BRUTALITY IS MORE SHOCKING WHEN FOUND IN THOSE SO YOUNG.

Some of the reasons murders by youngsters are increasing at such a rapid rate are as plain as the latest statistics on the family. Kids who commit homicide are more likely to be physically, sexually, or verbally abused. They are more likely to come from a broken home. And almost all use drugs, or come from a family where drug and alcohol abuse is a problem. All of those societal ills have skyrocketed dramatically in the last decade.

But many children come from those backgrounds and do not commit murder. What makes the difference between the 15-year-old who stabs a buddy during a fight and the one who avoids a confrontation? Between the girl who shoots her abusive parents and the one who runs away? Those answers are more elusive. And while social workers, teachers, police, and counselors can sometimes recognize when a teenager is about to explode into violence, intervening has proved difficult.

For society’s sake, the query “Why do kids kill?” may need to be replaced with another, more urgent question. What do we do with them after they kill?



ROXANNE, 17, SHOWS OFF HER ROOM. A POSTER OF THE MUSIC group The Cure and another showing the shaved head of Irish singer Sin6ad O’Connor adorn the cinder block wall. Her clothes and haircut are stylish punk, this year’s version of the rebel without a cause. The 14-by-14-foot space has two other beds, surrounded with two other girls’ posters and stuffed animals. Her roommates, like her, were sent here for murder.

Roxanne and another girl have been chosen to show me around campus because of their success in following the highly structured Giddings program. The collection of white brick and Austin stone buildings sits on 93 acres just outside the Central Texas town of Giddings. Except for the tall wire fence and the surveillance cameras in the dorms, it could be a summer camp facility. Of the 290 students held here, only 18 are girls, Seventy of the teens are here for homicide or attempted homicide; 27 are from Dallas.

Committed to TYC for capital murder, Koxanne has been nere 21 months. During that lime she’s been a model student, attending school, going to therapy, taking wood shop. She’s scheduled to return to her home in a large Texas city in 11 months, when she turns 18. In years past, she would be biding time, waiting for her release date. Now, she’s required to go through the Capital Offender Program, and that’s scary.

She’s a little vague on what put her in Giddings, though she’s quick to mention she didn’t do the actual killing. She was a co-actor-conspiring with two other teens in kidnapping, robbery, and blowing up a car-an incident that resulted in the death of her 19-year-old ex-boyfriend.

The group of eight or nine teenagers meets for two hours twice a week, for four months. First, students act out their “life stories ” pulling in other teens in the group to act as parents, siblings, other significant people. Roxanne has done that before in her regular therapy class. That’s not what’s frightening-she’s worried about playing the part of her victim. She’s heard it’s intense, emotional.

Acting out life stories allows the students to identify past problems that led to their feelings of aggresReyes, the psychologist in charge of the Capital Offender Program, says that almost three out of four of the students she’s seen here have come from dysfunctional families. (Of 45 teen killers that have come through the program so far, she says, only one came from a stable background.)

But often, the teens don’t realize the impact their background has had on their lives. Contrary to widespread belief, only a small portion of teen killers are truly psychotic; one study puts it at 7 percent. Most have what are called conduct disorders.

Reyes recalls a 16-year-old teen who remembered being locked in a closet by his siblings every day for years. She had him confront his brothers and sisters, played by other members of the group. Then she forced him to make other connections. The pent-up anger had not led him to kill the brothers and sisters. Instead, he got into satanic worship; then, he and his group found and shot an innocent victim, someone he had never met. But the association was there.

After the youths probe their backgrounds, the group moves into a reenactment of the crime. Because a recurring theme among these youths is a tendency to see themselves as not in control, the therapists and other group members relentlessly point out choices that each killer had made that led to the murder. Reyes won’t let them cop out.

The next step is for the teens to act out the part of their victim. “They need to feel shame, remorse, guilt, pain,” Reyes says. The goal of the psychodrama is to strip away the layers of defense-the chilly mask that police and lawyers usually see, often making teen killers appear frighteningly devoid of feeling. “Oftentimes,” Reyes says, “they’ll say (their] victim deserved it.”

Reyes saw this with two female cousins, Giddings inmates who had conspired to kill one of the girls’ mothers, an abusive drug addict. They woke up one night to find her standing over them with a dagger, saying they’d “get it” one night. In reenacting the crime, the two girls’ antics were at first very destructive to the group. “They would laugh hysterically, would say they’d do it again,” Reyes says. “But once we broke through the denial, there was a lot of remorse. \*fe got them to accept there might have been other options, like calling the police, or going to someone at school.”

In addition to acting out the part of the victim, the participants see videotapes of TV shows where victims and their families talk about the impact crime has had on their lives.

“A really critical element [in controlling aggression] seems to be the ability for the individual not to turn off their own feelings,” Reyes says. “That’s why we hammer so much on victim empathy.”



I’VE ASKED TO SPEAK TO ONE OF THE TEENAGERS FROM DALLAS who has completed the program. Edward (his real name is protected by juvenile court records) was 14 when he and an 18-year-old committed the sadistic rape and murder of 38-year-old Lexine Robinson, then shot and repeatedly stabbed her 12-year-old son.

Prosecutors, who called it the worst crime they had seen in juvenile court in years, were outraged when the conviction was overturned, and after a retrial in December, state District Judge Catherine S. Evans reduced the sentence.

Now 17, Edward could be released when he turns 21. Reyes testified on his behalf. His appellate attorney, Maridell Ternpleton, calls his story a “miracle,” and says he’s come a long way at Giddings. But those who remember the child, shot through the eye, have a hard time imagining Edward walking the streets again.

“I would not term his case a miracle,” says Stan DeGerolami, assistant superintendent at Giddings. “The young man has made progress-academically, socially, therapeu-tically. But he still needs to be at Giddings. I have a lot of respect for Linda Reyes, but I don’t think we work miracles here.”

Reyes won’t comment on Edward specifically. “Bui I have seen those with great potential, who say that they don’t know what their lives would be like if they hadn’t gotten caught and sent to Giddings,” she says.

While she won’t allow an interview with Edward, saying that the attention might harm his continuing therapy, Reyes does introduce me to “Lucas,” 18, who is scheduled to be released to live with his mother in a small town in Central Texas. Handsome, with an athletic build, Lucas ambles into one of the administration rooms at Giddings wearing a cowboy duster coat over his jeans and a University of Texas sweatshirt.

He speaks softly, matter-of-faetly. He lets me know he’s willing to talk with me, but it might be a little hard for him because this is the third anniversary of his stepmother’s death, an event that becomes significant as he tells his story.

The young man describes his home and his parents’ violent divorce-with him at the volatile center. He talks of how his mother would tell him, at six years old, to get himself to bed early because she was going out partying. He thought life might be better with his father, but after he moved to his dad’s home, a 10-acre spread in the country with lots of animals, the physical and verbal abuse began.

Lucas’s father was rarely home, and the boy grew very close to his stepmother. After she contracted a terrible illness, Lucas took care of her until her death. The morning the stepmother died, Lucas and his father went to breakfast. That’s when his dad asked him: “You really loved her?” Lucas said, “Yeah.” “You know you killed her?” his dad replied. Lucas was devastated. Nine months later, Lucas took his gun, and while his father slept, put a bullet through his head.

Lucas has been at Giddings a little more than two years. Before he went through the Capital Offender Program, he tried not to talk about the murder. The group forced him to confront it. “It [the reenactmenf] was hard,” he says softly. “It made me deal with feelings I repressed-1 always blamed myself for things: Diana’s death, the divorce, my dad’s abuse. If I could go back and change it, I would. I backed myself into a corner.”

Lucas thinks he’s changed, that he is now able to express his feelings verbally, rather than shutting them up until he explodes. He wants to continue giving talks about his crime at high schools and colleges. “I made a bunch of bad choices and bad mistakes,” Lucas says. “I’m trying to tell people how I made those mistakes. And that you can turn your life around.”

For many reasons, experts say, teens who kill their parents are unlikely to kill again. In fact, most people who kill once never repeat their crime, according to Dr. James Grigson, a psychiatrist popularly known as “Dr. Death” because he testifies at so many death penalty trials.

Those who are deemed most likely to kill again are those who derive pleasure from the murder, such as serial killers. Reyes says she’s never had one of those in her program, but says she would never completely rule out a youth committing another murder, or turning to other crimes, even though he or she successfully completed the Capital Offender Program. Almost all of those in the program are affected by the Giddings experience to some extent, some more than others. “The more antisocial they are, the less hopeful I am about their ability to stay away from criminal activity,” Reyes says. “Even the best therapy is no inoculation against aggression if they go back to the lifestyle.” Overall, the Ihree-year recidivism rate for those in TYC is 40 percent; for those at Giddings, it is just under 33 percent.

Early intervention in the lives of those from dysfunctional families could make a dent in the rising juvenile homicide rate, Reyes says. So could reduction in the easy availability of guns. “Those kids from Dallas and Houston talk about carrying weapons, even to school, from the time they are little kids,” Reyes says.

Reyes hopes that her program can be extended to those students committed to Gid-dings for aggravated assault. She has seen a few who she fears could be budding serial murderers. Though the law now allows juveniles to be sentenced to up to 30 years (they are transferred to the adult prison system at age 21) there’s little that the TYC can do about offenders who have been given indeterminate sentences, as are most of those committed for aggravated assault. They must be released at 21, and they are not offered the program Reyes administers to teen killers. And there is little chance that that will change. There simply aren’t the funds or the trained therapists to extend the program to other offenders at Giddings. “’It’s ironic,” laments Reyes, “you’ve got to kill someone to get into treatment.”

The enormity of the task of rehabilitatingthese teen killers is daunting, During hertherapy sessions, Reyes frequently tells the jteenagers how hard it is for her to forgivethem for what they have done, how terribletheir crimes make her feel. And that feelingslays with her when she leaves. “I feel morevulnerable out there in the world,” Reyessays. “I know the most innocent-looking kidcould be dangerous. I go home and wrestledemons in my dreams.”