Shootout with teen raises mental health questions

ENTERPRISE, Fla. — It was getting dark, so sheriff’s deputies used the lights on their rifles to get a better look at the two children who had been holed up in a suburban house for more than an hour.

Fourteen-year-old Nicole Jackson was using a metal baton to smash mirrors, a bathtub and furniture. As the officers closed in, she flipped her middle finger at them and strapped a loaded 12-gauge shotgun around her neck. A 12-year-old boy who had joined her in the escape from a nearby group home grabbed an AK-47 rifle.

The Volusia County sheriff ’s deputies already knew Nicole well. They had been called repeatedly to her house in nearby Deltona, responding to complaints that she was stealing neighbors’ pets, breaking windows in a rage, trying to set the house on fire.

Now, the eighth grader was crouched on one knee near a garbage can in the driveway, a .22-caliber pistol tucked in her waistband, the shotgun pointed straight at the officers. Several gunshots rang out from the house.

“Lieutenant, I’m all for not killing kids and stuff,” Sgt. Omar Bello told fellow officers, according to a state review of body camera footage from the scene. “But, I mean, if they’re shooting at us, we have to put an end to this.”

For 10 seconds, eight sheriff ’s deputies fired toward the children, unloading 66 rounds. Nicole screamed in pain, and the boy came out with his hands up.

The case of the juvenile “Bonnie and Clyde,” as they came to be known, ended on that evening in June with Nicole hospitalized with eight gunshot wounds and charged as an adult with armed burglary and attempted murder of a police officer. The boy, who is not being identified because he was charged in juvenile court, faced similar charges.

Sheriff Mike Chitwood blasted the adolescent “desperadoes” but also laid blame on a state juvenile justice system that he said was leaving a growing number of troubled children out on the streets.

For years, Nicole had cycled in and out of mental hospitals, foster care and group homes.

Her story is rife with red flags that waved for years, seemingly unnoticed. A review of hundreds of pages of police reports, case records and prosecution documents, along with interviews of Nicole, her family, group home employees and lawyers, shows that Nicole was placed in five group homes, one foster home and four mental hospitals in the two years after she was removed from her mother’s custody and made a ward of the state. She was committed to psychiatric facilities on emergency mental health holds dozens of times during the course of her childhood.

Yet she received intensive residential therapeutic care just once, state records show. It lasted for less than a month.

In a state still reeling from the mass murder of 17 people at a Parkland high school in 2018 — killed by a teenager with a history of mental health challenges — juvenile health advocates say Nicole’s case raises serious questions about how a child could have had so many repeated interactions with police officers, social service agencies and psychiatrists without ever getting the long-term therapy that might have broken the dangerous cycle.

The answer, many of them said, is Florida’s chronic underfunding of mental health services as the state’s population has soared. A state grand jury in 2020 called the mental health system a “mess,” noting that it provides less funding per capita for mental health care and treatment than any other state, and is managed by a patchwork of private agencies.

The state instead has escalated the use of brief, emergency mental health interventions.

Since the mid-20th century, community-based counseling, therapy and, in some cases, medication have been preferred over lengthy inpatient treatment for children with serious behavior disorders. Some of those who worked with Nicole said she was sometimes pulled out of programs that might have helped her as a result of her own bad behavior.

“People say the system has failed on me,” Nicole said in a telephone interview from Volusia County jail. “I don’t think I should go to prison. Obviously, I don’t. Little kids like me, 14-year-olds, make mistakes.

“Just not this big.”

A TROUBLED CHILDHOOD

Nicole had been born in Puerto Rico but moved to the

Orlando area with her parents when she was 9 months old.

Much of the time, those who knew her said, she was goodnatured and compliant. But she had an explosive temper. She and her three brothers frequently brawled so violently that it took police intervention to stop them.

Her mother, Elizabeth Maldonado, struggled to hold on to jobs while battling an opioid addiction and the tumult in her family.

They lived in a series of motels, rented houses and apartments. Hotels often kicked them out because of their frequent disturbances.

“We had to move 34 times,” said Nicole’s grandfather Elliot Maldonado, who moved in with his daughter after Nicole’s parents divorced.

Nicole was suspended from school at age 8 for going after the teacher with scissors.

Her mother once called the police to report that Nicole was setting fires, touching people inappropriately and had told people at school that she was going to shoot her family.

Nicole was 6 years old. The incident would be among the first of about four dozen documented encounters Nicole had with the police over the next eight years. She was involuntarily taken to a mental hospital at least two dozen times.

“They didn’t do nothing for me,” Nicole said. “They’d send me home the next day.”

When the state took custody of Nicole in 2019, state records show that her mother did not put up a fight.

Nicole spent the next two years in a series of group homes, shipped off to mental hospitals when she would get into fights with the staff.

In April 2021, Nicole got caught setting large fires in a vacant field.

“It was fun!” she told the officer who arrested her, according to body camera footage. “Nobody died.”

A FATEFUL ESCAPE

When the group home where she had been living refused to take her back, she was sent to the Florida United Methodist Children’s Home, a shelter for abused children that had a contract with the state to accept, as a last resort, foster children who had nowhere else to go.

On June 1, Nicole got into an argument with her minders over a familiar topic: She wanted to go outside the fence to catch lizards. When not given permission, she jumped over the fence and left.

She took along a 12-yearold boy, who also had a disruptive history. The two broke into a nearby house whose owner was not there.

They found the homeowner’s guns, and started arbitrarily firing the weapons.

Most experts who reviewed the outlines of Nicole’s case said a stable placement in a therapeutic foster home could have helped anchor her in a counseling and treatment program designed to interrupt her disruptive behavior.

But in Florida, space in such programs is lacking.

Prosecutors have offered Nicole a chance to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of 20 years in prison and 45 years’ probation. The boy she was arrested with, now 13, pleaded no contest to charges of burglary and attempted murder of a law enforcement officer and was sentenced to what will probably be about three years in a juvenile correction program followed by conditional release that by law must end when he is 21.

Nicole said she expected to go to prison but was hoping for a sentence that would leave her with enough time for what she called a “normal life.” She wanted to have a job, and to have two children, a boy and a girl.

“I want to become successful,” she said. “I want to become a doctor. If not a doctor, I want to become a veterinarian. If not a veterinarian, I want to become an actress. If not an actress, I’d become a model. If not that, I would become a detective.”

She thought a moment. “Detective might be a little hard.”