More Deaths -- and a Promised Review in D.C.

From the Aug. 15 Post: "Police yesterday captured a District man who escaped from Cheltenham Youth Center in Prince George's County on Sunday along with two other detainees. Maryland state troopers and D.C. police said they arrested 18-year-old Demarco E. Smith in the 700 block of 24th Street NE in the District."

From the Aug. 21 Post: "Southern Ave., 900 block, 1:35 a.m. Aug. 9. Drevon Proctor, 15, of the 1200 block of Southview Drive in Oxon Hill, was found with a gunshot wound. He was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead."

The 18-year-old escapee from the Maryland juvenile detention center and the 15-year-old D.C. homicide victim have something in common: Both were under the court-ordered supervision of the D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services.

Gerald Long, 17, was under DYRS supervision on Aug. 1 when he escaped from Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport shortly after DYRS personnel handed him over to the staff of a supposedly secure detention facility.

There's the case of 18-year-old JohnQuan D. Wright, who was shot and killed Aug. 14 just after 10 a.m. in the unit block of K Street NW. The Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services maintains that Wright was not under its supervision at the time he was killed.

Court records, however, show that on May 27, 2005, Wright was committed to DYRS custody until he reached age 21.

A court document filed by his attorney on March 8 in an effort to get him released from the D.C. jail, where he was being held on a February charge of armed robbery, indicated that at the time of his arrest, Wright had been living at a group home where he was placed through the DYRS. The document noted that Wright's DYRS caseworker said he would be returned to Oak Hill juvenile detention center if he were released from jail.

But if the agency no longer wishes to claim him, so be it.

The shooting of Drevon Proctor brings the total of DYRS-supervised youths killed this year to six (seven, counting Wright). That's up from four such deaths in all of 2007, and it is only August.

Past columns of mine have referred to two youths who committed armed robberies in June while under agency supervision and two drive-by shootings committed by another youth under DYRS supervision.

What is going on with the youths living in the community under so-called DYRS supervision?

This much we know: These convicted youths are on the streets because DYRS Director Vincent Schiraldi is a proponent of placing convicted juveniles in, as he has said, "the least restrictive, most homelike environment" -- that is, back in the community.