of his second year, the 15-year-old stayed out hours past the 9:30 p.m. curfew that Tyshaune said she set for him. Sometimes he wouldn't come home at all: 'Literally, my house became an ongoing missing person report,' Tyshaune said. She called the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, which prepared several missing person reports about Mylaki in May, July and September 2022. Each time, after several days away, Mylaki would eventually return home. Mylaki on the steps outside Jackson-Reed High School in D.C.'s Tenleytown neighborhood. (Family photo) Tyshaune said she installed a camera in his bedroom to deter him from climbing out the window. But on Oct. 3, 2022, Mylaki left again. After Oct. 20, he stopped showing up at school. He still answered some calls and texts from family members until Nov. 5, when the 16-year-old cut off communications with Tyshaune. For at least the third time that year, police circulated Mylaki's photo on a 'critical missing person' flier. When Tyshaune wasn't working shifts as a security guard, she tried to find Mylaki herself: scouring the aisles of a CVS where he had been known to hang out, asking her apartment building's front desk staff to keep an eye out and enlisting his brother, now 14, to gather leads from other teens. By mid-November, a prosecutor with the Office of the D.C. Attorney General sought to classify Mylaki as a 'person in need of supervision' under a statute that allows the juvenile court to intervene with habitual runaways. A judge signed an order empowering law enforcement officers who encountered Mylaki to take him into custody. But first, they had to find him. 'One more chance' Maurice also had a bright future that seemingly went missing along with him. He loved football and roller-skating, and as he grew into a young man, he talked of becoming an entrepreneur. But 'as he got older, it got harder,' Brittney said of raising Maurice, her only child. He went to high school at Ron Brown College Preparatory, an all-male D.C. public school a few blocks from the Deanwood Metro station, near the Maryland-D.C. line. When he was a freshman, someone stole his sneakers, Brittney said. Then he was robbed a second time. These robberies seemed to change him, his mother said. At times, Maurice attended classes virtually because of concerns about his safety. Maurice sometimes lived with Brittney, who worked as a hairstylist. At other times, he stayed with one of his grandmothers. Because of his mother's privacy concerns, The Post agreed to withhold most details about Maurice's home life. That includes the family's involvement with the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, as well as specific crimes he is alleged to have committed, information that is usually kept confidential for juveniles. A necklace Brittney Malloy wears with a photo of her and her son. Maurice loved football and roller-skating and had talked of becoming an entrepreneur, but 'as he got older, it got harder,' Brittney said of raising him. (Valerie Plesch/For The Washington Post) By 2022, the newly turned 15-year-old was spiraling. He had disappeared several times. The longest stretch was six days. Like Mylaki, he was featured on a police flier as a critically missing person. On a Saturday afternoon in October 2022, D.C. police arrested Maurice following an incident in Southwest Washington that resulted in eight criminal charges against him. Hours later, a friend shared on Instagram a photo of Maurice, his face mostly obscured by a black ski mask. 'Free my boy,' the friend wrote. It was Mylaki. The decision of what to do with Maurice rested with Judge Beatty-Arthur. A report filed by the Court Social Services Division recommended that Maurice be sent to a shelter house because of concerns about the risk he posed to public safety. He had fled from police and run away from home and the charges against him were serious, the agency noted. But prosecutors and Maurice's defense attorney jointly recommended that Maurice be released, which allowed them to avoid a hearing over the strength of the evidence. The judge ordered him freed with certain conditions: He must wear a GPS monitor, attend school and follow an around-the-clock curfew with few exceptions. On Oct. 31, 2022, Maurice was 'installed on [electronic monitoring] device #12-736630 and given a charger with instructions,' according to a court record. For a few weeks, his behavior improved. Maurice attended a wedding. His probation officer commended him for being responsive to his calls. A judge then allowed Maurice to have the ankle monitor removed and extended his curfew to 8 p.m. Maurice's compliance soon backtracked. When his probation officer, Ali Eltayeib, tried to reach him for a curfew check, his phone was turned off. At Ron Brown, he had 23 unexcused absences. By early December 2022, Eltayeib's notes reflected a growing sense of urgency to rein in Maurice, who had been missing for several days. The officer began drafting documents to try to bring Maurice back before a judge. Then, Maurice finally spoke to Eltayeib by phone, asking for 'one more chance.' The officer agreed, albeit with considerable hesitation. There would be 'no more chances after that,' Eltayeib warned Maurice late on the evening of Dec. 5. Around dawn on Dec. 7, officers from the Metropolitan Police Department's Violent Crime Impact Team and detectives from the Carjacking Task Force raided a third-floor apartment on Good Hope Court SE. The adult son of an elderly neighbor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of safety concerns, described the early-morning commotion as officers led out seven boys, one by one. They ranged in age from 13 to 16, records show. Mylaki and Maurice were among them. The apartment By official accounts, the boys were often missing. In reality, they weren't exactly hiding. Like many teens, they broadcast the minutiae of their daily lives on social media. In late 2022, videos posted to Instagram showed Mylaki, Maurice and other teen boys inside the dirty apartment. There, they slept on mattresses on the floor, smoked marijuana and cooked corn dogs on an electric hot plate. Maurice and Mylaki gained access to the vacant property near the Anacostia neighborhood through a friend's aunt. In a brief interview with The Post, the woman, Rylinda Rhodes, confirmed she had allowed her nephew and his friends to stay there for about a month. 'I wanted them to have a safe place,' said Rhodes, who described herself as a local business owner and anti-gun-violence advocate. '... Unfortunately, that didn't work out well.' Police narrowed in on the apartment while investigating a string of violent crimes. The previous night, an Uber Eats driver had dropped off food at a residence near the Hillcrest neighborhood of Southeast Washington. When the driver returned to his car, a blue Toyota Corolla, he later told police, a man holding a semiautomatic handgun knocked on his window. Then, three more people swarmed the other side of his car, rapping on his windows and telling him to get out. At gunpoint, the driver handed over his keys and watched as the perpetrators drove off in his car. The following morning, during the raid of the apartment where Mylaki and Maurice were staying, police said, they found one of the boys' friends sitting on the stolen Corolla key. Another boy in the group had Audi and Infiniti keys dangling from his belt loop. Police also recovered a 9mm black ghost gun, a firearm assembled from parts purchased online, in a bedroom closet. In the living room, they found a red ghost gun with a manufacturing kit and a drill. And — in what appeared to be a jury-rigged attempt to imitate a rifle — a tactical-style flashlight had been taped to a cane. Loose ammunition was scattered around the apartment. Neither Mylaki nor Maurice was alleged to have participated in the carjacking of the Uber Eats driver. But police claimed in their reports that some of the boys within the apartment, including Mylaki, were tied to other crimes. A photo Tyshaune Young took of her son so that she could retrieve his belongings from a detention center after an apartment raid that led to his arrest. She says the photo haunts her in hindsight because of Mylaki's expression. (Tyshaune Young) A month earlier, police said, several boys had stolen a Hyundai Elantra and used it to commit separate armed robberies of two high school students in Northeast Washington near H.D. Woodson High School and KIPP DC College Preparatory. The assailants struck the two victims with a handgun, according to police reports, injuring their faces and taking their sneakers, cellphones, a Canada Goose jacket, Blistex lip balm and a bottle of Gatorade. Police alleged that Mylaki's sneakers matched those of a perpetrator in surveillance footage from after the robberies. They arrested him on charges of unauthorized use of a vehicle, two counts of armed robbery and possession of an unregistered firearm and ammunition, according to records. Maurice, too, was arrested following the apartment raid. Both boys were taken to the city's juvenile detention center to wait for their initial appearances in court. The next day, on Dec. 8, 2022, each boy got a big break: the Office of the Attorney General, which decides whether to prosecute juvenile offenses in the District, declined to pursue criminal charges against Maurice or Mylaki. 'Prosecutors can only charge what they can prove,' a spokesman for the office said in a written statement. 'OAG charges every serious offense, especially gun offenses, when we have the evidence to prove the case in court.' In response, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police Department stated that while confidentiality laws prohibit commenting on specific juvenile arrests, 'all MPD arrests are made with probable cause.' Device #22-014087 Maurice was refitted with an ankle monitor, given a charger and released. Device #22-014087 was his second monitor in less than a month. Though he avoided new criminal charges after the apartment raid, he was still under court supervision for his earlier criminal case. 'Maurice explained himself and indicated a lot of the incidents were all taken out of context / wrong place wrong time / or just coincidence,' Eltayeib, his probation officer, wrote. School staff at Ron Brown described him as disruptive and troublesome and said they feared that he would 'be seen on the news' if his behavior did not change. Maurice's mother texted Eltayeib that if her son was killed on the street, 'I'll place some of the blame on you. I get a call everyday saying he's not in school. … he's still outside with the box on.' Eltayeib replied that he 'is always watching the youth's tracker.' One night in mid-December, Eltayeib called Maurice for his 8 p.m. curfew check. There was no answer. Maurice's GPS data placed him in District Heights, Maryland. Later that night, Eltayeib received a phone call from a Prince George's County police officer. Maurice had been arrested during a traffic stop and was facing several criminal charges. 'I told him it would probably be safest if he was not released, to prevent him from running away,' Eltayeib said he told police. Prince George's authorities held Maurice at the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center for several weeks. He turned 16 during his stay. Before sending him home in mid-January, Maryland officials cut off his D.C. ankle monitor and installed their own GPS device as his case there was pending. It was the third ankle monitor he had worn in as many months. GPS device was a point of contention, texts show Maurice's mother, Brittney Malloy, and his D.C. probation officer, Ali Eltayeib, texted about Maurice's ankle monitor after he was rearrested, according to Eltayeib's notes. 12/20/2022 Text message sent to Brittany Malloy: 'Good morning. Yes I was monitoring Maurice's box . That is how I saw he was on Maryland as I approached the home for curfews. He was arrested there last night and detained ████████████████████████████.' A.E. 12/20/2022 Text message received from Ms. Brittany Malloy: 'Hes been outside Your not doing your job Had u been doing your he wouldn't even be there' A.E. This excerpt was quoted as it was written, including a misspelling of Brittney Malloy's name. The Post has highlighted a reference to Maurice's 'box,' which is slang for an ankle monitor, and has redacted details about confidential juvenile criminal charges. Joyriding Though Mylaki faced no criminal charges, he was upset to learn that he still had to go to court. Prosecutors alleged he was a habitual runaway, defining him as a 'person in need of supervision,' or PINS, for short. In the past, D.C. judges could send these young people to secure detention, but that practice drew the ire of lawmakers and advocates who contended that incarceration drives youths further into the justice system. A D.C. law enacted in 2017 barred the practice. Beatty-Arthur, the judge, had limited options. She could have sent Mylaki to a shelter-care facility, which offers a safe, structured environment but is not considered secure detention. Instead, against the recommendation of a probation officer — who described Mylaki as a 'flight risk' and recommended a shelter-care facility — she sent him home to his mother on an ankle monitor. Tyshaune knew the law's limits but felt frustrated that her son was not facing consequences. If Mylaki did what the police alleged, 'he should have been locked up,' she told The Post. After the hearing, Mylaki and Tyshaune met an officer from the Court Social Services Division to discuss the rules. Mylaki needed to be home by 6 every night. There could be fines if he lost his charger or cut off the monitor, and he would need to avoid baths, which could damage the device. Mylaki repeated the rules back to the officer: 'I can't tamper with it. I can't cut it off.' Then, Tyshaune said, her son gave a sly smile. The officer told him that it was not a joke. Over a week later, a friend from school, Mckenzie Crawford, was scrolling through Instagram when she saw that Mylaki had posted a photo. It alluded to stealing cars, she said. Crawford angrily messaged him, writing that 'all y'all do is sell weed and get cars.' She asked Mylaki to consider the victims — parents 'working all day n night' to be able to afford a car. 'Y'all don't know what y'all [are] doing, for real,' she wrote to Mylaki on Dec. 18, 2022. '… It's most likely not [gonna] end good.' By Jan. 4, 2023, his monitor's battery had died, records show. On Jan. 10, he missed his scheduled court date, and Judge Robert Salerno issued a custody order seeking to bring him back to court. With a dead GPS battery, teen goes missing Excerpts from D.C. juvenile court records show how officials lost track of Mylaki in January 2023, just weeks after he was released on an ankle monitor. 1/11/2023 10:00 AM Curfew 6pm Electronic Monitoring YES Substance Usage MARIJUANA overall adjustment POOR The youth came under this writer's supervision for habitual runaway. While the youth is briefly before the Court, he started with compliance during the first week. However since that first week the youth has been in complete non compliance. The youth is on electronic monitoring, but his device is currently not charged. His whereabouts are unable to be tracked. The youth is currently not attending school daily. The youth consumes marijuana daily. Also at thsi time the youth is known to travel around the city in stolen cars. The custody order is outstanding, and his whereabouts are unknown. This excerpt was quoted as it was written. The Post has highlighted notes that refer to GPS monitoring. 'The youth is joyriding around town in stolen cars,' according to notes in Mylaki's court file. '… The youth is on electronic monitoring but his device is currently not charged. His whereabouts are unable to be tracked.' Mylaki's new probation officer, Nathan Johnson, searched for him at school, visited his apartment building and tried to call him — all with no luck. By Feb. 6, Mylaki's GPS monitor had been dead for so long — over 33 days — that the Court Social Services Division marked it 'terminated.' Three days later, Tyshaune heard a knock on the door in the late evening. Mylaki had come home. 'I guess this is becoming the norm for you,' Tyshaune said she told him. 'What?' he asked. 'Running away,' she answered. He showered, ate dinner and went to sleep. In the morning, she notified law enforcement. Officers allowed her to drape a jacket over Mylaki's handcuffed wrists before they walked him to the police car. Fearing for their lives The trouble that Mylaki and Maurice had begun to get into in 2022 carried over well into 2023, a year in which the highest rates of juvenile crime in more than a generation would grip the District. The boys could not escape it, but rather came to embody the crisis. Maurice — back in the District after his stint in custody in Maryland — needed a new D.C. ankle monitor. Eltayeib, his probation officer, installed it 'on the right ankle because the youth had a [Maryland] device on the left ankle,' according to his notes. For a brief time, Maurice was double-boxed. Still, he was feeling unsafe. Maurice showed up to a curfew check with a bruised face. During another conversation, he told his officer he was scared to go to school after someone attempted to shoot his 'opps,' street slang for an opposing crew. 'Maurice was reminded that his life is more valuable than he thinks,' Eltayeib wrote, advising him to stay indoors. A judge had sent Mylaki to a shelter-care facility after his mother turned him in. He stayed there for several weeks before being released, again wearing an ankle monitor. Now, he held similar fears as his friend Maurice. When a probation officer attempted to take Mylaki to a basketball court, the teen 'explained he had to remain in the car due to neighborhood concerns.' Later, he requested that the officer drop him off at home last because he feared 'other youths would see where he lives.' In early March 2023, Mylaki underwent a 'psychoeducational' evaluation at the courthouse, to help identify any mental health conditions or a need for counseling, mentoring or job resources. Help us report on D.C.'s response to youth crime The Washington Post wants to hear from people affected by or with knowledge of the District's juvenile justice system and the city's efforts to prevent and address youth crime. Have a tip? Reach our team using this submission form. Previous Next Mylaki was polite and friendly, the interviewer noted. He said he used marijuana daily and had tried codeine, a substance that users sometimes mix with soda to feel high. During the evaluation, he appeared drowsy and nodded off for 15 minutes. The boy who had once boasted to family that he would attend college 'did not report any future goals after high school and did not show concerns or a desire to earn his high school diploma.' Although Mylaki was in his third year at Jackson-Reed, he was so far behind that he was classified as a freshman. He remarked that he had lost several friends to gun violence but shrugged it off as an everyday occurrence, repeating a cautionary phrase he learned from his mom: 'Bullets don't name names.' A week after the evaluation, Mylaki went missing again. His probation officer drafted and submitted a custody order seeking to bring him back before a judge. On March 28, Mylaki attended a court hearing through a virtual meeting platform. Tyshaune also watched online as her son appeared on a video screen from a room in a house that she did not recognize. Judge Salerno directed the teen to contact his defense attorney and turn himself in. After the hearing, Tyshaune and Mylaki briefly talked to each other through their screens. She told him that she loved him. 'I love you too, Mom,' he said, before ending the call. His GPS battery died the next day. Days later, Mylaki's probation officer emailed Lydia Wade, his defense attorney. 'I was just checking to see if you have heard from the youth since the hearing?' Johnson wrote to Wade on April 3. She hadn't: 'Where is he?' Shots fired In the early-morning hours of Friday, April 14, 2023, Mylaki was about four miles away from his mother's home, where he was supposed to be under a strict curfew. Instead, he was with friends at LeDroit Park, cleaning up after a cookout, when a car drove by and its occupants began shooting, witnesses would later tell Tyshaune. A gunfire detection system captured 13 rounds of gunfire fired on V Street NW at 2:45 a.m. Two minutes later, at 2:47 a.m., police responded to find that a teen had been shot. Mylaki was pronounced dead at 3:15 a.m. at a hospital. His mother later went to the medical examiner's office and listened as an employee explained the process for identifying the body of a loved one. She would hand Tyshaune a manila folder, and inside there would be a photo of a deceased young man. Tyshaune would need to confirm that it was Mylaki. 'Please let it be someone else,' Tyshaune prayed. But when she opened the folder, she saw the face of her firstborn son. He looked as if he were asleep. She screamed and then sobbed. Days before death, teen's whereabouts unknown Mylaki had not charged his ankle monitor for more than two weeks before he was killed on April 14, records show. 4/12/2023 5:56 PM EM device alerts emailed to PO Johnson. Device currently dead and has not called in since 3/28. 4/13/2023 10:04 AM The youth's custody order remains outstanding. 4/13/2023 10:12 AM Good morning, Thank you for this update the youth currently is out on an active custody order please make me aware if the youth comes back online. Thank you. 4/14/2023 10:34 AM The youth's custody order remains outstanding. 4/14/2023 10:35 AM The youth had not returned home and is still in abscondence. 4/14/2023 10:41 AM This writer spoke to Ms. Young she reported that the youth was shot on REED street last night. This writer attempted to counsel the youth. This excerpt was quoted as it was written. The sequencing was reordered for clarity. The Post has highlighted notes from officials about their lack of awareness of Mylaki's whereabouts during his final days. The autopsy reported that a bullet entered the right side of Mylaki's abdomen, ripping through his bowels, tearing an artery and shattering his pelvis on its way out of his left hip. The report included other details, like the teen's sparse facial hair and a piercing in his left earlobe. And then a description from the deputy medical examiner: 'A black electronic monitor with the serial number '22-065474' encircles the left ankle.' Officials updated Mylaki's court records to state that he was the victim of a homicide. VeriTraks, a software platform for the GPS vendor, Securus Monitoring, asked court employees for help retrieving the ankle monitor from the medical examiner's office. One of the final entries in Mylaki's case file states: 'Device 22-065474 will be terminated from this youth at this time.' Mylaki's grave site at Rock Creek Cemetery. (Valerie Plesch/For The Washington Post) 'You need to charge it ASAP' Maurice, who had worn a monitor on each ankle, had been offered a path out of the juvenile justice system in the weeks before his friend's death. In Maryland, officials agreed to dispose of his charges after six months of probation. In D.C., he pleaded guilty to two charges from his October 2022 arrest, and in exchange, prosecutors agreed to drop the remaining charges. The deal required that he complete 20 hours of community service, follow court orders and stay out of trouble through the end of 2023. But days after a D.C. judge signed the agreement, Maurice began breaking curfew and missing school. GPS data showed he had been all over the city. 'Maurice continues to remain 'out and about' despite verbalizing feeling unsafe,' Eltayeib wrote on April 5, 2023. After Mylaki was shot and killed, Maurice wore a black sweatshirt printed with photos of his friend. Following a move from his grandmother's house to live with Brittney again, Maurice received a new probation officer, Carlos Bernal. Over a weekend in June, Maurice stayed out one Saturday night and did not come home. Brittney texted Bernal to ask him to help find Maurice by checking his GPS data. 'Ms. Malloy, I do not generally work during the weekend,' the officer responded on Monday. 'But I can check his device now. So he did not return all weekend?' He then texted Maurice about his dead GPS monitor: 'You need to charge it ASAP.' Over the summer, Maurice sometimes failed to answer calls for his curfew checks, missed an office visit with Bernal and was admonished for losing the charger for his ankle monitor. In August 2023, D.C. police arrested Maurice again. He was charged with 11 criminal offenses that authorities alleged he committed from the previous March to May. Maurice was 'very upset he was being named for something he was adamant he had no parts of,' his probation officer noted. The Office of the Attorney General and the Court Social Services Division recommended that Maurice be held in the city's juvenile detention center. Judge Sherry Trafford instead released Maurice on an ankle monitor. By then, he had worn a GPS device much of the previous 10 months. Maurice Jackson and Judge Sherry Trafford signed a document on Aug. 14, 2023, agreeing to the terms of his release following another rearrest. Maurice was ordered to wear a GPS monitor. The bolding of Maurice's name was added by The Post. (Document obtained by The Washington Post) Maurice soon enrolled at Dunbar High School in the Truxton Circle neighborhood of Northwest. He missed classes, sometimes at his mother's urging, because she worried he could be in danger, Brittney said. Other times, Maurice went to school anyway. On Sept. 26, 2023, a doorbell camera recorded him leaving their apartment. 'Sorry, Ma,' he said to the camera. 'I'm going to school.' He smiled, waved and walked away. After classes ended for the day, Maurice was among a crowd of boys on New Jersey Avenue NW, a couple of blocks from the school. Surveillance footage shows two groups converging and then suddenly scurrying in different directions. Maurice sprints and then staggers across the street, flagging down a crossing guard for help. He had been shot. At 4:15 p.m., he was pronounced dead at a hospital. His autopsy report revealed that he sustained two gunshot wounds. One bullet entered his right leg, while the other traveled through the left side of his chest and pierced his lung and heart, killing him. 'A black ankle monitor is around the left leg,' the deputy medical examiner noted. In a final report written after Maurice's death, his probation officer presented a favorable picture of his behavior. 'Maurice was compliant with his [electronic monitoring] protocol,' wrote Bernal. 'Also responded quickly to any issues with the device.' Bernal did not respond to The Post's request for comment, including about why he concluded that Maurice had followed the rules despite his history of violations. Meanwhile, in a group chat on Instagram, one of Maurice's friends shared a grim realization. 'I just thought about it,' the boy wrote. Maurice 'never got to get off da box.' Brittney Malloy speaks during a dinner and ceremony she called the 'First Annual Blue Tie Affair' in honor of Maurice. (Valerie Plesch/For The Washington Post) Epilogue About two months after Maurice's death, the Court Social Services Division ended its years-long contract with Securus Monitoring, the brand name of the company that provided the GPS ankle monitors worn by juveniles in the D.C. court system. Securus has touted its BLUtag GPS monitors as 'the industry standard.' But D.C. court officials grew concerned that a battery that took two hours to fully charge lasted only 48 hours. In 2023, they began looking for a monitor with a longer battery life and contracted with Sentinel, the company that provides the Omnilink OM500 monitor. Buchanan, the court spokesman, said the new monitors offer a one-hour charge for a five-day battery life, the ability to program geographic boundaries known as exclusion zones and 'enhanced command features including vibration, beeping and siren alerts.' The spokesman declined to disclose how much money had been spent on GPS devices. The court's reliance on ankle monitors was raised during a May 2024 community forum in Southeast Washington, where several local officials gathered to discuss the challenges of supervising young offenders. 'There were some limitations,' said Odom, who was still the director of the Court Social Services Division, of her agency's use of the devices. Then, she issued a mea culpa on juvenile deaths. 'Let me say this: We acknowledge that it was a failure. That five of our young people whose lives were cut short had our equipment on, equipment issued by the court,' she said. Odom, seemingly, was referring to previous remarks from D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) that five young people wearing ankle monitors died from September to October 2023. The court spokesman declined to answer questions about who was counted in the death toll and how many of the youths were wearing ankle monitors with dead batteries at the time of their deaths. At the forum, Odom acknowledged the limited battery life of the ankle monitors that D.C. had relied on for years. 'Two days is just simply not enough,' she said. Still, she said that longer-lasting batteries would not have deterred teens from making decisions that put them at risk. 'Again, any loss of a young person's life is painful. It's regretful,' Odom said at the forum. '... But I will say that out of that, there was a great commitment that emerged, and we have retooled how we operate and the use of the equipment.' No one has been arrested in the killings of Mylaki and Maurice. Then-acting D.C. police chief Pamela A. Smith briefs reporters on two homicides, including Maurice's, that happened on Sept. 26, 2023. (Peter Hermann/The Washington Post) Police believe a 14-year-old boy shot and killed Mylaki as part of a feud between two neighborhood groups, according to investigative details shared by a D.C. detective with Tyshaune. A teen boy who was friends with Mylaki then shot and killed the 14-year-old in retaliation, the detective told her. The other occupants of the car thought to be involved in Mylaki's shooting have not been apprehended. A Metropolitan Police Department spokesperson said Mylaki's homicide investigation remains active, with a $25,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest and conviction. Maurice's homicide was ruled administratively closed by police after the U.S. attorney's office declined to prosecute the case, according to the MPD spokesperson. During a July 2024 phone call with Brittney, a prosecutor said evidence showed that Maurice had planned to commit a robbery and that the person who killed him did so in self-defense. When police found Maurice, he had no gun in his possession, the prosecutor told her. * * * Brittney buried Maurice in Rock Creek Cemetery, the oldest in Washington. For months after his October 2023 burial, she saved money to buy a custom marker for his plot. Last summer, she drove to the cemetery with a shovel, a hoe and a headstone rimmed with Maurice's favorite color, blue. The sun beat down on her forehead as she anchored the stone in the earth. Brittney motioned down the row to the grave site of a 16-year-old boy. Mylaki Young. He was buried three plots over. By chance, just a few feet separated the bodies of the boys who had once been friends. Brittney Malloy, left, visits her son's grave site with a friend. Maurice was buried just three plots over from his friend Mylaki at Rock Creek Cemetery. (Valerie Plesch/For The Washington Post)
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How D.C.'s failure to curb truancy fueled a surge in youth crime
How the District's failure to curb truancy in middle schools yielded the biggest youth crime surge in a generation. As the first bell rang at Brookland Middle School on April 3, 2024, Irving LaBoard's desk sat empty. An hour earlier, police had found his body in Fort Dupont Park. He had been shot and killed. Irving was 14, an eighth-grader. Growing up, he was a strong reader who loved tossing footballs, playing the piano and analyzing the deeper meaning of Marvel movies. But in the last year of his life, Irving was detained in Maryland after being accused of stealing cars, then arrested and charged in the District with theft and unauthorized use of a vehicle. Weeks before his death, Nadine Younger, Irving's great-aunt, had been looking for any clue that could help explain what had gone wrong with him. She found a letter from his middle school, dated Feb. 1, that said Irving had missed 47 days of class — half the school year. 'How can you miss all those days?' she recalled thinking. Irving was one of nearly 16,000 D.C. Public Schools students — one-third of its K-12 enrollment — who were truant that school year, meaning they missed at least two weeks of classes without an excuse. For more than a decade, District leaders have linked school attendance to youth crime, saying tackling one will curb the other. But a Washington Post investigation found that the D.C. Council and Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) have failed to follow through on key initiatives that promised to keep students in class and out of trouble. Irving LaBoard, 14, was found fatally shot on April 3, 2024, in Fort Dupont Park. (Family photo) Nadine Younger, Irving's great-aunt, found a Feb. 1 letter from his middle school that said he had missed 47 days of class, or half the school year at that point. (Michael A. McCoy/For The Washington Post) The District's child welfare agency has largely abandoned the early-warning system that city leaders set up more than a decade ago to find absent students and help return them to the classroom. More than 18,000 reports of truancy went uninvestigated in the last three full school years, The Post found. 'We're just basically reporting into a vacuum,' said Cory Chapman, a math and special education teacher at MacFarland Middle School. More than 40 percent of the approximate 570 students at the Petworth neighborhood school were truant in 2023-2024, the most recently completed school year. 'We saw something, we said something.' Meanwhile, the number of DCPS students who missed at least two weeks of class in a school year increased 110 percent over the past decade, according to a Post analysis. In the District and across the nation, high-schoolers have the highest rates of absenteeism. Still, a Post analysis found that D.C.'s truancy problem has been growing the fastest among middle school students, an age group that helped drive the city's spike in carjacking and other serious crimes in 2023. Last school year, 30 percent of middle-schoolers — or five times more students than a decade ago — were truant. City leaders blamed the coronavirus pandemic for an uptick in unexcused absences, as well as the rise in youth crime. However, The Post found that the truancy rate began rising for DCPS middle-schoolers before the pandemic, from 10 percent in the 2014-2015 school year to more than 30 percent in 2018-2019 and one-third last year. Truancy rates increased most drastically in the historically underserved, Black neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River. Last school year, more than 20 percent of Sousa Middle School's 268 students missed at least a month's worth of class. 'When you ask the child [why they missed school], the child will shrug their shoulders,' said a Sousa teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the school district. 'It continues to happen because there's no consequences.' The D.C. Council passed anti-truancy laws intended to address youth violence after a series of shootings in 2010 left five young people dead. The legislation established a process to identify at-risk students before they ended up in the court system, and directed the mayor to create a plan to staff schools with mental health specialists. Additionally, DCPS leadership set goals to ensure every campus had enough extracurricular programs to keep students engaged. The Post found that these initiatives fell apart in the years before the 2023 youth crime spike — the very scenario they were designed to prevent. That year, D.C. police made more than 500 arrests of people under age 18 on robbery charges, which include carjackings. This marked the highest one-year total for such arrests since the 1990s, according to police reports. DCPS — which serves 52,000 students at 117 schools, including 24 with middle school students — answers directly to city leaders and, ultimately, Bowser. In 2007, amid scrutiny about test scores and graduation rates, the council and U.S. Congress both approved legislation that took control of the school system from the city's school board and gave it to the mayor. Bowser, who was elected to the city's top post in 2014, declined multiple requests to be interviewed for this story. She did not respond to written questions from reporters. Phil Mendelson (D), chairman of the D.C. Council since 2012 and a council member for nearly three decades, pinned the responsibility on government agencies. He said it was not the council's job to enforce the laws it passed. 'The laws that we have in place have the right framework — identify kids, identify their needs and then address their needs,' Mendelson said in an interview. 'It's clear to me that the persistent problems with absenteeism are a result of poor-quality implementation, not of something missing in the law.' Council member Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5), a former middle school teacher elected to office in 2022, criticized both his colleagues and Bowser for what he described as a bureaucratic blame game that too often leaves students behind. 'On this mayor's side, there is low performance, and bad performance has been allowed for many years,' Parker said in an interview. 'On the council side, there's been not-so-great oversight, or at least not oversight that's leading to change. And our schools and our young people are the ones that have paid the price here.' In recent years, both the D.C. Council and the mayor's office have taken steps to reduce chronic absenteeism. Last fall, education officials signed onto a national pledge to cut the school system's 2022-2023 truancy rate in half over the next two years. The rate of truant DCPS students ticked down the next school year, from 35 to 33 percent. The Bowser administration has spent more than $30 million over the past five years on a safety program that stations adults around campuses in high-crime areas, and recently expanded the effort to include a bus service for about 300 students who would otherwise feel unsafe getting to school. Schools have introduced tutoring and vocational programs, as well as a messaging system that reminds at-risk students to come to class. DCPS leadership also started a program called the Sixth Grade Academy, designed to ease the transition to middle school, which data showed decreased chronic absenteeism last year at nine of the 11 schools that participated. 'We have a plan and we're working the plan,' said Paul Kihn, the deputy mayor for education. 'It's not the case that everything is broken in this system. It is the case we have to reinvent some of what we're doing.' The reasons for truancy are varied and complex, and the vast majority of students who miss school do not commit crimes. They help to raise young siblings at home or take care of sick parents. Some don't have clean clothes. Still, most young people who wind up in D.C.'s court system have a history of poor school attendance. A study by the District's Criminal Justice Coordinating Council reported that children who were arrested between June 2019 and July 2020 had missed an average of 46 days, including 39 unexcused absences. D.C.'s juvenile justice pipeline This series examines the District's juvenile justice system, a constellation of agencies tasked with preventing children and teens from becoming caught up in crime and rehabilitating those who have violated the law. Click on the tabs to learn more about key parts of the system, including public schools, the police and the youth detention facility, which are overseen by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D). Schools Police Courts Detention Rehabilitation Nearly 16,000 students truant in 2023-2024 school year District leaders have found that juveniles who are arrested have a history of missing class. D.C. public schools, led by Chancellor Lewis D. Ferebee, are supposed to engage children with after-school programs, provide mental health specialists to students and investigate why youths are missing class. Truant students can be referred to child welfare or the courts. Judge Darlene Soltys, who presides over the District's family court division, told The Post that 'almost all' young people who are brought before her on charges have a history of being truant. The chief juvenile judge said some of the children fear for their safety, or are embarrassed by how far behind they have fallen in class. Some children give her another reason, Soltys said: 'They are aware that there's a lack of enforcement of truancy issues with the school or in the city.' Some youth advocates criticized District leadership for choosing to create new programs rather than address fundamental issues with existing truancy protocols. Others argued that the D.C. Council and mayor became invested in school attendance after headlines about youth violence — and worry they will lose that focus as crime rates fall from their 2023 peak. Last year, police arrested 80 juveniles suspected of carjacking, down from 110 the year before. Katrina Owens, the executive director of DC SCORES, a soccer, poetry and community service program operating in 68 DCPS and charter schools, said she believes that the District's leaders are at an inflection point: They can demonstrate their commitment to fixing long-standing issues with truancy before another violent cycle begins. 'We need to invest in our young people,' Owens said. 'If we don't, you will see an uptick in violence and kids getting involved in things.' A decade of discord In March 2010, a group of young people were gathering after a funeral in Southeast Washington when bullets flew out the windows of a passing vehicle. Three died and six were wounded in the drive-by, the culmination of a week of violence between two crews that became known as the South Capitol Street shootings. The attacks largely involved teenagers. The youngest victim was 16; the oldest was 20. Of the five young men convicted in the case in 2012, three committed other crimes as juveniles. Four had histories of missing school, as did 18 percent of DCPS students at the time. The shootings highlighted for city leaders the link between absenteeism and crime. 'Had their truancy been used to identify them as being at risk and had they received services and interventions earlier on, their actions in March 2010 may have been avoided,' Mendelson wrote of the killers in a 2013 committee report. Cathy L. Lanier, then the D.C. police chief, puts her hand on the back of Nardyne Jefferies, whose 16-year-old daughter, Brishell Jones, was killed in the South Capitol Street shootings in 2010. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post) The D.C. Council passed the Attendance Accountability Amendment Act of 2013, which created a protocol to identify troubled students before they racked up a mountain of absences. The system, though, quickly began to collapse. Officials investigated just 5 percent of truancy referrals over the past three school years, according to data from the city's child welfare agency. Here's how the law was supposed to work: The District would address truancy among high school students separately from elementary and middle school students, recognizing that younger students more often rely on their parents to get to school. High school staff were required to alert the courts when students missed 15 days of school without an excuse. Elementary and middle school staffers were told to call a hotline to report students younger than 14 who missed 10 days of school to the Child and Family Services Agency for possible 'educational neglect' by their parents or guardians. The agency would contact families, investigate why the child wasn't attending class and dispatch social workers to provide support that would help them get back on track. They might separate the student from a family if severe abuse was discovered. At the time, leaders at the child welfare agency supported the law and thought it was worthwhile to try an approach that could help families avoid the judicial system, according to Brenda Donald, who was running the agency when the act was passed. 'We were eager to help the little ones,' Donald told The Post. Their willingness did not last long. When David Grosso (I-At Large) became head of the council's education committee in 2015, child welfare staff told him that parents were skeptical about cooperating with an agency that had the power to pry their children from them, he said in an interview with The Post. 'It's like the police showing up,' Grosso, who left the council in 2021, recalled employees telling him. In most cases, the child welfare workers said, they found that students were missing school for minor reasons, such as a parent forgetting to send a doctor's note or a student needing clean uniforms. Tanya Torres Trice, a longtime child welfare staffer who is the agency's interim director, told The Post that the requirement to investigate every case spread the agency's staff thin. 'Doing that takes away from investigating actual abuse and allegations,' she said. 'The child welfare agency is not the answer.' By the end of the 2014-2015 school year, the agency was rejecting about three-quarters of educational neglect cases referred from the hotline. As the agency accepted fewer cases, it shifted responsibility to investigate most truancy cases back to the schools. Instead of contacting families for an investigation, child welfare workers began asking school staff to explore all potential reasons the student had missed class, according to Joseph Osiecki, supervisor of the agency's Educational Neglect Triage Unit. They would often tell school workers to connect families with neighborhood organizations — not the child welfare agency — if they needed help procuring uniforms and getting access to therapy, mentorship or parenting classes. By 2023, when juvenile violence was at its peak, the agency was rejecting 95 percent of the educational neglect cases that came into the hotline. In interviews with The Post, teachers and school staff said they found themselves overwhelmed by the additional tasks that came with the child welfare agency's new approach. They began taking longer to refer families. By the 2023-2024 school year, The Post found, school staff was referring families after students had accumulated an average of 16 unexcused absences, not the required 10. School leaders blamed the child welfare agency for the delays. 'If you're asked to run the first leg of the marathon in the relay race, and you run really hard and then there's nobody to pass the baton to, over time you're not going to run as fast or as hard,' Lewis D. Ferebee, who became DCPS chancellor in 2019, said to The Post. The D.C. Council opted not to amend the referral process, even as its flaws were made clear. In 2014, the child welfare agency was criticized for taking six days after a school staffer's referral to look into the case of Relisha Rudd, an 8-year-old girl who went missing from a D.C. homeless shelter. She has not been found. Young people participate in a remembrance ceremony in February 2016 for Relisha Rudd, an 8-year-old who went missing from a D.C. homeless shelter two years earlier. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post) In 2015, D.C. school officials submitted a report to the council explaining that staff felt 'buried in paperwork' required by the attendance law. By 2023, DCPS had hired full-time attendance counselors at 69 schools to assess more quickly why students were missing school, but it was 'clearly not enough because of the volume,' Kihn, the deputy mayor for education, testified during a council hearing. In her interview with The Post, Trice defended the child welfare agency's approach as more precise than the original protocol and sensitive to families' hesitance to work with the agency. She also said that truant students were often already being helped through other social service programs in the District. That is not always the case, according to Marie Cohen, a former member of D.C.'s Child Fatality Review Committee. Too often, Cohen said, children's issues were found too late. 'I saw example after example of young people who died, many of those of gun violence as teenagers, whose families had been the subject of multiple calls to the [child welfare] hotline over many years,' Cohen said about her years reviewing reports of suspected neglect cases. 'Many of those calls were screened out, especially about educational neglect. 'I think this is totally wrong.' After-school for some In 2013, as the D.C. Council was rolling out the early-warning system, Kaya Henderson — then the DCPS chancellor — wanted to hear from the children themselves. She invited about a dozen District students to chat with her over breakfast at an IHOP. 'You are the most truant kids in the building,' Henderson recalled saying in an interview with The Post. 'What's up with that?' The answer, she recalled, was 'school was wack.' They attended public schools in Southeast Washington, predominantly Black campuses drawing from poor neighborhoods. At some of these schools, there were no art or music programs, no cheerleading, and no yearbook. For decades, research from all corners of the country has consistently shown that quality after-school programs improve school attendance. After hearing from the students, Henderson told her staff that she wanted all of the school system's campuses to have at least 30 quality extracurricular programs within three years. In 2014, she secured more than $5 million from the council to put toward a 'fun fund' for these programs. Kaya Henderson, then the D.C. Public Schools chancellor, visits a sixth-grade class at Sousa Middle School in Southeast Washington on the first day of school in 2014. (Amanda Voisard/For The Washington Post) Middle schools, which had the fewest activities, would be key to the success, she said. When Henderson left the job in 2016, her post-breakfast goals for programming went with her. A Post analysis found that the council and school leaders have inconsistently funded after-school programming in District middle schools, furthering inequities they once tried to eliminate. Today, Henderson's goal of 30 programs has been realized at three middle schools — two campuses in the District's wealthiest, Whitest neighborhoods and a third in a rapidly gentrifying area. The median number of after-school programs available at DCPS's middle school campuses over the past school year was 23. And middle schools with fewer than 23 programs had average truancy rates that were twice as high as those with more programs, The Post found. At Alice Deal Middle School, a campus in Tenleytown in Northwest, its 1,460 students can choose from 41 clubs, including screenwriting, Scrabble and Harry Potter. Last school year, Deal's truancy rate was 7 percent. In the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Northeast, Kelly Miller Middle School has nine programs for roughly 300 students, most of whom are Black. More than half the student body — 53 percent — was truant last school year. Ferebee, the school system's current chancellor, has publicly acknowledged the lack of extracurricular programs in many of the system's middle schools. In 2023, Ferebee devised a plan of his own to expand access: He would double the number of spots available for students in those grades. That year, Bowser pledged to build 'the most robust free before- and after-school programs in the nation,' and her administration touted a vision of providing 'Afterschool for All.' Two years later, Ferebee said he is unsure if any middle schools have launched new programs. The work is 'ongoing,' he said, and schools are trying to 'maximize participation' with the resources they already have. Brookland Middle School Brookland Middle School is an example of how enrollment can influence after-school programming and how that programming can help curb truancy. By the end of the 2017-2018 school year, almost half of Brookland's 238 students were truant. Over the next seven years, the school's enrollment grew by 60 percent as officials recruited new families. Test scores improved. The school's budget nearly doubled to $8 million. Brookland added seven afterschool programs, including archery and theater, making it one of three middle schools with 30 or more offerings. It is now one of three middle schools to offer more than 30 after-school programs, including archery and podcasting. Last year its truancy rate was 4 percent — the lowest among middle schools. But the story of Irving LaBoard, the Brookland eighth-grader who was killed last year, shows that even at schools with high attendance rates, students who miss weeks of class can still fall through the cracks. Previous Next In the meantime, the chancellor said, he is researching which kinds of new programs students would want. In December, he told The Post that he had held a focus group with middle-schoolers. 'Many of the students felt like, if you were an athlete, you had something to do,' he said about the current options — most of which are sports. 'But what about all the other students who have different areas of interest?' The disparities in extracurricular offerings stem from funding decisions by the D.C. Council and DCPS. DCPS sets school budgets using a formula that relies heavily on student enrollment. Schools in affluent parts of the city typically attract more students, and more money as a result, meaning they can prioritize extracurricular programs. Schools with wealthier families also tend to have more active parent-teacher organizations that can organize fundraisers to support even more programming. Thousands of children, especially in less affluent parts of D.C., rely on a separate bucket of funding the council provides for grants that are awarded by the deputy mayor for education, Kihn. He oversees the Office of Out of School Time Grants and Youth Outcomes, the city's largest source of public after-school and summer program grant funding. The office supports dozens of nonprofit organizations that spread after-school activities more evenly across the city, including dance, theater, coding and robotics. Paul Kihn, the deputy mayor for education, speaks during a D.C. Council hearing on chronic absenteeism in November. (Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post) Kihn and his staff decide how to distribute those dollars across the nonprofits, which run after-school and summertime activities on or near school grounds. The grants office disbursed $27 million last fiscal year, a figure that has increased since its founding in 2018. But nonprofit leaders said they struggle with inconsistent funding from the deputy mayor's office from one year to the next. A Post analysis of grants reported by the city office also found swings in the amount of money given to dozens of programs. For example, of 128 programs that received funding from the office in fiscal 2023, 54 percent had their budgets cut in 2024. At least 30 programs lost their funding completely. The previous year, 64 percent of those same programs had seen a budget increase. This puts the nonprofit operators in an annual dilemma, as they regularly face the prospect of firing staff, eliminating spots for children or diluting their mission, a dozen providers said in interviews. They told The Post that the inconsistent funding makes it difficult to consider expanding programs into more schools and harder to craft activities that will continue to entice students. The number of spots for students enrolled in these grant-funded programs fell from 34,753 in 2019 to 14,629 in 2023, according to data the office published in its annual reports. Last fiscal year, the grants office started using a new system that requires providers to report enrollment and attendance on a weekly basis. Officials reported they had served 17,475 students. 'We anticipate when we do our yearly budget that we'll at least be matched. [If not,] it throws a wrench in our budget,' said Audrey Walker, director of youth services at Jubilee Housing, an affordable housing nonprofit that hosts after-school programs for residents. In fiscal 2023, Jubilee Housing's grant grew 5 percent from the previous year. After dropping by 6 percent the next year, the nonprofit had to scrap plans to hire a sign language instructor. Now, it's considering charging families for a summer field trip it usually offers free. 'It's frustrating, not because we're not grateful,' Walker said. 'It's frustrating because we are striving for high-quality programming and creating a love to learn for our youth. And that includes ramping up our efforts.' 'It's on us to make sure schools are places kids want to be. We clearly haven't done it.' — D.C. Council member Matthew Frumin (D-Ward 3) Asked about the impact of funding fluctuations on programs and enrollment, Kihn told The Post that his office was making it a priority to give grants to a larger number of nonprofits. In fiscal 2018, the office awarded grants to 89 nonprofits to run programs for District students. In 2024, it awarded grants to 150. That approach, he said, provides families with more options. 'You've got some individual providers that are suggesting they had their own individual budget cut and that that somehow is bad,' Kihn said. 'And I just, I would, in a very respectful way, encourage you to reframe that a little bit, because let's say you have two programs, and they each get $100, versus five programs where they're each getting $80. What's better for the city?' Kihn's office disputed the enrollment data it published in its own annual reports. Pamela Goldsmith, a spokesperson for the deputy mayor, described the 2019 figure as an 'estimate,' acknowledging that some students were counted multiple times. Goldsmith could not say how program attendance had changed over time. A year after the grants office began promoting Bowser's vision of delivering 'Afterschool for All,' its disbursements fell from $28 million to $27 million. Officials said the decision came as the deputy mayor's office ran out of federal aid it started receiving during the pandemic. The D.C. Policy Center, a local think tank, estimates that about 3 in 5 children between prekindergarten and eighth grade do not have access to a spot in any afterschool program. D.C. Council member Matthew Frumin (D-Ward 3) introduced a bill in December 2023 that would increase the number of publicly funded after-school seats by 10 percent each year until every student has access to these programs. The council has not yet scheduled a vote on Frumin's bill, which he reintroduced in January. 'It's on us to make sure schools are places kids want to be,' he said in an interview. 'We clearly haven't done it.' A promise unfulfilled District leaders have pledged for years to put teams of mental health experts in schools to combat truancy, but The Post found that since 2020, an increasing number of those jobs have gone unfilled. In 2012, the D.C. Council passed a law that gave the mayor one year to come up with a plan to expand behavioral health services to all students by 2017. The council, alluding to the shooting two years earlier on South Capitol Street, noted that the city's 'deferred investment in youth behavioral health created the conditions that made [such] tragedies' possible. Research backed up the effort: Making counselors, social workers and psychologists available to students has been found to help them overcome obstacles to attendance, according to experts at Attendance Works, a national nonprofit focused on reducing absenteeism. In 2017, two years after Bowser became mayor — and four years after the council's original deadline — she unveiled a plan to expand these kinds of positions in District schools. At the time, only 47 DCPS campuses, or about 4 in 10, had partnerships with the Department of Behavioral Health to provide mental health and early intervention services through behavioral technicians, council reports show. Bowser's plan called for putting a technician in every school, and having them work with social workers and psychologists already deployed at most schools. Officials at the schools would determine how many of each specialist they needed, based on enrollment, truancy rates and the number of economically disadvantaged students. The District allocated funding for these positions, but keeping the jobs filled has been a growing challenge, The Post found. By the end of the 2023-2024 school year, 42 percent of DCPS campuses were not fully staffed with the mental health professionals that city leaders said they needed. Help us report on D.C.'s response to youth crime The Washington Post wants to hear from people affected by or with knowledge of the District's juvenile justice system and the city's efforts to prevent and address youth crime. Have a tip? Reach our team using this submission form. Previous Next The gaps have gotten worse over time, with more schools grappling with more openings each year. During the 2020-2021 school year, 22 campuses each had one vacant behavioral support position. By the 2023-2024 school year, 46 schools had 79 vacancies. Some schools with significant truancy problems have struggled to recruit and retain these key staff members year after year. Every school year since 2017-2018, MacFarland Middle — the Petworth school where 4 in 10 students were truant last school year — has operated with at least one of the positions unfilled. In 2018-2019, the school had no psychologist. In 2021-2022, it was short a counselor. Over the past two school years, one of the two social worker positions at MacFarland was unfilled for a stretch of at least seven months — twice. Chapman, the MacFarland math teacher, said having more staff focused on students' behavior would benefit the school. 'It would just allow them to help more students who have a need,' he said. 'That's the biggest thing right now: There's not enough to go around.' Kihn said part-time staffers sometimes fill in when behavioral health positions are left open. 'The vacancy does not equal lack of service,' he said. The deputy mayor said there has been a shortage of qualified people applying for these roles. In 2023, the city offered hiring bonuses to attract stronger candidates, as well as retention bonuses to keep existing staff. During budget hearings in 2024, mental health advocates unsuccessfully pushed the council to invest millions of additional dollars to boost recruitment efforts and raise salaries, which are well below what psychologists and other specialists can make outside the school district. Council member Christina Henderson (I-At Large) told The Post she was not convinced that she and her colleagues could solve the problem. 'I don't know if this is a particular phenomenon from the pandemic or just kind of where we are as a society in general, but if you are a mental health clinician, you can make more money in private practice working from your home office without ever taking insurance,' said Henderson, who joined the council in 2021. 'So where do we find the people?' When the District has made mental health staffing at high-need schools a priority, data shows, students have benefited. One example is Kramer Middle School in Anacostia. In the 2021-2022 school year, 93 percent of the 272 students missed at least two weeks of school — the highest truancy rate among middle schools in the District. The next school year, officials added three more social workers from the Department of Human Services to assist the behavioral health experts working there. Absenteeism declined. By the 2023-2024 school year, the truancy rate at Kramer had dropped to 56 percent. A mural hangs in the entrance of Kramer Middle School in Southeast Washington in November. (Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post) Students are served lunch during a Thanksgiving event last year at Kramer Middle School, where the truancy rate has fallen by roughly half in recent years. (Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post) The school still has one of the District's highest rates of students missing class. Gerice Williams, the lead case manager from the Department of Human Services, said she is certain that attendance will continue to improve as her team works to make Kramer as inviting to students as possible. She decorated Room 17, the team's home base, with cobwebs on Halloween and pink ribbons for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. She visited parents and provided clothes and hygiene products for students in a pinch. Because students often skipped classes on Fridays, Williams had fancy breakfasts catered at the school at the end of the week. 'Hi, Miss Williams,' said Ayden, a soft-spoken eighth-grade boy with tiny braids, one recent Friday as he arrived early for a plate of fluffy waffles. Gerice Williams, the lead case manager from the Department of Human Services. (Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post) When he was in the seventh grade, Ayden missed more than 30 percent of the school year because 'school is boring,' he recalled. Williams and her team told him he could set an example for his classmates through his dedication and improvement. 'They helped me with my self-esteem and believed I could be a leader,' Ayden said. As an eighth-grader in the 2024-2025 school year, Ayden boasted a 90 percent attendance rate and was class president. The social workers helped him draw 'Ayden for President' signs for his campaign. As the students ate breakfast, Williams watched for small indicators among children who might need the encouragement that Ayden once received. She brought those observations to a weekly attendance meeting with the social workers, an assistant principal, an attendance counselor, a school psychologist and others to discuss ways to get more help to struggling students. Williams noted that a student who usually smiles was not smiling. She picked up that another student's behavior worsens whenever their hair is untidy, which made her suspect there might be difficulty at home. One morning before Thanksgiving, Williams handed out construction paper and asked the students to write down something that made them grateful. Some children said they were thankful for their parents, or their school, but several raised their hands to say they could not think of anything to write. Williams encouraged them to dig deeper. A few of the students wrote: 'I'm thankful to be alive.' The truancy-crime pipeline Without a functional early-warning system, sufficient after-school programs and adequate mental health staffing, the District's public school system was ill-prepared to keep young teens in school as carjackings and other violent crime spiked across the city in 2023. The vast majority of students who missed class were struggling to readjust to in-person learning after the pandemic or get their basic needs met at home. But some of those children started getting into trouble. Karon Blake had started leaving Brookland Middle School early to take care of his younger siblings, his friends previously told The Post. The 13-year-old had become more isolated during the pandemic, especially after a community football program was shut down. Karon Blake's mother, Londen Blake, wears a necklace with a portrait of her son. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post) About 4 a.m. on Jan. 7, 2023, a Brookland resident said he saw Karon and his friends breaking into cars. The man retrieved a handgun and began shooting, fatally wounding Karon. 'I'm just a kid,' Karon pleaded in the final moments of his life, according to home surveillance footage captured the night he was killed. Jason Lewis, 42, was later convicted on manslaughter charges. In October 2023, five girls jumped Reginald 'Reggie' Brown, a 110-pound man with lupus, in an alleyway near Georgia Avenue. Brown was 64. The girls, ages 12 to 15, beat him to death. During her trial, one of the girls told the judge that they had all skipped school — they attended several across the city — the previous day. She and her friends attacked the man because they were 'bored.' All five girls were convicted in the fatal attack and sentenced to rehabilitation with the District's Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. 'We know that there's a high correlation between juveniles who are getting into trouble — I'll say delinquency — a high correlation between that and absenteeism,' Mendelson said at a December 2023 council hearing, echoing remarks he made a decade ago. Under public pressure to address the youth crime crisis, the mayor put forward legislation in 2024 that would change the way schools dealt with truancy. It instructed elementary and middle schools to refer children with 10 unexcused absences to the Department of Human Services — not child welfare. Education advocates embraced the proposal to involve the human services agency, which has a less punitive reputation than child welfare. District leadership finally seemed poised to correct a fundamental and well-known issue in the city's response to truancy and crime among its younger students, particularly those in middle schools. But much of the proposal fell apart, again. The council didn't vote on the mayor's bill and instead proposed testing the new truancy referral system at nine schools, including some that served middle school students. When the pilot program got off the ground in October, it debuted at five campuses — all high schools. The decision was made because high schools have the highest rates of absenteeism, Kihn said. By then, truancy rates at high schools had already returned to pre-pandemic levels, a Post analysis found. The proportion of children missing class in middle schools, though declining, remains higher than before 2020. It has been more than a year since Irving LaBoard was killed. Police have made no arrests in his death, which is still under investigation as a homicide. One day after Irving was found dead in Fort Dupont Park, the DC SCORES soccer team at Brookland was practicing at a nearby recreation center. Nathaniel Kundrat, a Brookland science teacher and soccer coach, received a call from a co-worker who told him to get his students inside. Avion Evans, 14, was dead. A student at Ida B. Wells Middle School in the Takoma neighborhood of Northwest Washington, Avion had previously attended Brookland. Police said he had gotten into a fight at the Brookland-CUA Metro station when a 16-year-old drew a gun and fired into Avion's chest. The older teen was later charged with second-degree murder. Brookland science teacher Nathaniel Kundrat coaches the middle school's soccer team in March. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post) Kundrat's students cried, hugged and promised one another it would be okay. They wrote poetry to process their feelings and tried to use the lessons they had learned from their after-school program to cope with the violence. 'Everything in soccer can help me in life,' Lyam, an eighth-grader, told The Post. 'Because when there's an obstacle in life, it is kind of like dealing with defenders on the field. You have to get past it.' The children told their coach they wanted to do more to help the community. So Kundrat and the students organized a day to pick up trash around the Metro station. Last month, the team hosted an evening town hall at their middle school focused on reducing gun violence. The group of middle school students concluded they could not wait for city leaders to address their concerns. They wanted to find their own solutions before there was another empty seat at Brookland Middle School.
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D.C. teens in need of rehabilitation wait months in a detention center
D.C. teens needed rehabilitation to keep the city safe. They languished in a violent detention center instead. Washington's juvenile justice agency appeared to finally be reformed. After decades of court monitoring, a judge declared in late 2020 that the long-troubled Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services could return to the mayor's control. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) promised 'a focus on restorative justice, love, and empowerment' that would 'serve and improve the lives of our young people, their families, and our entire community.' Instead, progress at the agency — charged with setting serious and repeat teen offenders on a better path — unraveled as youth crime spiked, a Washington Post investigation found: The agency has taken months to provide many teens with comprehensive treatment plans, violating a law that requires it to do so within 17 days of a judge sentencing a youth to its custody. In fiscal year 2022, the first after the city regained control of the agency, it completed planning for 93 percent of teenagers within three months, according to agency metrics. The next year, less than half had plans in the same time frame. The District's detention center, where children are held while they wait for their plans, is overcrowded. Fistfights break out often. Police come to quell the violence, while ambulances whisk away the injured. Last year, at least two teenagers tested positive for fentanyl. Since 2021, the number of dangerous incidents at the center has nearly quadrupled, meaning chaos has become a near-daily reality for the high-risk young people held there. two teenagers tested positive for fentanyl. Since 2021, the number of dangerous incidents at the center has nearly quadrupled, meaning chaos has become a near-daily reality for the high-risk young people held there. Children committed to DYRS while awaiting treatment should be transferred to a rehabilitation program within 30 days, the agency director has testified. But the average wait time saw a nearly fivefold increase, to 62 days in 2024 from 13 in 2018, The Post found. Some teens waited more than six months for treatment. Many delays are caused by a shortage of beds for teens at residential programs that contract with DYRS. Bowser didn't pursue a 2022 proposal to create a psychiatric residential treatment facility in the District, The Post found. That left DYRS relying on a dwindling number of facilities with long wait lists. They often reject D.C. youth or have been accused of serious misconduct. Last year, the agency sent 14 children to a Pennsylvania nonprofit where two staffers had been charged with sexually assaulting children — including a teen from D.C. — at one of its centers. where two staffers had been charged with sexually assaulting children — including a teen from D.C. — at one of its centers. Because time spent waiting for placement doesn't count toward their stay in a rehabilitative program, children have routinely been kept away from home for much longer than intended. Attorneys and teens commonly refer to this wait period as 'dead time,' which advocates say can be logistically and psychologically harmful to a young person. 'You want to stop crime in the city, as Mayor Bowser says?' said Will Mount, a lawyer who has represented hundreds of teens in D.C.'s juvenile justice system over the past nine years. 'The solution is to get these kids the services they need now, or otherwise, you reap what you sow.' Bowser declined multiple requests to be interviewed. She has publicly touted her administration's progress on youth crime, telling a local media outlet last year that DYRS is 'fantastic.' In April, she announced that violent crime arrests were down 26 percent over the same time last year. Carjacking arrests were down 50 percent. Lindsey Appiah, the deputy mayor for public safety, defended the administration's handling of the agency in a statement. 'The District is working to hold young people accountable for wrongdoing—especially violence—even as we try to build pathways to rehabilitation and growth,' she said. 'The Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services works consistently to ensure the safety of its young people and of the general public.' Sam Abed, the agency director, also declined to be interviewed. The Youth Services Center, where young offenders are held before their court hearings and while they wait to be placed in rehabilitation programs, in Northeast Washington. (Valerie Plesch/For The Washington Post) In an emailed statement, DYRS spokeswoman Turnesha Fish said the agency is committed to delivering 'comprehensive rehabilitative services to the young people in our care while ensuring community safety.' 'We are enhancing these efforts by strengthening existing partnerships and collaborating with our contracted providers to expand a robust continuum of care,' Fish said. 'The safety of the youth in our care is paramount, and we are dedicated to taking all necessary measures to safeguard and support the youth and families we serve — principles that have long guided our work.' Fish said that as of March 6, 22 teens were waiting at the agency's detention center for spots at treatment programs, alongside the dozens of teens held at the detention center before their trials. The number of youths waiting for treatment beds was as high as 41 in February 2024, according to city data. The DYRS spokeswoman said the March figure 'reflects our ongoing efforts to streamline case management and ensure timely placements.' Fish said the agency had reduced the number of children waiting for programs even as it saw a 30 percent increase in young offenders committed to the agency's care from fiscal years 2024 to 2025. A Post analysis of internal data shows an agency struggling to prevent young people from returning to crime: More than 70 percent of juveniles who were committed to the agency from 2018 to 2022 were accused of new crimes or violating other court orders within two years of release. The rate is in line with national patterns, but likely an undercount because it does not include teens rearrested and charged as adults. D.C.'s juvenile justice pipeline This series examines the District's juvenile justice system, a constellation of agencies tasked with preventing children and teens from becoming caught up in crime and rehabilitating those who have violated the law. Click on the tabs to learn more about key parts of the system, including public schools, the police and the youth detention facility, which are overseen by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D). Schools Police Courts Detention Rehabilitation Youth Services Center perpetually overcrowded Juveniles may be detained in the Youth Services Center, which is under the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services and overseen by Director Sam Abed. The facility, which is often overcapacity, holds children who are awaiting court hearings, as well as teenagers who are waiting to be transferred to a group home or treatment facility. To investigate DYRS's performance, reporters gained rare access to the city's juvenile justice system, which is shielded from public view to protect children's identities. The Post conducted an analysis of internal data obtained from the agency through Freedom of Information Act requests, enabling reporters to track more than 500 children as they moved through the system from 2018 to 2024. The Post also received permission to observe dozens of court hearings typically closed to the public; reviewed internal documents and confidential files detailing juvenile court cases; and interviewed scores of current and former DYRS employees, lawyers, judges, advocates, juvenile justice experts, and families and children who have navigated the system. One of those young people was N.H., who was 17 when he was charged with at least nine felonies, including unauthorized use of a vehicle and carjacking, in 2023 and 2024. The teenager — who is being identified by his initials to keep his juvenile record confidential — was committed to agency custody by D.C. Superior Court Judge James Crowell last year. N.H. had been abused by a relative as a young child, according to records and interviews. The District's child welfare agency investigated allegations of neglect by his mother. He floated in and out of foster and group homes in D.C. In 2022, his brother died of a fentanyl overdose while incarcerated. The next year, N.H. was arrested and charged for the first time. He was rearrested on charges of carjacking in 2024 and sent to the detention center. There, he began to wait — for services, for treatment, for help. 'It's traumatizing there' The Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services was born out of turmoil. In 1985, a class-action lawsuit in D.C. Superior Court brought by several city youths alleged decades of abuse and mismanagement at detention facilities run by the agency's predecessor, the Youth Services Administration. Attorneys and their juvenile clients said that the buildings used to hold teens were uninhabitable and that the city agency was failing to deliver promised services to children. The following year, city officials entered a consent decree that required the agency to report to a court monitor as it completely overhauled how it approached criminal justice for young people. Across the country, juvenile justice agencies began moving away from a punitive system that seemed to ferry children convicted of crimes straight into adult jails and prisons. An emerging body of scientific research concluded that the part of the teenage brain responsible for good judgment and weighing consequences was still developing. That spurred reforms toward programs focused on rehabilitation. In 2004, the city dismantled the old agency, replacing it with DYRS and a new approach: Instead of holding children in large prisonlike facilities, the agency would release young people accused of crimes back to their families with community-based services or into secure residential programs aimed at providing comprehensive services to address underlying problems. Officials unveiled the Youth Services Center, or YSC, on Mount Olivet Road in Northeast as a way station to securely hold young offenders before their court hearings and after, while they waited to be placed in rehabilitation programs. The detention center, which opened with 80 beds and soon added eight more, replaced the decrepit holding facilities that had prompted the lawsuit decades earlier. Bowser had sought to end court oversight of DYRS since becoming mayor in 2015. She agreed to create the Office of Independent Juvenile Justice Facilities Oversight to monitor the YSC and New Beginnings, a longer-term rehabilitation program run by DYRS in Laurel, Maryland. But in the years after the agency exited court monitoring, the population exploded at the detention center. From October 2018 to the following September, the average daily population at the YSC was 40 youths, including teens who were awaiting trial. In May, it was more than 100. As more teens were arrested, DYRS added 10 beds in 2023. At the same time, the detention center has grown more chaotic and violent, according to data published by the oversight agency. A hallway at the Youth Services Center in Northeast Washington. (Valerie Plesch/For The Washington Post) In 2021, the agency reported 100 dangerous incidents at the center; in 2024, there were 394, according to data released by the oversight agency. The agency also reported more injuries in recent years: In January 2022 — the first year the oversight agency collected the data — DYRS recorded six injuries to youths. That jumped to 30 in January 2025. Mark Jordan, the executive director of the oversight agency, blamed the surge in violence partly on the increased number of children held at the center. 'Facilities like the YSC, in which the population changes frequently and there can be a lot of conflicts from the community that carry over into the facility, conditions are constantly changing,' he wrote in an email. 'The management response has to respond to the specifics of what's happening inside the facility.' In April 2024, seven teenagers were involved in a fight and all required medical attention, according to reports obtained by The Post. Later that month, when a guard left a door propped open, two teenagers assaulted another resident. Days later, guards found another teen with a shank fashioned from a nail and a face mask. The next month, a guard was escorting a Maryland man's son, then 17, and the rest of his unit through the halls of the facility when a worker opened a door to another unit. The man's son, whom The Post is not identifying to protect him from retaliation, and others rushed through the door and began to fight with teens in the room, according to an internal incident report. Though employees saw multiple teens beating his son for several minutes, the guards said they couldn't open the door to intervene because other youths were trying to rush in and join the fight, according to the report and a former employee who witnessed the brawl. His son was sent to the hospital with a swollen eye. Another teen went to the hospital with injuries to his jaw, according to the father and the former employee. 'I don't feel safe for anybody's kid, not just my own,' the father said. Beyond the violence in the facility, advocates and families have repeatedly sounded the alarm about a lack of services for youths. Mental health specialists are available at the YSC, but because the detention center is intended to be a temporary destination for teens, it does not offer intensive or regular therapy. It also does not provide access to as many behavioral specialists as dedicated rehabilitative facilities typically staff. Abed, the DYRS chief, said during testimony to D.C. Council members in December 2023 that the detention center is 'not a treatment facility.' D.D. Davis, a lawyer who has represented many teens who have been housed in the YSC, said that young people are confined for hours at a time to their rooms when there are any fights or disturbances, which are common. During these lockdowns, therapy is off the table. Instead of attending school, children are handed worksheets to complete. 'They get an hour a day or two hours a day of being free,' Davis said. Over the past year, the courts permitted The Post to attend confidential hearings in juvenile court. In some, DYRS officials told judges that teens were not receiving adequate services at the detention center. A health services manager at the YSC testified at a May 2024 hearing that detention center staff allowed a 14-year-old — upon his request — to replace his prescribed psychiatric medication with melatonin gummies. Staff also agreed to stop biweekly therapy sessions for the young teen after he 'expressed he was okay and did not want to talk to a therapist any longer.' The teen's public defender, Emily Sufrin, noted that these therapy sessions had taken place in a game room where other teens were often nearby. Sufrin said the teen had previously been attacked in this public space: 'It's traumatizing there.' D.C. Superior Court Judge Andrea Hertzfeld questioned Bruce Edwards, then the associate general counsel for DYRS, about the situation. 'You're telling me that meeting with a therapist a couple of times a week in the game space at [the detention center] and getting a melatonin gummy is sufficient rehabilitation for this juvenile?' she asked. Edwards, who has since left DYRS and is now a magistrate in Prince George's County, replied, 'I wouldn't qualify this as sufficient at all.' 'Dead time' The time teens spend waiting in detention for an opening in a rehabilitative program means that some are away from home much longer than intended. 'That 'dead time' is really expensive and it's damaging on its own account just for that kid,' said Tom Woods, a senior associate at the Annie E. Casey Foundation who has studied juvenile detention. 'There's sort of this unavoidable psychological harm to that.' DYRS has no requirement for how quickly young people must be transferred to programs after the courts commit them to the agency, according to a review of its policies and city law. But Abed, the agency chief, has testified at multiple D.C. Council hearings that children and teens should go to an appropriate program within 30 days — and ideally sooner. Yet today, young people are languishing for months at the detention center, according to a Post analysis of internal data. Teens waited for an average of about 60 days to go to a rehabilitation program last year, The Post found. Some waited six months or longer. From 2020 to 2024, nearly one-quarter of teens met the agency's goal of spending less than a month within the detention center. In those years, 36 percent of young people spent three months or longer at the center. The District is lagging behind neighboring states: Maryland and Virginia youths spent an average of 23 and 28 days, respectively, waiting to leave detention centers for treatment programs, data shows. A 2023 crime wave led some, including the mayor, to call for increased jail time and harsher punishments for offenders. In 2024, Bowser worked with the city council to pass a law giving judges more leeway to jail adults and some juveniles charged with violent offenses before their trials. Research shows that locking up juveniles leads to higher rates of rearrest than probation and other interventions that keep teens at home and in school. A 2015 study by juvenile justice researchers found that teens in Seattle who were arrested and incarcerated were four times as likely to end up in jail or prison as an adult, compared with other youths who were arrested but did not serve time in a detention center. 'You're putting that child in a horribly traumatic environment and the idea that we expect them to get any better without treatment is not logical and not at all consistent with what clinical best practices tell us,' said Jennifer Snow, the national director of government relations at the nonprofit National Alliance on Mental Illness. Former DYRS employees whom The Post is not naming to protect from professional retaliation say some of the delays occur because agency social workers are taking longer to complete rehabilitation plans. This is often a necessary step before sending a teen to a treatment program. The agency is required by law to provide treatment plans for teens within 17 days of referral from the courts. But former employees and advocates said it often takes several weeks or even months to complete the process. The agency doesn't report how many teens received a plan within 17 days. Instead, it reports how many young people have gone through a complete 'case planning process' within three months, according to annual summaries filed to the Office of the City Administrator. This process includes the courts sending relevant documents to DYRS; the agency completing an assessment that helps determine the proper treatment for a young offender; and staff convening a meeting to decide where to send the teen. The vast majority of young people — about 9 in 10 — had gone through this process within 90 days of commitment to DYRS custody in the 2022 fiscal year. The following year, less than half of teens had a completed plan within three months. Then, in 2024, the rate was zero. In that report, the agency said that 'significant staff turnover' led it to abandon an assessment that was part of the planning process — and that the agency would stop reporting data on the treatment plans because, moving forward, they were going to use different standards. Critics have pushed the mayor's office to speed up placements: The Office of the Attorney General — which prosecutes cases involving youth crime — worked with Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) in 2024 to introduce a bill to make DYRS find beds at treatment programs for children within 30 days of commitment. The mayor's office and Abed, the agency chief, lobbied aggressively against the measure. They said that the timeline was unrealistic and that it failed to take a 'comprehensive' approach to the juvenile justice system. Nevertheless, the D.C. Council passed the Road Act late last year with an even more aggressive timeline: The new law requires the juvenile justice agency to begin the treatment planning process before a child is even committed. It also directs the city auditor to report on the agency's progress. 'There was a resistance on the part of the [mayor] to work with the council on this, which was unfortunate and also counterproductive,' Mendelson said in an interview. In the meantime, the delays have landed DYRS in court again. The District's Public Defender Service and the local American Civil Liberties Union office filed a federal lawsuit in October accusing the agency of a 'failure to meet the rehabilitative and treatment needs of children in its custody and the District's practice of needlessly and unlawfully extending the time children spend in jail-like settings.' 'DYRS continues to fail these kids, and a generation of kids are being lost.' — D.C. Superior Court Judge James Crowell The suit was brought on behalf of two teens who had each spent more than three months at the detention center. K.Y., a 16-year-old identified in the complaint by his initials, had been waiting since July for DYRS to transfer him to a treatment facility 'to get therapy.' In the lawsuit, K.Y. wrote that he had post-traumatic stress disorder that was going untreated as he waited at the detention center. 'There's nothing going on in here,' he wrote. 'They treat us like dogs and animals in here. If people were in our shoes, they wouldn't want to be here.' In response to the suit, DYRS has acknowledged that most youths committed to the agency will spend 'some amount of time' waiting in detention. The agency said these waits are dependent on several factors outside its control, including the details of each teen's case and whether space is available at a program. Days after a December hearing in the case, the agency transferred the two youths to rehabilitative programs. The agency did not answer questions related to the lawsuit, which is ongoing. 'Big ideas' In late 2022, as Bowser prepared to enter her third term, the mayor announced that she was looking for 'big ideas' to improve the city. The directors of three agencies that work with at-risk children decided to heed her call. Hilary Cairns, the head of DYRS at the time, said in interviews with The Post that she met with the chiefs of the Department of Behavioral Health and Child and Family Services Agency to make a proposal to the mayor. Together, they asked the Bowser administration to consider creating a psychiatric residential treatment facility in the District for teens. Known as PRTFs, these inpatient facilities provide comprehensive mental health services for children with complex needs. Some child welfare advocates oppose residential programs; they argue that children do best when they're treated in their communities, living with their families and going to their schools. Still, beds at PRTFs are typically in high demand. Opening up beds at a city-run facility, the agency chiefs suggested, would reduce the wait times at the detention center, while also providing psychiatric services for the District's most troubled children close to home. The District's need for more treatment beds had been widely known for years: Before the pandemic, other officials at DYRS and eight other local departments and organizations that work with children held the Inter-Agency PRTF Collaboration Meeting. In minutes from the March 10, 2020, meeting, attendees noted that treatment options were limited, writing that 'there are fewer each year' and that 'some providers on the list will no longer accept DC youth despite being a current provider.' Since then, the agency has struggled to find space not just at PRTFs but also at less specialized residential programs for youths, too. In 2013, it sent children to 31 residential treatment centers. By 2023, the number of rehabilitation programs working with DYRS had dwindled to 10, The Post found. Some facilities that D.C. used closed their doors after youth arrests started declining in the 2000s. More shuttered during the pandemic. In 2019, Pennsylvania shut down the Glen Mills Schools over allegations of widespread child abuse. Help us report on D.C.'s response to youth crime The Washington Post wants to hear from people affected by or with knowledge of the District's juvenile justice system and the city's efforts to prevent and address youth crime. Have a tip? Reach our team using this submission form. Previous Next Some of the remaining programs no longer accept D.C. teens, saying they can't handle youths with complex needs or who have violent offenses on their records. The proposal from Cairns and other agency directors seemed to them to be an obvious solution to bed shortages. But nearly three years after the agency chiefs gave the idea to Bowser, no such facility exists in the District. Representatives from the mayor's office and the three agencies that developed the proposal all declined to answer questions about what happened to the plan. The Post filed several Freedom of Information Act requests for records related to the proposal. But government agencies refused the request, citing an exemption that protects internal deliberations. It is unclear how much such a facility would cost the District. But other states have set aside funds to create their own: This year, Maine awarded a $2 million contract to a nonprofit to run a PRTF. Cairns said staff had scouted potential locations around the region, including unused land near New Beginnings in Laurel. She said she knew that her request to the mayor's office was ambitious but that she believes it would have been worth it. 'It was an acknowledgment that it was expensive in the short term for a long-term investment,' Cairns said. The mayor asked Cairns to resign in 2023. Cairns, who helmed the city's juvenile justice agency for less than two years, said she was blindsided. She now works with the Office of the D.C. Auditor to set up a system to monitor the agency. She said she still does not know why the Bowser administration didn't pursue the project. Three months after The Post first asked city officials about the proposal, the D.C. Council added language to the Road Act, the bill from the attorney general's office that is now known as the Recidivism Reduction at DYRS Amendment Act. It requires the mayor to take steps toward opening a PRTF in the District. According to the new law, Bowser's office must submit a report to the council estimating the cost of a new facility in September. Mendelson, the council chairman, said he was not surprised the Bowser administration did not follow through on the 2022 proposal. He told The Post that the mayor's office thinks the 'best way to deal with crime is just to lock people up.' In the December 2024 memo outlining changes to the bill, he emphasized the importance of opening a local treatment center. 'The lack of a PRTF in the District is a barrier to the timely placement of children with psychiatric disorders committed to DYRS,' Mendelson wrote. 'As such, it is critical that the District seriously begin planning for such a facility.' A place for N.H. Everyone agreed that N.H. needed help. The teenager who came before Judge James Crowell last summer would benefit from the intensive services that a PRTF could provide, his lawyer told the court. He had first been arrested in February 2023, accused of stealing a car, according to his probation report obtained by The Post. Police picked him up on similar charges in March, April and May. That June, he was again arrested and charged with first-degree theft, unlawful entry of a motor vehicle and unauthorized use of a vehicle. This time, N.H. was detained for about a month, until the courts sent him to a shelter home. The case was later dismissed through a plea agreement. That fall, as part of a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation, a doctor recommended extensive therapy and psychotropic medication for N.H., writing that he 'will most likely continue to act out in the community, and that this will be the case until his condition is successfully treated.' In October 2023, N.H. pleaded guilty to several of his charges and entered a program that allowed him to return home. But a few months later, he was arrested on new charges of carjacking and again held at the detention center. When Crowell committed N.H. to DYRS custody last summer, the agency was already searching for a bed for him in a rehabilitative program. N.H. said he hoped the agency would quickly transfer him to such a program so that he could work through his issues and go to North Carolina, where his mother had moved. But every time he talked to Mount, his lawyer, N.H. learned that there was no space for him at a treatment facility. N.H. at the Youth Services Center on Oct. 3. (Valerie Plesch/For The Washington Post) In October, The Post attended one of the teen's hearings. He returned to Crowell's courtroom wearing the detention center uniform: a bright purple polo, slacks and rubber clogs. Four months after the judge had committed N.H. to DYRS custody, the teen had gone nowhere, his lawyer said. Speaking in front of a nearly empty courtroom, Crowell did not hide his frustration. 'DYRS continues to fail these kids and a generation of kids are being lost,' the judge said. 'It's been the exact same, time and time again. No one wants to call them out. No one wants to put light to this. But it's an absolute failure.' Locked up in detention, N.H. felt like 'an animal,' he told The Post. Sometimes he thought about the crimes that got him arrested. Adrenaline, fun and 'fast money' led him to steal cars, he said. He knew he was going to get caught. 'At the time, I wasn't thinking,' he said. His crimes had hurt people, he recognized. In one case, N.H. and other teenagers had pushed a woman out of her car. She had a bruised arm and pain in her right leg, according to the police report. N.H. said his actions warranted consequences. 'But having to be here without knowing when you're leaving, and just being under somebody else's power, is frustrating,' he said. As the months went by, N.H. and the other teens at the detention center followed a daily routine: schoolwork, followed by hours of watching television and playing cards. At times, they would get together for group talks, led by guards or their peers. N.H. was in therapy to process the abuse he experienced as a child until he was about 15, he said. He always knew he had a problem with anger. He would occasionally get therapy at the detention center, he said, but not on a regular basis. 'There was no programs there,' he said. 'We were just sitting there doing nothing.' Then, in September, agency officials presented Mount and his client with an option: N.H. could go to a facility run by Abraxas Youth & Family Services. The Pittsburgh-based nonprofit operates residential programs in five states. It was not an ideal solution, Mount said. The campus that N.H. would attend in Marienville, a rural community 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, had therapy and counseling. But it did not offer as much access to psychologists, social workers, therapists, nurses and counselors as a PRTF. The agency also did not tell Mount about another issue: Staff members at the facility had been accused of sexually abusing children in their care. In March 2024, an Abraxas dorm supervisor told the agency that a D.C. teen was one of multiple youths who had allegedly been sexually assaulted, according to an internal report obtained by The Post. Court records show that Ana Danielle Carlton, then 24, was charged with institutional sexual assault, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and indecent assault of a minor under 16 years old. One teen told Abraxas staff members that the mental health counselor had sexual contact with five youths in the facility, according to a police report. Carlton has not yet entered a plea in the case. Her attorney called the charges 'unproven accusations' in an email to The Post. Erin Perez, whose 14-year-old was allegedly abused by Carlton in 2024, said in an interview with The Post that she was 'disturbed and disgusted' by what happened at Abraxas. 'They're horrible and I'd never send any kid there,' she said. 'They should be shut down.' Jeff Giovino, the president and CEO of Abraxas, said in an email that staff informed DYRS and law enforcement of the abuse allegations as soon as they surfaced. 'Abraxas treats all allegations of abuse and harassment with the utmost seriousness,' he wrote. The Abraxas Youth & Family Services campus in Marienville, Pennsylvania. (Jeff Swensen/For The Washington Post) It was the second time in as many years that a staff member was accused of sexually abusing a teen at the facility: In 2023, a 47-year-old woman was arrested after a youth told police they had sexual contact. The woman was later sentenced to state prison for disseminating sexual materials to a minor and endangering the welfare of a child. Last year, dozens of people who attended Abraxas facilities between 2003 and 2023 filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania court saying they were sexually abused at the programs. Giovino told The Post that the claims in the lawsuit are without merit. Sixteen plaintiffs specifically accused employees at the Marienville campus of assault. Nevertheless, the District's juvenile justice agency sent 13 teens to Abraxas in 2024 after the incident was reported, records show. The agency declined to say whether it conducted an investigation into the sexual assault allegations or informed any families or attorneys they referred to Abraxas about the problems. Unaware of the allegations, Mount said he and N.H. decided it would be the best option. 'The client wants to leave the YSC as soon as possible, which I don't blame them for wanting to do,' Mount said. 'And we're offered an out-of-state placement option, and of course, we're going to take it, because the faster we take that option, the faster we can get them back home.' N.H. arrived at the remote campus in October, one of the few Black teens in the program. He no longer had visitors because he was so far from home: a six-hour drive from D.C., and even farther from his family in North Carolina. Still, the six-month program was better than the detention center, he said: He could open his own doors and walk from building to building. He was able to join the basketball team at a neighboring high school, practicing with his teammates most afternoons. At times, he would talk to a counselor, he said. N.H. was released to a group home in April, after spending a year away from home. Now 19, he said he isn't angry about his time with the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, but said he didn't feel like the agency did its job. 'They're not rehabilitating nothing,' he said.
