A Youth Agency That Needs to Open Up

Phyllis Woods, crying softly, was being comforted by two co-workers as I left the building where she works on Trenton Place SE.

I left with a copy of a May 19 D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services memorandum addressed to her. It reads:

"To: Ms. Phyllis Woods From: Willie J. Toney, Aftercare Worker, DYRS Subject: Case Closure Re: Wood [sic], Errick Jamar.

"This memorandum serves to inform you of the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services intent to close the above referenced case. Notification of this intent has been forwarded to the Office of the Attorney General, Defense Counsel, and his sentencing Judge."

With that memo (not a letter, mind you, but an instrument normally reserved for interoffice circulation) the District's juvenile justice agency officially washed its hands of Errick Woods, age 20, who was found at 4 a.m. April 26 in the 2400 block of Elvans Road SE with multiple gunshot wounds.

Errick Woods, son of Phyllis Woods, was the city's fourth homicide victim of the night. He was also under DYRS supervision when he was killed.

Woods, known as Bubby, had been committed in his teens to the agency's supervision until he reached age 21. Woods served successive detentions at DYRS's Oak Hill youth detention center before the agency placed him in a Youth In Transition program operated by a DYRS vendor in Baltimore.

Some of that time was put to good use. Last November the Maryland State Department of Education awarded Woods a high school diploma for having scored well on five GED tests. He also landed a job and was allowed family visits on the weekend, if, according to the agency's protocol, his mother agreed.

Phyllis Woods said the DYRS vendor didn't always obtain her consent.

She said she didn't know her son was in Washington on that fateful April weekend until she received a phone call from George Washington University Hospital at 8 a.m. informing her that he had been killed four hours earlier.

She said the DYRS vendor told her that Errick had asked to be dropped off on Elvans Road SE, which is in a high-crime neighborhood located blocks from her home, and that the driver had complied.

Asked about this, DYRS spokesman Reggie Sanders wrote in an e-mail: "As you know, by law we cannot comment on cases involving individual youth. We can say that the info you have is incomplete."