Police Are Seeking Escaped Teenager

Youth Called 'Armed and Dangerous'

D.C. police are looking for a "dangerous" 17-year-old who authorities said escaped while being transferred from the D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services to a secure treatment facility outside Washington.

Gerald Long was handed over by the D.C. agency to officials from the treatment facility at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport on Aug. 1, but he got away while waiting to board a plane, the agency said. Details of his escape remain murky.

D.C. police said in a news release that Long "should be considered armed and dangerous," but authorities would not disclose why he was in the youth agency's custody, citing confidentiality laws about juvenile offenders. Also unclear is how the teenager got loose a second time, last Saturday, after being arrested in Seat Pleasant.

Police in Seat Pleasant, in central Prince George's County, said they were unaware that Long was wanted by D.C. authorities. They said they turned him over to a social worker in the county, after which he either escaped or was released.

It appears that Seat Pleasant police did not know that Long was being sought in the District because D.C. police had not entered information about him into a regional law enforcement computer system. D.C. police spokeswoman Traci Hughes said yesterday that the department was not told about Long until early this week, 10 days after his airport escape and two days after his run-in with police in Prince George's.

"We're trying to put together all the information and figure out what happened," said Ayan Islam, a spokeswoman for the D.C. youth agency.

Police said Long is 5-foot-8 and 181 pounds, with black hair, light-colored eyes and a medium complexion. Officials obtained a court order this week allowing them to disclose limited information about Long to aid the search for him.

Islam said the agency's director, Vincent Schiraldi, was not available yesterday to comment on the case. Schiraldi, a former executive director of a juvenile justice think tank, was hired in 2005 to overhaul the department, then called the Youth Services Agency.

Before his arrival, 26 percent of youths in custody had walked away from detention facilities or not returned from weekend passes. This year, the average is 5 percent, according to the agency.

In May, a 17-year-old boy being held at the city's Oak Hill detention facility escaped while he and other incarcerated teens, members of a Shakespeare troupe, attended a holiday cookout at Schiraldi's Columbia Heights home. The youth was later arrested and charged as an adult with cocaine distribution.

An official familiar with the D.C. juvenile justice system, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of privacy rules, said Long had been in the agency's custody for about two months when he disappeared from the airport.

Islam would not disclose the name or location of the treatment facility to which Long was being transferred. She said the escape occurred "hours" after Long had been turned over to representatives of the facility at the airport.

She said that the agency was informed of the escape shortly after it happened and that "all the proper procedures" were followed. The agency obtained a custody order from a D.C. judge, the equivalent of an arrest warrant in an adult case, and notified D.C. police that Long was missing, she said.

The usual procedure, officials said, is for D.C. police to enter information about someone into a database called the Washington Area Law Enforcement System, or WALES.

Seat Pleasant police said they encountered Long last Saturday at the scene of a domestic dispute. Checking law enforcement databases, they said, they saw Long was listed as a "missing person" in the National Crime Information Center system, which is similar to WALES but much larger.

They said they then turned him over to a social worker.