Amonth before the Halloween-night shooting that would result in the death of Tyronn Vincent Garner, a D.C. Superior Court judge convened a hearing. He wanted to know why the city’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services — in whose care the 17-year-old Mr. Garner had been placed — hadn’t kept its promise to send the juvenile to a drug treatment center in Pennsylvania. There were no good answers; instead there were these tragically prophetic words from Judge Milton C. Lee Jr.:
“You know one day, one day there’s going to be a horrible end to all of this — and I don’t want anything to happen to your son but for him to get his service — but I can imagine . . . if something happened to him while he was at DYRS . . . as opposed to [the drug treatment center] where he was supposed to be, there’d be a headline out there somewhere and there would be, I’m sure, employment difficulties across the board. It should never come to that.”
It did come to that. “My boy would still be alive,” Rebekah Garner told us, if DYRS had followed through. That it failed to do so is yet another sign of shortcomings in how the city’s juvenile justice system deals with troubled youth. DYRS officials didn’t respond to our request for comment, but his mother and others familiar with Tyronn paint a picture of a teenager who “smoked too much weed,” got in trouble on a minor assault charge and didn’t fare well on court-ordered probation. They say Judge Lee’s decision to commit him to DYRS was premised on an agreement to send him to Pennsylvania’s well-regarded Abraxas treatment center; the District has a lack of meaningful substance abuse programs for youth. Mr. Garner was sent to the New Beginnings secure juvenile facility to await transfer to Abraxas, but the move to Pennsylvania never occurred and the judge apparently wasn’t told.
At the aforementioned Sept. 30 hearing, Judge Lee — reportedly upset with the failure to get the promised residential drug treatment for the boy — apparently lost confidence in DYRS. Concluding that continued confinement without drug treatment was inappropriate, he decided to try probation one more time, releasing the boy to the custody of his family with another hearing set for Nov. 4.
D.C. Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), who chairs the committee with oversight over the city’s juvenile agency, said court officials have opened the proceedings for his review and gave him permission to release a portion of the transcript. “A mistake was made,” he said, making clear that it was DYRS’s failure to provide drug treatment that should be faulted. Why that occurred may never be known because of confidentiality laws that allow the department to shield its mistakes.
Equally pertinent is the issue of why the District has a system that gives judges no authority to determine the future treatment of youth committed to DYRS. Wouldn’t everyone had been better off if Judge Lee had been empowered to get Mr. Garner the treatment he had deemed was needed? Why do judges have more options with adults than with youths?
Chief Judge Lee F. Satterfield called that “tying the hands of judges in a way that does not add to the safety of the city.” Nonetheless, as he told us, “There’s nothing we can do, we have no authority, we can’t hold in contempt or force action. We can only yell and that is not good enough.”
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