No Matter How Loud I Shout (18 page)

Growing up, George thought about her all the time, imagining the life she must be living, glad for her, jealous of her, grieving for her. After years of begging, he was allowed a fifteen-minute visit with her in a park in LA when he was fifteen, nine years after they had parted. They did not recognize or remember one another. It was awkward and silent, a meeting of strangers who shared blood and ancestry, but whose lives had nothing else in common. She belonged now to a solid, law-abiding family, stable and safe. She was a great student, a kid with a future George could only dream about.

“It was the first time I met her, and the last time,” George would later say wistfully, eyes wet. Shortly after the meeting, the girl and her family moved to another county to escape George's mother, who was out on parole at the time and attempting to take her daughter back. Not long after the move, on Christmas Day, George's sister and two other members of her adopted family were killed by a drunken driver. George heard about it three weeks later, long after his only sister had been buried.

Thinking about his dismembered family makes George weep silently, his eyes crimson, the injustice of it leaving him quaking with an angry despair. He has lost his older brother as well. They were initially kept in the same foster homes, so at least they had one another, but they always ended up running away together. George idolized his brother, clung to him as his anchor. George would do anything he said. But the older boy was even more angry and difficult than George, sometimes violent, sometimes weeping uncontrollably for hours, calling for his mother to save him. By the time George was eight, the social workers separated the two boys for good. His older brother telephoned him and wrote letters for a long time, but the calls and cards gradually slowed, then stopped. George doesn't know where his brother is now. “He's somewhere in the system, in prison somewhere, that's all I know,” George says. “He's a total loss. My sister, my brother, my whole family. Gone. Now it's just me.”

George had done nothing wrong to become a 300 kid. He had not asked for a murderous mother or a shattered family. He was just one of a daily procession of abused and neglected children, one of twenty-five thousand
who occupied LA's child welfare system with him in 1983—a system that, today, holds more than twice as many kids.

Despite the uncertainties of his future, the loss of his family, the constant moves from one foster home to another, one school after another, George thrived for some of the time he was raised by the state. Like many abused and neglected children, the trauma of his early life left him in need of medication and counseling for psychological problems, hyperactivity, tantrums. They called him “SED” in court hearings, which George learned meant “severely emotionally disturbed.” For a while, he was heavily medicated. Then someone decided he wasn't so disturbed after all. He began to receive more moderate treatment and, finally, he began to heal. By the 1990–91 school year, when George was in seventh grade—and he was allowed to stay in the same foster home all year—his grades were all A's and B's, with good attendance and good behavior. He became the top student and role model at the Helping Hands group home, dressing each day in bow ties and sweaters, after school diligently tutoring and counseling younger kids. The owner of the group home would have been happy to keep George indefinitely.

But then the Juvenile Court made a fateful decision. In keeping with the system's primary goal of bringing families, even abusive ones, together, the court took George out of the group home in which he was thriving and sent him to live with his aunt and uncle.

For a while—even for a year or two—it seemed to work out. There was just one problem: George's uncle was a drug dealer who later succumbed to addiction and who died of an overdose during George's second year in the home. His aunt lost control after the suicide and began drinking and using drugs.
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She would leave George to go score, the house in shambles. George responded the only way he knew how: He began staying away from the house, then skipping school, his once excellent grades plummeting. Then he joined a street gang. All this took place while he remained a ward of the court, his upbringing still the legal responsibility of the Juvenile Court. The social worker assigned to track George's case somehow never noticed any of this.
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Eventually, an older gang member took George under his wing. The older teen was tough, confident, brash—everything George felt he should be, but wasn't. This boy started a schoolyard brawl, and George leapt to his defense. George's new mentor cut another kid with a broken bottle, the police were called, and everyone got arrested, George included, though he was immediately released. A short time later, another gang member offered George and several other kids a ride in his new car. Two policemen
confronted them at a gas station and arrested them all. The car had been stolen. Of the passengers, only George was truthful with the police and admitted he had known the car was hot when he saw the jimmied ignition switch, though he had no hand in taking it.

Despite George's minimal involvement—by the police department's own account, he was merely a passenger in the car and an unarmed latecomer to the schoolyard fight—he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and, thanks to his forthrightness, car theft, both felonies. He was taken to Juvenile Hall, then Juvenile Court. Not the supposedly protective Juvenile Court dependency branch he knew as a foster kid, but a very different, harder place, the separate, larger side of the court reserved for delinquents, where people like Judge Dorn and Commissioner Jones maintained order.

He met his lawyer for the first time when he took his seat at the defendant's table. The judge was talking to someone else, and the harried-looking young blond woman from the Public Defender's Office whispered to George, “Sorry I couldn't talk to you before the hearing. It's been really busy. I'll be representing you today.” She pulled a file from a large, messy stack of manila folders in front of her and studied it for a minute, reading it for the first time. Then she asked, “You are George, aren't you?”

The hearing passed quickly and without substance. There would be another pretrial hearing, but not for several months, thanks to the constant logjam of cases in Juvenile Court. The bailiff gave George a piece of paper with directions to the Probation Department, so he could talk to an officer about his case, and it was over.

“Look at the bright side,” his lawyer had said. “Isn't that your aunt in the back of the courtroom? You'll be able to go home with her now.”

Despite its brevity, there was a hidden subtext to George's first hearing as an accused delinquent. It had transformed him—in the eyes of the law, at least—from a child in danger to a dangerous child. No one blamed the nameless bureaucrats who took an A–B student and sent him to a home troubled by drugs; there is no such accountability in the system. No one asked how a ward of the court could become a gang member without anyone noticing. Only George was held accountable. His status as a 300 ward had ended, his file in dependency court stamped with one large red word: “Terminated.” Officially, he was no longer a victim, he was a criminal, and that is how he would be treated forevermore.

The child welfare system failed miserably in George's case, but this caused no consternation. The public remained unaware of it, because, in the name of protecting children, the Juvenile Court zealously guards the
confidentiality of 300 cases (not even delinquency court judges get to see these files). And within the system, none of the initiates much noticed, because what happened with George is so shockingly common. Every year, ten thousand cases are dropped from the dependency system in LA. A third of them get termination stamps because kids being raised by the state turn to crime.

That's more than three thousand kids in Los Angeles, every year.

It was downhill from there for George. Because of the confidentiality that swathes 300 kids, his first probation report does not even mention the fact that he was a ward of the dependency court for eight of his fourteen years. It reads as if he suddenly turned to crime at age fourteen for no good reason. The regular counseling and therapy he had received as a victim of child neglect ended. No one noticed: Now he was just a bad kid. He was released to his aunt, who, subsequent probation officers reported, had been jailed on drug charges. George ran away and never showed up for his court hearings, hoping the system would just forget about him.

And then, something incredible happened. The mother of one of his friends took him in. Her home was small and rather shabby, her income was meager, but Kathy Reveles offered George something he had never experienced: kindness, support, acceptance. She treated him like a son, got him reenrolled in school, gave him chores, a small allowance. When he misbehaved, she told him so, and George would apologize, begging her not to send him away. “That's not going to happen,” she would always say. “This is your home now.”

He never really dared to believe that, not completely anyway, until that day he shyly showed her a poem he had written, and she had hugged him and thanked him, as if it was actually worth something. Then George had said, “Thank
you
, Mom,” and it felt right. Kathy had given him a big hug, and he didn't stiffen or push away or anything. George wasn't sure, but at age fourteen, he thought he finally loved someone. And maybe, just maybe, that person loved him back.

For a year, George stayed in school and out of trouble while in the Reveles home. He eventually returned to court and got probation for his old auto theft and assault charges, and Commissioner Jones allowed him to stay with his new “mother.” But a few months later, a member of Reveles's household burglarized a home in the neighborhood. A stolen VCR turned up in George's room, and he was arrested and charged, too. A new probation officer assigned to the case decided Kathy Reveles's household was a bad influence, that her home was too crowded and unkempt, and that
George should be removed. “She's all I have; please, I'll be good and study harder,” George begged, sobbing wildly during their interview. “Please let me go back home.”

But the probation officer was adamant, and Commissioner Jones agreed. George was sent to a group foster home in an LA suburb, many miles from the Reveles home. At the time, notations in George's court file show someone finally noticed his need for counseling, that he was alternately consumed by anger and depression, hurling profanities at schoolteachers one moment, then weeping uncontrollably the next. The probation officer reported that George became “hysterical” during their interview. His school counselor begged the court to put George into some in-depth treatment program before something terrible happened. The Probation Department runs such a residential program, with secure space for a hundred kids and a waiting list of up to six months to get in. But George was never even considered for it. He received no counseling there, or anywhere else.

George hated his new group home. He was the only Hispanic kid; all the others were black and George felt like a misfit, unwanted and picked on. After a few months, George ran away. He returned to his old gang turf and soon fell in with a twenty-two-year-old gangbanger named Frank Villa. Villa and George recruited two other juveniles on probation to participate in a home invasion robbery. Their target was a used-car salesman named Shorty, reputed to keep large amounts of cash in his home.
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Villa was to arm himself with a revolver, George with a .22 rifle, and one of the other juveniles, JoJo, with another gun. The remaining kid, Bambi, was told to knock on the door and to ask for one of Shorty's sons by name. As soon as the door opened, the others would storm the house, hold Shorty and his family at gunpoint, then make off with the money, Villa ordered.

Instead, Shorty shot Villa in the leg, the rest of the family pounced on him, kicking and punching, and the three kids working with Villa ran off.

Once behind bars, Villa quickly informed on the others, placing much of the blame on George and hoping to get leniency in return for cooperation. The police found George at Kathy Reveles's house; his other partners in crime were in the same neighborhood. The charges were extensive: There were six people in the house, including an infant, which meant six counts of attempted armed robbery. Because Villa fired his gun, attempted murder charges were under review as well.

George had reached his sixteenth birthday by then. The court system that had always given him such short shrift studied his record in minute detail now. In order to justify treating him as an adult, a new spin was put
on his background by yet another probation officer assigned to his case—the sixth since he had entered the system. In the past, George's criminal involvement—in the assault, the car theft, and the burglary—had always been seen as minimal, which is why he stayed on probation and received virtually no supervision or services from the Juvenile Court. But now, the new probation officer wrote, “The minor appears to have a rather serious previous delinquent history. There is a previous assault with a deadly weapon. . . . It is clear that he is a threat to the safety of others.”

As before, there was no discussion in this latest report of his childhood entrusted to the state. There was no mention of the unheeded pleas that George receive psychological counseling after he became a delinquent. There was only a harsh recommendation: Transfer him to adult court. Prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law.

Now it was up to Jewell Jones to decide.

·  ·  ·

In court, George shifts in his seat and glances mournfully at the empty chair next to him, the one marked “Parent.” The bailiff speaks into the public address system: “Parents of George Trevino, please follow the yellow line to Department 251.” Then, after a whispered command from Jones, he adds, “
Guardian
of George Trevino, please report to 251.” After a moment, Kathy Reveles walks in, blond and plump with a wrinkled, kind face. She sits down heavily next to George, then begins to pat his shoulder as he wipes his tears on a sleeve. “I'm all he has,” she tells the court.