Not a word in this story from either set of parents
..from Inside Edition
Update: Ok, we now see a long history of mental illness with both. The girl’s injuries are now shot in the chest and arm, and not the neck as reported below. We are talking 39 encounters with law enforcement.
The boy was once held three times under the Baker Act in a ten day period, at 7 years old. The girl has had over 30 police encounters since 2017.
“Since January 2019, the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office has responded more than 100 times to reports of missing people from the group home, according to dispatch logs.”
“Chitwood said deputies were called to the group home 289 times last year and 89 times so far this year.”
“Kitwana McTyer, president and CEO of Florida United Methodist Children’s Home, said in a statement Wednesday that the home is a “child welfare facility, not a secure care facility.”
Still not a word about parents, and zero information on the conditions they were living under, but they obviously had a lot of wandering time.
As Gordon does so love to say, welcome to how the world really works…JD ]
[ Editor’s Note: You just can’t make this sh-t up! This kind of material is not VT’s usual morning news. I am running it as an example of despite all the resources to deal with problem kids, some slip through the cracks.
The 14 year old girl ended up in a half way house after stealing a bunch of puppies. It seems she was unhappy being there, so she burned the place down. Silly me, I would not have thought to just transfer her to another half way house to burn down.
But it seems that after first torching, she was looking for a little more excitement. She grabs the 12 year old boy, breaks out of the home, and hits the jackpot when breaking into a home a couple of miles away, finding a weapons cache.
With their shotgun, an AK-47, a pistol, and lots of ammo, it was ‘game on’ when the cops came, and what would normally be an inner city gang shoot out begins. The boy needs insulin every four hours. In the end, the girl comes out to engage the cops, as she received bullet wounds.
The 12 year looks like a vacuous 10 year old choir boy, zoned out during the video court hearing. Together the two look like Disney movie kids. Will the court send them to another ‘half way’ house again?
The flip side to this story is the 7 year old last week, who when his family had a boating accident, swam an hour to shore to get help… an interesting contrast in parenting and resilience.
Dad admits that sthe 14-year-old has ‘mental disorders’, but is not a gangster because “she only steals puppies”. He left out her starting a half dozen brush fires one week, where the cops named the unknown assailant, “the fire starter”… Jim W. Dean ]
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A 12-year-old boy and 14-year-old girl who ran away from their Florida group home are in custody after cops say they broke into a house, armed themselves with the homeowner’s guns and opened fire on responding deputies in a 30-minute shootout.
According to authorities, 14-year-old Nicole Jackson was shot and wounded after she came out of the garage and pointed a shotgun at deputies. She remains in the hospital recovering from life-threatening injuries. Travis O’Brien, 12, surrendered seconds later.
Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus. He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews. He now writes and posts periodically for VT.
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Reflects on the Society. Children to behave like this. To have given up on life. Shame the way the country is governed. The way ordinary people are exploited. Shame on those who sit in legislature, courts and gouse power. They seek conflicts around the globe and treat the folks as slaves who labour to pay taxes like slaves. Who said that slavery mean to have Visible Chains around their Legs? I wonder how many millions little ones are living in a system thinking ” Life is not worth living “.
My friend worked over 20 years in a facility like this, at the peak of his career he made 16 dollars per hour. it was a very high ranked facility in Ny state.
He and many others quit when the entire focus turned from helping children to making money. Sometimes wealthy jewish or black families from NYC actually paid to have their children sent there, under specific conditions.
Locked door facilities for children and adolescents are scarce but needed. Private hospitals are costly. Sometimes things work out well for the patient and they move on. Many times they have to outgrow their behaviors. Sometimes it just works out badly. I worked 17 years in these places and eventually learned that a lot of the patients wouldn’t be there if their parents were better at raising them. The drugs cause more harm than good in my humble opinion because they are over prescribed. But children are resilient and can overcome? Hell, I survived Catholic School! If you have a troubled child, try to be normal and give them support. Eventually they will come back to you because you are family and they love you and you them.
These children need level six locked door institutional care. Not pills or time outs.
I did see a longer version of the video , and the police supervisor was advising the officers to stand down even while they were being shot at. The restraint was apparent. A tough day for the cops. The privatization of these type of facilities has caused a significant degradation of the quality of staff for a couple decades now. It is common for the contracts like food and other things to be doled out to friends or family instead of quality. The burn out rates for staff go way up when they are not qualified in the first place, and the pay is usually minimum or just above. The stories of how the children end up there are horrific in many cases. At one point the girl was carrying the rifle, shotgun and pistol, and obviously was proficient at operating them all. There seems to be something deeper here.
Jim, I would hesitate to jump too fast to conclusions about the “bad kids”. In my experience in child welfare, there are adults who groom the kids. The kids then act out. It is possible that the kids were first made that way by adults while at home (family, neighbors, strangers, etc), but I doubt that the group home helped them. There are/were adults pulling the strings of those kids, and that is practically a guarantee. My wild guess would be serious abuse in the early years.
Maybe that will come out, and then again not, due to the child protection laws. What we did learn from it though as they are throwing these really damaged kids into facilities that don’t have the resources to deal with the problems. The State “outsourced” it, thinking that as a budget saver, which it was. I don’t suspect kids like this end up employable, God forbid.
What’s conspicuously absent from these discussions by the MSM is the drugging up of our children on prescribed antidepressants and ADHD substances. The explosion of violent video games. The proliferation of violent rap music and videos. The everyday use of guns and violence woven into the themes of our movies and made for TV shows. There is no discussion of these feeders of violence, only about the weapons.
Jim, you’re simplifying the issue. It’s not just rotten parents or their kids, is all the system what is rotten, economy, culture, government and media, mainly in the west world.
Yes, simplifying within the confines of an introduction. We need to hear from neighbors, teachers, parents, the half way house people, including the one burned down, etc. But the privacy regulations could limit things to what is in the court records. I have no idea if the public will have any early access to that info. So we will rely on what local news reports. I have the story updated now with more background.
Yes, it is systemic. It is civilizational. Existential. The evil that has befallen this land.
If the had been black kids would they be alive still?
They’d be portraying them as thugs somehow. They’d be calling for them to be tried as adults. Just S c um.
More fun than a trip to Disneyland for a couple all-american brats, especially the shootout with police.
Do we know her whereabouts on the 6th of January? People who cannot control their own lives should not be parents. Unbelievable!
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