Victim of juvenile assault, neighbors want DJS Secretary fired

BALTIMORE — It should've been a short walk from where he parked his car near Patterson Park, to his home on Madeira Street. But he believes a group of five teenagers figured they'd spotted an easy target.

"They started to put their bandanas across the face and I started speeding up, then they started speeding up, and I said, 'Oh, I've seen this movie before,'' the victim, who WMAR-2 News is not identifying, recalled.

The teens knocked him unconscious, then stomped on his head while he lay face down in the street. The assault was captured by his home surveillance cameras. His daughter found him outside, and he went to the hospital to get stitches on his face. He still has two black eyes.

"The next day I woke up, I looked in the mirror and I was just so disgusted. I was beaten to a pulp. I'm just so angry when I found out they had caught two of them and the arresting officer had specifically said not to release the 15-year-old, and DJS just released him anyway, within hours."

"I was flabbergasted, floored by the footage. And it was clear to me right away, gosh, that was attempted murder," Arch McKown, safety chair of the Patterson Park Neighborhood Association and a member of a community relations council for the Baltimore Police Department, told WMAR-2 News.

Baltimore City State's Attorney Ivan Bates agrees. He's pursuing an attempted murder charge for the 18-year-old who was arrested. But the 15-year-old was released by the Department of Juvenile Services, and is back on the streets now.

"I think that down at intake, can't they pump the brakes a little bit? They treat it like it's a McDonald's drive-thru, like they gotta get people in and out quick," McKown said. "In this case, they hadn’t gotten the video of the crime so they had no idea what had happened and they didn’t read the police report. The narrative - everything was there, if they had taken the time to read the police report."

He's calling on the Governor to fire the head of DJS, Vincent Schiraldi.

"If the idea is, there's a public safety component to DJS, DJS is not fulfilling that component. That mandate has been tossed to the wind."

The 66 year-old victim in the Butcher's Hill assault agrees.

"He’s harboring these baby criminals. He’s letting them get away with it, and I don’t think it’s really doing the youth any good," adding he no longer feels safe in his neighborhood. "I don’t know if I can come out of the house late at night. I am enrolled right now to get a gun, a carry permit. I don’t know what else to do to protect myself but to do it myself because the government is not doing anything for me."

Fellow neighbor Donna Ann Ward started a petition, also demanding Schiraldi be recalled.

The three neighbors say the changes made in 2022 when a controversial juvenile justice reform law was passed in Maryland don't hold juvenile suspects accountable.

"Where are our elected officials who thought this was a good idea?" Ward asked.

"These kids are clearly off the beam. They're being released without charges, without seeing a judge, without sentencing, right back into the exact same environment that produced them. They are incredibly violent," she told WMAR-2 News.

While Ward was writing her petition, a group of juveniles attacked another one of her neighbors on Sunday afternoon, the owner of this corner store on Wolfe & Gough. That attack was also caught on camera.

"They rolled up, threw the bikes in the middle of the street, went in, tried to rob in, he pushed back, they attacked him. They attacked him with bicycles, traffic cones, traffic calming posts. He went to the emergency room," Ward said.

City lawmakers, the mayor, and the Baltimore police commissioner all say something needs to change.

Some pointed toan incident last year in the same neighborhood, when a 12- and 14-year-old assaulted and robbed a woman walking home, and were released just a few hours later. Outrage from lawmakers was swift then too, and now they say, nothing's changed.

In a statement to WMAR-2 News, DJS said:

"The Maryland Department of Juvenile Services cannot comment on individual youth or individual cases. We condemn violence in all forms. We are committed to serving justice-involved youth by holding them accountable for their behavior and providing rehabilitative support. In partnership with our legislative leaders, law enforcement, community leaders, and other system stakeholders, we are fully committed to building safer and stronger communities."

"We’re looking at an agency in the state of Maryland that this year has a $340 million dollar budget, that is veiled in secrecy basically," McKown said. "Ostensibly, it’s veiled in secrecy to protect the kids, and I get that. I don’t think it’s good to lock up kids; it’s bad for them. But also I don’t think it’s good for that kid - let’s just talk about that kid that we were going to lock up. That kid is now running around and recidivating, recidivating, recidivating. Where are the programs? Where’s the support? And if that’s not being furnished for them, how are we advocating for that kid? Because what happens is they get to the point where finally they’ve killed somebody, and we’ve seen that before around here, or they’re killed themselves on the streets."

A new juvenile justice reform law that was passed during the most recent legislative session will go into effect on November 1. We spoke to the State's Attorney about how he hopes the changes will help. That story will air on WMAR-2 News tomorrow evening.