“Death sentence”: Autistic teen faces decades behind bars after violent incident
Video footage of the February 2023 incident was horrifying: a 6-foot-6 17-year-old Florida boy violently pushing a Palm Coast teacher’s aide to the ground and repeatedly punching her until school staff pulled him away.
The teen, Brendan Depa, is on the severe end of the autism spectrum and has been diagnosed as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder – which makes him uncooperative and hostile toward others – and intermittent explosive disorder, which results in outbursts of anger. Before Depa’s arrest, his therapist had concluded that the teenager had the emotional maturity of a 4-year-old, his mother, Leanne, said.
Depa now sits in Flagler County Jail, 25 miles north of Daytona Beach, awaiting sentencing after being charged as an adult under Florida’s “direct file” laws — sweeping powers given to prosecutors to move kids to the adult system. The Miami Herald recently reported that Black teens are disproportionately tried as adults under this law.
Things could have been different: Depa’s parents had repeatedly sought help for Depa for years leading up to the incident. And numerous times, their efforts were thwarted by the limited support available to the state’s most troubled children.
Depa’s family initially could not find any facilities in Florida that could support his needs. They found one in South Carolina in early 2020, but were forced to remove him less than a year after he arrived because their insurer had stopped paying for his care. By this time, space had opened up in a Florida group home that could care for him, but the facility was not equipped to provide him an education. Depa wound up attending Matanzas High School for his classes.
The Depa family alleges that the Flagler school district, which includes Matanzas High School, failed to follow Depa’s customized learning plan — a federal requirement — and instead placed him in the care of a teacher’s aide who lacked the requisite training to work with children with special needs.
The result? A 58-year-old woman with broken ribs, multiple bruises and mental trauma she is still recovering from and a teen with special needs facing the possibility of spending most of his adult life in prison.
“Why was he even allowed to attend a regular school?” said Joan Naydich, the teacher’s aide. She told the Herald that she blames everyone who knew what he was capable of doing and said that school officials gave her the impression that she had completed all the required training.
“Parents who have teenage sons with autism are terrified by this case because what happens when their son has a bad day?” said Stephen Furnari, a local Flagler attorney who is the father of a special needs child. Furnari chairs an advisory group that works with Flagler’s school district on meeting the needs of kids with disabilities.
“Brendan Depa, a kid who has serious health issues, is basically bearing all of the burden of the failure of the governmental and insurance systems that should’ve been in place to protect them,” he said.
Even the criminal case against Depa, a Black teen, could have gone differently.
The prosecutor’s office declined to say how long of a sentence they are seeking, but Depa could be sentenced for as long as 30 years — a far harsher potential penalty than was recently given by the same judge to a white teen with similar problems who was accused of a similar crime.
John Willford resided in the same group home as Depa and violently assaulted two aides and a teacher in 2019. He had just turned 18 and was charged as an adult. But even though he could have been charged with three offenses, one for each staffer, he was only charged with a single third-degree felony.
In contrast, prosecutors upgraded Depa’s charges from a second-degree juvenile felony to a first-degree charge in adult court and the judge found him competent to stand trial despite grave doubts from one of the two experts appointed by the court to assess his mental fitness. Prosecutors didn’t offer Depa a plea deal to reduce his potential sentence.
Willford did not need to post bail after his arrest.
As for Depa? $1 million.
‘The criminalization of disability’
The Flagler County Sheriff’s Office posted police body camera footage of Depa’s arrest the day after the incident. The agency described what happened in the post but, because of privacy laws, made no mention of Depa’s disabilities. The post went viral and led to stories in both local and national news outlets. Users on social media platforms described Depa as a “hulking” teen, a “rabid creature” and a “monster” who “will never change.” The sheriff’s office also released CCTV footage of the assault three days later, fueling more public outrage.
The sheriff’s office did not respond to the Herald’s questions about why it decided to publicly release the videos even though it hadn’t done so for Willford. The state attorney’s office of the Seventh Judicial Circuit — under which Flagler County falls — also declined to comment.
Public outcry often influences prosecutorial decisions, said Michele Deitch director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin.
“Prosecutors are political beings,” she said. “They don’t want to appear soft on crime.”
School districts are federally mandated to have an “Individualized Education Program” for each special needs student, which is a set of rules staff are required to follow when dealing with the student. The IEP maps out the instructions, supports and services kids like Depa need to make progress in school.
Flagler’s school district delayed implementing Depa’s IEP for months after he enrolled in December 2020 and Depa was only able to start school during spring the next year, attorneys representing him alleged in an administrative complaint against the school district. Depa got into altercations with other students and school staff multiple times over the next two years but the complaint says that his behavioral plan was never reviewed or changed and the school “did not seem to have any control.”
“The district failed to provide the direct instruction, supports and services to teach [Brendan Depa] how to not only function in the school setting but how to regulate his emotions, communicate his wants and needs,” it states.
“The trajectory is clear. Had the district intervened at any of these points, [it] would have prevented the eventuality of what occurred.”
Joan Naydich, the teacher’s aide whom Depa assaulted, had worked as a lunch lady in the school district for 17 years before becoming a teacher’s aide roughly two years before the incident. Records obtained by the Herald show that Naydich didn’t have any special training to work with students with special needs. She completed such a training in September 2023, rougly six months after the attack, but only for pre-kindergarteners.
Disability advocates say it’s all too common for teacher’s aides with no particular training to be thrust into the role of taking care of kids with special needs.
Because they haven’t been taught how to de-escalate conflicts, it can lead to violent incidents like the one involving Depa and to instances where educators feel the need to call in law enforcement to address the problem, said Ann Siegel of Disability Rights Florida, an advocacy group.
“The schools’ failures turn into the criminalization of disability,” she said.
‘A death sentence’
On the afternoon of Feb. 21, 2023, surveillance cameras from inside the school captured Depa in the hallway pushing Naydich so hard she was flung a few feet in the air. She then fell to the ground motionless while he repeatedly beat her and – per the arrest report – threatened to kill her.
The exact details of what transpired in the time leading up to the assault are disputed. Depa told police that Naydich had taken away his Nintendo gaming device; Naydich told the court that she “never even touched it” and had just asked him to put it away but Depa did not comply. He “began to get highly irritated” and screamed “nasty names” at her before finally assaulting her, she said.
The assault broke five of Naydich’s ribs. She suffered a concussion and told the court that she still often gets headaches and feels dizzy, has lapses in memory and gets anxiety attacks in crowded places. Naydich went back to work after physically recovering but left the school soon after. She didn’t specify why she left but said she has been seeing an army of doctors and medical experts.
“I have lifetime injuries that make it difficult to get through life as I used to,” she told the Herald. “He is a danger to society and needs to be sentenced appropriately.”
Naydich testified in court that no one in the school administration had told her about the specifics of Depa’s disabilities or that his IEP stated that she was not supposed to reprimand or correct him in front of others. She did not know his gaming device was a known trigger.
The Flagler school district and Matanzas High School declined to answer the Herald’s questions about why Naydich was assigned to Depa despite not having specialized training to work with speciall need students and why no one had informed her about Depa’s specific disabilities.
Depa’s mother, Leanne, is sympathetic to Naydich but worries about what prison will mean for her son.
“Joan did not deserve this to happen to her,” Leanne Depa told the Herald. “I hope the judge will allow Brendan to go to any facility other than prison because I just don’t think he’ll survive.
“Prison for him is a death sentence.”
Lack of options
Brendan Depa loves mac and cheese and playing with Legos, his mother said. He is an avid fan of video games and Pokémon. Eugene Lopes, who has been tutoring Depa in jail for his GED, said that Depa has an extensive vocabulary and is generally very polite.
But he struggles to process emotions and adapt to changes in his routine and has a history of lashing out against things and people he dislikes, according to public records and interviews with those close to him.
The Depa family were initially his foster care parents before they adopted him when he was 2. From an early age, Depa struggled to control his emotions – and as he grew in size, his outbursts became more violent and harder for his parents to contain.
Depa struggled in the chaotic environment of daycare from the very beginning. The family tried a range of traditional public and charter schools in his early years growing up in Riverview, a Tampa suburb, but his mother said that he “did not do well.” Leanne said she knew there were things wrong with him from the time he was little and decided to homeschool him.
His psychiatrist put him on ADHD medicines when he was 4, and over the years the Depas have tried different medications to help him. None of them worked, Leanne said, and he gained weight — 10 pounds a month at one point — making him difficult to restrain during outbursts.
She said that police officers detained Depa a few times via the Baker Act, a Florida law under which people with mental health issues can be temporarily detained for safety reasons. A few other times he was arrested.
Depa has four prior juvenile battery misdemeanors — two after he had an outburst and hit other kids at a park and two from when his family called the police to their home to restrain him, according to reports the Herald obtained from Hillsborough’s Sheriff’s Office. The incidents took place in early 2019 when Depa, then 13, was in the process of changing medications.
“It was clear that he needed to be put in a residential facility to figure things out,” Leanne said.
They initially looked for places in Florida, but none of them matched their primary Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance and secondary Florida Medicaid plan. Eventually they found Springbrook Autism Behavioral Health in South Carolina right before the outbreak of COVID. Depa was 15 at the time.
Depa was a resident at the facility for nearly a year in total. Medicaid continued to process payments during that time, but Blue Cross Blue Shield stopped paying after a few months. Eventually a Medicaid caseworker told Leanne that she was having difficulty continuing to get the payments approved.
Leanne, an occupational therapist, couldn’t afford to keep Depa at the facility without insurance — she estimates it would have cost roughly $13,000 a month. She decided to look for group homes in Florida that were under the state’s Agency for Persons with Disabilities, which meant that most of Depa’s costs would be covered by the state.
Florida has roughly 2,300 licensed group homes serving around 13,300 people with disabilities. None of them have in-house educational facilities. The only one that did, Carlton Palms Educational Center, northwest of Orlando, was shut down in 2018 after the suspicious deaths of three teenaged patients and multiple allegations of neglect and abuse.
After Depa was forced to leave his residential facility in South Carolina, the closest Florida facility with an open bed was the East Coast Habilitation Options in Palm Coast, a two-and-a-half hour drive from the Depa’s home.
While school districts typically arrange for tutoring in a residential facility if they think they will not be able to meet the needs of a student with a disability, Flagler’s school district didn’t do so for Depa. Instead, he attended school at Matanzas High School, a traditional public school around 10 miles from the facility.
A different path
From the outset, Depa did not adjust well to the school setting. Within a few months of starting classes in 2021, Depa, then 16, had been suspended several times for pushing a teacher’s aide, spitting at another student, yelling at teachers and being aggressive toward staff.
But despite these instances, the school district made no changes to his behavioral plan or support services.
Then came the day of Feb. 21, 2023, when Depa assaulted Naydich. State attorneys charged Depa in adult court with aggravated battery on an educational employee three days later.
Both Jessica Anderton and Roger Davis, two court-ordered psychologists who evaluated Depa, noted that his autism and mental health issues compound his symptoms. But they found him alert and “cooperative,” per court footage the Herald obtained through records requests.
Davis concluded that while Depa might need to be corrected at times, he seemed attentive and well-behaved and was competent to stand trial. Anderton, who evaluated him a month prior, disagreed.
She was bothered by Depa’s inappropriate laughing bouts and hallucinations of voices that were “mostly comforting,” but occasionally suggested disturbing actions, like telling him that he should “kick people,” she told the court. She said she was unsure whether the voices were just manifestations of inner thoughts or psychotic symptoms.
She said that Depa fell under the American Psychiatric Association’s most severe autism classification and needed “extreme” levels of day-to-day support.
Despite that, Judge Terence Perkins found Depa competent to stand trial, noting that Davis’ evaluation was more recent, that Depa had so far behaved well at court and that his answers regarding what the legal proceedings meant were as good as could be expected of a teen.
Depa pleaded no contest — neither admitting guilt nor disputing the charge — on Oct. 30, 2023.
The outcome was a far cry from a similar incident the same judge had ruled on just two years prior, court records and arrest reports show.
John Willford, who lived at the same group home as Depa and had similar behavioral issues, had attacked two teacher’s aides at Palm Coast High School in 2019. According to the arrest report, he repeatedly kicked the two aides, punched one in his chest and stabbed him in the shoulder with a pen, while screaming racial slurs and threatening to kill the staffers.
Like Depa, his attack came after he had been told not to use an electronic device in class — in his case, an iPad.
Perkins ordered a psychological evaluation for Willford and initially found him incompetent for trial. He was sent back to the group home and ordered treatment to continue.
In 2021, Willford was reevaluated. This time, he was judged sound enough to go through the legal proceedings and faced up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. The judge accepted a plea agreement: Willford would serve 18 months probation, attend emotion management sessions, do 100 hours of community service and write an apology letter.
The Herald was unable to determine where Willford currently resides, or who his guardian is.
Judge Perkins and the prosecutor’s office declined to comment when asked about the differences in the handling of Willford and Depa’s cases.
Depa has said little during his court hearings, but Anderton, one of the two court-appointed psychologists who evaluated Depa, said that he has taken responsibility for his actions. Anderton told the judge that Depa had said he “should be held in jail until he is right with God” and that he has “learned his lesson.”
In jail, Depa is isolated from most of the general inmate population. He is allowed out when the dorm he is housed in is mostly empty. At other times, he is allowed outside an hour each day, Leanne said.
The jail staff seem friendly and understanding, she said. He and his roommate are working on writing a book, possibly with a choose-your-own ending.
But Leanne worries what a prolonged prison sentence would mean for her son – and whether he would survive it. Florida’s prison system is rife with allegations of abuse and brutality and inadequate medical care, even for inmates without developmental disabilities or mental health issues.
Cindee Murphy, the mother of a severely schizophrenic son who was sentenced to three years in prison in 2021 for felony littering after he drove his truck into a pond, wrote to Judge Perkins asking him to be lenient with Depa. Her son, Tristin, had a documented history of mental health issues, but prison staff did not provide him with his prescribed medication for prolonged periods, she told the Herald.
Tristin killed himself with a chainsaw while on a work detail 63 days into his sentence.
“What should have been a short sentence became a death sentence for Tristin,” she wrote. “I do not want the same thing to happen to Brendan Depa.”
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Shirsho Dasgupta | Investigative Data Reporter
Ben Wieder | Editor
Jessica Lipscomb | Editor
Dana Banker | Editor
Rachel Handley | Illustrator
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