ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, April 6, 1996 TAG: 9604080026
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
NOTE: ABove
WHEN Davon Anderson was growing up in Roanoke, there were times he got so hungry he ate watermelon seeds that littered the sidewalks of his public housing project.
Neighbors who saw him would shake their heads and call Anderson's uncle, Anthony Logan.
After driving up from his Martinsville home, Logan testified in court last month, he would find his 6-year-old nephew running the streets - "homeless, shoeless and hungry."
The Lincoln Terrace apartment where Anderson sometimes lived was barren of furniture; his mother had sold it to support her cocaine addiction, Logan testified. There may have been a wooden crate to sit on, he said, but not much else. In the refrigerator, there was "nothing but the ice trays sitting in the freezer."
By the time he was 14, Anderson had been abused physically, sexually and emotionally.
After documenting the abuse in court, his lawyer told the judge:
"You have seen the evidence of the life - I would say the lack of a life - that this child has had."
About 2 a.m. last May 3, Isaac Dunithan was jolted awake by a woman's screams.
Looking out the bedroom window of his Old Southwest home, Dunithan saw two shadowy figures beating and stomping a man lying on the sidewalk at Fifth Street and Mountain Avenue.
The attackers fled in the darkness, leaving 39-year-old Roger Boothe curled in a fetal position, comatose. When police arrived, Dunithan said, the woman who had screamed for help was gone.
A few hours earlier, police had been called to the scene of another beating just as vicious. They found David Chase in his Mountain Avenue apartment, lying in a pool of blood 5 feet wide. Chase, 38, later said two young men barged into his apartment and beat him unconscious with a sawed-off aluminum baseball bat.
When police arrested Davon Anderson and charged him with aggravated malicious wounding, the teen-ager's blue-and-white Nike shoes were stained with the blood of both Boothe and Chase.
It is hard to say what is worse: the despicable conditions of Davon Antonio Anderson's childhood, or the acts he committed as a 14-year-old that made him - at least in the eyes of the law - an adult.
Anderson, who is now 15, is the youngest person to be convicted as an adult in Roanoke Circuit Court. He was prosecuted under a recently passed law that lowers the age at which a juvenile can be treated as an adult from 15 to 14 .
On Thursday, a judge referred him to a Department of Corrections program for youthful offenders. If Anderson is accepted to the program, he would serve an indeterminate sentence of up to three years. If not, he could face up to 15 years in the general prison population.
Either way, Anderson will join only two other 15-year-olds currently incarcerated by the Department of Corrections.
But many more like him are on the way.
Since it lowered the minimum age for an adult trial two years ago, the General Assembly has made even more sweeping changes to Virginia's juvenile justice system.
Starting July 1, all juveniles 14 and older charged with murder and aggravated malicious wounding will automatically be tried as adults. Other juveniles 14 and older charged with malicious wounding, rape, robbery, abduction and other violent felonies will face mandatory adult trials at the discretion of a prosecutor. A third tier of juveniles - charged with any other felony - would be eligible for transfer to Circuit Court at the prosecutor's discretion, but could challenge that decision in court.
The new legislation also opens previously closed juvenile court proceedings to public scrutiny in cases where the offender is charged with a violent felony. The changes were made to cope with a rising tide of violent juvenile crime in Virginia.
Critics say that by making the law more punitive, lawmakers are giving up on young offenders like Anderson who still have a chance to turn their lives around.
Under the old law, which applied to Anderson's case, the decision to transfer a juvenile to Circuit Court was left to a judge. Judge John Ferguson initially decided to keep Anderson in Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court, hoping the youth could be rehabilitated. Ferguson's decision was reversed on appeal after a hard-fought legal battle.
Under the new law, Anderson would have gone straight to Circuit Court with no questions asked.
"The law now allows us to take children who are younger and younger and flush them down the toilet," assistant public defender Michelle Derrico said in court as she argued against sending Anderson to prison.
"Do we want to flush another child down the toilet? ... Do we want to take this boy at the ripe old age of 15, throw him into the penitentiary, and see what pops out?''
To which Prosecutor Wanda DeWease responded:
"This is precisely the kind of case that the law was changed for. We have an increasing problem with violent juvenile behavior ... and it is this individual that the law speaks to."
As for the teen's troubled life, DeWease said: "Davon Anderson may be the product of his upbringing, but he is no less dangerous to the community whether he had a bad upbringing or a good one.
"If [Derrico] is suggesting that I am taking the position of locking him up and throwing away the key, she is absolutely right. And I will not apologize for that."
In asking Judge Richard Pattisall to impose a 15-year-prison term, DeWease argued that the juvenile court's emphasis on rehabilitation and treatment had already been overwhelmed by Anderson's runaway criminal record.
By the time he was 13, court records show, Anderson had been charged with assault, trespassing, breaking and entering, disorderly conduct, shoplifting, entering private property with the intent to damage it, and running away repeatedly.
In addition, according to court records, "he was also accused by the schools of being incorrigible because of a repeated history of disruptive behavior." At the time of the attacks on Boothe and Chase, Anderson was on probation for assaulting a student at school.
In 1994, when Anderson was living with a cousin in Henry County, the Department of Social Services asked for a psychological evaluation in an attempt to find out why someone so young was getting into so much trouble.
"Davon is a tall, well-built 13-year-old who entered the examining room wearing leg shackles," a psychologist would later write in a report.
"He sat with his elbows resting on his knees and his upper body bent over until his head was actually between his legs. His responses to my questions were intentionally sparse, his manner was resistant and sullen."
"It was easy to see how low his self-esteem is, and his cool, nonchalant and diffident attitude seems to provide only a thin veneer of cover for a great deal of anger and hurt inside himself.
"He apparently tried to cope with his abysmal past and his rather bleak future by deliberately not thinking about them, although this coping mechanism has obviously not served him well."
"When I asked him if he knows any adults whom he admires and respects, he responded, simply, `No.' I believe that this probably sums up this youngster's problems."
The whereabouts of Anderson's father is listed as "unknown" in court records. As for his mother, social workers decided several times to remove Anderson from her custody. In addition to a drug problem, she has a criminal record and a history of mental illness, according to court records.
Logan, the brother of Anderson's mother, said her drug problem was so bad that relatives were reluctant to give her children any clothes, out of fear she would sell them for drugs. "I raised a lot of Cain with my sister about selling their tennis shoes," he testified.
Throughout his childhood, Anderson was bumped from home to home. By the time he was in the eighth grade, he had attended eight different schools.
In the 11 months he has spent in Coyner Springs Juvenile Detention Center, he has not received a single visit from a family member. Anderson, who has not testified at any of his court hearings, did not respond to a request for an interview.
Elnora Morris, a cousin who took Anderson into her Henry County home, described him as a good boy who made decent grades in school and loved to play basketball. But even at a young age, she said, Anderson seemed haunted by the abuse he suffered in his mother's home.
"He saw so much coming up, that stuff just kept flashing back," Morris said.
Trouble seems to run in the family: Last week, in the same courthouse, Anderson's older brother, Jermaine, received a 20-year prison sentence for setting a Patton Avenue Northwest house on fire and then throwing a knife at a police officer who was called to the scene.
Davon Anderson's abysmal upbringing does not excuse the crimes he committed, Pattisall said. But it does explain it. "It is not difficult for anyone to see, upon reading the records and reports, why you are what you are today," the judge told Anderson.
That may offer little solace to Boothe and Chase, who were both beaten to within inches of their lives by Anderson and a 17-year-old co-defendant, Leo Harper, on the night of May 2 and the early morning hours of May 3.
Summarizing the evidence in court, DeWease gave the following account:
On the evening of May 2, Chase got into an argument with Harper's mother, who lived in the same apartment building in the 500 block of Mountain Avenue, about some trash that was strewn in a hallway.
When Anderson and Harper found out about it later, they decided to get even.
Knocking on Chase's door, they said they were the police and ordered him to open the door. They then forced their way into the apartment and struck Chase in the head with a sawed-off baseball bat. Chase, who suffered severe cuts and a fractured skull, lost his job as a construction worker as a result of his injuries and eventually ended up on the streets, homeless.
Several hours later, DeWease said in court, Anderson and Harper were walking the streets near the Sunnyside Market at Fifth and Mountain when Boothe - whom they did not know - approached and asked for drugs.
He then made a sexual comment, DeWease said, that angered Anderson, prompting the 14-year-old to sling at the man a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam that he was holding.
"The dude came toward him, and that's when they started fighting, blow to blow," Harper said in his statement to police. At 6 feet tall and 200 pounds, Anderson quickly got the best of the fight.
"Davon just popped him, and popped him again," Harper said. "I mean when he hit him, you could hear it just like a punching bag ... 'cause that boy's got big hands anyway." After Boothe was knocked down, Harper said, Anderson repeatedly stomped his head on the sidewalk.
Although Harper claims he tried to break up the fight and had a minimal role in the attacks, he has also been convicted of malicious wounding. He is scheduled to be sentenced this month.
When Boothe was taken to Roanoke Memorial Hospital, he was in a coma from which he did not emerge for several months. He now lives with his mother in Bedford County and is unable to care for himself.
Speaking in slurred speech caused by his head injuries, Boothe testified that he needs help in feeding and dressing himself. "It's all the little stuff that I can't do that I used to be able to," he said.
Boothe, who has no memory of the attack, is not expected to improve enough to return to work.
Given the way that Anderson's crimes changed the lives of two men forever, and given the threat he poses to society, DeWease argued that a long prison sentence was warranted.
As he agonized aloud from the bench, Pattisall said the case was a classic example of the punishment vs. prevention debate that framed discussions about the legislature's changes to the state's juvenile justice system.
"There's a lot of rhetoric out there" for tougher punishment, the judge said. "But those making the rhetoric are often not the ones who have to make the decisions."
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