One of my top 10 favorite movies.
Posted on 03/14/2004 6:08:58 AM PST by madprof98
EVANS -- Sherrie Glover's only child hanged himself with a prison bedsheet more than two years ago.
He was 15 and locked up for vandalizing and stealing candy from a ballpark concession stand and breaking into a church storage building and shooting a Coke machine with a stolen gun.
"Dear Mom," Richard Brown Jr. wrote on Dec. 19, 2001, the day he died. "I'm sorry for all of the Bad things I'v done in the past. But what I do now is for both of us. Mom, I love you. Please don't be sad."
Glover carries a worn copy of the note in her wallet.
A copy is all she has. Despite requests from her lawyer dating to last summer, the state has failed to send her the original note or the letters she wrote to Richard while he was incarcerated. She wants the letters. She wants to hold the last thing he wrote.
"They took everything I had," Glover, 43, said in a tearful interview last week at her home in Evans, near Augusta. "Can't they give me those back?"
On Friday, a state official said Glover would receive Richard's personal effects this week.
"I just apologize profusely," said Jaci Vickers, spokeswoman for the state's Department of Juvenile Justice. "I thought it had been taken care of, and it wasn't."
It is now a priority, Vickers said. "We'll do everything we can to expedite her receiving it," Vickers said. "I really feel terrible about it. . . . I don't know what happened."
To compel the state to hand over Richard's belongings, Glover had enlisted her lawyer, who wrote Juvenile Justice in August. Wade Padgett said he and his staff wrote letters and made "a series of phone calls."
"They are the last words of this lady's child," Padgett said. "They are the last communications of Sherrie with her child."
Last month Glover turned to child welfare advocate Rick McDevitt, Georgia Alliance for Children president, and asked him to see if Orlando Martinez, the former Juvenile Justice commissioner, could intervene. Martinez contacted Vickers in February, and she forwarded his request to the department's legal adviser.
Vickers saidFriday she thought, until contacted by a newspaper reporter last week, everything had already been sent to Richard's mother.She called the Ireland Youth Development Campus in Milledgeville, only to learn Richard's belongingswere still there.
"It's one of the unfortunate things that slipped through the cracks," said Vickers, whosaidstaff changes at the youth prison and at Juvenile Justice headquarters might have contributed to the problem. "There was no intent to withhold those personal effects from the mother."
A relieved Glover said Friday, "I think it's sad that it had to get to this point. I thought it was an easy request."
Her wait for the suicide note and letters is the last part of her son's tragic entanglement with Juvenile Justice.
After Richard hanged himself with a bedsheet tied to a top bunk, Glover filed a negligenceclaim against the state. The state settled out of court in February 2003 for an amount Glover won't disclose. The money's not the point, she said. "I'd go live in a car with him," she said, "if I could have him back."
After Richard's death in Milledgeville, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Juvenile Justice investigated. Among the findings:
• Boys had bullied Richard and taken his food. One boy said the food was for gambling debts.
• The staff broke a rule that would have ensured two officers were on duty in Richard's cottage when he died. A staff member had taken some boys to the gym, leaving only one officer to oversee 17 boys.
• Richard was on the list for medication that evening, for what his mother said was attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, but no one summoned him.
• Staff failed to regularly check the boys' rooms that evening, in violation of Juvenile Justice policy.
Richard's time in Milledgeville, which he entered five weeks before he died, wasn't his first encounterwith Juvenile Justice. Glover had turned over her son a few times because she was having trouble controlling him, she said.
She and Richard's father had split up when Richard was 9 months old.
The trouble started when Richard was 14, she said. He and another boy broke into a concession stand at a ballpark behind Glover's apartment. A judge sentenced Richard to ayear's probation and fined him $250, Glover said.
But soon Richard was skipping school and arguing with her. When Richard became too much for her to handle, Glover would call his probation officer, and at times Richard would be sent to a Juvenile Justice institution. She said she had hoped the state would set him on a better path.
"I thought I was teaching Richard a lesson by letting him suffer the consequences of his actions," she said. "They all told me it's where kids get help."
These days, Glover said, she struggles with the fact that she turned to the state for help. "My hand was in it."
In September 2001, Richard and a partner burglarized the sameconcession standagain and "made a mess of the place," Glover said. The same night, they broke into a building behind a church and Richard shot a Coke machine with a gun another boy had stolen, she said. Richard was charged with two counts of burglary and one count of possession of a firearm. A judge sentenced him to two years of state supervision with the first year to be served in a youth prison.
After a brief incarcerationin Savannah, Richard was sent to the Ireland Youth Development Campus in Milledgeville that November.
Glover and her son were upset because he was more than 90 miles from home. She couldn't see him often because she was working two jobsand her car was unreliable. Glover said she begged officials to move Richard to a youth prison in nearby Augusta.
In Milledgeville, shevisited her son the Sunday after Thanksgiving 2001. They sat clutching each other's hands.
"Mama, please don't leave me here," she recalled he told her. "I'm scared. I don't know what I'm going to do."
On her way out, in tears, Glover told a staff member she was worried. Richard was put on suicide watch that night, then moved to a different cottage, she said. "They said that's all he needed."
On Dec. 19, 2001, he hanged himself.
At Glover's home, she has stacks of photos documenting her brown-eyed boy's childhood.
"When he was little, he would send all his balloons up to God," she said last week.
She cried, remembering. And she cried over what happened to him.
"I sent them a child who was a teenager," she said. "He was smart and he was loved. And within a little bit of time, they turned him into somebody who thought he didn't have any value to anybody."
When she lost Richard, she lost everything that meant anything to her, she said.
"People will say, 'How many kids do you have?' " she said. "None," she said she sometimes answers. "My son killed himself." Then she'll fish out her copy of the last thing he wrote.
"I'll never see his first prom," she said. "He turned 18 in February. I don't have anybody to share holidays with anymore. So I just don't do them. I go to the Waffle House for Christmas dinner. It just never should have been this way."
He sure was busy.
Evidently the state did not provide him with sufficient outlets for entertainment.
I have a 16 year old daughter that spent 60 days in the Milledgeville facility for the horrible crime of beating up the daughter of a Loganville city coucilman that had been tormenting her for weeks.
First off, even though my daughter did not deserve the sentence she got, and I gave every effort to free her of those charges, it's still my failure as a parent and I would've been totally at fault if something had happened to her during her stay in Milledgeville.
Secondly, this facility is absolutely horrid. It is not run with enough staff, and most of the staff there don't do their jobs.
Like the boy in the story, there were many evenings my daughter didn't receive her medications.
Certain kids were allowed to run around beating up whoever they pleased without fear of retribution, while those who defended themselves against the bullies were disciplined.
My calls to the staff regarding my daughters treatment were ignored, and I was forced to take further measures. I learned that the head worker went to kroger on a certain evening each week to grocery shop.
She looked very surprised when I stopped her in the dark parking lot, and told her in very clear and detailed terms what would happen if so much as one hair was harmed on my daughter.
Being the gentleman that I am, I apologized to the lady for the obvious state of fear I had put her in, but reminded her that I was forced to go this route by their ignoring me.
My daughter never had another problem, but if something had happened to her, I would've been to blame. I'm her father, and even though I went through every effort to do what I felt was right, and even though my daughter got railroaded by the state, I would've been totally and soley responsible.
This is the way things are run in most public schools. The teachers and administrators are afraid of the violent bullies (and they are afraid of lawsuits for disciplining trouble-makers). If "normal" public schools are often so bad, I can only imagine that facilities for children who have problems must be hell-holes, where children are not disciplined or "rehabilitated." I imagine any bullies who get sent to such a place find that they can do anything to the weaker or slower children there and never fear being punished. The "children" who survive that learn to become hardened criminals.
Too bad the Coke machine couldn't shoot back. Would have avoided wasting a perfectly good bedsheet.
Bwah! Reminds me of Colonel 'Bat' Guano's warning to Group Captain Lionel Mandrake,
..you'll answer to the Coca Cola company for this!
Given that, I stand amazed that liberals continue to look to an even more powerful government as the solution to their problems.
That's what jumped out at me!
When is the public going to rise up against the drugging of the nation's kids?
ADH or whatever they call it is so much bogus crap! Ritalin and the other drugs serve no other purpose than to quiet down normal boys so teacher can sit at her desk and correct papers without interruption. That these drugs have nasty side effects sometimes resulting in suicide doesn't seem to be a concern of the liberals who make the diagnosis and prescribe the drugs.
Why don't you ask the owner of the concession stand that this "kid" vandalized and burgarlized twice. I wonder who had to pay for that? How many hours of his own labor did the owner have to put into cleaning up after the first time only to have it happen again?
The first time I might agree that he was a kid getting in trouble and deserved a second chance. The second time, it becomes obvious that he did not learn from the first experience, and he is attacking the livelihood of the stand owner.
Not stated in the article is all the other times he broke the law and didn't get caught. Read between the lines and think about what this kid was really like.
One of my top 10 favorite movies.
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