A fight erupted and a mother’s panicked cries rang out Friday evening in D.C. Superior Court, as she begged her 13-year-old daughter not to hit the deputy U.S. marshals in the courtroom, and then she begged the officers not to hurt her daughter.
The outburst came about an hour into a hearing to determine whether the girl and another teen girl should be removed from their homes and detained by the District’s Department of Youth Rehabilitative Services (DYRS) — the city’s juvenile criminal detention system, largely seen as a stop of last resort for the city’s troubled youth.
The trouble began Friday when the girl kicked a female deputy U.S. marshal who had chastised her behavior and ended with paramedics removing the teen from the courthouse on a stretcher.
Tension appeared to build quietly in Judge Dorsey Jones’s courtroom as evidence was presented in the case involving the teen and a 15-year-old who were charged Thursday with second-degree murder in the beating death of Reginald Brown, an ailing, 64-year-old man in October. Attorneys for both teens pleaded not guilty to the charges.
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The Washington Post generally does not identify suspects in criminal cases who are charged as juveniles. The Post was permitted to attend the hearing on the condition that the identity of the teens or their parents were not disclosed.
About an hour into the hearing, Jones told the 13-year-old he could hear her using profanity and warned her that if she continued to do so he would remove her from the courtroom. Later, the marshal took away the teen’s paper and pen.
The teen ultimately lashed out minutes after prosecutors played a graphic, minute-long cellphone video clip that showed a group of five girls chasing Brown into a Northwest alley after midnight. The video showed the girls pull Brown down as he tried to climb a chain-link fence to escape. They can be seen stomping his head into the pavement, pulling his pants down around his ankles, removing his belt and beating him with it.
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In the courtroom, the 13-year-old began kicking and hitting the deputy marshal as her mother — standing in the audience — pleaded with her to stop. One of her two attorneys with the Georgetown Juvenile Justice Clinic tried to break up the teen and pull her away from the marshal as two other marshals jumped on top of the teen. The marshals then dragged the girl out of the courtroom through a side door to a cellblock. The girl’s screams continued to be heard inside the courtroom.
Jones ordered the courtroom cleared. The other teen sat quietly until she too was whisked to a holding area. Six paramedics raced up to the courtroom JM-15 to treat the teen’s injuries. The extent of those injuries was unclear Friday, as was whether the teen would incur any additional charges related to the incident.
The teen’s mother, standing at her seat in the audience, told the judge that her daughter had a history of “impulsive outbursts” and other mental health challenges and that the teen was seeing a psychiatrist. She said it was the psychiatrist who told her daughter to rip up shreds of paper and to sit on her legs whenever she felt anxious. Her mother said she believed that is why the marshal became irritated with her daughter. Outside the courtroom, she also said her daughter was deaf in one ear and might not have heard the marshal’s commands.
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In front of the judge, the teen’s mom said she had tried to get her daughter help. “I have been begging this city for help for three years. Begging the city, police and no one would help me with them,” she said.
In March,police charged two 13-year-old girls and a 12-year-old girl in connection with the beating. The 12-year-old has since turned 13. All three girls — despite efforts by their attorneys at recent hearings in D.C. Superior Court to have them released home to the custody of their parents — have been held in DYRS detention as they await trial.
At an earlier hearing Friday for the three teens, Judge Kendra Briggs said the two girls who were arrested this week will join the other three teens for trial. She set a hearing for all five teens for next Friday. A trial was scheduled for the three teens for late August, but the judge acknowledged Friday that date might be delayed due to the two new arrests.
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As he did at two previous hearings in March for the initial three teens, D.C. homicide detective Harry Singleton testified that Brown and his attackers did not know one another when they approached him in the 6200 block of Georgia Avenue NW, knocked him to the ground and beat and kicked him, slamming his head into the concrete pavement.
Singleton said an unidentified, adult male initially attacked Brown and knocked him to the ground. Brown said the 15-year-old who was arrested Thursday approached the man and asked if she and her friends could also beat Brown. The girls then chased him into an alley, the detective said.
Prosecutors say the cellphone video played in court Friday was recorded by one of the girls during the attack. Brown was diagnosed with schizophrenia, one of his sisters said in March at the time of the three initial arrests.
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Singleton said several witnesses identified the two teens by their clothes and shoes visible in the recording. Singleton also displayed Instagram messages between the teens, where he alleged they discussed deleting the cellphone video which they had posted on Instagram after the attack.
Prosecutors said someone had saved the video after it was shared on social media and presented it to police.
“What they did was callous. They chased him down and beat this man as he lay on the ground, defenseless. And then celebrated that they had killed him,” prosecutor Gabrielle LoGaglio said.
Brown, his family said, had lost six fingers to amputation because of lupus, a disease of the immune system. He also experienced chronic blackouts, the sister said. Once, after losing consciousness, he collapsed to the pavement and injured his skull so badly that a surgeon had to put a metal plate in his head. In recent years, Brown had been diagnosed with cancer, his family said, and he often took long walks at night after hours of chemotherapy. The late-evening walks, they said, helped him to sleep through the night.
Jones ultimately said the girls were “a danger to the community” and ordered them detained with DYRS until their next hearing Friday.
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