Everyone had come to see the case reach its resolution. But that morning, the district attorney’s office had abruptly withdrawn the five-year offer. Now they had a new proposition: seven years in state prison.
Du Bois broke the news to Jasmine in the vestibule outside the courtroom. She erupted in fury and dismay.
“No! No! No!” she yelled. “I’ve been nice! I’ve been polite!”
But there was nothing she could do. The district attorney’s office held all the cards. Take it or go to trial, Du Bois said they’d told him.
Du Bois pulled up a chair beside Richard to explain what had happened. As the news registered, Richard’s head sank to his chest.
Jasmine sat up straight in her seat, her eyes fixed intently on her son. Richard turned and met her eyes. They stared at each other for a long, heartbreaking moment. When Richard turned back to face Du Bois, he tucked his head into his shoulder like a bird wrapping itself in its own wing. Jasmine covered her mouth with one hand, her fingers curled into a fist.
The bailiff unlocked Richard’s shackles and he stood, moving with a defeated, dreamlike languor. He looked back at his mother one more time, his eyes swimming, his face pale. Then he bent down and signed the plea.
THE FINE PRINT
Under the terms of the deal, Richard’s sentence could still be reduced to five years—if he successfully jumped through a series of hoops. Three months after his sentencing, the judge would receive an evaluation of his conduct at the Division of Juvenile Justice, as California’s juvenile facilities are called. If his conduct was good and he was participating in the educational and rehabilitation programs offered there, he would return to court for a second evaluation in another three months, just before his eighteenth birthday. If this second evaluation was also positive, the judge would resentence him to five years in state prison instead of seven, which would mean he could stay in a juvenile facility for the whole time he was incarcerated. But if either evaluation had a black mark on it, the seven-year sentence would stand. If it did, Richard would be transferred to an adult prison when he turned eighteen.
Du Bois was visibly furious. “He’s now thrown to the wolves,” he said when the hearing was over. Any number of scenarios could lead to a bad discipline report, he pointed out. Richard could be attacked by another inmate, or harassed by a sadistic staff member. Weeks later, he was still fuming. “He’ll do five years in adult prison if he gets one bad progress report,” he said. “It’s punitive. And for what? Protecting the community by making this kid into a real gangster?”
A STRUCTURED ENVIRONMENT
District attorney Nancy O’Malley was never able to fully explain why the offer changed at the last minute. But it was pretty clear that her deputies had simply lost patience.
“It kept getting continued and continued and continued and the result was that he sat in our facility without having meaningful treatment,” she said.
There were more services available in the state’s Division of Juvenile Justice facilities than in the county’s Juvenile Hall, she argued, and the sooner Richard was sentenced, the sooner he could take advantage of them. “We need this young man, when he comes out of incarceration, not to get on a bus and set another person on fire,” she said.
Of course, if Richard wasn’t resentenced before he turned eighteen, he wouldn’t be in a DJJ facility for long. He’d be sent to an adult prison, where the choice of programs was meager. But O’Malley was confident that Richard would be able to meet the benchmarks she’d set.
“By all accounts he appears to be someone who—unfortunately for him—does well in a structured environment,” she said. “But he’s not going to live in a structured environment forever.”
That was the story as she saw it: Richard did well when he was confined and poorly when he wasn’t. Clearly, then, the solution was to keep confining him.
LOOK WHERE HIS PEOPLE WENT
Some of Richard’s friends had reached the same conclusion. Not because they wanted to protect the world from Richard, but because they wanted to protect Richard from the world. The world they knew had so many dead-end streets, so many dangerous corners, and no clearly marked way out.
Richard’s cousin Gerald remembered how Richard had been the summer he first got back from Redding. Full of ambition and resolve. “He was telling me when he first got out that he was doing good and he was going to work and stuff,” Gerald said. “He started falling off when he started going with the wrong people.”
Gerald never said who those wrong people were, but in the year between Richard’s arrest and his sentencing, two of his old friends were arrested for separate but equally serious crimes—carjackings and home invasion robberies. They were both sentenced to five years in adult prison.
“I’m not saying jail is for everybody, but it probably could save his life because look where his people went,” Cherie said. “He’s not going to do everything his friends are going to do, but he would’ve gotten wrapped up in some of it.”
That was the dilemma all of them faced in one form or another. If your friends were on a dangerous path, adults told you to cast them aside. But without your friends, who could you trust? Who could you count on to have your back?
VICTIM-IMPACT STATEMENT
Richard returned to court in November for sentencing. Debbie and Karl were there, as were Jasmine and her sister Juliette. Lloyd was there too. It was the first time he had come to one of Richard’s court appearances. When Richard saw his family there, a smile flickered across his face and then disappeared, like a snail retreating into its shell.
Debbie had been asked to give a victim-impact statement. She was ushered past the wooden bar that separated the gallery from the court and given a glass of water to clear her throat. Then she stood in front of Richard and read aloud a letter, her voice quavering.
“You attacked our child as they slept on a bus,” she began. “Maybe you thought it was weird that Sasha was wearing a skirt.”
Richard’s gaze stayed on her face as she described Sasha’s ordeal—the charred skin, the painful skin grafts, the hours of daily bandaging. His eyes filled with tears.
“We do not understand your actions,” Debbie went on. “But we also think that hatred only leads to more hatred and anger. We don’t want you to come out of prison full of hate. Following the incident, communities near and far affirmed Sasha’s—and everyone’s—right to not be harassed or hurt or bullied for how they dress, or whether they are gay or trans or agender. We truly hope that you will gain some understanding and empathy in the years to come. Maybe sometime in the future you will be the one coming to the aid of someone being bullied.”
Afterward, Debbie and Karl spent about half an hour answering questions from the media. Then they walked out of the courthouse in the November sunshine and stopped for coffee at a nearby sidewalk café. They were exhausted from talking to reporters, unsure whether to be relieved or distraught.
“I felt like it was important that he hear it from us,” Debbie said of the letter she’d read. “What that was like. I don’t want people to think, Oh, it’s not a big deal to us because we’ve been forgiving. But”—her voice grew soft—“I wish it had turned out differently for Richard. We got Sasha back. But poor Jasmine. She lost her son for years.”
“I just had this wave of emotion at how young he looked,” Karl said. “He just looks like a kid.”
“I hope they can make it,” Debbie said. “I hope they don’t get crushed.”
“He,” Karl corrected.
“Yeah,” Debbie said. “I hope he doesn’t get crushed.”
NERD FRATERNITY
As Richard was being sentenced, Sasha was moving out of the dorms and into Epsilon Theta, which was housed in a yellow colonial revival mansion about two miles from the MIT campus. A former Navy fraternity, it was now, as Sasha explained, “a fraternity in name only.”
“I mean, we’re dry, we’re coed, we’re a bunch of nerds,” they said. “It’s kind of like the an
ti-fraternity.” It was the perfect place for someone as shy as Sasha—a ready-made cadre of like-minded people. “Whenever I’m not in class, I’m at ET,” Sasha explained.
The house had many eccentricities, one of which was that none of the bedrooms contained beds. The rooms were for studying or socializing only. All twenty-one Thetans slept in an attic dormitory that was kept perpetually dim and hushed so that house members could sleep undisturbed at any time of day.
When not sleeping or studying, Thetans were fond of video games, constructing and solving elaborate puzzles, playing, inventing, and reimagining board games, and pretending to kill one another as part of live-action Mafia games. They ate communal meals prepared by a cook named Karen, and had a variety of wry, nerdy traditions, like Not Coffee (defined as “a weekly study break with tasty snacks that, in general, are not coffee”) and Stereo Wars (“a contest of loudness before the start of Finals”).
Sasha was the only nonbinary person in the house, but in response to their request, the house changed the names of the gendered bathrooms—known as “heads” in a linguistic carryover from ET’s Navy days—to “men’s plus” and “women’s plus.”
“Anyone who doesn’t exclusively identify as male can use the women’s head and anyone who doesn’t exclusively identify as female can use the men’s head,” Sasha explained. By this definition, Sasha could use both.
When Sasha came home for vacation, they proudly wore an Epsilon Theta sweatshirt. It was a little hard to tell that it was an ET sweatshirt, though, since both the letters and the sweatshirt were the exact same shade of purple.
They were happy at MIT. They’d found their people and they liked their classes. As for the fire, it was already a distant memory. Few people at MIT even knew it had happened.
HOW IT ENDED UP
Cherie sits in a café in Oakland, drinking a smoothie and talking about the old days, back when she and Richard were fourteen. She’s wearing a turquoise tie-dyed T-shirt, jeans, and gold hoop earrings. Her hair is waist-long and gleaming, her jewelry glittery, her skin flawless—except for the streaks made by the tears streaming down her face.
“It was kind of fucked up that we were out there fighting and cutting school,” she says. “Let me just say that it was karma, you know? We should’ve been doing what we were supposed to be doing. Because look how it ended up for us.”
She ticked the outcomes off on her fingers. Skeet was dead. Ashley was a mom. Hadari and Jesse were serving time in the state penitentiary. Richard had been convicted of a felony.
She and Dae were the last ones standing. They were both eighteen, but so far neither of them had graduated from high school. They weren’t giving up on those diplomas, but they had a lot of catching up to do.
“It’s just a sad story,” she says. “When you think about it, it’s just hella sad.”
MAIL DELIVERY
In January 2015, Sasha finally received the two letters Richard had written fourteen months earlier.
“I sympathized with him a lot, reading his letters,” Sasha said. “It was definitely really moving, seeing his perspective.”
Debbie and Karl read the letters too.
“I’m kind of bummed that I didn’t see them a year ago,” Karl said.
“It would’ve made a difference,” Debbie said. “I would have been more engaged in what was going on with Richard, I think. For him to say, ‘I did wrong and I’m sorry and I hope you get better.’ That meant a lot to me.”
She sighed. “If I’d read the letters, I would have had a different speech to give to him.”
CHAD
On January 2, 2015, Richard left Alameda County Juvenile Hall in the back of a Crown Vic cage car and traveled an hour and twenty minutes by freeway to Stockton, California. From there, the car motored down a long, straight road with plowed furrows and rows of trees on the left, brown grass on the right. Through a gate topped by razor wire, into a complex of low-slung white buildings with pitched blue roofs. This was N. A. Chaderjian Youth Correctional Facility, known as Chad, home to some two hundred and thirty males ages eighteen to twenty-five.
OPPORTUNITY
From the Youth Rights Handbook distributed by the Division of Juvenile Justice:
After considering all the options, a decision was made by a Juvenile or Adult Court to commit or house you with the Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ). Now that you are here, you may experience a feeling of anxiety or fear. This handbook was created to help you understand your rights, what to expect while housed in a facility of DJJ, answer some commonly asked questions, and provide useful information to help you while at DJJ.
DJJ would like to see you successfully complete your stay and end your involvement with the criminal justice system. A number of our youth do well here, and never find themselves in trouble again. When this happens, everyone benefits, and most importantly you. Think of your time here as an opportunity rather than a punishment and take advantage of all there is to offer. If you do this, there is no doubt that you will succeed and be better prepared when you are released into the community.
Basic Necessities
You have the right …
To be provided with the basic things you need to live and stay healthy. Basic necessities include the right to:
• Healthy food
• Sleep
• Exercise
• A daily shower
• Medical services
• Reading material
• Contact with your parents, guardians, and attorney
• Clean water
• Bedding
• A drinking fountain
• A toilet
• Access to religious services
• Send and receive mail
Once you arrive at a Reception Center or Facility, you will be provided clean basic state-issued clothing and sufficient personal hygiene items. You will shower daily and are provided with soap, shampoo, towels, toothbrush, tooth paste, and other hygiene supplies. You may also choose to purchase other clothing and hygiene items through canteen.
SOME ITEMS AVAILABLE AT CANTEEN MAY INCLUDE:
• Clothing (pants, sweatshirts, thermals, name brand shoes)
• Food (snacks and soft drinks)
• Hygiene (Lotion, hair products, makeup for female youth)
• Electronics (MP3 player and walkman)
Contraband
There are a number of items that are prohibited. Here are just a few:
• Cigarettes/tobacco
• Controlled substances
• Drug paraphernalia
• Drugs
• Gambling or lottery materials
• Gang writing or materials
• Money
• Sexually explicit drawings, pictures, prints, etc.
• Weapons or explosives
• Cell phones, PDA’s, pagers, etc.
Searches
You have the right …
TO BE SEARCHED IN A WAY THAT IS LEAST EMBARRASSING TO YOU.
Searches are necessary to provide safety for you and others in your facility. There are different types of searches.
PROPERTY OR ROOM SEARCHES
Staff may search your room or possessions for contraband or evidence. Property and room searches should be conducted in your presence whenever possible. Staff will look through your clothing, bedding, books and all other belongings that are in your room.
PAT DOWN SEARCH
Clothed “pat-down” searches are conducted on a routine basis and are done in certain instances, like when a youth is leaving a vocational shop.
SKIN SEARCHES
Skin searches require you to remove your clothing. This will be conducted with maximum concern for your privacy and only peace officer or licensed medical staff of the same sex as you shall be present or participate in the search. Should you be suspected of concealing contraband in your rectal or vaginal area, a rectal or vaginal search may be conducted. This type of search will be performed by a lic
ensed medical staff.
THEN AND NOW
Ten years ago, California had 10,000 incarcerated juveniles in eleven state facilities and six camps. Today, the number hovers around 700, distributed among three facilities and one conservation camp, where low-risk youths do fire-suppression work. Only hard-core offenders come to Division of Juvenile Justice facilities—kids convicted of violent crimes and sex offenses. (Youths convicted of less-serious crimes serve their time in county juvenile halls or group homes, or by remaining in the community while wearing GPS ankle monitors that track their movements.)
Most of the young people in DJJ facilities were tried in juvenile court, as those who go through adult court usually wind up in adult prisons. Offenders who come here generally stay two or three years.
Chad has twelve living units, only nine of which are currently being used. They are arranged in a semicircle around a scrubby grass expanse where the youths play softball, touch football, soccer. It’s blisteringly hot in the summer, bleakly cold in winter. The views are dreary: a bare brown hill, a chain-link fence, searchlights stacked on a pole. Yet despite the horrid weather, the squat sameness of the buildings, and the severity of the youths’ offenses, Chad doesn’t feel like a terrible place. The atmosphere is relaxed and informal, more like a school than a prison. Youths go to class, attend vocational programs, work at on-site jobs, take part in cognitive-behavioral counseling groups. They complain about being tired from work and from school, but they don’t complain about being bored.
Ten years ago, Chad was a very different place. In August 2005, an eighteen-year-old named Joseph Daniel Maldonado hung himself with a bedsheet from the upper bunk of his room at Chad’s Pajaro Hall. He had spent the previous eight weeks confined to his room close to twenty-four hours a day and had been denied mental health services despite his repeated requests. It was the fifth suicide at a California juvenile facility in as many years.
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