The day before, my coworker informed me that a former student had been arrested for murder. I check his name on the internet, sigh, and say to myself that I have now taught two murders.

The first murder was the definition of premeditated. While he was in our facility, he told anyone who would listen that he intended to kill the boy having sex with his sister if we ever sent him home. Not sending them home was an option, as we step the boys down to lower private placements and group homes, most of which are pastoral and all of which are far from the environments that contributed to turning our students felonious.

However, at that time, the state of New York was trying to push through the Closer to Home Initiative, the crux of which was shutting down juvenile detention facilities upstate in favor of putting the kids as close to their actual houses as possible, in unsecured, undertrained, and unprepared placements. My student walked out the side door without being noticed, went to his house a block or so away, grabbed a knife, found the boy, and stabbed him to death. I don’t know if he tried to run or if, having done what he set off to do, he waited for the police to come and bring him to a much higher secure facility, one with barbed wire and the sense to take threats seriously. He killed a boy, true, but he forfeited the possibility of a good life for that revenge.

The most recent alleged murderer was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Granted, the "wrong place" was his friend’s home, which he was burglarizing for drugs, initiating the "wrong time" of the owner’s friend getting shot. Since this death occurred during the commission of a felony, the state considers it murder and it is on my former student’s head, even though the stories I read do not suggest my former student even touched the gun. It almost feels cheap to call him a murderer given that, but a man is dead and someone has to go to prison in payment. "Homicide" seems a more fitting verdict -- he meant to steal, to break and enter, to menace, but he didn’t plan of anyone dying; it is difficult to call that part premeditated -- but I am not a lawyer. The young man was stupid and impetuous, and he will have the rest of his life to contemplate the enormity of that.

The next day, I mention to my coworkers that my tally is now up to one gang rapist, two murderers, and no dead former students (that I am aware, but we might not hear). One stops me to remind me of another resident I taught a couple years ago.

I explain I am unfamiliar with this crime even in the vaguest terms. After walking from El Salvador to evade a gang that wanted him dead, this boy came into my classroom nearly ignorant of the English language and, after a few semesters of an interpreter and my badly translated texts, he was released conversational but not fluent. That is the last I heard of him.

The exact parameters of the crime, the details, are too revolting to describe in full. There are keywords: girls, hunted, bludgeoned, upside down, tongues. I read as many stories as I can before becoming too nauseated to continue, trying to find some way in which my student couldn’t have been involved. During his tenure in my facility, he gave me few problems. I don’t remember him frustrated, and he had good occasion to be with the language barrier. He was never restrained in my classroom. Most are at least once. I would be surprised if I even found a reason to write him up for misbehavior, even though he entered the facility only knowing enough English to curse someone out.

His life prior to our meeting was horrifying in a way that would be cinematic were he a sympathetic character. The grains of the story that filter in through the oddly reserved articles -- hesitancy that comes when a crime is so ghastly that even reporters desperate of an uptick in readership reframe to avoid vulgarity -- paint him as an amoral monster, soulless. His crime -- and there were more slayings than just the girls, though I cannot say when he held the weapon and when he only facilitated its use -- offers no wiggle room. He wasn’t exacting a specific vengeance against the boy who had wronged his sister. He wasn’t trying to steal drugs when a gun went off and a bullet found its unfortunate mark. He set out with his gang to murder someone to terrorize the community, so he murdered.

I reserve a distance from the prior crimes of my students. My facility is a turning point, where on our best day we help bring dysregulated boys back to society. What they do afterward troubles me. Most of their subsequent crimes are simple: drugs, cutting off their ankle bracelets, getting in a fight, hitting a family member, mugging and burglary, grand theft auto, the occasional arson. Once you are in the system, particularly once we send you back into the same environment that was so problematic, it doesn’t like letting you go. Our rate of recidivism is eighty to ninety percent, and I can’t act sunny for a ten to twenty percent rate of "success." (Not being arrested again as a juvenile is not success; becoming a man who can manage himself well enough to go to college and get a legitimate job is success I have seen escape all but a handful of boys I’ve taught.) These smaller crimes, with no permanent harm, mostly make me roll my eyes. They were stupid, they couldn’t break the cyclical patterns that ruled their lives, they lost another three to six months of their adolescence in my facility (or a longer stint at another facility if the nature of their crime suggested they should not be at a non-secure facility). I cannot let these issues beneath my skin or I will have none left.

The former two murderers, I cannot say I can forgive. Two men are dead who might not otherwise be if things had gone a little differently. However, I don’t see those acts as signs that those former students are irredeemable. The length of their sentence might render them so, but their crimes do not implicitly.

The third murder I discovered hits me hard because I could not have expected it. If I were told that he was in prison for drug smuggling, I would have accepted it. Assault? Sure, that could have happened. Randomly torturing strangers, an execution too dark for crime procedurals? No, not him. I’ve taught students so volatile that I would be disgusted but not shocked, but he was not among them. He smiled almost shyly in class, loved making up elaborate handshakes, laughed over how hard he found my last name to pronounce.

I don't fully know the monsters that dwell inside my students. I don't know whether this is just the nature of man, or the nature of traumatized and broken boys, or if I critically overlooked what they were at their cores because it made the day easier. We talk a good game of focusing on what happened to these boys instead of what is wrong with them. That is fine when they are acting out in class because their mother neglected to visit them for the fifth time. It is ludicrous when faced with a case where two girls were hunted and mutilated to show how fearsome a gang is. It is totally fair to ask what is wrong with the person who would do that. 

The gang rapist and the gang murderer -- the adjective is noted and the gang is the same -- give me so little hope that there is something in them left that can allow redemption. My forgiveness is not asked for, but I couldn’t imagine offering it. I rarely want one of my students in prison -- I would like some of them committed to a mental hospital until they are no longer a danger to themselves or others -- but I would be relieved to know these two were sequestered away from future victims forever. The world is better without people who would do that.

Of course, I have anger that I could not do enough for these boys, that I could not give them something that could help them cling harder to the remaining tatters shred of their humanity rather than the flag of some gang that prostituted them and tried to murder them. They have committed atrocities, acted like slavering beasts on the hunt, and I didn’t know to stop them.

Soon in Xenology: Mummies.

last watched: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
reading: Abduction by John E. Mack
listening: David Bowie