 |
James Nedock / The (McAllen) Monitor
Meghan Adams, Frank Macias and Chris Lozano could spend up to 99 years in an adult prison if convicted of killing Meghan's grandmother. Posted on 06/15/2003 7:49:41 AM PDT by MeekOneGOP
Teens' discontent turned deadly
3 charged in grandmother's strangulation blame each other
06/15/2003
PHARR, Texas – It was never much of a plan.
What Meghan Adams, 16, really wanted was to get to Louisiana and reunite with her mother. Stealing her grandmother's car was simply a means so that she and two other self-styled outcasts at school could make the trip and leave behind the rules and the aimlessness of their lives.
On the night of March 6, Meghan and her friends, Frank Macias and Chris Lozano, both 15, decided to make it happen. They gathered at the two-bedroom apartment Meghan shared with her grandmother, Jan Barnum, 57. Then, things went horribly wrong.
They waited for Ms. Barnum to go to sleep so they could get the car keys and leave. When she didn't go to bed, the kids grew impatient and decided to kill her, prosecutors said. One of the boys strangled her using a red, white and blue ribbon from Meghan's school spirit medal, the prosecutors said. Ms. Barnum fought desperately and died hard.
In their confessions to police, the three lay the blame for the killing on each other. The callow pointlessness of the killing, however, led authorities to try as adults these three kids still struggling with baby fat.
James Nedock / The (McAllen) Monitor Meghan Adams, Frank Macias and Chris Lozano could spend up to 99 years in an adult prison if convicted of killing Meghan's grandmother. |
It's not a happy story. Nor, sadly, is it particularly unusual, said Dr. Helen Smith, author of A Scarred Heart: Understanding and Identifying Kids Who Kill. It is just a sadly typical occurrence of youths with little grounding in personal accountability. They kill, she said, because they can.
"They believe there are no consequences to their actions," said Dr. Smith, a forensic psychologist in Knoxville, Tenn. "When they spiral into violence, it seems to just happen. But nothing ever just happens with these kids."
An adult crime
Meghan and her friends remain in the Hidalgo County Jail on a single murder charge each. District Judge Edward Aparicio set a bond of $1 million each, pending formal indictment on the adult charges by a grand jury.
"The totality of the circumstances illustrate that it was an unconscionable and senseless death," Judge Aparicio said in his order certifying them as adults. "The fact that these individuals are minors does not lessen the crime."
Under Texas law, a juvenile who commits a first-degree felony, such as murder at the age of 14 or any felony at 15 or 16, can be certified for trial as an adult. In 2001, authorities certified 18 youths to stand trial on murder charges in Texas.
Besides the Pharr teenagers, Hidalgo County has had only three juvenile certifications in the last three years.
"We don't do a lot of juvenile certifications. It has to be pretty egregious," said Assistant District Attorney Roy Valdez, who will prosecute the case. "This one qualifies."
Attorney Dan Reyes of McAllen, representing Meghan, told the court that she would appeal her certification. Lawyers for Chris and Frank said they would not.
If convicted, Meghan, Frank and Chris could spend up to 99 years in an adult prison. The possibility of spending time in juvenile correction until their 18th birthdays, then transferring to adult prison, was ruled out when no juvenile facility was willing to take them because of the nature of the crime.
Family members and the youths' attorneys declined to be interviewed. Their comments to juvenile authorities, however, are part of the defendants' record that was unsealed during the certification hearing before Judge Aparicio and subsequently made public by the court.
After the certification hearing, Meghan broke into tears and was consoled by her great-grandmother, Shirley Saulsbury, mother of the murdered woman. During the hearing, Mrs. Saulsbury, a well-respected retired math teacher in Pharr, had testified that she didn't believe Meghan had intended Ms. Barnum's death and urged that Meghan be tried as a juvenile.
Earlier, in interviews with juvenile authorities, Mrs. Saulsbury said, "The child needs to be punished for stealing the car and running away, but not for the rest of her life."
In photographs taken at their hearing, the trio looks more like children caught playing hooky than people looking at hard time for a brutal and impulsive murder.
Hard to handle
Meghan Mae Adams came to the Rio Grande Valley in October 2001 when her mother, Robbie Lynn Adams, a special education teacher living in St. Francisville, La., decided she could no longer deal with a hyperactive and argumentative teenager.
It was not the first time. Court officials learned that after Meghan's parents divorced in the mid-'90s, Mrs. Adams had sent her to live with various relatives while she struggled to make a living and take care of Meghan's two younger sisters.
In March, she told juvenile authorities she had sent Meghan to Texas "because she could no longer handle her."
Meghan moved in with Ms. Barnum, her maternal grandmother, who shared a house in Pharr with her mother, Mrs. Saulsbury. It was, at best, an awkward time. Mrs. Saulsbury, the former teacher, was a firm disciplinarian with her great-granddaughter. Ms. Barnum, however, frequently sided with Meghan in disputes with the older woman.
In January, Ms. Barnum and Meghan moved into their own place, a squat, red-brick apartment complex in south Pharr.
Meghan was a ninth-grader at Pharr-San Juan-Alamo North High School, a sprawling complex of about 2,000 students that sits on what once was a melon field. Meghan, an average student who played third-chair flute in the school band, made more frequent trips to the counselor's office as her grades began to suffer and as she increasingly skipped class and engaged in minor violations of school rules.
Meghan gravitated to a small clique of kids who favored dark clothes and the somber pretensions of the Goth world – among them, Christopher Lozano and Francisco Macias.
Frank, as he preferred to be called, is a small, frail-looking kid whose clothes always appear too big. A poor student, Frank received detentions for being "rude" to teachers and classmates. Once he was reprimanded for wearing a pentagram to school. Other kids mocked him as "the Antichrist."
To his family's consternation, Chris had taken to dressing in Goth wear, affecting a pose as a Wiccan worshipper. A medium-build, good-looking kid, he started painting his fingernails black. He and Frank enjoyed talking about the Lord of the Rings movies and their mutual hatred of their respective stepfathers.
Meghan told juvenile authorities that she and the boys frequently talked about how removed from their school community they felt, about how much their families interfered with their lives.
It is a textbook example of how marginalized youths can turn bad, said Dr. Smith, who has evaluated more than 5,000 troubled young people and adults.
"Most of these kids have no extensive history of violence before they kill," she said. "But they do have a distorted view of the world, and they operate out of a sense of entitlement. They truly believe they should be able to do whatever they want."
The problem worsens, Dr. Smith said, when parents, families and school officials fail to step in early to foster a sense of personal accountability.
Idea to flee
By high school, the three increasingly skipped school to smoke cigarettes in nearby homes under construction or hang out at Meghan's apartment, watching television. Ms. Barnum, never a disciplinarian, began to complain about her granddaughter's keeping company with the boys.
Meghan bridled at the imposition of rules, school officials said. She began thinking how good it would be to see her mother, even though she frequently told her friends that her mother "abandoned" her. She began asking other students to help her get to Louisiana.
It remained wishful thinking until March 5. That night, after a bitter fight with her grandmother, Meghan stormed out of the apartment to join Chris and Frank in a walk around their neighborhood. A police officer caught them at a vacant house. The trio was detained for criminal trespass but not charged.
It was their first real brush with the law. Police called their parents. While waiting in the lockup, the three decided that they would leave for Louisiana the next night.
They agreed to meet at Meghan's apartment, wait for her grandmother to fall asleep, then steal her car, prosecutors said. As the evening wore on to about 10 p.m., Ms. Barnum showed no sign of turning in. In her confession, Meghan said Frank grew impatient and said, "To hell with it, let's just kill her."
At this point, the three friends' accounts of the killing diverge. Meghan said she did not want her grandmother killed. Frank, however, told police it was Meghan's idea and that Chris said, "Go for it."
Frank said he sneaked up behind Ms. Barnum, a woman of medium build, and began choking her. She screamed and fought back, ripping out strands of his hair. Meghan then handed him the school award with the ribbon attached, Frank said. He wrapped it around the older woman's neck.
"I kept choking her until she stopped moving her arms," Frank wrote in his confession. He then hugged Meghan and said he was sorry. She cried softly, then got up and calmly retrieved her grandmother's purse and car keys.
Chris tells a different story. He says he walked in while Frank struggled with Ms. Barnum and tried to get him to stop. Blood on his shoes and other forensic evidence suggest he held her legs while she was being killed, prosecutors said.
After the killing, the trio walked out to the car. "Meghan said she left something and told me to go back and get her pet hamster," Chris said. He did, putting the animal's cage in the back seat of the beige Mercury.
Caught
About 11:10 p.m., Pharr police Officer Javier Gallegos responded to the A&E Store on North I Road on a complaint about three runaways called in by an off-duty officer. He questioned them and dropped Frank and Chris at their homes. He then accompanied Meghan back to the apartment.
When no one answered, he had the manager open the door and found Ms. Barnum sprawled facedown on the floor. He placed Meghan back in the police car and quickly returned to the homes of the two boys and arrested them. By 3 a.m., all three had given signed confessions.
The differing stories will grow clearer as the case goes to trial, said Mr. Valdez, the assistant DA. "This case involves questions of who did what and when they knew about it," he said.
"We have physical evidence, and we have confessions in which one person says, 'I strangled her.' The major conflict is whose idea it was."
The killings sent shock waves through the Valley community. Students and teachers had great difficulty believing that some of their own could be involved in such a crime.
"The day after the killing, word spread through school like wildfire," high school counselor Annie Garza said.
"Kids were very upset and crying. They weren't prepared to believe anyone they knew could be involved."
Antonio Guajardo, superintendent of the Pharr-San Juan-Alamo Independent School District, said he had trouble knowing who the three were when he read about the arrests in the paper.
"Usually, we know the very good ones or the very bad ones," he said. "But these kids are somewhere in the middle. They just didn't stand out."
Meghan, Frank and Chris are being held in cells separate from the general population and are not in communication with one another, jail officials said.
While still in the juvenile facility, evaluators noted, Meghan talked excessively and animatedly and showed little emotion. She did, however, express sadness that her grandmother was dead.
Asked what she would like to be, she told the evaluators, "I would like to be an angel or a butterfly – free."
E-mail dmclemore@dallasnews.com
Hmmmmmm...
Like someone's absence?
Well now, she's trained to work with special ed kids, but can't even deal with her own kid.
WHERE'S DADDY?
Although I can empathize..Robbie Lynn needs to think about a career change!
This is what happens when Rat values, or rather the lack of values, corrupt someone.
In this case it sounds like father AND mother abandonment. No one loved this girl, maybe the grandmother tried after it was too late. The other two have stepfather's mentioned, it's likely their mothers pretty much abandoned them while out picking up new men to bring into the home. Kids can make it with one parent ---if that parent stays home and raises them.
What was the point of this sentence? The photo shows three slim teens. The only reason for this is to gain sympathy for the killers' youth.
Meghan moved in with Ms. Barnum, her maternal grandmother, who shared a house in Pharr with her mother, Mrs. Saulsbury.
Why is the grandmother a Ms., and the great-grandmother a Mrs.? Such silliness doesn't belong in a serious article.
Meghan was a ninth-grader at Pharr-San Juan-Alamo North High School, a sprawling complex of about 2,000 students that sits on what once was a melon field.
I BLAME BILL CLINTON.
I thought they were struggling with baby fat.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.