With a still-growing body count linked to juvenile wards of the District of Columbia government’s so-called Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, the city now faces a $20 million lawsuit filed by the family of homicide victim Neil Godleski. Underage DYRS wards make up a significant percentage of the Metropolitan Police Department’s murder cases, so the lawsuit’s claim that the agency “incompetently supervised the juveniles under their control” is a statement of fact, not a question for legal debate. Former DYRS Director Vincent Schiraldi attempted to change the way the city treats youthful offenders — from warehousing them in the juvenile equivalent of an adult prison to a more rehabilitative setting. Schiraldi’s vision culminated in the $46 million New Beginnings juvenile detention center in Laurel, a landscaped, 30-acre campus that was described as being similar to a small private college. But wards escaped the first week it opened and, since then, DYRS has been unable to perform its basic mission, which is keeping troubled and often violent youth off the streets.
Which is why Eric Foreman, who the lawsuit claims has a history of gang activity and violence, was out the night of Aug. 22, 2010. The 17-year-old DYRS ward has been indicted for gunning down Godleski, a 31-year-old Catholic University student, in Sherman Circle while Godleski was bicycling home from his job as a waiter. Godleski lost his life for $60.
The Washington Times reports that Foreman was apparently living at a Northwest group home described in an unrelated police affidavit as completely unsecure, with easy exit from a first-floor bedroom window. And there were reportedly no surveillance cameras or alarms warning caretakers of any escapes.
Last month, another DYRS ward who also somehow escaped from the agency’s custody allegedly killed a taxi driver. The fact that DYRS wards keep popping up on police blotters as either perpetrators or victims of violent crime is an indictment of a city agency that is not only spectacularly failing to rehabilitate them, but in the process exposing D.C. residents to bodily harm.
If it takes losing a $20 million wrongful-death lawsuit for Deputy Mayor B.B. Otero and Human Services Committee Chairman Jim Graham, both of whom have direct executive and legislative responsibility for overseeing this failing agency, to finally get the message that whatever DYRS is doing is not working, it will be money well-spent.
