Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Previously on Serial. I don't care if you was my worst enemy. I'm not telling on you.
I don't care what you did. We need people out there in the community that are concerned with black lives, with brown lives, with white lives, with purple lives, to step out and do something. Shit, I'm trying to help Major the best way I can. Helping Major is telling the truth. I told you my truth, Don. Listen, I went through the things that I was going through when I was younger because I was young and dumb. ♪♪
From This American Life and WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial. One courthouse told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig. When I began this project, I didn't plan on covering any juvenile cases. Juvenile records aren't public, for one thing. And I figured, eh, we got plenty to look at right here in the adult system.
But after a while, juvenile cases, juvenile crime, became impossible to ignore. The newly elected county prosecutor seemed to be talking about juvenile violence at every opportunity. Young people, 14 to 21, are crime drivers, he was saying. And the data supported his alarm. More and more juveniles were being charged with the worst crimes. Serious assaults, robberies, rapes, homicides, all rising for the past five years.
Once these juvenile crimes made their way into the juvenile courts, though, and once the juveniles themselves made their way into juvenile prisons, they disappear from view. Juvenile courtrooms are tightly controlled. The names of juvenile defendants aren't publicized, for good reason. The crimes children commit should not forever mark them. But as a result, I didn't have a picture of what juvenile justice looked like in Cuyahoga County.
I'd hear mutterings at the Justice Center, though, mostly from defense attorneys, grousing to each other, you're not going to believe what just happened to my juvenile client, or to me, you think this place is bad, you should head over to juvenile. And I'd think, why? What are you talking about? But then I met Joshua. He was 19 at the time, so not a child. He'd tell you he was grown. But he was still in the juvenile system. You can stay there until you're 21.
Keep in mind, the juvenile system, its mission is different from that of the adult system. The point isn't to punish. It's not about retribution. The point is to rehabilitate. In the juvenile system, that's where we're supposed to think like parents, where the standard should be, my child. Is this what's best for my child? Would this help my child? So I'm going to tell you about Joshua. Joshua.
Joshua sometimes starts off a story with, OK, so boom. Boom is big in Cleveland. It's shorthand for, let me try to explain, for real. I'm going to tell you how I feel, like, all the way, like, boom. All the tape I have with Joshua is from prison. So the sound is mostly a tinny thread of terrible. I'm sorry about that. The prison system wouldn't allow me to interview Joshua in person. But I can tell you as his longtime interlocutor, I like it when Joshua says boom. Or better yet, boom, boom.
means I might start to understand something, such as how Joshua came to inhabit his current predicament. One night in June of 2014, Joshua, freshly 16, had gone to sleep after a night at a bar. Next thing he knew, FBI agents were pulling him from his bed.
They took him to an interrogation room in Cleveland Heights. They told him they had him for some robberies. Instagram, Facebook. Seems 15-year-olds are rarely criminal masterminds. There he was, posing with all these other kids.
The FBI agents were saying, "Not only do we have video evidence of what you've done, but thank you, social media, we also know who you run with." The crimes Joshua was charged with were serious, armed robberies from many months back.
Two of them were gas stations. He and a friend held up two BP's in one day. And a third robbery of a Popeyes. Joshua said he was coerced into that one by an older gang member. They barely got any money. He said they left with this pathetic little plastic bucket that had small bills in it. According to a police report, around 150 bucks, which he handed over to the boss. But the restaurant had people in it who'd had to lie down on the ground. That's a multiple kidnapping indictment right there.
Joshua had jumped over the counter and pointed a gun at someone. And again, according to the police report, said, you have five seconds to open the safe or I'll shoot him. Joshua said his gun had no bullets in it and that his co-defendant's gun was broken. The firing pin was busted. But the customers and workers at Popeyes that Wednesday morning didn't know that. The FBI agents were telling Joshua, we've got you on video. So let's run through our choices, shall we?
We can hand you over to the adult court system. That's called a bind-over. In Ohio, children as young as 14 can be bound over to adult court for certain crimes. To Joshua, adult court sounded serious. And it was. In the adult system, Joshua would be facing between 20 and 30 years in prison. Or, the officers said, another option. We can talk.
And if we talk, we can keep you in the juvenile system. We won't bind you over. You'll get out when you're 21, five years from now, with no adult felony record. Want to talk? Joshua was operating on a couple hours' sleep. If he remembers right, he was handcuffed. He said the officers weren't rude or abusive to him. It was cool, he said.
They left him alone for a while to think about the deal they were offering. So at any point did you say to them, I want to talk to a lawyer or I need to speak to my mom? Or like, was there any a
No, like, I most definitely did. I wanted to talk to my mom, but, like, at that point in time, they didn't. They didn't let me talk to anybody. It was just me up there, like, wanting to, like, know. I didn't have nobody right there with me. It was just me and the police. But did you say, can I have a lawyer or no? No, I never said that. I never brought up the lawyer. I just brought up my mom.
Right. Okay. Say again? Am I supposed to have what? Oh, an adult. When they said, am I supposed to have an adult here with me, what did they say?
I don't even think they responded to me. I don't even think they responded to me. And how long did they keep you there? I was there for about like four or five hours.
With no adult knowing where you were? No. Really? Really. Oh, my God. Doesn't this sound illegal? It's not. It's allowed. My children haven't robbed any gas stations, so I feel the apples and oranges here. But I have to sign a permission slip for my teenager to go on a quote-unquote field trip that's a five-block walk from her school.
I have to check the box to allow my son's photo from summer camp to be used for promotional purposes. But here was Joshua, 16, fogged by exhaustion and the prospect of everlasting incarceration, and no adult to put a hand on his shoulder, to crouch down and whisper in his ear what I believe most of us would have whispered if we'd been in that room. Ask for a lawyer. Do it now. Ask for a lawyer.
If Joshua had, the interview would have, should have stopped. And maybe his story would have, should have gone another way. As it was, Joshua took the deal. That fast. It was June of 2014. Two months earlier, his daughter had been born. Those two months with her, he told me, were the happiest of his life. He couldn't handle the idea of being locked up until both he and she were decades older. And also, Joshua's relationship inside the gang he was in, the Heartless Felons, were complicated.
I know it's hard to square, but Joshua says he was an armed robber who wasn't into violence. He said the only benefit of joining the Heartless Felons was the protection they offered from the Heartless Felons. From them. He said they extorted people into committing crimes, especially the younger kids like him, who wouldn't do serious time if they got caught. So yeah, he did stuff with them and for them, but he didn't feel anything for most of them.
The only one he half considered a friend, he told me, even that guy had pulled a gun on him once during an argument. So he took the deal. Juvenile life. With a catch. Something called a Serious Youthful Offender Dispositional Sentence. Usually people just call it an SYO. It works like a suspended adult prison sentence. You, young man, are going to stay in the juvenile system — that's the carrot — but we're hanging a ghostly adult sentence over your head — that's the stick.
which we can invoke if you can't keep it together in juvenile prison. So if you want to stay in juvenile, you have to behave. Joshua believed he could behave. He took the deal. That same day he got arrested, Joshua says he drove around with the cops, showed them places. He identified people in photographs, people associated with the heartless felons.
In the coming months, he'd meet with investigators a couple more times. Joshua has terrific recall for all manner of information. And he'd give them dates, addresses, times. He'd tell them details of crimes about which they already knew and about ones they didn't. As a source, he was a champion. He really, Joshua is extremely unusual.
This is Lisa Rankin. She was Joshua's public defender. She was assigned his case only after Joshua had agreed to cooperate. When I called her to ask about Joshua, who'd been her client for only a couple months, three years earlier, she remembered him immediately.
She's used to clients refusing to cooperate with the police, refusing even to tell her information that might help their defense. So for him to be so open and volunteering information, and I think that's how this whole thing started, is that when he had met with the officers before the arraignment and before he was represented, he had volunteered information. And he really helped them understand
on a number of investigations because they didn't have starting points. This is when the heartless felons really started coming into play. They were wreaking a lot of havoc in Cuyahoga County, and I believe to this day still are. And so the police were very desperate to get as much information as they can. And Joshua really connected a lot of dots. And I think he explained it in a way that
That really was almost like a tutorial. I mean, he could tell you everything. You know, he could explain hierarchy, how things work. You know, there's really no such thing as a gang expert because there aren't people in these gangs, you know, studying these gangs. They kind of study them from a sociological standpoint. And I felt like Josh was probably one of the clearest historians that they've had in a long time. He really...
put himself out there. And because of Josh, you know, other major crimes were solved. And, you know, the hope was that much more dangerous individuals were being taken off the streets because of Josh. This gang is affiliated with the Heartless Felons. The gang operated in the Glendale neighborhood between St. Clair, Superior, East 105 Street area.
Seven months after Joshua began cooperating, a bunch of important people in Cleveland would hold a press conference. The mayor, the Cleveland police chief, people from ATF, FBI, county sheriff's office, county prosecutor. And they said, six months ago, we began an investigation. They announced a 13-person indictment. All members of a Heartless Felons-affiliated group called the Cutthroats from Joshua's general neighborhood. We looked at these gang members for crimes ranging from
There were drug charges, RICO charges, gang charges. More gang-related arrests would follow. The FBI didn't talk to me about Joshua's case, or his cooperation, by the way, nor did the Cleveland police.
Almost everyone in the cutthroat indictment pleaded guilty, but a couple of people went to trial. And again, Joshua kept up his end of the deal. A year had gone by since his arrest. He thought he was all done helping. But then off they took him to the Justice Center, where he got up in front of his dangerous erstwhile friends and outed himself as an informant.
He knew they'd hate him for it. He knew he could get killed for it if these guys got the chance. But he also figured everyone on that cutthroat indictment, all these cases, they were adults. They'd be going into adult prisons. He was staying in juvenile. He testified at the trial of one guy charged for a drive-by shooting. That guy was acquitted. And also in a murder trial.
For that one, Joshua's only job was to identify the defendant, just to say, "Yeah, I know him." Joshua had no firsthand information about the crime. But the state put him on the stand anyway. I asked the prosecutor, Mo Awadallah, "Why put Joshua up there then? You had other people ID-ing your guy, including an ATF agent, including the defendant's own mother, who'd said, 'Uh, yeah, that young man sporting the distinctively energetic ponytail on the surveillance tape? That's my son.'"
So why put Joshua up there? You don't want to leave evidence not used. You know, you have evidence, we're going to use it to ensure that, you know, something like this, a homicide where a person's life is taken from them for no reason, and another person is gravely injured, that we don't leave it to chance. Do you guys ever hesitate to use juveniles because you're just like, let's try to keep them out of this stuff?
Sometimes. It, again, depends on the case. Our problem is a lot of our shooters or people who are killing people are young, and those are the people they hang out with. The prosecutor from the other trial, the drive-by shooting, told me, of course, they never want their witnesses to get hurt. He also said, quote,
Lisa Rankin, the public defender, happened to be in the courtroom when Joshua was on the stand. He wasn't her client anymore, but she recognized him. And she thought, wow, they are still using him. This is still going on. You know, I was very concerned for Joshua's safety because we know how these cases go. You know, and he was a kid. Other defense attorneys told me they do not advise their clients to cooperate unless there's no other solution.
Too often the benefits aren't what they're cracked up to be, while the risks crackle on for years. I talked to another public defender in the juvenile division, Morgan Pierce. She told me she, quote, rarely, if ever, has a kid cooperate with law enforcement. Unless your kid can jump on a plane, she said, they're either going to go to juvenile prison and be in danger, or they're going to go back to their neighborhood and be in danger. And I don't very much trust the system to follow through on what they say.
The prosecutors are not beholden to anything. So the kids are used. They're naive. Lisa Rankin remembered how much the police officers had seemed to like Joshua when they interviewed him. How they'd encouraged him. There was talk of him getting out of prison, going to school. There was a lot of talk that they would check in on him. And I guess, you know, ideally you hope that that means somehow protecting him.
Juvenile prisons in Ohio are run by the Ohio Department of Youth Services, ODYS. And if a juvenile prison system could have a golden age, this would be it for Ohio's. Ten years ago, the system was forced to remake itself after lawsuits and a state investigation, then a federal investigation, and finally a consent decree.
Back in 2007, a court-ordered investigation found what sounded like child abuse, essentially. Severely overcrowded housing units, untrained, confrontational, poorly supervised, sometimes even vengeful staff, using excessive force and "reckless and malicious practices," chokeholds that created extreme risks of asphyxia. Staff would use these tactics in strategic locations to avoid cameras.
Kids were also being harmed by other kids, and they had no real avenue to complain or to get help. Sometimes they threatened suicide just to get into isolation. Then came federally mandated and fairly massive reforms that sought to do away with solitary confinement as a punishment, barred staff from using force except in extreme circumstances, and added lots of educational and therapeutic programs. Most impressively, they really did redefine what juvenile prisons should be for, or rather whom they should be for.
Unless your child is hurting other people, using a gun, committing rape, setting house fires, he is probably not going to an ODYS-closed facility. He's going to go to a smaller residential or non-residential program in his own community. And while some young hotwirers and spray painters still do end up in ODYS prisons for the wrong reasons, a dearth of alternatives in their own rural counties or a wrongheaded judge, generally speaking, Ohio is not locking up kids like that anymore.
In 2004, there were 2,000 kids in Ohio's juvenile prisons. Now, there are about 500 kids. In 2015, the Department of Justice issued a report celebrating a turnaround that has, quote, Excellent progress, yes?
The one downside is that the kids who do get sent to ODYS, to borrow a phrase from Donald Rumsfeld, are the worst of the worst. Or if Donald Rumsfeld had a compassionate social worker aunt, she might say, the kids arriving at ODYS now are more traumatized and higher needs. And instead of being divided among nine institutions, they're now corralled into three. A higher concentration of sometimes violent, always struggling children living together in a smaller space.
The facility where Joshua landed in September of 2014 is called Indian River. It's not officially maximum security, but functionally it operates like Juvie Max. One big building housing, at that time, about 140 kids.
They have their own school, which is across the yard. I've been inside the main building. It's clean, brightly painted. Life-size posters of basketball stars are decorating the hallway. It has eight units, roughly 20 kids to a unit. Single rooms with doors that close. Each unit has a day room with a TV. They can play video games. They can play cards, though dice are contraband. The kids go to school and to therapy. They might have jobs cleaning the cafeteria or doing maintenance.
At first, things went okay for Joshua at Indian River. No one knew he cooperated with law enforcement. Joshua's own family didn't know.
He saw that the Heartless Felons were in charge of some of the units, controlling the video game remote, taxing kids for their food, forcing them to clean up or to make three-way phone calls for them, all of which Joshua had anticipated. The Heartless Felons were invented in Cleveland's juvenile lockups, and Joshua had been inside one of them before, when he was about 13. That was the first time he saw how tightly they operated inside prison.
Joshua had already passed the various tests to get absorbed into the gang. They call it getting twisted. You don't get twisted. Twisted is getting in the family.
If you don't want to be perpetually bullied and assaulted, if you want to be able to eat, that's a big thing, other kids taking your food. Joshua said you try to join. And to join, you have to get three bodies, assault three people. Other juveniles or staff? Like, it could be juveniles or staff. They don't really have no preference. Most people, they try to join in because you come in there and want that pressure. They don't put on a man's band. Like, they don't want to be the only ones that feel like outsiders.
At Indian River, Joshua was an insider, well-positioned. Nobody was asking him, where are you from? Always the first loaded question. He was friends with the leader of the Heartless Felons, the Godfather, or GF, who vouched for him. So he was good for about a year. But then he'd had to testify at the trials downtown. And a slither of rumors started back at Indian River that Joshua had told. Hello?
So wait, when you say it popped up, like what are you talking about? What specifically is happening to you? Like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like,
Whenever I asked Joshua what it was like to testify, how he felt about cooperating with the police, his answers are rushed and a little mechanical, as if the subject triggers a tiny guillotine window in his brain to zip closed, protecting the more fragile synapses from exposure. What he can recount, with practically digital accuracy though, is when the trouble really, really started.
Joshua had been at Indian River for about two years, and then he transferred to a minimum security juvenile prison called Cuyahoga Hills. Summer of 2016. That's when the bare-bones rumors about Joshua started to take on meat.
And then by, like, July, like the middle of July, it was like, oh, yeah, we know him, like, this. And then, like, people up there had cell phones. So when they had those cell phones, they was like, they did call to the streets. And then the streets were full. Like, they called, like, somebody from an institution and called somebody else on. And then a person that was in the institution with me. And they'll say, yeah, like, yeah, this is true. Like, he did do this. Stuff like that.
Cuyahoga Hills is in a suburb right outside Cleveland. Lots of people from his neighborhood or rival neighborhoods coming and going, family members visiting, calling, gossiping, and someone from the drive-by shooting case that Joshua had helped the police with. Not one of the defendants from that case, but the victim. He'd been shot in the leg with an assault rifle. That victim, he was also at Cuyahoga Hills.
Joshua said they'd seen each other a year earlier at the Justice Center when Joshua had had to testify at the trial. And now at Cuyahoga Hills, that kid was telling people who Joshua was, what Joshua did. It was open season. Cuyahoga Hills, unlike Indian River, it's eight units with open dorms. There's one seclusion room per unit in case, but otherwise kids are mingling all the time, which if you're a target is tantamount to a hellscape.
A quick look at the ODYS rundown of incidents involving Joshua, and you see the rush of assaults as soon as he gets to Cuyahoga Hills, like a blood pressure spike. July 3rd, July 7th, July 19th, July 22nd. Joshua can fight. A few staff members told me he can really fight. He told me his moves caught the attention of one guard who was also a gym teacher. Joshua said the guy used to watch the surveillance videos of his fights in admiration.
Anyway, Joshua fought back, but he said more and more people were assaulting him. First it'd be three people, then four people, then six people. The worst assault, in terms of the physical damage done to Joshua, was in September of 2016. It happened in the schoolhouse. He'd been staying clear of school because he knew it wasn't safe there, but he said they told him he wouldn't be allowed to take his GED tests if he didn't have 90% attendance. So he went.
And then, next thing you know, like, I was walking through the schoolhouse, just with my papers and stuff in my hand, going to class. And then I got assaulted from behind. And I blacked out. I don't remember nothing. I got knocked out. I woke up in the hospital. That's all I remember. Oh, my God, really? So you have no memory of, like... Nah. Like, you weren't even able to fight back. You just went down? Nah, no. Yeah, I got assaulted. I hit my head on the door, hit my mouth on the ground.
I had my eye on the doorknob when I was on the way down. I was just laying there. I had a seizure. I was coughing up blood. This is all stuff that I was told. I don't even remember. I just know I woke up in the hospital, clothes full of blood. I don't even remember.
Another attack, December 30, 2016. Joshua's jumped again. This time, he firmly believes a guard made that happen. He'd just been moved to a new unit, and he started arguing with the guard on duty.
Joshua said he went and took the unit phone from the guard's desk. It was a ploy to get some attention. He put it in his footlocker by his bed, wouldn't give it back. Meanwhile, the guard had ordered pizza for some of the kids on the unit. Joshua said when the guard came in with the pizza boxes, he told some kids, "Go get the phone back from Joshua. Then you can have your pizza." Knowing full well, Joshua says, that that would likely lead to an assault. It did.
Three kids jumped Joshua. It got out of hand. Joshua said the guard then cuffed him, started to walk him out. But then a bunch more kids — Joshua thinks it was about five of them — they joined in, got Joshua on the ground. So now he's got about eight kids on him, all heartless felons, while he's handcuffed. Joshua said the guard didn't call a Signal 88 to ask for help. That's for a serious fight or riot. Instead, a different guard called a Signal 5, which means other staff are more likely to mosey over to help rather than run.
But Joshua says more guards finally did come over, and one of them put his own body between Joshua and the kids who were stomping him.
Three guards were also injured. Joshua says after that, they took him to operations, and he sat there for another hour or two, handcuffed.
Then Joshua went into seclusion cell for a while. I ran all of what Joshua told me by ODYS, but the department would not answer any questions about Joshua. They do not discuss juveniles in their custody, nor would they provide anyone for me to interview about their policies or procedures or philosophy generally, because they said it would be in service of a story about a particular youth. They did send me a general statement, which I'll get to later.
Joshua said all along he'd been telling the administration at Cuyahoga Hills, I am not safe here. I heard similar complaints from other kids at ODYS. I told them, but they didn't really do anything. You see it in institutional reports and lawsuits over the years as well. Allegations that staff knew kids were in danger from other kids and didn't do enough or anything to protect them. Joshua said he practically begged the people in charge at Cuyahoga Hills, you've got to send me back to Indian River.
Yeah.
I sat down with the superintendent at the institution in the hills, and he basically said, like, it was my fault that I was getting assaulted. Again, ODYS did not comment on Joshua's case, including whether he asked to be moved. Like, I don't know. He basically said that I was bringing everything on me.
How? Like, saying like that. I tried to boss people around, like, I'm the high-ranking heartless felon, and he knew I was not the heartless felon, so he just told me, like, you better stop or this is what's going to keep happening to you. He thinks you're a heartless felon still? Yeah, yeah. That's what he thought? Yeah, that's it. Like, that's what he was saying. I kept telling him. I kept trying to explain to him, but they were just, like, flicking it off or just making, like, bringing it back on me.
After about six months at Cuyahoga Hills, Joshua met with a couple of lawyers. A defense attorney, who said he'd figure out if he could get Joshua early release from ODYS. And a civil rights attorney, Mr. Paul Cristallo, as a matter of fact, whom you might remember from Aramis' case. That's how I learned about Joshua, from Paul.
Both attorneys were shocked, they said, that it seemed like the heartless felons were colluding with staff. They considered asking the state attorney general's office to launch an investigation. In the meantime, Paul had called the facility to say, I'm no juvenile justice expert, but seems like you might want to move this kid. And P.S., we might be suing you. More after the break.
Hey, serial listeners, go deeper into one detainee's story in Letters from Guantanamo on Audible. Mansour Addaifi was 18 when he was kidnapped by Afghan militia and sold to the CIA. As one of the first prisoners at Guantanamo, he endured unbearable
unimaginable torture. Starting as an act of rebellion, he wrote to the Pope, President Bush, MLK, and others. For the first time, hear these letters that celebrate the strength of human spirit and that ultimately bring catharsis to Mansoor. Letters from Guantanamo is free with membership at audible.com slash Guantanamo. I'm Julian Barnes. I'm an intelligence reporter at the New York Times. I try to find out what the U.S. government is keeping secret.
Governments keep secrets for all kinds of reasons. They might be embarrassed by the information. They might think the public can't understand it. But we at The New York Times think that democracy works best when the public is informed.
It takes a lot of time to find people willing to talk about those secrets. Many people with information have a certain agenda or have a certain angle, and that's why it requires talking to a lot of people to make sure that we're not misled and that we give a complete story to our readers. If The New York Times was not reporting these stories, some of them might never come to light. If you want to support this kind of work, you can do that by subscribing to The New York Times.
I have to think back now to access a more innocent time around 18 months ago when I was still incredulous. Give me a second. There it is. How could the government take a teenager, an unrepresented teenager, persuade him to do the thing almost nobody does, the thing law enforcement has been desperate for someone to step up and do, cooperate?
Get him to generously spin through his heartless felons Rolodex. Then put him on the witness stand, not once, but twice. Then put him back in juvenile prisons packed pretty tightly with heartless felons. Offer a parting handshake and a general note to behave himself. Remember that SYO hanging over your head? And how could that same government then sit back and watch him get jumped again and again and again?
How could they call an ambulance to take him to the hospital? And months later, according to Joshua, arrange transportation to a couple of neurologist appointments to attend to the brain bleeds he said he was diagnosed with. Oh, and then that other trip for a CAT scan. How could all that have happened and be happening? And yet I couldn't hear anyone aside from Joshua raising an alarm. So I considered, as anyone in my position would, there's probably more to this story that I'm not seeing. I set out to fact-check Joshua.
It began with Ms. Turner, Shayla Turner. She ran a literacy and social action program inside Indian River and Cuyahoga Hills called Freedom School. It's a curriculum designed by the Children's Defense Fund. Joshua says Freedom School was by far the best thing that happened to him inside ODYS. It changed his whole demeanor, he said, from an enraged, suspicious scowler into a young man who was beginning to recognize his feelings and manage them.
"'Every time I got mad, she'd ask me why,' he said. "'It was the first time somebody actually ever sat down and listened to me vent "'and tried to coach me and worked with me. "'Joshua stayed in the program for two years, longer than anyone else. "'When the program lost funding, "'Ms. Turner positioned herself as Joshua's mentor and kept in touch.'
I asked Ms. Turner about Joshua's version of the pizza incident because I figured she knows him well. She's seen his worst and best behavior. I figured she'd know whether he was exaggerating. Would a guard really have handcuffed Joshua and then more or less allowed more kids to assault him? I'm hearing stuff like, you know,
The guard put handcuffs on him. Yes. Like that's real? Yes. That is absolutely real. And the way that I verify that is just when asking to be able to see the footage and their inability to do that, only reason I knew any of information about it is because they called me to calm Joshua down. Oh, they called you? Yes. So the facility called me with Joshua in a room because they know I'm his mentor to calm him down. And that is the most angry I've ever heard him. I could hear him crying.
And I couldn't even manage that myself. So I told them that I needed to see him. I needed to be able to talk to him in person. And we went to go see him. And that's when I saw the bruises and the beating. And Joshua was very strong. He's a fighter. This is what got him into first. Like this is something that you're very comfortable in. So to see him that bad and be able to talk to him and find out what happened, it was horrible. And then the guard was fired afterwards. The guard wouldn't have been fired if the guard wouldn't have been in the wrong.
I eventually got the personnel records for this guard. He was fired, though later through a settlement with the union, he was allowed to resign, along with a pledge to never again work in ODYS. The guard wasn't sanctioned for Joshua getting jumped, though. He was sanctioned because of the pizza. He admitted to taking 20 bucks from one of the kids and using it to buy them pizza. It's against the rules. It seems like every time he's telling me a story, I'm just like, it feels like inside of there...
certainly at Cuyahoga Hills, but also to a certain extent at Indian River, that it's just chaos for them. Absolute chaos. It is absolute chaos. No, I think that's what I would say. Clearly, it is absolute chaos. And that the kids seem in charge. Or is that not true? Yes. I would absolutely agree with that. Really? Yes. And that was one of the reasons our program was so beneficial, because the children were on our side with the program. If we were to have relied on just the staff, I would not have felt safe.
So, the children. I wanted to speak to other kids who'd been at ODYS to know whether Joshua's situation was real and whether it was common knowledge. This is Malik. He's 18. He was at Cuyahoga Hills with Joshua. He's in adult prison now. Malik said he saw Joshua get jumped multiple times. I feel bad for him.
I'd gotten Malik's name from a former staff member who'd suggested he might be a good person to talk to about what life was like at Cuyahoga Hills. She'd given me a couple of names of remarkably frank former ODYS kids. She didn't know Joshua, and she definitely didn't know that Malik is actually Joshua's cousin. If you overlay Cleveland and ODYS, you see a lot of coincidences like this. It's a pretty small world.
Malik told me Joshua had it worse than anyone he'd seen come through Cuyahoga Hills. He said he himself had been high up in the Heartless Felons when all this was going on. But he loved his cousin, so he stuck up for him. When it got to a certain point, I had to step in because, like you said, that family, I couldn't just keep letting the things that was happening to them continue to happen. So.
He had words with a couple of the guys, he said. Asked them to cool it. The heartless felons started to turn against Malik. Started to steal from him, he said.
One night when he was sleeping, someone hit Malik in the face with a combination lock, right between the eyebrows. He needed stitches. I talked to another guy named Leo from Toledo, who'd been at Cuyahoga Hills at the same time as Joshua. He remembered the assault in the school when Joshua woke up in the ambulance. Somebody just clapped him in the heart. Clapped means hit. Because it was a big deal. They punched him. He punched him. He went to sleep, but he hit his face on the concrete wall. And then he was on that car going to a seizure. And then...
And his whole face just swole. It just looked crazy. And then he went to the hospital for that. Leo said it was because word had gone around Cuyahoga Hills that Joshua was a snitch, that he was giving the prison staff information about the heartless felons, the family. Yeah, he knew a lot of stuff about the family. He was just telling a lot. He was, um...
trying to get a better sentencing or something giving a lot of people up giving a lot of people names up okay when you heard like oh yeah this guy's a snitch like did you have any feeling about that personally one way or another were you like i don't care were you like no that's what he deserves like what's the feeling about that no i don't know
I was heavily involved in that, in the gang and that, so... You were? He was snitching on me. Not only just me, just a lot of other people. Okay. So did you know this hit on him was going to happen or no? Yeah, I know. Oh, you knew. Okay. Can I ask, did you order it? Am I talking to the man who ordered it? Uh...
Uh, yeah. At the time, Leo said he was in charge of a section of the gang called YF, Young Felons, so he called the hit on Joshua. Coincidence? He'd later become the godfather. Joshua said he wasn't telling on the Heartless Felons at Cuyahoga Hills, that they were conflating his past cooperation with the present. Regardless, Leo said he was mostly hearing about Joshua from the guards. A lot of staff was telling me shit about him.
That's how I found out that he was snitching. Wait, what do you mean staff were telling you about him? He would try to ride a kite to his dad. In Cuyahoga Hills, a kite is how you get a message to the office. Like, oh, I need to talk to administration. Oh, I need to talk to operations. Or like the superintendent. And there's two black staff. He brought your name up. He's telling on you and he's telling on you on such and such.
Staff was informing on Joshua, Leo says, to the most dangerous people in the prison. Him. Leo. And his guys. I spoke to a couple of other former and current ODYS youths from different facilities. I also spoke to current and former guards, not disgruntleds, people who liked their jobs. Also current and former ODYS social workers. Most of the adults spoke to me on background for fear of retaliation.
What they described reminded me of a black market, as if the juvenile prisons have their own subterranean economy, sucking in both youth and staff who trade in favors, power, and also cash.
Of course, I know corruption exists, and I know juvenile prisons in particular are prone to bullying and tumult. But this was a system recently out from under consent decree. Metamorphosed. The Ohio model. Whose stated mission is not to punish, but to habilitate youth and empower families and communities. Cuyahoga Hills has won a national award for how it treats the children in its care. Twice. And yet, well, I'm just going to run through some of what I learned. Take contraband.
I interviewed a former guard, Edward Kennerly. He's the only guard who agreed to go on the record, possibly because he's got nothing to lose. He lost his job already after he was charged with domestic violence. When we talked, he was actually in prison, as a prisoner. Before that, he worked the other side, as a guard at Cuyahoga Hills.
They call them YSs and ODYS, youth specialists. Edwards said guards bringing in contraband? Yes. Bringing in cell phones, weed, blocking miles. You know, I heard incidents where people was getting... One guy came in with... He was bringing weed in for a whole year.
And they had to know about it. Everybody knew about it. The guy worked on one of the most unruly units, Edwards said. But when he was on duty, everyone was curiously chill. Edwards said that guard ended up getting fired. Edwards said he himself didn't bring anything in like that. But he said kids did ask him to. We'll keep the unit under control if you bring in a cell phone or some weed. Yeah, for sure. I have a lot of COs on hand that I dealt with on that type of situation.
That's Malik, Joshua's cousin, and quite the businessman. He was bringing stuff into the north and south buildings, he said, with the help of guards. Two or three at any one time, he said. They'd go pick up stuff from his people on the outside and bring it back in so Malik could sell it. And for the guards, this wasn't just about keeping the units calm. It was about making money. Malik would pay them. And how much were they getting? $1,000.
How much would you have to give them? Maybe. It depends. It depends on how much I have them bring in. If they bring in all that, sometimes I pay them $1,100 here, $700 here. It just depends. It all depends on what I have them bring. Oh, my God. That's like real money. Yeah. Yeah.
Dude. Wow. Oh, my God. How much does a cell phone go for at Cahoga Hills? It depends on what kind of phone is it. Okay. An Android, maybe like $500, an iPhone, $1,000. So there's that much money moving around in there. Yeah, it is. It's crazy down there.
The heartless felons, they're also called the family or the fam, which has another meaning, forever about money. Leo, the former GF, told me, they take it seriously. You've got to move product. Malik estimated there was anywhere from $7,000 to $10,000 in cash circulating at Cuyahoga Hills at any one time. Most kids send their money home, sometimes through visitation. By the time Malik left, he said he'd sent home about $2,500, and he had about $900 on hand.
The commodity running alongside and sometimes feeding into the contraband market is violence. Three guards I talked to, one current, two former, said the guards feel hamstrung sometimes because some of their best tools for controlling the kids were taken away by reforms. Certain physical restraints, seclusion. They couldn't even put kids to bed at 7 p.m. anymore. Couldn't make them keep their hands behind their backs.
The kids can be violent, the guards are outnumbered, and you can't count on swift backup from operations if there's a fight or a riot. So yeah, the guards will sometimes provoke kids, taunt them, or insult them, so that the kid will respond in kind, and then the guard has an excuse to shut them in their rooms and not have to deal with them. I talked to a former social worker named Casey Helkowski, who told me she saw that kind of thing a lot. Casey worked at the Cuyahoga County Detention Center as a therapist until last summer, and
The detention center isn't technically ODYS, but there's a lot of cross-pollination with ODYS, especially with Cuyahoga Hills, in terms of staff and kids and gang culture. Staff would stand in, you know, the doorway of their room and be like, do something, do something. Like, oh, you know, you say that, do something. Or, you know, when you come out, like when they're in their transition, so they're locked up in their rooms, oh, when you come out, like, I want to see you, I want to see you do that. Yeah.
You know, if another fight happens, you can lock down the whole unit and then you just sit in the day area for the rest of your shift, watch TV. And you would see stuff like that? Yeah. Casey told me a story about two kids who'd fought. And then when the loser of the fight was being in pain in this one guard's ass, the guard asked the winner of the fight to go after the kid a second time.
Incidents like this, staff orchestrating youth-on-youth attacks, everyone I spoke to from ODYS said it's common.
Edward, the former Cuyahoga Hills guard, said, yeah, a guard will form a relationship with the highest-ranking gang member or else the strongest youth on the unit and use that kid to keep the rest of the kids in line.
Did you ever experience that where a guard said to you, like, can you go take care of so-and-so or called a hit on... Yeah, for sure. I used to do that all the time. They'd just come to me or one of my friends and they'd tell us, like, get him up there. We'd take care of you. We're going to take care of you all. Wait, who was taking care of who? The CO. The CO was going to take care of us wherever we needed, whatever we wanted, we was going to get it. If you did what?
Beat on whoever they tell you to beat on. And why were they wanting you to beat on a certain kid? I mean, disrespectful, giving them a hard shift, whatever. And what would you get in return? Food and contraband, whatever I wanted. Money, whatever I wanted. The final thing I'll mention, sex. Sexual assaults or attempted sexual assaults, and also sex.
Both Leo and Malik said they'd had sex with multiple female guards who were in their 20s and 30s at Cuyahoga Hills. Before Joshua was transferred to Cuyahoga Hills, back when he was doing okay at Indian River, he was swimming along in this corrupt water too, taking advantage of it. He could get anything in there, he said. Porn, weed, lighters, tequila.
He said he never jumped anyone for money, but he did operate as a middleman. Guards would pay him, maybe $20, maybe $40, to arrange hits on certain kids. Joshua said sometimes the hits were in retaliation for something violent a youth had done to a guard. Maybe the kid threw pee on them or attacked a female. The guards aren't supposed to strike back, so they use the kids as their proxies. Right.
So they're using you guys to fight back? Right. Down there, see, that's the thing. They, like... I don't know, man. Many people I spoke to about ODYS, they'd hit an explanatory wall like this. They'd say, you just, you have to see it. Joshua's best effort, I thought, was when he explained it as a kind of madman's vacation. A vacation for people that fucked up.
A vacation for the youth, you mean, or a vacation for the guards? Both. Both sides, the people that are fucked up. Would there have been a way for you to come in and be like, I'm not going to touch any of this, I'm going to be a totally squeaky clean, just do my time kid and not get pulled into anything? Is that possible to exist like that? No, because people, they take that for a weakness on them. So you will definitely have been out there fighting or something. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, it's hard to explain. Youths, guards, social workers, they all told me, for a kid to quote-unquote succeed at ODYS, to get help, stay out of trouble, and get back out, you'd need a rare, rare confluence of luck, grit, and influence.
I spoke to four social workers who worked at different ODYS facilities. Their experiences spanned 2012 to 2018. And they all said there were plenty of people who wanted to help the kids, to advocate for them. But there was no way. One former Indian River guard told me everything was hush, hush, hush. The social workers said they were discouraged from raising problems or calling out cruelties. Guards who outed kids as sex offenders, say, or looked the other way when a child got jumped.
The social workers said there was a strong no-snitching culture among the staff. A couple of them told me it was made clear to them they might not be protected if they were to be assaulted on the units.
One person told me the clinical notes she was writing in her kids' files for reports that had to go to the courts every six months were being edited by another staff member until her boss put a stop to it. And that when she went to look back at a note she'd put in one kid's file describing assaults on him that appeared to have been facilitated by staff, her documentation was missing entirely. Several social workers told me that they started to lose their own sense of what was normal, what was ethical.
They felt like the kids had no protection from abuse or from coercion. So rather than trying to stop it, they'd help the kids navigate it. One told me, "There was nothing I could do." Another told me, "I mean, I just had to be realistic about it. To pretend like they were getting rehabilitated was foolish. I'd tell the kids all the time, 'The system is not designed to help you.'" She worked at Cuyahoga Hills, national award winner. "It was almost like the place had a mask on," she said.
Every story I heard about ODYS, every allegation from youths and staff, current and former, we ran it by ODYS. Again, they didn't comment on anything specific, but they gave us this statement. "Whenever there are allegations of misconduct, we swiftly investigate and take appropriate action," they wrote. DYS has increased programming, security, and supports to serve the most challenging youth in the state who have lengthy criminal histories and often have gang affiliations that they bring into the facilities.
January of 2017, Joshua went back to Indian River. This time, they didn't keep him on one of the heartless felon units, A-Alpha, B-Bravo, and N-November. Instead, they put him on D-Delta. D-Delta was the closest thing Indian River had to protective custody. A mix of kids from Columbus, Cincinnati, Youngstown, a few Clevelanders...
When I first started talking to Joshua, that's where he was, D-Delta, on unit restriction, meaning he couldn't go to the normal places in the facility. Yeah, I don't even go to school. Okay, the teacher comes to you. Yeah, because I can't go to school. If I go to school, I'm going to be assaulted all the time, like nonstop.
He can't go to the school, to the cafeteria. It was now mid-May, five months of unit restriction for Joshua's own protection.
He felt safe-ish on his unit. He said he was cool with most everybody in D-Delta. His hopes were set on early release. And then who knows, maybe a lawsuit, but early release was the main thing he wanted. I talked to Joshua every couple of days, sometimes every day. Early on, he started describing what sounded like an uptick in the usual chaos. Yeah.
What do you mean? He said about 15 kids from A-Alpha, a heartless felons unit, had yanked the door open and stormed the kids on D-Delta. Joshua said the heartless felons were trying to conquer their unit, basically, because their unit wasn't joining HF, wasn't submitting to HF. D-Delta was more HB, Headbusters, a rival gang.
D-Delta had kids from Columbus and Cincinnati. And kids from those places, if they're in a gang, they tend to be HB. That was most of the tension. And then, persona non-Joshua was on D-Delta too. The distress dispatches kept coming. His unit had been rushed on their way to school. Dozens of kids swarming at them from across the yard. Staff hurried them back inside before anyone was hurt, but it was really scary. There'd been another riot, this time on A-Alpha. He'd seen staff attack a youth in his room.
There's so many people walking around here on my unit with black eyes and stuff, he said. We just got two new dudes on our unit. Dude from Toledo, they jumped him twice in one day. And a dude from Cleveland? Yeah.
Sometimes, in the calls, Joshua was sounding jangled. He said he couldn't take it anymore. It's too much stress on me. In early July, Joshua's unit was put on AOV protocol, active violence protocol. Sort of like lockdown. 7 p.m. bedtime, no extras.
Meanwhile, he said the heartless felons were larking around, TV and video games all day, getting to go outside, in their Nike shoes, jogging pants, watches. His unit, all state-issue stuff, stuck inside, watching the heartless felons, the aggressors, through the windows. An Indian River guard I spoke to confirmed, yes, they had been putting some units on AOV protocol lately, but B-Bravo, the unit where the heartless felon leaders are, too dangerous. Yeah, this guard said, they won't even try.
Joshua said his unit united. They discussed it. This isn't fair. We're not safe. The staff isn't protecting us. It feels like the superintendent is siding with the heartless felons, protecting them. And we're the ones being punished for fighting back. They all wrote up grievances, which they sent to the ODYS central office.
Activism. Look at that. Respectful to whom it may concern activism.
A staff member at Indian River had helped Joshua with it, told him where he should send the packet, that she go to Columbus in care of Julie Walburn, assistant director of ODYS.
Joshua didn't know who Julie Walburn was, but the judges down in juvenile court in Cleveland did, including Joshua's judge, Kristen Sweeney, who's also the administrative judge for the juvenile court. Here's how she described Julie Walburn to me. Julie Walburn had come to work at ODYS that April, a month before I started talking to Joshua, and he started describing the mayhem at Indian River.
Julie Walburn had come to a recent meeting of juvenile judges in Cuyahoga County, and she said, we know about the violence and the rule-breaking. We're going to fix it. Judge Sweeney thought, finally.
I'm trying to think, like, well, how long has it been that I have felt like the institution is sort of not taking some of the violence seriously? I would say probably at least four or five years. At least four or five years. Mind you, that's in the post-consent decree, post-reform era of ODYS. One of Judge Sweeney's colleagues, Judge Denise Reeney, she was Malik's judge, gave me the backstory of how the spring rain came to be.
She'd gotten a case back in December, a kid at Indian River, a heartless felon. Inside his case file were pictures. Here's Judge Rini. And I'm looking at all these photographs, and they're photographs of youth smoking marijuana. Well, wait, I have it. Oh, okay. Judge Rini keeps the case folder on her desk to remind her, she explained, of how we're failing these youths when we let heartless felons run the facilities instead of the adults. We looked through the stack of photos together.
So this is from inside. There they're definitely smoking. Definitely smoking, listening to maybe an iPod, something like that. Gang signs. Well, I don't know from gang signs, but I assume that's what that is. So then money, holding a wad of money. Wait, was he posting from inside? Oh, really? The kid had a cell phone and an Instagram account where he was posting these photos.
So Judge Rini saw all these images in December of 2016, and she flipped her lid. The impunity, the message they're sending to other kids. Go to ODYS, smoke weed, make money, kick it with your friends. Judge Rini sits on a state judges committee for juvenile law and procedure. And I just sent them to all of the members. So they started calling ODYS and saying this is unacceptable. In
In January, officials from ODYS came to a judge's meeting. And they were trying to explain why this was occurring. And I was visibly distraught, to say the least, where Judge Floyd put her hand on my little arm and said...
Wait, because what was the explanation? Like, how do you explain it? It was an isolated incident. I'm like, he has 37 pages. How isolated is this? We, you know, I'm in the facility every day and, you know, this doesn't really happen. I'm like, it's on Instagram. What do you mean it doesn't happen? So they were basically just kind of like whitewashing it.
My biggest issue was you are not helping our community. You take these youth and you put them in here and they come out and they know absolutely they have no trade, they have no vacation, and they have no ability to act appropriately. So what are we doing besides housing them in a facility where we're not teaching them anything?
A few months after that meeting, the assistant director of ODYS abruptly resigned, and Julie Walburn took her place. As soon as she came on board, she walked through the, according to her, she walked through all the facilities. She met with all of the heads of each facility, and she said, you know, we're going to take back the facilities, and we are going to ensure that these youth are not only safe, because there was a lot of fighting going on,
but the ones that are the bad actors are going to be removed. In mid-June, Joshua told me that the superintendent of Indian River had gathered the SYOs, the kids who had adult time attached to their sentences, that could kick in if they didn't do well in juvenile. ODYS hadn't been invoking those adult sentences, but now the superintendent told them, new sheriff in town.
We now have a zero-tolerance policy for SYOs. Any infraction doesn't even have to be violent, and we can seek a bind over. You are now on notice. Behave yourselves. About a month after that, late July, another call. Joshua told me he'd just found out he had a court date. It's tomorrow. Tomorrow? Yeah. Why would you have any court dates? Why would you have a court date coming up?
Oh, you're kidding. I told Joshua I couldn't imagine anything drastic was going to happen to him. How could it? The system knew his situation. But Joshua wasn't hearing that.
If Joshua got bound over, that was the adult sentence he was looking at. 18 years. That was his S.Y.O.
Joshua wasn't going to the court date tomorrow, but I could go and watch the adults figure out where Joshua belongs. That's next time on our final episode this season of Serial. Serial.
Thank you.
Our music is by Adam Dorn and Hal Wilner, with additional music from Matt McGinley and Nick Thorburn. Our theme song is also by Nick Thorburn and remixed by Adam Dorn.
Special thanks for this episode to Alphonse Gerhardstein, Kimberly Jump, Sam Amada, head of the Cuyahoga County Public Defenders Juvenile Division, Abe Hamaday, Gabriela Celeste, Laura Austin, and Brooke Burns. The animation and illustration on our website was done by the talented team at Moth Studio. Thanks to Dave Prosser, Daniel Chester, Marie Margot, Zachary Skanatovitz, Luke Doyle, I4 Ashton, and Henata Garcia.
You can check out their work at our website, SerialPodcast.org. That's SerialPodcast.org, where you can also sign up for our email newsletter and be notified when new episodes are released. Serial is a production of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago.