Horrifying acts' common thread: troubled kids
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By JAMES H. BURNETT III
jburnett@MiamiHerald.com
`Kids will be kids'' used to mean a child got caught with his hand in the cookie jar, or in some other acceptably immature, playful, or maybe thick-headed, but relatively harmless, behavior.
Thursday afternoon, 15-year-old Wayne Treacy stood before a Broward County judge to answer for allegedly beating and stomping with steel-toed boots a female classmate at Deerfield Beach Middle School.
The Broward Sheriff's Office says Treacy, who was arrested on an attempted-murder charge following the Wednesday afternoon attack, continued to stomp and kick Josie Lou Ratley in the head after she had fallen to the ground.
Ratley, a 15-year-old eighth-grader, remained hospitalized late Thursday in extremely critical condition.
According to BSO, Ratley and Treacy exchanged heated text messages prior to the assault, including a taunt she allegedly sent him about his older brother's suicide in October.
Circuit Judge Elijah Williams ordered Treacy held in juvenile detention for 21 days while the Broward state attorney's office decides whether to charge him as a juvenile or an adult.
BROTHER'S SUICIDE
Treacy clearly has problems. That's not a dig at him. Not to excuse his actions Wednesday, but his mother Donna Powers and stepfather Carey Smith say Treacy's brother committed suicide in October, the day before Treacy's birthday. And Treacy, then 14, found the body.
Perhaps more troubling, though, is how common kid-on-kid assaults are becoming -- not simple, old-fashioned fist fights, but assaults.
Michael Brewer, 15, was a student at Deerfield Beach Middle School five months ago, when several classmates surrounded him near his home, doused him with rubbing alcohol, and set him on fire because he allegedly reported them to police for attempting to steal his father's bicycle, and because he supposedly owed one of them $40 for a video-game purchase.
In December, Avion Lawson, 17, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for participating in a brutal West Palm Beach gang rape when he was just 14, and beating up the victim's young son, who was present during the attack.
Another of Lawson's three codefendants was legally a minor -- 17-year-old Jakaris Taylor, who received a life sentence in October for his part in the rape and beating.
`TROUBLED'
What's the common denominator with all these kids? There are probably several. One that jumps out at me is that in at least 30 newspaper reports during the past two years, in which either South Florida journalists or law-enforcement officials, or both, referred to them all as ``troubled.''
I've used ``troubling'' in this column. Hard to describe these teenagers or these scenarios any other way, without explanations from the assailants and shining a giant, glaring spotlight on parental culpability.
But lest we dismiss this behavior as a fluke -- especially in light of January reports that overall aggravated assaults in Miami-Dade and Broward counties were down by as much as 15 percent in 2009 from 2008 and 2007 rates -- consider a 2006 study in Britain about the prevalence of serious crimes committed by children:
That country's Youth Justice Board concluded in 2006 that there was cause to celebrate, because crimes committed by children ages 13 to 17 had fallen in the prior year. However, crimes committed by 10 to 12-year-olds rose 6 percent.
It's 2010. Like more than 70 percent of the juveniles arrested and/or charged with committing violent crimes in South Florida over the past two years, those 10-12-year-olds leading the rise in child crime in the UK are 14 to 16 now.
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