No Matter How Loud I Shout (2 page)

The new arrivals are escorted one by one to a small room, where the Intake Officer conducts a brief interview, reviews the police reports, talks to the suspects' next of kin if they're around, then writes a two-page report with recommendations. Some of the intake officers have perfected a technique of quizzing newcomers that rarely, if ever, requires them to utter a complete sentence. They simply say, “Name? Date of birth? Address?” all the way down the form in front of them, like reading a shopping list, a complete interview done and only a few dozens words uttered in the process. This peremptory method belies the immense power the Intake Officer wields as a kind of pretrial judge, jury, and jailer rolled
into one. He can recommend release or incarceration, prosecution or diversion to counseling, even dismissal of charges, and his calls carry great weight with the court. The recommendations tend to get more liberal as the lockup reaches its capacity each night—“You can only make so many of 'em sleep on mattresses on the floor before the ACLU shows up,” the Intake Officer on duty this night confides to a cop escorting one of the newcomers.

The Intake Officer has already processed twenty-seven cases in a little over four hours—all manner of thieves, burglars, and gun-toting criminals, several probation violators, two carjackers, an arsonist, an armed robber, and a drive-by shooter. The Intake Officer is used to routine and rote, to offenders who fit the classic stereotypes, but of late the patterns had been changing, not so much because of the mix of crimes—that had remained fairly constant—but because of the type of people committing them. In recent days, he had referred for prosecution a stickup suspect who was rich, with a home in one of LA's most affluent neighborhoods and no need beyond sheer kicks for robbing anyone; a drive-by shooter who was female—still an oddity, even in an age of unprecedented violent crime; and a home invasion robber with one of the hardest-luck stories the Intake Officer had ever heard, having been raised by that ultimate dysfunctional parent, the state, only to be abandoned to a life of crime.

Tonight, he has an even more unusual newcomer, this one charged with murder—though that is not the strange part. Used to be murder cases were momentous exceptions to the plodding dullness of his job, but now they, too, had become almost routine. Dozens a month now. The “pop sheet” at the lockup is full of them. It is the circumstances of the case—and its probable outcome—that jump out at you. It is nothing short of bizarre.

The case involves a botched robbery at a freeway motel. Two armed suspects demanded money from the desk clerk, but another motel employee emerged from a back room with a gun of his own, blowing a fatal two-inch hole into the ringleader's chest. No one else was hurt. Still, the surviving robber—Geri Vance, who now stands before the Intake Officer—was arrested for murder in the death of his crime partner, the theory being that no one would have died had the robbery never taken place. It was a legal loophole in reverse, a murder charge for someone who had killed no one. The Intake Officer has heard of such cases, but has never actually seen one before.

“How can they charge me with murder? I never even fired my gun at anyone,” Geri tells the Intake Officer, which is perfectly true—and, legally
at least, completely irrelevant. “I was forced to take part in that robbery. I didn't want to do it, but I gave in. I know I have to do some time for that, I understand that. But I'm no killer.”

There is an earnestness in Geri's manner and words that even the jaded Intake Officer can see. He almost feels sorry for the guy. “You'll have your day in court,” the Intake Officer offers. Geri only winces.

Geri's case is in stark contrast to another murder case the Intake Officer handled just days before—a very ugly double homicide in which the suspect had already confessed to police that he killed his employers, a middle-aged married couple who owned a popular neighborhood ice cream shop in the View Park section of Los Angeles. Although they had long treated their counterman like a member of the family, the shop owners had recently chastised Ronald Duncan for chronically coming late to the shop. This so irritated Ronald that he decided to rob them, then blow their heads off with a shotgun while they drove him home from work. He boasted about it to a friend the next day, which was his downfall, as it is with a surprising number of criminals who would not otherwise be caught. The arresting officers in this case had handed him over at Central with obvious relief, as if he were contagious.

In both, the Intake Officer had to look through the thick rubber-banded packets of paper compiled by the police on each killing. Although they had both been brought in on murder charges, the two suspects couldn't have been more different. It seems clear that Geri the motel robber wasn't a killer at heart. The only reason he had been caught was because he brought his dying crime partner to a hospital emergency room after fleeing the Best Western they tried to rob. He could have gotten away clean, but chose to try to save a life instead. Then he had pretty much told the truth from the moment the police grabbed him at the hospital, immediately admitting to the robbery—not realizing he had signed his own murder warrant by doing so, his protests of coercion notwithstanding. He is bright and personable, with a sad history that began when he was abused and neglected as a child, left to roam the streets and to accumulate a record of minor crimes, none of them violent, at least until today. His fate had been sadly predictable, almost preordained, the Intake Officer figures.

But this other one, this shotgun-wielding killer, had come out of nowhere. Ronald Duncan had no criminal record, no known history of violence or abuse, no mental illness—just an unremarkable middle-class background, plodding and dull. He had cooked up a bogus alibi when the
police caught up with him, then later confessed after a marathon session with detectives, without any apparent pangs of conscience or remorse. Once his initial fear at the unfamiliarity of the lockup faded, the Intake Officer saw a grin on Ronald's face, as if he had been brought to Central on a traffic offense, not a murder charge. He wondered aloud how much respect on the streets he'd earn for getting busted on such a serious rap. But when asked why he killed his employers, Ronald adamantly denied it—notwithstanding the police tape recording of him admitting to murder. Then he had the gall to ask, “Can I go home now?”

Both of these newcomers ended up on the same unit, the lockup's high-risk offender wing, joining the other murderers, rapists, and assorted other violent criminals awaiting trials or sentencing, stripped, searched, showered, and given orange jumpsuits to wear, their clothes and possessions boxed and tagged. After months, a year, possibly more, their cases will be resolved. The Intake Officer has no doubt which of the two murder defendants the system will end up treating more harshly.

Geri Vance, the would-be motel robber—the murder defendant who killed no one—faces life in prison without possibility of parole, and will almost certainly get it.

Ronald Duncan, the shotgun killer, can serve no more than eight years, and will probably do less. He can never see the inside of a state penitentiary. After his release, his record will be wiped clean, as if it never existed, the files sealed by state law, so that he can move freely, run for office, own a gun.

Even a man made cynical from running the intake desk too many nights has to marvel at this. But the Intake Officer doesn't dwell on such matters very long, nor does he try to manipulate some other result by injecting opinion into his reports. He gave up long ago trying to find sense in the workings of Juvenile Court.

There is just too much else to deal with—things were backing up in the Old Wing. Let some overworked juvenile judge worry about the rights and wrongs of it all. The Intake Officer still had to deal with two young car thieves, a twelve-year-old child molester, an assortment of warring gangbangers, and a straight-A student who tried to hack her sister to death with a machete. There were papers to fill out and cells to fill up. It was a busy night behind the high stone walls of Los Angeles's Central Juvenile Hall.

Like always.

Elias is reading to my class, his dark eyes fixed on the paper quivering in his hands.

These are the things I learned when I was growing up:

I learned how to take a spray can of paint

and write my
nombre
on the wall.

I learned how to make a Walkman's motor into a tattoo machine,

so that I could get my barrio on my arms and my neck,

to show how much I love my homeboys.

I learned how to sell the weed and the rock.

These are the things I learned when I was growing up.

The seven other boys in the class nod as Elias reads. They are fourteen and fifteen and sixteen years old, and he is describing their lives as well as his own, lives that brought them to Central Juvenile Hall not as mere delinquents, like most of the 1,600 kids warehoused here, but as HROs—high-risk offenders. Geri Vance is in my class, and Ronald Duncan, part of a broad assortment of kids, some with futures, some without, most of them painfully aware which category they fall into. “We're the monsters they talk about on the news,” sixteen-year-old Chris, a gentle-mannered robber of pizza deliverymen, told me matter-of-factly when I first started teaching the Monday-night writing class two months ago. “We're the ones you're supposed to be afraid of.” I felt too guilty to tell him that I had, indeed, expected to find monsters when Sister Janet first led me to them. Hesitating outside the double-locked steel door to their unit, I had asked the Juvenile Hall chaplain rather nervously why she had chosen these kids, rather than some less hardened, more salvageable boys or girls, and Janet had just smiled cryptically and said, “Because these boys need you more.”

Elias has a stoic strength about him, quiet and shy, in the past too nervous to read his work aloud. At first, he always just folded his eloquent essays on life in the streets into tiny squares of paper, passing them to me in silence so I could read them privately. Tonight, though, his anger has boiled up from the page and into the classroom.

When I was growing up, I learned how to take

another person's car without a key,

how to drive it and sell it, or just leave it somewhere.

I learned how to sit down low

and look out the windows for the enemy,

to see them before they saw me.

And, finally, when I was growing up,

I learned how to load bullets into a gun.

I learned how to carry it and aim it,

and I learned how to shoot at the enemy,

to be there for my homeboys, no matter what.

“I hear you,” James says, an obvious longing for the street in his voice. He has just penned an essay on how he'd like to drive a car over his ex-girlfriend, and it is not entirely clear that he is joking. The kids, in their severe jailhouse haircuts and the neon orange jumpsuits reserved for HROs, look pale and fragile beneath the hall's harsh lights, a few of them nursing adolescent wisps of mustache hair that only make them look younger. Yet, most of the boys in this room are on trial for thoroughly adult crimes—murder or attempted murder or armed robbery. They have witnessed and done terrible things. At the same time, these kids who could pull a trigger without a blink remain painfully timid about reading their work aloud, blushing, breathing hard, breaking a sweat just at the thought of standing before the class and baring themselves. Silence can claim the room like an advancing tide. Tonight, though, Elias, with his angry diatribe, is my unexpected hero. He has broken the ice.

And then this seemingly hardened gangbanger, this kid with the huge tattoo on his arm announcing his gang allegiance, “Sureño 13,” surprises everyone. His voice drops nearly to a whisper, hoarse and urgent, his words taking a new direction.

These are the things I learned when I was growing up.

But this is what I want to know:

I want to know, who is going to teach me

how to pick out the right baby carriage for my little girl?

Who is going to teach me how to make up a bottle,

or to change a diaper, or to buy baby food?

Who is going to teach me how to be a father?

How to take care of my family?

How to live a life—a normal life?

These are the things I never learned growing up.

Who will teach me now?

When he finishes, the room is silent, not a cough, not a mutter, not a rustle of clothing, just the sound of Elias setting his paper down on the
old Formica tabletop and, filtered through the room's walls of metal, cinder block, and safety glass with wire mesh embedded within, the muffled jailhouse sounds of feet shuffling, toilets flushing, young voices competing with the television bolted to the wall of the common room. Elias's eyes stay locked on his piece of paper. The sorrow and regret in his voice was so naked that the bravado and machismo that normally inhabit this room have evaporated like dew in the desert. Several boys are blinking hard.