More teens are facing murder charges. How it came to this
Even in a year as violent as this one, the accused killer Cincinnati police arrested this spring was exceptional.
In less than four months, police say, he’d been involved in a robbery and shooting in South Fairmount, an attack that left a car riddled with bullets in Westwood, a fatal shooting in Millvale and a deadly ambush that prosecutors say he arranged on Facebook.
Four dead. Three wounded. One suspect connected to every crime.
That suspect, police say, was 14 years old.
Barely out of middle school, he was not old enough at the time of his arrest to drive a car, drink a beer or vote in the last election. But he had a gun, prosecutors say, and was willing to use it.
Related gun violence article: Police: 16-year-old arrested in connection with fatal shooting in Avondale
Though his case is extraordinary, the arrest of someone so young for crimes so violent is not. Fourteen other teenagers have been charged with murder this year in Hamilton County Juvenile Court, more than in the previous four years combined. Nearly all involved guns.
Those cases don’t include the dozens of juveniles connected to shootings that didn’t result in deaths but altered lives forever. Like 8-year-old Marcellus “MJ” Whitehead, who now requires around-the-clock care after being shot in the head this summer outside an East Westwood convenience store.
Marcellus was on his way to buy snacks for his family’s movie night.
Turmoil, instability and trauma
The Enquirer examined juvenile court records for several of the teens arrested on murder charges this year and spoke to the probation officers who struggle to steer kids away from the violence around them.
Those records and interviews provide no easy answers, no explanation for the surge in violent crime among young people. But they do reveal a common thread running through the lives of these kids, no matter where they grew up, no matter whose life they are accused of taking.
Almost all of them were raised in turmoil. From an early age, sometimes since birth, they experienced instability in their homes and in their lives. Sometimes that meant violence or abuse, sometimes neglect. Always, it created chaos.
“The change I’ve seen is the level of trauma and the amount of trauma,” said James Mack, a Hamilton County probation officer specializing in mental health. “When I first started, if I had a caseload of 25, I might have maybe one or two kids that suffered some major trauma, like being raped or stabbed. Not shot but stabbed.
“Now I would say 80% of the kids that we deal with have suffered some major trauma.”
Anthony, the 14-year-old charged this spring in four homicides, is a case in point. Because he’s still a juvenile, the Enquirer is not using his real name.
Anthony’s father was in jail for selling drugs when he was born in 2006. His mother was on probation for punching a woman. He was at least briefly removed from his parents’ custody as a young child and later bounced from one home to another.
Officials in juvenile court eventually concluded he was beyond his mother’s control, and he was charged with robbery at 13. Last December, a child in Anthony’s family home was shot in the head by another child, apparently while playing with a stolen gun.
Anthony and the other 14 charged with murder this year aren’t the only ones who have endured hardship. Thousands of young people do every day and never commit a violent crime.
But these kids did, police say. They turned to the streets, to their friends or to people they thought were friends. They found common cause with strangers on social media. They found an outlet for their anger. And, in most cases, they found a gun.
The result is more ruined and lost lives. More pain and suffering. More chaos.
Cincinnati killings surge in 2021
By any measure, it's been a bloody year in Cincinnati.
All but two of the killings that occurred at the hands of these juveniles happened in the city of Cincinnati, which is on pace to exceed 80 homicides for only the third time since 1959. Last year’s homicide total, 94, is believed to be the most ever. It’s part of a surge in violence being seen across the country.
The murder cases involving juvenile defendants in Hamilton County include two 16-year-old girls charged in different robberies that ended with the victim being shot and killed. Neither girl is accused of pulling the trigger, but their alleged involvement in the crimes led to murder charges. One girl recently had her case moved to adult court and will be prosecuted as an adult.
The total number of juveniles charged with murder doesn’t include the fatal shootings in Smale Park on the Fourth of July. Police say the shooters were 16 and 19 years old, and they ended up killing each other.
Every time a teen is killed in Cincinnati, Aaron King prays. He’s a Hamilton County Juvenile Probation Officer, one of a handful of people whose job it is to try to intervene and help maneuver these kids through the chaos, to alleviate some of the neglect, to quiet the turmoil.
“The first thing I’m thinking is: I hope it’s not my kid that’s dead,” King said. “Then the next thought is: I hope it’s not my kid that did it.” These officers are the people who are closest to the lives of these dangerous and troubled youth.
King and other probation officers often refer to juveniles they are assigned to help as “my kids.”
They’ve all lost kids to gun violence, and they know that for the teens they work with it’s a coin toss on whether they end up behind a gun or in front of one. For the most disadvantaged and troubled youth in Cincinnati, the trauma they’ve endured and the environments they come from put them at nearly equal risk of being a perpetrator or a victim.
“Some of this violence is something as simple as a fight that occurred last summer,” said King. “The retaliation is somebody gets killed. Or a social media post that they didn't like, (and) the decision is drive by and shoot a crowd of people.”
Related violence article: 'No one should have to bury a child:' Police search for answers in unsolved Thanksgiving Eve murder
Juvenile probation officers see their jobs as a way to teach someone else's kids to make better choices. But that is harder than it looks.
“We had one kid who we told not to go back to Avondale because you're gang affiliated and you're going to get killed,” King said. “We moved him to live with his grandma in Kentucky, and the weekend he went to see family in Avondale, he was murdered.”
People want easy answers. These officers have looked. They do not exist.
“I think we would all be willing to be unemployed if we had the solution to what's going on, Probation Supervisor Jodi Stanton said. "I just don't think it's that simple.”
Stanton compared it to an iceberg. The shootings are just what’s above the surface, people don’t see what’s beneath. They don’t see the broken families, the easy accessibility of guns, the bizarre role social media plays in all of it and most of all the adverse experiences these kids have endured.
“Some of these kids," Probation Officer James Mack explained, "are walking through fire with gasoline underwear on.”
Anthony
That certainly was true in Anthony's case.
In the months before he was born in 2006, his father was sent to prison on drug charges and his mother was placed on probation for punching a woman. At the time she became pregnant with Anthony, his mother had lost custody of six other children, one of whom died in foster care.
After Anthony was born, the state took temporary custody of him. By January 2007, his mother was in jail waiting to find out if a grand jury would indict her after being accused of robbing someone at gunpoint. She ended up not being indicted.
A juvenile court judge described his mother as having "longstanding mental health, substance abuse, domestic violence and criminal issues that prevent her from being able to parent" her children, according to court documents.
By the middle of 2007, when Anthony was almost 1 year old, his mother regained custody. She was receiving services provided by the state and was working part-time. While she worked, his father, who had been released from a halfway house, would watch him and his brother, according to court records.
There are no juvenile court records detailing Anthony’s life for the next decade.
The next time the court intervened in Anthony's life, it was because of his own involvement with crime. In 2019, when he was 13, he was charged in juvenile court with misdemeanor assault and criminal mischief. The next year, he was charged with robbery.
Court records say officials believed Anthony was beyond his mother’s control. In 2020, the court concluded he had been "AWOL with dad for 45 days." Eventually, he ended up in a youth detention facility and was released after a court hearing in September 2020.
Days after that hearing, on Sept. 22, 2020, court documents say his mother shot a man in the abdomen, wounding him. She would later plead guilty to improperly handling a gun in a motor vehicle.
A month later, prosecutors say, Anthony's life took a more violent turn. They say the boy, now 14, took part in a robbery in South Fairmount that led to the death of one of his two alleged accomplices when a person being robbed shot at them.
Anthony faces a murder charge in that case because he is suspected of being involved in a crime that led to the death of another person.
But police didn't connect Anthony to that shooting until months later, so he remained free. According to prosecutors and court records, violence continued to swirl around him.
In December 2020, court documents say, a juvenile in Anthony’s home was shot in the head by another juvenile, apparently while playing with a gun. The gun was stolen, the documents say. It's not clear who brought the weapon into the home.
A warrant for Anthony’s arrest was issued a day after that shooting – for violating conditions of his pretrial release in the earlier robbery case – but court documents say his mother failed to turn him in. Police went to his home to arrest him, but he ran away before they arrived.
While on the run, prosecutors say, Anthony took part in a string of fatal shootings.
The first was on Feb. 1, prosecutors say, when he used Facebook to set up a meeting with two people in South Fairmount. He went to the location and fired multiple shots into a vehicle, according to prosecutors, killing Terrance North, 19, and wounding another person inside the vehicle.
Less than two weeks later, on Feb. 16, Anthony was one of three people who prosecutors say shot up a car in Westwood that had several people inside. Deontray Otis, 27, was killed and two others inside the car with him were severely injured.
Prosecutors have said another man directed the shooters, including Anthony, as well as the targets to the location.
Two days later, on Feb. 18, prosecutors say Anthony was involved in a fatal shooting in Millvale. Donnell Steele was killed in the street, they say.
After his arrest in April, Anthony was charged with multiple criminal counts, including four counts of murder. Prosecutors have said they intend to pursue charges against him in adult court, but for now, his cases remain in juvenile court.
If convicted in adult court, Anthony could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Kids raising themselves
Absent parents and chaotic lives are a constant theme in the world of probation officers who oversee juvenile defendants.
“A lot of our kids are raising themselves. The parents are just not involved,” Chief Probation Officer Perrie Estridge said. “We've all heard it dealing with kids on probation: ‘He's the one on probation. Don't affect me. He's the one on probation. You fix him and then give it back to me.’”
Mack recalled working with a teen on a “behavior chain,” an exercise that helps people understand the consequences of their actions. The idea is to practice following one decision down the line to understand the possible consequences. They practice what might come naturally to some so the teen can use the exercise in real time to make better decisions.
The teen had been separated from his mother and was living with his aunt and uncle at the time. While Mack and the teen worked on the behavior chain exercise at the boy's house, the teen's uncle sat on the couch, listening.
Mack said the uncle had just gotten out of prison and wore an electronic monitoring bracelet on his ankle, a condition of his parole.
"That's the same stuff we did in prison," the uncle said of the exercise. "That stuff don't work."
His words proved prophetic. On July 4, the same teenager, Milo Watson, went to Smale Park. Police say the 16-year-old brought a gun with him and, before the night was over, used it in a shootout with 19-year-old Dexter Wright Jr.
Both Watson and Wright were killed.
Related article: Police: 'Increase in violence' responsible for curfew for youth in Mount Healthy apartment complex
Mack said the call from the teen’s family still haunts him. He said he dropped the phone after hearing the news.
With a lack of parental support, the kids often find their family on the streets. Mack said it’s easy to understand how troubled kids find each other. We all gravitate to people who understand us and have had similar experiences, these kids bond over trauma.
Probation officers say the kids know each other from the streets and social media. Sometimes, they find common ground and become friends. Sometimes, they don't and become rivals. They often carry grudges, as well as guns.
“Essentially, it's their family,” King said. “They value that system.”
The loyalty doesn’t end at death, either. King said fights and shootings can start over someone’s “dead,” the slang term used to describe a friend who has been killed.
Kids have told King that they will resort to violence if their dead are disrespected.
Chloe
The youngest juvenile charged with murder this year was 13. Chloe, not her real name, is charged in the stabbing death of another girl in Winton Hills. Her mother didn’t have consistent housing or income, according to court documents, and told court officials she didn't know who Chloe's father was.
Growing up, Chloe spent several years in the care of a family friend who volunteered to take in her and two siblings to keep them out of foster care. Social workers had removed the kids from their mother's home in August 2015, when Chloe was 7, because her mother was being treated for mental health issues and did not have a job or appropriate housing.
By June 2016, the family friend said the children had become a financial hardship. The family friend was seeking financial assistance from Hamilton County Job and Family Services, the child welfare agency.
At the same time, court records say, JFS was advising the family friend to return the children to their mother, so “HCJFS can remove the children from mother and place them into foster care.” The family friend didn’t agree with that plan and kept the children.
She wrote in a petition for custody that she provided “a stable and loving environment” and made sure the children were “well taken care of, attend school regularly and enjoy being children.”
In September 2016, the family friend was awarded temporary custody. Six months later, in March 2017, the children had been with the family friend for about two years, documents say. Their mother was not yet ready to have them live with her.
Then, sometime in either 2018 or 2019, the family friend returned Chloe and her siblings to their mother “without court authorization,” documents say. The family friend no longer had the resources to care for them, and she reported “they had become too difficult to care for.”
In December 2020, Chloe’s mother applied for custody of Chloe and the other two children. She was living in Winton Hills and wrote in the petition: “I have my place now, have had them back since 2018. I can not get any benefits of support until this is done.”
The day before the custody hearing, on April 19, Chloe got into an argument with 13-year-old Nyaira Givens outside an apartment building on Winneste Avenue. Police say she stabbed Givens in the neck with a pocketknife, killing her.
Chloe's social worker learned she'd been charged with murder at the custody hearing the next day. The court also learned that day that Chloe's mother and her new baby both tested positive for marijuana when the baby was born.
The hearing was continued until August. On Sept. 22, the motion for custody was dismissed because Chloe’s mother, who asked that the filing fee be waived because she couldn’t afford it, didn’t provide proof of income.
The family friend was again given custody of the children.
Michael
A similar story emerged this summer when Cincinnati police tracked down a 16-year-old boy suspected of being involved in two shootings, one in Evanston and one in Spring Grove Village.
Michael, not his real name, grew up with an absent father who never "tried to visit or support" his son and a mother who needed "some drug intervention," according to the boy's grandmother, who tried in 2006 to get custody of Michael.
The grandmother succeeded in getting temporary custody of the child but later withdrew the request, returning Michael to his mother.
As a young teenager, Michael was at times unsupervised and left to care for his three younger brothers, court records show.
In 2018, when he was 13, Michael’s grandmother filed another petition for custody. She said Michael's mother, who had been convicted a year earlier of stealing $334 in merchandise from Macy's, was “on drugs” and “only shows interest in (Michael) when she wants him to do her responsibilities, such as watching siblings, cook, clean, etc.”
As for Michael's father, the grandmother said, he had "not been in (his) life, at all."
The lack of supervision was a recurring theme. According to his grandmother, the 13-year-old Michael babysat his three brothers, ages 3, 7 and 9, "almost every day."
In April 2019, police found one of the boys at a Kroger without an adult. When the boy was returned home, another boy was found there, alone.
That same year, police several times picked up Michael and two of his brothers “for delinquent behaviors,” documents say. By July 10, 2019, Michael’s three brothers were in two different foster homes. Michael was in a juvenile detention facility.
More on Cincinnati teen shootings: Police: 16-year-old arrested in connection with shooting in Bond Hill
“He has a history of delinquent behavior and has several charges pending, including a theft charge,” documents say.
When the shootings occurred this summer, Michael was 16.
The first was an apparent drive-by shooting in Evanston on May 23 that wounded a bystander, a girl who told police she was standing on her front porch. In the second shooting, which happened June 8 outside a BP station in Spring Grove Village, Michael, is accused of driving the shooter from the scene.
The victim in that shooting, 31-year-old Robbie Smythe Jr., died from his wounds. Michael, charged as an accomplice, faces a murder charge.
Prosecutors say Michael and the accused shooter, 18-year-old Christopher Solomon, were trying to steal Smythe's car.
The bane of social media
Plenty of kids grow up in troubled homes, probation officers say. That's nothing new. The problem now, they say, is that so many now have access to guns, and to social media that helps them find trouble if they're looking for it.
Misunderstandings and teenage feuds that might have faded quickly now metastasize online. Kids who might never meet, let alone point guns at one another, now build animosity until they lash out violently.
“I've watched a number of Facebook Lives of my kids downtown just hanging out, asking people, Hey, I'm here, come down here, come hang out, come hang out,” King, of juvenile probation, said. “And the next thing you know, they show up in the video. It's just that easy to say, here I am. Come hang out. And then they're all there, smoking weed, hanging out on Facebook.”
More on gun violence: At least 10 guns recovered in 2 days, some from a 13-year-old
The problem is that when you post on Facebook, everyone knows where you are, even the people who have problems with you. And everything is documented. Every schoolyard insult. Every toothless threat made in a moment of anger. It’s not just that the subject of that insult or threat will find out, it’s that everyone finds out. At that point, it can become a matter of honor.
And just like everyone else, these teens like to brag on social media. They post photos of themselves with stacks of money or posing with a gun.
Sometimes, it seems everyone has a gun.
Officer Mack was visiting a school one day when he saw a group of teens roaming around in the woods next to the building. He eventually found out teens were looking for guns they'd stashed before walking into school that morning.
It had become a routine for many of them: To avoid metal detectors and other screenings at the school doors, the kids found places to hide them nearby. That way, they could be armed on their way to school and on the way home without getting caught with a gun at the door.
But on this particular day, Mack said, things didn't go as planned. Police had caught on. Once the kids were in school, they searched the woods and confiscated the guns.
King said he and the other probation officers ask their kids about guns all the time. Not only is it illegal to carry a gun as a juvenile, but it can also result in a probation violation as well. King said the conversations always go the same way.
“Why are you carrying a gun?” King will ask.
“I have to,” the teen says.
“Why do you have to?”
“Because," the kid tells him, "I don’t want to get shot."
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Kids who kill: More teens are facing murder charges. How it came to this
