Region’s young shooters ‘run ragged’
Raise the Age, bail reform allow even violent youths the chance to remain free
Tears streamed down the faces of the two mothers as they embraced in a hallway outside a second-floor courtroom at the Albany County Judicial Center earlier this month.
Both women had sons who had been shot in broad daylight, nearly a year apart and allegedly by the same 17-year-old boy from Albany. The first victim, a 3-year-old, was struck in the arm by a stray bullet in July 2019 as he took a nap in a South End day care center. He needed surgery to repair the broken arm. The bullet had come within inches of his heart.
The other victim, 21-year-old Nyjawaun Thomas of Troy, was gunned down late last month, just steps from an Albany police station. Thomas was killed after he climbed from the wreckage of a rented U-haul truck following a brief car chase that ended with the 17-year-old brazenly firing from his driver’s-side window as he drove past Thomas. He circled back and fired again, but law enforcement officials said Thomas was already dead.
The victims’ mothers were in the courtroom July 1 as the 17-year-old and an adult co-defendant, 19-yearold Bahkee Green, were sentenced to prison terms of 15 and 10 years,
respectively, for the shooting that injured the 3-year-old. The two teens pleaded guilty to weapons charges, admitting they had driven with two others to the South End last summer and fired a hail of bullets at a group of young men they viewed as their enemies.
The 17-year-old had been arrested for the day care shooting a year ago and was initially charged with attempted murder, reckless endangerment, assault and tampering with evidence. But his arrest kept him in custody at a juvenile facility only brief ly, in part due to New York’s bail-reform statutes and a “Raise the Age” law that went into effect over the past two years — creating a new “adolescent offender” category that ensures 16- and 17-year-olds are not automatically prosecuted in adult courts or placed in adult jails, even for crimes of violence.
The statute was intended to ensure young offenders are not unfairly punished, and to provide them with services needed to rehabilitate and reintegrate them into their communities rather than putting them in prison. Pressing for those reforms, advocates noted that New York was one of the last states to automatically treat offenders as young as 16 as adults in criminal prosecutions. The state passed the legislation with reimbursable funding intended to help expand local programs to aid the troubled youths.
But a fallout of the statute has been a veritable revolving door in the youth justice system that has been evident in Albany, which has been rocked by gun violence this year. Some of that violence has involved cases in which juvenile offenders were placed under the supervision of probation officials rather than incarcerated — with many being re-arrested, often on gun charges, only to be released again.
Although a large number of Albany’s shootings this year — which are up nearly 400 percent from 2019 — have involved victims and suspects 18 or older, there have also been dozens of violent crimes attributed to youthful offenders in the past two years.
Interviews with law enforcement officials and crime victims, and a months-long review of criminal cases handled in Family Court and the Youth Part of Criminal Court in Albany County, reveal numerous instances in which offenders whose release on supervision was fostered under the new statutes were subsequently arrested for committing new crimes, including murder.
Over roughly the past two years, Albany County has handled more than 100 youth and adolescent criminal cases: 31 involving weapons possession charges; 45 robberies; 16 assaults; and seven charges of murder or attempted murder.
In addition, at least a dozen teenage boys and young men involved in Albany shootings and gun cases over the past two years were not incarcerated after their arrests due to the Raise the Age statutes and the more recent bail reform changes, according to police and court records, as well as interviews with law enforcement officials.
Many of the youthful offenders, law enforcement officials said, also have been keenly aware of the relative leniency of the new statutes, and are exploiting them by failing to charge or simply cutting off GPS ankle-monitoring bracelets so that probation officers can’t monitor their whereabouts. Even when they are brought in front of a judge, they often are put back on house arrest, where parents often struggle to control them.
Daylight shootings
The “critical provisions” of Raise the Age, which was cast into law in the April 2017 state budget by the Legislature and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, took effect in two stages: for 16-year-olds on Oct. 1, 2018, and for 17-year-olds last October. The statute also mandated that those who commit nonviolent crimes would receive intervention and evidence-based treatment.
Last summer, after the 17-yearold was arrested for the shooting that injured the toddler, the Times Union began tracking his case, and also those of numerous other youthful offenders implicated in crimes in Albany County ranging from gun trafficking to robbery, rape and murder.
The cases all are being handled either in the Youth Part of Criminal Court or in Family Court. Under the new rules, a judge is required by statute to use the least restrictive means of assuring the defendant’s return to court. Judges cannot consider “dangerousness to the community” in determining whether to set bail.
Most of the defendants have lived in Albany their whole lives, have no documented criminal history and therefore don’t pose a flight risk under the rules. As a result, most end up under the supervision of probation officers with a GPS monitoring bracelet locked on their ankle.
Although there have been no formal studies on the statutes’ impact on criminal statistics, part of Albany’s explosion in shootings this year has been at the hands of teenagers released under the supervision of probation officers rather than jailed as adults.
A Family Court judge, after hearing prosecutors’ evidence against the 17-year-old last summer, determined there was strong evidence that the teenager was one of the two shooters in the car that drove into the South End that afternoon. The boy’s case therefore remained in the Youth Part of Criminal Court, and he was initially held on $50,000 bond. But after 45 days, prosecutors declined to indict the teen, in part due to what they saw as the likely need to disclose the identity of a witness if they had moved forward.
Instead, Albany detectives continued the shooting investigation, using wiretaps to build a wider case that snared the second gunman involved in the toddler’s shooting and implicating several others in other shootings, and also on gun possession and guntrafficking charges.
The 17-year-old was finally indicted for the toddler’s shooting in December — and also for a second shooting that had occurred 16 days earlier, July 2, 2019, where he and several other teenagers fired guns wildly in a public housing complex in the city’s South End. One of the weapons in that earlier shooting, a 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun, was also used in the shooting that injured the toddler, according to court records.
The teenager and some of his friends who were implicated in the pair of shootings were charged with evidence tampering for returning to the car they had driven into the South End on the afternoon of the day care shooting, then removing weapons from the vehicle and wiping it down.
The evidence implicating the 17-year-old in the two daytime shootings in crowded neighborhoods included eyewitness accounts, Facebook posts, text messages, surveillance footage and cellphone videos showing him holding the 9mm handgun. Assistant District Attorney Michael Shanley, when he argued seven months ago for the teenager’s bail to be set at $100,000, noted that the teen had been caught tampering with his ankle-monitoring bracelet, stopped attending school and broken his curfew.
“I don’t think incarceration pending this matter is necessary to secure his appearance here, nor will it secure the safety of the community, as the electronic monitor certainly deters any potential criminal conduct,” the teenager’s court-appointed attorney, Eric Schillinger, argued at the Dec. 19 arraignment.
Judge William A. Carter, who handles Youth Part criminal cases in Albany County, agreed and allowed the teenager to remain free under the supervision of probation officers.
“If you mess up once, you will stay in jail until your trial,” the judge told him. “Do you understand that?”
Both Carter and Richard Rivera, the Family Court judge who issued the decision to keep the 17-year-old’s case in youth criminal court — and handles many of the cases involving juvenile offenders — declined comment for this story.
Unsecured
Another boy, a 16-year-old who was with Green and the 17-yearold boy when the toddler was shot, has been in and out of secure detention after being charged with tampering with evidence. The 16-year-old was later shot but remained uncooperative, and was charged with falsely reporting an incident. He was arrested again, for possession of a handgun, and in the wiretap investigation had been caught on his way to sell a gun. In addition, he was involved in a shooting incident at his mother’s house.
The 16-year-old’s case is pending in Youth Part of Criminal Court, and he is currently released under the supervision of probation.
Bahkee Green, who initially faced a seven-year prison term in connection with the toddler’s shooting, was released on a $50,000 “unsecured” bond following his indictment — a new provision of the bail reform statutes that prosecutors contend allows defendants in violent incidents to go free after signing what is the equivalent of a promissory note. But after pleading guilty and prior to being sentenced, Green was rearrested for weapons possession in connection with another shooting.
His 17-year-old co-defendant also pleaded guilty earlier this year to weapons possession in connection with the shooting of the toddler, but he remained on house arrest. The boy was supposed to be sentenced in April to 10 years in prison — a term that would have begun in a juvenile detention facility — but the proceeding was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Under the supervision of probation officers, the 17-year-old continued to violate his house arrest conditions. He became an Uber driver, which was prohibited and had not been approved. He failed to properly charge his GPS monitoring bracelet at least six times in April and May, prompting his probation officer to order him to report to the office in early May to get a new one. But the boy didn’t show up and also left home after arguing with his mother, according to court records.
He stayed out until 3 a.m. one night, and on May 11 was located in Schenectady in the middle of the night. On May 17, he appeared in a video posted on Youtube that showed him smoking marijuana and showing off large bundles of cash. A man in a medical mask sat next to him brandishing a handgun.
On May 21, Albany County prosecutors filed a motion seeking to revoke the 17-year-old’s release conditions. The boy failed to show up in court for the hearing, and a judge issued a warrant for his arrest.
But he remained at large after cutting off his new ankle bracelet. Seventeen days later, he allegedly shot two men along Central Avenue, striking one of them six times in the torso and the other victim once in the foot. Both men survived, but the 17-year-old was still on the run.
On June 24, he allegedly drove to the South End looking for a man he believed had fired shots at him earlier that month. He ended up killing Nyjawaun Thomas, possibly in a case of mistaken identity, according to police and prosecutors.
“all this stuff this boy did, he shouldn’t have been on the street, period. If they had done their job properly, my son would still be alive today . ... I’m so so fed up with the way that this is going on . ... It doesn’t make sense how he was still walking the street after all this.” — Shinequa Thomas, mother of Nyjawaun Thomas
‘Fed up’
The victim’s mother, Shinequa Thomas, said that her son had been sentenced to prison for robbery in 2015 when he was just 16 years old. She cannot understand how the 17-year-old charged with killing him wasn’t jailed after being indicted for shooting the toddler.
“All this stuff this boy did, he shouldn’t have been on the street, period,” Thomas said. “If they had done their job properly, my son would still be alive today . ... I’m so so fed up with the way that this is going on . ... It doesn’t make sense how he was still walking the street after all this.”
The 17-year-old was arrested in Schenectady two days after Thomas was killed. On July 1, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for shooting the toddler — an increase of five years due to his additional arrests — and is currently negotiating a plea to resolve the June 9 shooting and the June 24 homicide, according to statements prosecutors made in court.
“There’s nothing that fell through the cracks, but there is a chasm that was created by Raise the Age … and the (new) bail laws,” Albany County District Attorney David Soares said. “The (state) district attorneys association continued to provide warnings as to what would occur. … We warned about the fact that young people are carrying weapons and shooting each other, that the process in Family Court was not adequate … and at the time we were told we were fear-mongering.”
Soares said for 16 years his office had a program — Operation Speeding Bullet — in which it would seek to have people arrested for shootings or weapons possession incarcerated and only pursue plea agreements that included prison terms. But that program fell apart when bail reform measures went into effect earlier this year that struck illegal gun possession off the list of alleged offenses that allow judges to set bail.
Although there have been no formal studies of the spiking crime rates across New York this year — the state’s overall crime rate is up 10 percent — statistics show the increase in gun violence in Albany is being mirrored in other cities that have seen the number of shootings and homicides skyrocket.
“Because of reform, the new rule becomes: If you have a gun, we have to actually wait for you to kill someone,” Soares said. “Judges can’t consider dangerousness. Judges can’t use their discretion. What youhaveinalbany—and you have it in Syracuse and you have it in Buffalo and you have it in Rochester — this is not a coincidence.”
When there are cycles of shootings, Soares said, police and prosecutors had previously used other tactics to lock up suspects or individuals likely to engage in retaliatory gun violence, including arresting them for drug charges or other criminal activity. If they were in jail for a few months, he said, the violence would sometimes calm down.
Alice Green, executive director of the Center for Law and Justice in Albany, chairs a Zero Youth Detention committee created by Albany County last year — and modeled after a successful juvenile intervention program in Seattle, Wash. — that is examining how the programs and resources available to the area’s youth are functioning.
“Certainly Raise the Age cannot be blamed for whatever cases have happened in this period of time, but we haven’t looked at bail reform in terms of understanding the cases and what the impact is. We haven’t really looked at Raise the Age as well,” Green said. “What we have been in a habit of doing is blaming certain crimes in certain times on these reforms over this short period of time.”
Prior studies have shown that locking up teenage offenders in prisons and juvenile detention facilities does not solve the problem, Green added, noting that racial disparity is at the heart of the reforms, as Black juveniles tend to be locked up more than white, middle-class youth.
“This is a community issue,” she said. “When I hear prosecutors say, ‘Oh, we knew this was going to happen,’ they’re basing it on a few cases.”
The motivation for the shootings in Albany and other cities is also no longer tied to drug battles or turf wars, as had been thecaseinmuchofthe 1980s and ’90s. Now, law enforcement officials said, many of the shootings are simply the result of feuds prompted by social media posts or homemade videos.
“It used to be you might not see your ‘enemy’ for a month or two on the street. Now, they are in each others’ faces constantly due to social media and text messages,” a law enforcement official said.
Erie County District Attorney John J. Flynn said that it is too early to gauge whether the increase in violence — Buffalo has had an increase in shootings of more than 50 percent this year — can be attributed to bail-reform statutes. He also said that Raise the Age statutes have not contributed, as far as he can tell, to the increase in gun violence in that region.
But there is a measurable increase in the severity of the crimes being committed by youthful offenders, he added.
“They’re going to Family Court on stolen car cases and on robbery cases, and they’re graduating now to grand larceny and to gun possession cases,” Flynn said. “I’m not seeing, here, the graduation to shoot
“There’s nothing that fell through the cracks, but there is a chasm that was created by raise the age … and the (new) bail laws. … We warned about the fact that young people are carrying weapons and shooting each other, that the process in Family Court was not adequate … and at the time we were told we were fearmongering.” — David Soares, Albany County District Attorney
ings and homicides yet, but I am seeing a graduation to higher crimes.”
Syracuse also has seen a spike in crime, with shootings up 55 percent from a year ago and incidents in which people are injured by gunfire up 100 percent.
Onondaga County District Attorney William J. Fitzpatrick noted that a little more than two years ago, New York was “the safest large state in America, and at the same time had reduced its state prison population by a remarkable 30 percent. That’s an outstanding accomplishment.
“Our crime rates in Syracuse are through the roof as they are in New York City,” Fitzpatrick said. “We wait until the people can’t enjoy a neighborhood, until kids get shot on their way to school, where a kid is more likely to be in a gang than he is to be able to read his diploma. And then we try to legislate our way out of it with ridiculous laws . ... I wish the geniuses in Albany would spend a day at a shelter, at a drug rehab center, at a funeral, at a community meeting listening to people of color begging me to get back their streets.”
‘Run ragged’
The 17-year-old’s mother spoke to the Times Union on July 1 when her son was in Family Court on the murder charge, about two hours after he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for shooting the toddler. She said that she had sought help for her son, including pursuing a Persons in Need of Supervision petition, which places a habitually disobedient juvenile under the supervision of probation officials with treatment programs to help them correct their behavior. But she said the programs and services offered through Family Court and probation had provided little, if any, benefit.
She said her son was always different from his six siblings, and that she struggled to control him.
“If he had gotten the therapy and services that he needed, like a lot of these young people .... ” Her voice trailed off. “They just let them run out here and run ragged.”
She said that she did not allow her son’s friends to come into her home. The first time she met with officials associated with the Family Court case, they cautioned her that she could face a Child Protective Services investigation if she refused to allow her son in when he came home after hours, against her wishes.
She said they spoke to her son about attending night school and he went to a therapy program, “but they’re not doing nothing in the program. They give them crackers and juice, and that’s it.”
Albany County officials said funding from the state has increased the past two years, including nearly
$1.5 million for probation services and staffing. The state also reimburses the county $454,000 through the county’s Department for Children, Youth and Families for supervision and treatment services for juveniles.
“Funding from the state has only increased over the last two years, and the county has not cut any funding from our own programs during that time,” said Cameron Sagan, a spokesman for the county executive’s office. Those programs include Project Growth, which focuses on juveniles who owe restitution for crimes.
Sagan said there are also additional programs that help with employment training and job-retention skills, as well as courses to help youths obtain their driver’s licenses so they get can to jobs easier.
But the programs and intervention efforts do not appear to be turning back crime, at least not over the past two years in New York.
In 2017, Cuomo hailed the legislation as a “legacy accomplishment.”
His office referred comment for this story to the Division of Criminal Justice Services, which issued a statement Saturday noting New York has allocated $300 million to implement the Raise the Age law, including state and local funding for comprehensive diversion, probation, detention and programming services for youth.
“While New York provides support to assist localities with Raise the Age implementation, it’s local judges who set conditions of probation and county probation departments that are responsible for ensuring those on probation are complying with those conditions,” said Janine Kava, a spokeswoman for DCJS.
Alice Green, who has been involved in Albany’s criminal justice initiatives for decades, said the work of the Zero Youth Detention committee has been hobbled by the coronavirus pandemic. Its members have been unable to meet for months. But she cautioned against blaming bail reform or the Raise the Age statute for the state’s spike in violence, especially as that relates to youthful offenders.
“Once you take one of these kids and give them long (prison) terms, the research shows that they come back in worse condition then they went in, and it’s a real threat to public safety,” Green said. “I don’t see how going backward helps with this problem. This problem of youth violence is certainly much more of a problem in terms of understanding what’s happening with these kids, what’s happening in our communities, and why are there more guns.”