Previously on Serial. I don't care if you was my worst enemy, I'm not telling on you. I don't care what you did. We need people out there in the community that are concerned with black lives, with brown lives, white lives, and purple lives to step out and do something.
I'm trying to help make it the best way I can. Helping nature is telling the truth. I told you about truth, don't. Listen, I went through the things that I was going through when I was younger because I was young in time.
From this American life in W.B.E.C. Chicago, it's Serial. One courthouse told week by week. I'm Sarah Cady.
When I began this project, I didn't plan on covering any juvenile cases. Juvenile records are public for one thing. And I figured, we got plenty to look at right here in the adult system. But after a while, juvenile cases, juvenile crime became impossible to ignore.
The newly elected county prosecutor seemed to be talking about juvenile violence at every opportunity. Young people, 14 to 21, are crime drivers, who are saying. The data supported his alarm. More and more juveniles were being charged with the worst crimes.
Serious assaults, robberies, rapes, homicides, all rising for the past five years. Once these juvenile crimes made their way into the juvenile courts, though, and once the juveniles themselves made their way into juvenile prisons, they disappear from view. Juvenile courtrooms are tightly controlled. The names of juvenile defendants aren't publicized, for good reason.
The crimes children commit should not forever mark them. But as a result, I didn't have a picture of what juvenile justice looked like in Coyoga County. I'd hear mutterings at the Justice Center, though. Mostly from defense attorneys, grousing to each other.
You're not going to believe what just happened to my juvenile client, or to me. You think this place is bad. You should head over to juvenile. And I think, why?
What are you talking about? But then I met Joshua. He was 19 at the time. So not a child.
He'd tell you he was grown. But he was still in the juvenile system. You can stay there until you're 21. Keep in mind, the juvenile system, its mission is different from that of the adult system.
The point isn't to punish. It's not about retribution. The point is to rehabilitate. In the juvenile system, that's where we're supposed to think like parents.
Where the standard should be, my child. Is this what's best for my child? Would this help my child? So, I'm going to tell you about Joshua.
Joshua sometimes starts off the story with, boom. Boom is big in Cleveland. It's shorthand for, let me try to explain. For real.
All the tape I have with Joshua is from prison. So the sound is mostly a tinny thread of terrible. I'm sorry about that. The prison system will allow me to interview Joshua in person.
But I can tell you as his long time interlocutor, I like it when Joshua says boom. Or better yet, boom boom. Means I might start to understand something. Such as how Joshua came to inhabit his current predicament.
One night in June of 2014, Joshua, freshly 16, had gone to sleep after a night at a bar. Next thing you knew, FBI agents were pulling him from his bed. They took him to an interrogation room in Cleveland Heights. They told him they had him for some robberies.
It was my phone phone. So, they had me two days from the day we got to one video doing this. And then at first I was just in the honor exam. And then they showed me to like these, like all these pictures.
Instagram, Facebook, seems 15 year olds are rarely criminal masterminds. There he was posing with all these other kids. The FBI agents were saying, not only do we have video evidence of what you've done, but thank you social media. We also know who you run with.
The crimes Joshua was charged with were serious, armed robberies from many months back. Two of them were gas stations. He and a friend held up two BP's in one day. And a third robbery of a Popeyes.
Joshua said he was coerced into that one by an older gang member. They barely got any money. He said they left with a little plastic bucket that had small bills in it. According to a police report, around $150, which he handed over to the boss.
But the restaurant had people in it who had to lie down on the ground. That's a multiple kidnapping indictment right there. Joshua had jumped over the counter and pointed a gun at someone. And again, according to the police report said, you have five seconds to open the safe or I'll shoot him.
Joshua said his gun had no bullets in it. That his code defendant's gun was broken. The firing pin was busted. But the customers and workers at Popeyes that Wednesday morning didn't know that.
The FBI agents were telling Joshua, we've got you on video. So let's run through our choices, shall we? We can hand you over to the adult court system. That's called a bindover.
And Ohio children as young as 14 can be bound over to adult court for certain crimes. To Joshua, adult court sounded serious. And it was. In the adult system, Joshua would be facing between 20 and 30 years in prison.
Or the officer said, another option. We can talk. And if we talk, we can keep you in the juvenile system. We won't bind you over.
You'll get out when you're 21, five years from now, with no adult felony record. Want to talk? Joshua was operating on a couple hours' sleep. If he remembers right, he was handcuffed.
He said the officers weren't rude or abusive to him. They was cool, he said. They left him alone for a while to think about the deal they were offering. At any point, did you say to them, I want to talk to a lawyer or I need to speak to my mom?
Or like, were there any adult or any lawyer involved in any of that? No, I like, I'm a definitely good. I wanted to talk to my mom. I'm like, that's pretty common.
They didn't. They didn't. They didn't. It was just me up there.
Like, I know I had nobody right there. It was supposed to be in the police. But did you say, can I have a lawyer? No.
No, I never said it. I never bothered them to. I just throw my mom. Right.
Okay. Like, I did say, like, I'm up with that. A daughter with me, like, doing stuff like that. Say again, am I supposed to have one?
No, an adult. A daughter with me, a daughter with six days. When they said I was having an adult here with me, what did they say? I don't even think they responded to me.
They just, like, I don't even think responded to me. And how long did they keep you there? I was there for about, like, well, like, not like, like, day, like, four or five hours. With no adult knowing where you were.
No. Really? Oh my God. Doesn't this sound illegal?
It's not. It's allowed. My children haven't robbed any gas stations, so I feel the apples and oranges here. I've designed a permission slip for my teenager to go on a quote unquote field trip that's a five block walk from her school.
I have to check the box to allow my son's photo from summer camp to be used for promotional purposes. But here was Joshua, sixteen, fogged by exhaustion, and the prospect of everlasting incarceration. And no adults put a hand on his shoulder. To crouch down and whisper in his ear, what I believe most of us would have whispered if we'd been in that room.
Ask for a lawyer. Do it now. Ask for a lawyer. If Joshua had, the interview would have, should have stopped.
And maybe his story would have, should have gone another way. As it was, Joshua took the deal that fast. It was June of 2014. Two months earlier, his daughter had been born.
Those two months with her, he told me, were the happiest of his life. He couldn't handle the idea of being locked up until both he and she were decades older. And also, Joshua's relationship inside the gang he was in, the heartless felons, were complicated. I know it's hard to square, but Joshua says he was an armed robber who wasn't into violence.
He said the only benefit of joining the heartless felons was the protection they offered, from the heartless felons, from them. He said they extorted people into committing crimes, especially the younger kids like him, who wouldn't do serious time if they got caught. So yeah, he did stuff with them, and for them, but he didn't feel anything for most of them. The only one he half considered a friend he told me, even that guy had pulled a gun on him once during an argument.
So he took the deal, juvenile life, with a catch. Something called a serious youthful offender, a dispositional sentence. Usually people just call it an S-Y-O. It works like a suspended adult prison sentence.
You young man are going to stay in the juvenile system, that's the carrot, but we're hanging a ghostly adult sentence over your head. That's the stick, which we can invoke if you can't keep it together and juvenile prison. So if you want to stay in juvenile, you have to behave. Joshua believed he could behave.
He took the deal. That same day he got arrested, Joshua says he drove around with the cops, showed them places. He identified people in photographs, people associated with the heartless felons. In the coming months, he'd meet with investigators a couple more times.
Joshua has terrific recall for all manner of information, and he'd give them dates, addresses, times. He'd tell them details of crimes about which they already knew, and about once they didn't. As a source, he was a champion. He really, Joshua is extremely unusual.
This is Lisa Rankin. She was Joshua's public defender. She was assigned his case only after Joshua had agreed to cooperate. When I called her to ask about Joshua, who'd been her client for only a couple months, three years earlier, she remembered him immediately.
She used to clients refusing to cooperate with the police, refusing even to tell her information that might help their defense. So for him to be so open and volunteering information, and I think that's how this whole thing started, is that when he had met with the officers before the arraignment, and before he was represented, he had volunteered information. He really helped them on a number of investigations because they didn't have starting points. This is when the heartless felons really started coming into play.
They were wreaking a lot of half-hucking-kia county, and I believe to this they still are. The police were very desperate to get as much information as they can. Joshua really connected a lot of dots. I think he explained it in a way that it was almost like a tutorial.
He could explain hierarchy, how things work. There's really no such thing as a gang expert because there aren't people in these gangs studying these gangs. They study them from a sociological standpoint. I felt like Josh was probably one of the clearest historians that they've had in a long time.
He really put himself out there, and because of Josh, other major crimes were solved, and the hope was that much more dangerous individuals were being taken off the streets because of Josh. This gang is affiliated with the heartless felons. The gang operated in the Glendale neighborhood between Sinclair and Superior, East 105 Street area. Seven months after Joshua began cooperating.
A bunch of important people in Cleveland would hold a press conference. The mayor, the Cleveland Police Chief, people from ATF, FBI, County Sheriff's Office, County Prosecutor. They said, six months ago, we began an investigation. They announced a 13-person indictment.
All members of a heartless felons affiliated group called the Cutthroats, from Joshua's general neighborhood. We looked at these gang members for crimes ranging from blinds assaults, aggregate robberies, kidnappings, various weapons violations. They're also tied to at least one homicide that we know of right now. There were drug charges, rego charges, gang charges, more gang related arrests would follow.
The FBI didn't talk to me about Joshua's case, or his cooperation, by the way, nor did the Cleveland Police. Almost everyone in the Cutthroat indictment pleaded guilty, but a couple of people went to trial. And again, Joshua kept up his end of the deal. A year had gone by since his arrest.
He thought he was all done helping. But then, off they took him to the Justice Center, where he got up in front of his dangerous, erstwhile friends and outed himself as an informant. He knew they'd hate him for it. He knew he could get killed for it if these guys got the chance.
But he also figured, everyone on that cutthroat indictment, all these cases, they were adults. They'd be going into adult prisons. He was staying in juvenile. He testified at the trial of one guy charged for a drive-by shooting, like I was acquitted, and also in a murder trial.
For that one, Joshua's only job was to identify the defendant, just to say, yeah, I know him. Joshua had no first-hand information about the crime. But the state put him on the stand anyway. I asked the prosecutor, Mo Aodala, why put Joshua up there then?
You had other people ID'N your guy, including an ATF agent, including the defendant's own mother, who said, yeah, that young man's sorting the distinctively energetic ponytail in the surveillance tape? That's my son. So why put Joshua up there? You don't want to leave evidence not used.
You know, you have evidence, we're going to use it to ensure that something like this, a homicide where a person's life is taken from, for no reason, and another person is gravely injured, that we don't leave it to chance. You guys ever hesitate to use juveniles because you're just like, let's try to keep him out of this stuff? Sometimes. It again depends on the case.
Our problem is a lot of our shooters, our people who are killing people, are young, and older people they hang out with. The prosecutor from the other trial, the drive-by shooting, told me, of course they never want their witnesses to get hurt. He also said, quote, in terms of Joshua, after he was done testifying, I didn't really give him any thought. Lisa Rankin, the public defender, happened to be in the courtroom when Joshua was on the stand.
He wasn't her client anymore, but she recognized him, and she thought, wow, they are still using him. This is still going on. I was very concerned for Joshua's safety because we know how these cases go. We need with the kid.
Other defense attorneys told me they do not advise their clients to cooperate unless there's no other solution. Too often the benefits aren't what they're cracked up to be, while the risks crack on for years. I talked to another public defender in the juvenile division, Morgan Pierce. She told me she, quote, rarely if ever has a kid cooperate with law enforcement.
Unless your kid can jump on a plane, she said, they're either going to go to juvenile prison and be in danger, or they're going to go back to their neighborhood and be in danger. And I don't very much trust the system to follow through on what they say. The prosecutors are not beholden to anything, so the kids are used. They're naive.
Lisa Rankin remembered how much the police officers had seemed to like Joshua when they interviewed him, how they'd encouraged him. There was talk of him getting out of prison, going to school. There was a lot of talk that they would check in on him, and I guess, you know, ideally you hope that that means somehow protecting him. Juvenile prisons in Ohio are run by the Ohio Department of Youth Services, ODYS.
And if the juvenile prison system could have a golden age, this would be it for Ohio's. Ten years ago, the system was forced to remake itself after lawsuits and a state investigation and a federal investigation, and finally a consent decree. Back in 2007, a court-ordered investigation found what sounded like child abuse, essentially. Severely overcrowded housing units, untrained, confrontational, poorly supervised, sometimes even vengeful staff, using excessive force and, quote, reckless and malicious practices.
Choke holds that created extreme risks of asphyxia. Staff would use these tactics in strategic locations to avoid cameras. Kids were also being harmed by other kids, and they had no real avenue to complain or to get help. Sometimes they threatened suicide just to get into isolation.
Then came federally mandated and fairly massive reforms that sought to do away with solitary confinement as a punishment, barred staff from using force except in extreme circumstances, and added lots of educational and therapeutic programs. Most impressively, they really did redefine what juvenile prisons should be for, or rather whom they should be for. Unless your child is hurting other people, using a gun, committing rape, sending house fires, he is probably not going to an ODYS closed facility. He's going to go to a smaller residential or non-residential program in his own community.
And while some young hotwires and spray painters still do end up in ODYS prisons for the wrong reasons, a dearth of alternatives in their own rural counties or a wrong-headed judge, generally speaking, Ohio is not locking up kids like that anymore. In 2004, there were 2000 kids in Ohio's juvenile prisons. Now, there are about 500 kids. In 2015, the Department of Justice issued a report celebrating a turnaround that has, quote, resulted in what is in many ways a model system, what we are calling the Ohio model.
Excellent progress, yes? The one downside is that the kids who do get sent to ODYS, to borrow a phrase from Donald Rumsfeld, are the worst of the worst. Or if Donald Rumsfeld had a compassionate social worker aunt, she might say, the kids arriving at ODYS now are more traumatized and higher needs. And instead of being divided among nine institutions, they're now corralled into three.
A higher concentration of sometimes violent, always struggling children living together in a smaller space. The facility where Joshua landed in September of 2014 is called Indian River. It's not officially maximum security, but functionally it operates like GVMAX. One big building housing at that time about 140 kids.
They have their own school, which is across the yard. I've been inside the main building. It's clean, brightly painted, life-sized posters of basketball stars are decorating the hallway. It has eight units, roughly 20 kids, to a unit, single rooms with doors that close.
Each unit has a day room with a TV. They can play video games, they can play cards, though dice are contraband. The kids go to school, to therapy, they might have jobs, cleaning the cafeteria, or doing maintenance. At first things went okay for Joshua Indian River.
No one knew he cooperated with law enforcement. Joshua's own family didn't know. He saw that the Heartless felons were in charge of some of the units. Controlling the video game remote, taxing kids for their food, forcing them to clean up, or to make three-way phone calls for them.
All of which Joshua had anticipated. The Heartless felons were invented in Cleveland's juvenile lockups. And Joshua had been inside one of them before, when he was about 13. That was the first time he saw how tightly they operated inside prison.
Joshua had already passed the various tests to get absorbed into the gang. They call it getting twisted. If you don't want to be perpetually bullied and assaulted, if you want to be able to eat, that's a big thing. Other kids taking your food.
Joshua said, you try to join. And to join, you have to get three bodies. Assault three people. Other juveniles are staff.
At Indian River, Joshua was an insider, well-positioned. Nobody was asking him where he was from, always the first loaded question. He was friends with the leader of the Heartless felons, the godfather, or Gf, who vouched for him. So he was good for about a year.
But then he had to testify at the trials downtown. And a slither of rumors started back at Indian River. That Joshua had told. It kept popping up like Eric for a month.
So it was like the agenda of 2000. And the agenda of 2000 was saying that it popped up. It popped up. It was a good thing.
It did. It popped up again in January. It got down from the beginning. So wait, when you say it popped up, what are you talking about?
What is the biggest happening here? We're going around that. I thought it was. Whenever I asked Joshua what it was like to testify, how he felt about cooperating with the police, his answers are rushed and a little mechanical.
As if the subject triggers a tiny guillotine window in his brain to zip-closed, protecting the more fragile synapses from exposure. What he can recount with practically digital accuracy, though, is when the trouble really, really started. Joshua had been in Indian River for about two years, and then he transferred to a minimum security juvenile prison called Kaihoga Hills. Summer of 2016, that's when the bare bones rumors about Joshua started to take on meat.
They were like July, like the middle July, like, oh yeah, we know him like this. And then they got people who had cell phones. They had cell phones. They had caught the street from them.
They called like, somebody called my institution. They called my real phone. They had three weeks. The person that worked out was an institution with me.
They had to be like, yeah, this is what he did do this for him. Kaihoga Hills is in a suburb right outside Cleveland. Lots of people from his neighborhood or rival neighborhoods coming and going. Family members visiting, calling, gossiping.
And someone from the drive-by shooting case that Joshua had helped the police with. Not one of the defendants from that case, but the victim. He'd been shot in the leg with an assault rifle. That victim, he was also at Kaihoga Hills.
Joshua said they'd seen each other a year earlier at the Justice Center when Joshua had to testify at the trial. And now at Kaihoga Hills, that kid was telling people who Joshua was what Joshua did. It was open season. Kaihoga Hills, unlike Indian River, it's eight units with open dorms.
There's one seclusion room per unit in case, but otherwise kids are mingling all the time. Which, if your target is to hand him out to a hellscape. A quick look at the ODYS rundown of incidents involving Joshua. And you see the rush of assaults as soon as he gets to Kaihoga Hills.
Like a blood pressure spike. July 3rd. July 7th. July 19th.
July 22nd. Joshua can fight. A few staff members told me he can really fight. He told me his moves got the attention of one guard who was also a gym teacher.
Joshua said the guy used to watch the surveillance videos of his fights and admiration. Anyway, Joshua fought back. But he said more and more people were assaulting him. First to be three people, and four people, and six people.
The worst assault in terms of the physical damage done to Joshua was in September of 2016. It happened in the schoolhouse. He had been staying clear of school because he knew it wasn't safe there. But he said they told him he wouldn't be allowed to take his GED tests if he didn't have 90% attendance.
So he went. Then, next thing you need to do is take your first class and then I got shot from the heart. Now, I got knocked out. I woke up in the hospital.
That's all I remember. You have no memory of like, if you weren't able to fight back, you just, you know. Nah, nah nah nah. I got to start it.
I hit my head on the door, hit my mouth on the ground. I hit my eye on the door and I was going to wake down. And I just went and had a seizure. I was coughing up blood.
I was like, this also that I was told. I don't remember. I was told. I don't remember.
I was no. I woke up in the hospital close, full of blood. Like I don't remember. How long were you in the hospital?
I was just there for a couple of hours and I came right back to the institution. They put me back in the same part of the inclusion with the higher high ranking of the sentence back where I'm from back at square one. Another attack, December 30th, 2016. Joshua's jumped again.
This time he firmly believes a guard made that happen. He'd just been moved to a new unit and he started arguing with a guard on duty. Joshua said he went and took the unit phone from the guard's desk and was deployed to get some attention. He put it in his footlocker by his bed, wouldn't give it back.
Meanwhile the guard had ordered pizza for some of the kids on the unit. Joshua said when the guard came in with the pizza boxes, he told some kids, go get the phone back from Joshua and you can have your pizza. Knowing full well, Joshua says that that would likely lead to an assault. It did.
Three kids jumped Joshua. We got out of hand. Joshua said the guard then cuffed him, started to walk him out. But then a bunch more kids, Joshua thinks it was about five of them.
They joined in, got Joshua on the ground, so now he's got about eight kids on him, all heartless felons, while he's handcuffed. Joshua said the guard didn't call a single 88 task for help. That's for a serious fight for Riot. Instead, a different guard called a single five, which means other staff are more likely to mosey over to help rather than run.
But Joshua says more guards finally did come over and one of them put his own body between Joshua and the kids who were stomping him. That guard dropped him out of the cover and he got knocked out. And then the rest of the staff would be already caught up in the game, but he didn't want to let them out. Three guards were also injured.
Joshua says after that they took him to operations, and he sat there for another hour or two, handcuffed. Then Joshua went into seclusion cell for a while. I ran all of what Joshua told me by ODYS, but the department would not answer any questions about Joshua. They do not discuss juveniles in their custody, nor would they provide anyone for me to interview about their policies or procedures or philosophy generally, because they said it would be in service of a story about a particular youth.
They did send me a general statement, which I'll get to later. Joshua said all along he'd been telling the administration at Kaihoga Hills, I am not safe here. I heard similar complaints from other kids at ODYS. I told them, but they didn't really do anything.
You see it in institutional reports and lawsuits over the years as well. Allegations that staff knew kids were in danger from other kids and didn't do enough or anything to protect them. Joshua said he practically begged the people in charge of Kaihoga Hills. You've got to send me back to Indian River.
When I first got started down there, I told them to send me back to Indian River, because it's not going to stop. At the end, the insetuce thing like they basically just brushed it off. I kept coming back and back for like two months. I never stopped saying that to Indian River.
I kept telling them. And they didn't stay still, they didn't do it. I said I was the superintendent at the insetuce thing and he basically said like, it was my fault that I was going to throw it like. Again, ODYS did not comment on Joshua's case, including whether he has to be moved.
I don't know. He basically said that I was bringing everything on me. How? Like saying like that, I tried to boss people around.
I'm not high-ranking all the sudden. He knew I was not a hard-to-heart fellow. So he just told me like, you better stop or don't go. This is what's going to keep happening to you.
You think you're a heartless felon still? Yeah, yeah, he's good. That's what he thought? Yeah, that's it.
Like that's what he was saying. I kept telling them I kept explaining them but they just like flicking them off. And they were just like bringing them back on me. Like you need to keep your mouth closed.
Then we kept them, keep your mouth closed. After about six months at Kai Hookah Hills, Joshua met with a couple of lawyers. A defense attorney who said he'd figure out if he could get Joshua early release from ODYS and a civil rights attorney. Mr.
Paul Cristallo is a matter of fact. Who you might remember from Airma's case. That's how I learned about Joshua from Paul. Both attorneys were shocked, they said, that it seemed like the heartless felons were colluding with staff.
They considered asking the state attorney general's office to launch an investigation. In the meantime, Paul had called the facility to say, I'm no juvenile justice expert but it seems like you might want to move this kid. And PS, we might be suing you. More after the break.
I have to think back now to access a more innocent time around 18 months ago when I was still incredulous. Give me a second. There it is. How could the government take a teenager?
An unrepresented teenager? Persuatum to do the thing almost nobody does. The thing law enforcement has been desperate for someone to step up and do. Co-operate.
Get him to generously spin through his heartless felons' rolodex. Then put him on the witness stand. Not once, but twice. Then put him back in juvenile prisons packed pretty tightly with heartless felons.
Offer a parting handshake and a general note to behave himself. Remember that S.Y.O. hanging over your head? And how could that same government then sit back and watch him get jumped again and again and again?
How could they call an ambulance to take him to the hospital? A month later, according to Joshua, arranged transportation to a couple of neurologist appointments to attend to the brainbleeds he said he was diagnosed with. Oh, and then that other trip for CAT scan. How could all that have happened and be happening?
And yet I couldn't hear anyone aside from Joshua raising an alarm. So I considered, as anyone in my position would, there's probably more to the story, but I'm not seeing. I set out to fact check Joshua. I began with Ms.
Turner, Shayla Turner. She ran a literacy and social action program inside Indian River and Kaohoga Hills called Freedom School. It's a curriculum designed by the Children's Defense Fund. Joshua says Freedom School was by far the best thing that happened to him inside ODYS, but changed his whole demeanor, he said, from an enraged, suspicious sculler, into a young man who was beginning to recognize his feelings and manage them.
Every time I got mad, she'd ask me why, he said. It was the first time somebody actually ever sat down and listened to me vent and tried to coach me and worked with me. Joshua stayed in the program for two years, longer than anyone else. When the program lost funding, Ms.
Turner positioned herself as Joshua's mentor and kept in touch. I asked Ms. Turner about Joshua's version of the pizza incident, because I figured she knows him well, she's seen his worst and best behavior. I figured she'd know whether he was exaggerating.
Would a guard really have handcuffed Joshua and then more or less allowed more kids to assault him? I'm hearing stuff like, you know, the guard put handcuffs on him. That's real? That's absolutely real.
And the way that I've verified that is just when accessing to be able to see the footage and their inability to do that, the only reason I knew any information about it is because they called me to calm Joshua down. What I called you? Yes. So the facility called me with Joshua in the room because they know I'm his mentor to calm him down and that is the most anger I've ever heard of.
I could hear him crying and I couldn't even manage that myself. So I told him I needed to see him. I needed to talk to him in person and we went to go see him and that's when I saw the bruises and the beating. And Joshua was very strong and he's a fighter.
This is what got him into this. This is something that is very comfortable and so to see him that bad and be able to talk to him and find out what happened, it was horrible. And then the guard was fired afterwards. The guard wouldn't have been fired if the guard wouldn't have been in the wrong.
I eventually got the personnel records for this guard. He was fired. Though later through a settlement with the Union, he was allowed to resign along with a pledge to never again work in ODIAS. The guard wasn't sanctioned for Joshua getting jumped though.
He was sanctioned because of the pizza. He admitted to taking 20 bucks from one of the kids and using it to buy them pizza. It's against the rules. It seems like every time he's telling me a story, I'm just like it feels like inside of their certainly a Kaohoga Hills but also to a certain extent at Indian River that it's just chaos for them.
Absolute chaos. It is absolute chaos. It is absolutely chaos. And that the kids seem in charge.
Or is that not true? Yes. I would absolutely agree with that. Yes.
And I want to resolve our program as an official because the children were on the side with the program. If we were to have relied on just the staff, I would not have felt safe. So the children. I wanted to speak to other kids who've been at ODIAS to know whether Joshua's situation was real and whether it was common knowledge.
It was crazy. I don't know. It was crazy. It was crazy.
It was real bad. This is Malik. He's 18. He was at Kaohoga Hills with Joshua.
He's an adult prison now. Malik said he saw Joshua get jumped multiple times. I feel bad for him. He got a hoe and put it together.
I got Malik's name from a former staff member who suggested he might be a good person to talk to you about what life was like at Kaohoga Hills. She'd given me a couple of names of remarkably frank former ODIAS kids. She didn't know Joshua and she definitely didn't know that Malik is actually Joshua's cousin. If you overlay Cleveland at ODIAS, you see a lot of coincidences like this.
It's a pretty small world. Malik told me Joshua how it worked than anyone he'd seen come through Kaohoga Hills. He said he himself had been high up in the heartless felons when all this was going on. But he loved his cousin.
So he stuck up for him. When it got to his first point, I had to say that I could just keep anything. I could just keep anything. I could just keep anything.
I could just keep anything. I could just keep anything. I could just keep anything. I could just keep anything.
I could just keep anything. I could just keep anything. So I wanted some ideas that being in D.H.L. and I just came from people like that.
And I had words that couple of people. He had words with a couple of guys he said. Asked them to cool it. Did you personally get any blowback of like, why are you front of this kid or why are you, you know, like this kid?
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did. The heartless felons started to turn against Malik.
It started to steal from him, he said. One night when he was sleeping, someone hit Malik in the face with a combination lock, right between the eyebrows. He needs stitches. I talked to another guy named Leo from Toledo, who'd been at Cuyoga Hills at the same time as Joshua.
You remember the assault in the school when Joshua woke up in the ambulance. Somebody did. Clapped means hit. When you went to sleep, he had a face on the concrete wall.
It went back by and went for a season. And his whole face just swallowed. If you're crazy, then he had what to offer. Leo said it was because word had gone around Cuyoga Hills that Joshua was a snitch.
That he was giving the prison staff information about the heartless felons, the family. Yeah. You know a lot of stuff about the family. You know a lot of people are kind of like it.
Okay. When you heard like, oh yeah, this guy just said, did you have any feeling about that personally one way or another? We were like, okay. Or we like, no, that's what he deserves.
Like what's the feeling about that? You were. He was the next person on me. And I don't mean just me.
Okay. So you, did you know this like this hit on him was going to happen or no? Yeah, no. Oh, you knew.
Okay. Can I have to? Did you order it? Am I talking to the man who ordered it?
At the time Leo said he was in charge of a section of the gang called YF, young felons. So he called the hit on Joshua. He was in charge of the incident. He later became the godfather.
Joshua said he wasn't telling on the Heartless Fellens at Kaohoga Hills. That they were conflating his past cooperation with the present. Regardless, Leo said he was mostly hearing about Joshua from the guards. Wait, what do you mean staff were telling you about him?
I don't know. He was trying to write a quote just there. And Kaohoga Hills, a quote is how you get a message to the office. Like, I want you to talk to the administration.
I want you to talk to the operations. And I like to superintendents. And he brought your name up. I want you to talk to the first.
Staff was informing on Joshua. Leo says to the most dangerous people in the prison. Him, Leo, and his guys. I spoke to a couple of other former and current O.D.Y.S.
youth from different facilities. I also spoke to current and former guards, not disgruntleds, people who liked their jobs. Also current and former O.D.Y.S. social workers.
Most of the adults spoke to me on background for fear of retaliation. What they described reminded me of a black market, is that the juvenile prisons have their own subterranean economy, sucking in both youth and staff who trade in favors, power, and also cash. Of course, I know corruption exists, and I know juvenile prisons in particular are prone to bullying and tumult. But this was a system recently out from under consent decree, Metamorphosed, the Ohio model, whose state admission is not to punish, but to habilitate youth and empower families and communities.
Kaohoga Hills has won a national award for how it treats the children in its care, twice. And yet, well, I'm just going to run through some of what I learned. Take contraband. I interviewed a former guard, Edward Kennerley.
He's the only guard who agreed to go on the record, possibly because he's got nothing to lose. He lost his job already after he was charged with domestic violence. When we talked, he was actually in prison. As a prisoner.
Before that, he worked the other side as a guard at Kaohoga Hills. They called them YS's and O-D-Y-S youth specialists. Edward said, guards bringing in contraband? Yes.
One guy came with, came in with, he was bringing weed in. The guy worked on one of the most unruly units, Edward said. But when he was on duty, everyone was curiously chill. Edward said that guard ended up getting fired.
Edward said he himself didn't bring anything in like that, but he said kids did ask him to. We'll keep the unit under control if you bring in a cell phone or some weed. A lot of fields on hand are dealt with on that type of situation. That's Malik, Joshua's cousin, and quite the businessman.
He was bringing stuff into the north and south buildings, he said, with the help of guards. Tour three at any one time, he said. They go pick up stuff from his people on the outside and bring it back in so Malik could sell it. And for the guards, this wasn't just about keeping the units calm.
It was about making money. Malik would pay them. And how much were they getting? How much were they getting?
How much were they getting? Maybe it depends on how much they have to bring in. They bring in all that, some 500, 700 years, 700 years. Oh!
If they get the job to pay them, what I have to bring. Oh my God, that's like real money. Yeah. Dude.
Oh my God. How much does the cell phone go for at time of your health? It depends on what kind of phone is. It's like the entry made by phone.
It'll have phone about. So there's that much money moving around in there? Yeah, it is. It's crazy on her.
The Heartless Fellans, they're also called the family, or the fam, which has another meaning, forever about money. Leo, the former GF, told me, they take it seriously. You've got to move product. Malik estimated there was anywhere from $7,000 to $10,000 in cash circulating at Kaihoga Hills at any one time.
Most kids send their money home, sometimes through visitation. By the time Malik left, he said he'd send home about $2,500, and he had about $900 on hand. The commodity running alongside and sometimes feeding into the contraband market is violence. Three guards I talked to, one current, two former, said the guards feel hamstrung sometimes, because some of their best tools for controlling the kids were taken away by reforms.
Certain physical restraints, seclusion. They couldn't even put kids to bed at 7pm anymore. Couldn't make them keep their hands behind their backs. The kids can be violent, the guards are outnumbered, and you can't count on swift backup from operations if there's a fight or a riot.
So yeah, the guards will sometimes provoke kids, taunt them, or insult them, so that the kid will respond in kind. And then the guard has an excuse to shut them in their rooms and not have to deal with them. I talked to a former social worker named Casey Helkowski, who told me she saw that kind of thing a lot. Casey worked at the Kaihoga County Detention Center as a therapist until last summer.
The detention center isn't technically ODYS, but there's a lot of cross-pollination with ODYS, especially with Kaihoga Hills, in terms of staff and kids and gang culture. Staff would stand in the doorway of their room, do something, do something. Like, oh, you say that, do something. Or, you know, when you come out, like when they're in their transition, so they're locked up in their rooms, oh, when you come out, like I want to see you, I want to see you do that.
You know, if another fight happens, you can lock down the whole unit and then you just sit in the day area up at the grocery shop, watch TV. And you would see stuff like that? Yeah. Casey told me a story about two kids who'd fought, and then when the loser of the fight was being in pain in this one guard's ass, the guard asked the winner of the fight to go after the kid a second time.
He offered that youth extra commissary to assault him again, to fight him again. Did that guy get fired? No. Incidents like this, staff orchestrating youth on youth attacks, everyone I spoke to from ODYS said, it's common.
Edward, the former Kaihoga Hills guard said, yeah, a guard will form a relationship with the highest ranking gang member or else the strongest youth on the unit and use that kid to keep the rest of the kids in line. Did you ever experience that where a guard said to you, like, can you go take care of so-and-so or call the hit on... Sure. Yeah, but sure.
I like to do that a lot of time. They just come to me or one of my friends and they're like, getting one through. We're gonna take care of you know. So we're gonna take care of you.
Wait, who was taking care of who? If you know, if you don't take care of whatever we need or whatever we want to get it. If you did what? You know, we don't, we don't, whoever they put it to be down.
And why were they wanting you to be down a certain kid? I mean, disrespectful, given him a horseshift, whatever. And what would you get in return? Full, that kind of thing, whatever I wanted.
Mine, whatever I wanted. The final thing I'll mention, sex. Sexual assaults were attempted sexual assaults and also sex. Both Leo and Malik said they'd had sex with multiple female guards who were in their 20s and 30s at Kaihoga Hills.
Before Joshua was transferred to Kaihoga Hills back when he was doing okay at Indian River, he was swimming along in this corrupt water too, taking advantage of it. He could get anything in there, he said. Horn, weed, lighters, tequila. He said he never jumped anyone for money, but he did operate as a middleman.
Guards would pay him, maybe $20, maybe $40, to arrange hits on certain kids. Joshua said sometimes the hits were in retaliation for something violent a youth had done to a guard. Maybe the kid threw pee on them or attacked a female. The guards aren't supposed to strike back, so they use the kids as their proxies.
And they know that the human would fight the air. Right. So they're using you guys to fight back. Right.
The owners and the beings, they, like, it's all no man's life. Many people I spoke to about ODIY-S, they'd hit an explanatory wall like this. They'd say, you just, you have to see it, you have to, I can't. Joshua's best effort, I thought, was when he explained it as a kind of mad man's vacation.
A vacation for the youth, you mean our vacation for the guards? Both sides, see what it is. Would there have been a way for you to come in and be like, I'm not going to touch any of this, I'm going to be a totally squeaky clean, just do my time kid and not get pulled into anything. Is that possible to exist like that?
No, because people would take that for a week of his owners. They would go, will definitely be not her fighting or something. Yeah. Yeah.
Youth's guards, social workers, they all told me, for a kid to quote unquote succeed at ODIY-S, to get help, stay out of trouble and get back out, you'd need a rare, rare confluence of luck, grit, and influence. I spoke to four social workers, who worked at different ODIY-S facilities. Their experiences spanned 2012 to 2018. They all said, there were plenty of people who wanted to help the kids, to advocate for them, but there was no way.
One farmer, Indian River Guard, told me, everything was hush, hush, hush. The social workers said they were discouraged from raising problems or calling out cruelties, guards who added kids as sex offenders say, or look the other way when a child was in a way. The social worker said there was a strong, no snitching culture among the staff. A couple of them told me it was made clear to them, they might not be protected if they were to be assaulted on the units.
One person told me the clinical notes she was writing in her kids' files, for reports that had to go to the courts every six months, were being edited by another staff member, until her boss put a stop to it. And that when she went to look back at a note she'd put in one kid's file, describing assaults on him that appeared to have been facilitated by staff, her documentation was missing entirely. Several social workers told me that they started to lose their own sense of what was normal, what was ethical. They felt like the kids had no protection from abuse or from coercion.
So rather than trying to stop it, they'd help the kids navigate it. One told me there was nothing I could do. Another told me, I mean I just had to be realistic about it. To pretend like they were getting rehabilitated was foolish.
I'd tell the kids all the time, the system is not designed to help you. She worked at Kaihoga Hills, National Award winner. It was almost like a place I had a mask on, she said. Every story I heard about ODYS, every allegation from youth and staff, current and former, we ran it by ODYS.
Again, they didn't comment on anything specific, but they gave us this statement. Whenever there are allegations of misconduct, we swiftly investigate and take appropriate action, they wrote. DYS has increased programming, security and supports to serve the most challenging youth in the state who have lengthy criminal histories and often have gang affiliations that they bring into the facilities. January of 2017, Joshua went back to Indian River.
This time, they didn't keep him on one of the heartless felon units, A. Alpha, B. Bravo and November. Instead, they put him on D.
Delta. D. Delta was the closest thing Indian River had to protect of custody. Mix of kids from Columbus, Cincinnati, Youngstown, a few Clevelanders.
When I first started talking to Joshua, that's where he was, D. Delta, on unit restriction, meaning he couldn't go to the normal places in the facility. Okay, the teacher comes to you. Yeah, because I can't go to school, I'm going to be following all the time, like non-stop.
He can't go to the school, I'm going to the cafeteria. How long has that been going on that you're not leaving the unit? It's been like that, fuck it all. It was now mid-May, five months of unit restriction, for Joshua's own protection.
He felt safe-ish on his unit. He said he was cool with most everybody in D. Delta. His hopes were set on early release, and then who knows, maybe a lawsuit, but early release was the main thing he wanted.
I talked to Joshua every couple of days, sometimes every day. Early on, he started describing what sounded like an uptick in the usual chaos. What do you mean? He said about 15 kids from A-Alpha, a Heartless Villains unit, had yanked the door open and stormed the kids on D.
Delta. Joshua said the Heartless Villains were trying to conquer their unit, basically, because their unit wasn't joining HF, wasn't submitting to HF. D. Delta was more HB, headbusters, a rival gang.
D. Delta had kids from Columbus and Cincinnati, and kids from those places, if they're in a gang, they tend to be HB. That was most of the tension, and then persona non-Joshua was on D. Delta, too.