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The surveillance footage doesn’t show the actual stabbing, but it’s still a shocking video. The seven boys might not even be in high school. Some wore COVID-19-era masks, but you can still see all of them laughing and smiling as they walk through the mall in Wheaton, a neighborhood in Montgomery County. The smiling boys were armed with knives, we now know, with the sole plan of stabbing a stranger.
You see the boys follow a man, oblivious to the gang, into the restroom. Then you see them sprinting out. They had stabbed the man multiple times, sending him to the hospital.
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Teenagers committing pointless violent crime is not surprising in Montgomery County, Maryland. What’s shocking is their smiles as they go about their business that shocks the conscience.
Something is rotten in Montgomery County.
The Wheaton Mall stabbing came less than a month after a 16-year-old student at Wootton High School shot and injured a classmate in the hallway during the school day. Two other Wootton students have been charged in recent years for threatening mass violence at the school.
These aren’t isolated incidents. The youth of Montgomery County are becoming more and more violent, and typically, the violence is random and senseless.
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Montgomery is a famously desirable suburban county that borders Washington, D.C. Homeowners and taxpayers pay a premium to send their kids to these public schools. But since the COVID lockdowns and the killing of George Floyd in 2020, a youth crime wave has swept Montgomery County’s schoolyards and streets.
Montgomery wasn’t the only county in the country to see a COVID lockdown and George Floyd crime wave, but the problem has been more stubborn there than in most places.
Some of the root causes are universal problems: Family breakdown, and social media. Some of the root causes are very local, and rooted in bad decisions by county leaders: draconian lockdowns, record-long school closures, politicians’ antipathy towards police, and sanctuary county laws, to name a few.
Montgomery is one of the wealthiest and most populous counties in the country. The causes and effects of this youth crime wave are worth a deeper study.
The Crime Surge
The crime wave began near the end of 2020, after George Floyd protests and when schools opened only “remotely” for the 180,000 public school students. In the five calendar years preceding that moment (2016 to 2020), there were 91 homicides in Montgomery County. In the five following years, there were 130 homicides. That’s a 43% increase.
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Most types of crime peaked in the county in 2022 and have declined since then. In 2025, crime in the county was below 2019 levels. What remains elevated is violent crimes by minors. And while numbers on crimes by young adults (ages 18-21), are not published, those also seem to be higher.
“As I review all of my detectives’ investigations,” Marc Erme, director of criminal investigations for the Montgomery County Police Department, reported, “the individuals involved are getting younger and younger.”
Veteran County prosecutor John McCarthy in 2023 stated that juvenile arrests had doubled over one year, and these arrests were not scaring kids straight. “We’re just churning kids, we’re not solving problems. We’re not rehabilitating kids, which is the goal of everyone on this call.”
By 2024, police noted “juvenile-related violent crime increased 95% since 2019, and robbery, specifically, increased 108%,” a local news outlet reported.
Specifically, McCarthy reported on an “explosion” in carjackings by minors, some as young as 13 years old. In a typical Silver Spring carjacking, three boys (ages 15, 15, and 17) were armed with a gun, assaulted the woman as she stepped out of her car, sending her to the hospital.
A burglary crew caught on video in downtown Silver Spring in 2023 looked to include pre-teens.
High school kids engage in shootouts in broad daylight in residential neighborhoods.
In another recent notorious video, teenagers took over intersections in Chevy Chase and Silver Spring, drag racing, doing donuts, and partying in the street. When police arrived, the teenagers blatantly mocked the cops and did illegal donuts in front of them.
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Fewer juveniles are being arrested for non-violent crimes in Montgomery County these days compared to pre-2020, but that doesn’t mean fewer juveniles are committing these crimes. After George Floyd’s death, the state legislature passed the Juvenile Justice Reform Act and the Child Interrogation Protection Act, which made it harder for police to question or arrest minors.
The county tracks “gang-related incidents,” which are mostly assaults and weapons offenses, but also murders, rapes, and robberies. Gang incidents peaked in 2022, but nevertheless are generally climbing. In 2025, county police reported, “Youth were responsible for 58% of all gang-related incidents.”
What made the kids here lose their minds?
The Lockdown
In late July 2020, Montgomery County Public Schools announced that they would not open in person until at least January 2021. At the same time, county health czar Travis Gayles ordered the non-public schools to remain closed until at least October 1.
Even though the rate of positive COVID tests was falling, and even though most school districts across the country were going to open in person, Gayles argued it was unsafe to open the schoolhouse doors. He granted “there are downstream effects to not having in-person learning.”
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The youth crime wave is one of those “downstream consequences.”
The public school board didn’t open in January. The teachers’ union protested a planned reopening in March, and some grades didn’t reopen until April. Even then, and into the next school year, thousands of students remained “remote.”
The county issued the strictest quarantine rules in the country. As the county executive explained it: “If they’ve got any symptom of COVID — which, if you look at the list of symptoms would be anything you feel on a normal day except absolutely perfect — you have to go home, and they start looking at who has to be quarantined based on close contact.”
Many students never returned.
In the 2024-2025 school year, 15% of MoCo students were chronically absent, and only then did the school superintendent suggest that COVID-era caution may be going too far. “We are now in that in-between gray zone of, am I ultra-sensitive to every health ailment?”
Of course it isn’t merely illness keeping kids out. A year or more of “remote schooling” had broken students and parents of the habit of attendance. The county sent the message that actually showing up to school wasn’t very important.
The schools weren’t the only thing closed, of course. The county closed recreation centers, libraries and gyms.
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The result: Kids left without guidance, without mentorship, without responsibilities, with less connection. Is it surprising some of them would turn to destructive crime?
Wokeness
Meanwhile, the state and county embraced the racial wokeness and anti-police attitude that swept left-leaning places in those days.
County executive Marc Elrich and other county leaders publicly supported the Black Lives Matter protests (while banning outdoor church). They spoke of defunding the police. Elrich’s stated goal was to “Lessen police presence on streets as a direct measure to help diminish impacts of racial bias in interactions with Montgomery County police officers….”
That is, the official policy of the county was fewer cops on the beat and less police-community interaction.
A massive wave of retirements and resignations hit the department.
And the county council voted to remove police officers in high schools, known as School Resource Officers.
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Other social indicators in the county are dire. The portion of children raised by a single mother in 2020 was 20.6%. That portion has climbed every year since then, reaching 27.8%, higher than the state average. Neighboring Prince Georges County, much less wealthy, has a single-mom rate of only 21.5%.
This wealthy county no longer has the elements of a healthy society. Less marriage, less connection, less law and order, and more disorder. That’s why it has more violent children.
