By Dan Morse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Of all the times she worried about how much to discipline her teenage son, depriving him of a PlayStation and taking down posters of cars and rap stars he admired, Shannan Troiano never imagined their relationship had become so strained that he would try to hire a hit man to kill her.
But there in the spacious living room of her Southern Maryland house was a detective, talking about how Cory Ryder, then 16, had told someone he wanted to have his mother killed. "We need to find out if he is serious," the detective said.
He proposed a sting. The woman Ryder talked to, the mother of one of his friends, would take him to a hotel room, where he would meet with an officer posing as a hit man.
"He's not going to do this," Troiano told her husband after the detective left.
"He's just mad," Joey Troiano responded.
That night, on June 2, the detective called at 7. Everything was in place, he said. Troiano, not knowing what else to do, began to frantically clean her house. He called again several hours later. Ryder was in custody and would be charged with attempted murder.
In a bathroom, where she was still cleaning, Troiano fell to her knees and burst into tears.
Ryder, now 17, is scheduled to be tried tomorrow in Circuit Court in St. Mary's County. Detectives say he offered the undercover officer his stepfather's new pickup truck as payment to kill his mother and his stepfather. "Two bullets is all it takes," the teenager is alleged to have said.
Like parents of any teenager who has gone off track, the Troianos had struggled over when to ground their son, when to back off, when to call for help. They took things away -- radio, TV and the posters -- and grounded him for weeks at a time. After Ryder smashed a picture frame and threatened to cut his mother's throat in her sleep, they said, they had the police take him to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation -- testing that, according to the parents, turned up nothing serious.
Troiano, 35, who is expected to testify as a witness for the state, said she feels like a heartbroken mother wanting to believe her son's apologetic jailhouse letters and, at the same time, like a furious crime victim wanting him locked up.
"He needs to understand what he did was wrong," she told a judge at a hearing in September. ". . . I'm scared to death that if this kid is serious, and they put him in a three-month program, they're going to release him to the street."
Ryder has told Juvenile Services officials that he was upset his parents kicked him out of the house and that he felt pressured to talk to the man in the hotel, according to an agency report. He told them that he never intended to have his parents killed and that he wanted to call the police himself that night in the hotel room.
His attorney, John Getz, has suggested that Ryder might have heard the "two bullets" line on television and that he repeated it without meaning it. In court, Getz has accused Troiano and her husband of giving up as parents. "It's apparent that the victims in this case expect the Department of Juvenile Services to solve all their problems," he said at the September hearing.
Ryder, whose case was transferred recently from adult to juvenile court, is being held at the Cheltenham Youth Facility in Prince George's County. Getz declined to make him available for an interview.
Ryder, his two stepsisters and his parents lived a seemingly typical exurban life in semirural southern St. Mary's. His mother works as a budget and financial manager at nearby Patuxent River Naval Air Station. His stepfather is an information technology specialist. At night, a blanket of stars covers their 5,800-square-foot house.
Troiano married young. When her son was 13 months old, she left his father, a man with whom she had what she called an abusive relationship. By the time the boy was in sixth grade, she had married Joey Troiano, and officials at Spring Ridge Middle School in Lexington Park began calling. He had walked out of class and was roaming the halls. Could someone come get him?
Over the next few years, as he received poor grades, the Troianos tried stricter and stricter discipline. At one point, Shannan Troiano's best friend, Jessica Pamepinto, suggested backing off.
"I used to run around," Pamepinto remembers telling Troiano. "I turned out good."
When Ryder was 14, according to court records, he smashed the glass front of a fire extinguisher case at school and broke into the county fairgrounds, spraying fire extinguishers and smashing lights. A judge sentenced him to supervised probation.
A progress report on Jan. 27, 2006, was dismal: six F's and an E. "I think he is very capable of doing the work," one of his teachers wrote in an e-mail later to the Troianos, "he just refuses."
For a time, the Troianos tried using the probation as leverage. Of 36 meetings with authorities, Shannan Troiano said, she and her husband went to 34 together, and each went to one of the other two.
This spring, Troiano requested that her son be placed in a structured residential program in Western Maryland if he failed to improve at school, she said.
But Ryder had fulfilled his court-ordered obligations outside of school -- he had paid restitution and performed community service -- and on March 21 he was released from probation, leaving his parents feeling they were the only bad guys.
Things got worse. Ryder quit school. According to his parents, he broke into their room and took $45 from his sister's piggy bank, leading first to a physical fight between him and his mother and then to her kicking him out of the house. "Get out!" she remembers telling him.
For two months they didn't see much of Ryder, who spent at least one night in his truck and stayed with friends.
Troiano found a recent MySpace page her son created, one showing his affinity for hard-core rap, which she felt was a growing influence in his clothing and demeanor. She said she talked to one of his friends, who confirmed that Ryder wanted to spend a brief stretch at Cheltenham, thinking it would boost his street credibility.
In June, after the sting and after Ryder was sent to Cheltenham, his parents received two letters from him. Troiano's hands shook as she opened the first.
"You know I love you with all my heart mom!" he wrote in the first. The second was similar: "Mom, thank you for every thang' you ever did for me!"
Troiano was moved, but others quickly saw manipulation, particularly because, in one letter, Ryder asked his mother to tell the judge she wanted him back home.
"I know you love your son," her friend Pamepinto remembers telling her. "But in reality you could be dead right now. If that was not a police officer, you and your husband would be dead."
His mother made a decision: She would go along with what St. Mary's prosecutors wanted to do -- charge her son as an adult and try to send him to the adult prison system.
The hearing Sept. 17 was to determine whether the case would be heard in adult court or be transferred to juvenile court. The Troianos took their seat in the gallery. As deputies led him in, Ryder -- dressed in black shorts, a baggy white T-shirt and a baggy Allen Iverson jersey -- appeared to glance in their direction.
Juvenile Services officials testified that Ryder could benefit from treatment in their system. "He's actually a pretty gentle person if you talk to him, if you sit down and talk to him and listen to him," added Georgia Kenney, a clinical social worker in the public defender's office. "He needs to learn some social behavior. He needs to learn how to control his anger."
Kenney said Ryder had told her that his stepfather hit him and physically abused him, an assertion that Circuit Court Judge Karen Abrams dismissed.
"I don't for one minute think that Mr. and Mrs. Troiano abandoned Cory or did wrong by him or abused him or didn't go well out of their way to try to help him and get him what he needed," she said. "And I understand completely what I heard when I heard, 'We've called this agency, we've called that agency and we've called somebody else and somebody else.' "
The judge ruled that Ryder should be tried in the juvenile system because of its emphasis on rehabilitation, a decision that means he cannot be held past his 21st birthday.
That outcome, and the possibility that he could be released much sooner, left Troiano deeply concerned for reasons she explained as she spoke of her conflicted emotions in court moments earlier.
"I miss him being at home," she said, "and I miss us joking around and kidding around. And then in the very same breath. . . . I don't know what this kid will do, because it's not my son. That can't be my little boy sitting there."
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