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"He regarded his fellow students as 'trying to make enemies with me,'" according to the report prepared by Lawrence J. Raifman, an official with Springfield Hospital Center in Sykesville. The report was culled from Johns' extensive state files and supplemented with three long jailhouse interviews.
After Johns' grandmother died in 1995, his behavior began to deteriorate. "He experienced nightmares following her death," Raifman wrote. "He made suicidal thoughts public and undertook suicidal gestures, such as tying a string around his neck."
For most of 1999 and much of 2000, Johns was living at the Regional Institute for Children and Adolescents in Catonsville. While there, sources said, he shared a 15-bed cottage with Philip Parker, another troubled youth. When Johns was in a structured environment such as the institute's, officials reported, he did well. He earned a high school diploma.
Goldie Brown, who worked at the institute during Johns' stay, was asked at the Feb. 1 sentencing hearing whether he was "known to be violent."
"No," she answered, "he wasn't violent at all."
Before Johns turned 18, he ran away from the program of the moment and didn't return. He joined the ranks of thousands of children in Maryland who have essentially been raised by the state and have little idea of how to function when they are no longer institutionalized.
"Like bad sausage, they're mixed up," said Stacey Gurian-Sherman, a lawyer and juvenile justice advocate. "There's no transition back to the home. We spend an enormous amount of money to fail people."
Johns went to live with his mother on Furrow Street, but mostly hung out with his uncle, Robert Lee Percell. "We drunk together, played pool together, smoked weed together, talked to females together," Johns relayed to a counselor who interviewed him in the Baltimore City Detention Center. "He tried to be threatening and smart sometimes, but I didn't pay him no mind."
Transition into adulthood was hard. He was out on the streets without medication. He moved on to illegal drugs. His mother turned out to be no more involved with him than before. The state's exhaustive report on Johns called him "a time bomb waiting to explode on February 2, 2002."
That night - three years to the day before Parker died - Johns was living in an abandoned house on Frederick Avenue, about two miles from Parker's mother's home. Johns spent the day at a bar drinking and later hung out with his uncle at the house. Percell had been accusing him of taking money, Johns would tell authorities, and he tired of it.
"The devil voice started just then," he told a counselor.
Johns took off his belt and started to strangle his uncle. The belt snapped, he told police, so he put Percell into a choke hold. "And then I thought he would come back alive," Johns told detectives. So he searched for something to cut with and went after Percell's throat with an old saw he found. "And I thought that wasn't working 'cause it didn't feel right so I went downstairs," Johns said, where he got a box cutter to finish the job.
In a March 2003 plea bargain, Johns was sentenced to 35 years in prison and got a referral to the Patuxent Institution, where some of the most seriously mentally ill inmates are sent. It was a brief hearing, just 12 minutes. Johns thanked Baltimore City Judge John M. Glynn for making him eligible for parole down the road - even if it wouldn't be for 3 1/2 decades. "I'd like to thank you for the opportunity you gave me and the chance to see society again," Johns told him.
Johns' mother made an appearance, too. She proclaimed her son's innocence before he was taken away.
Kevin Johns was sent to Patuxent, but in October 2003 he was reassigned to the Maryland Correctional Training Center, a medium-security prison in Hagerstown. A Division of Correction spokeswoman wouldn't say why he was transferred, but soon he had a cellmate named Armad Cloude.
The Baltimore boy was just 16, serving a 12-year term for second-degree murder. Cloude pleaded guilty in 2002 to fatally shooting another teen, 17-year-old Corey Mason, in a botched robbery attempt. Cloude was just 14 at the time and should have been at home. But days earlier Cloude had slipped out of the home detention electronic monitoring device the court forced him to wear for his drug-trafficking offenses.
Johns, a violent 21-year-old, and Cloude, now 16, were cellmates in January 2004 - something prosecutors and family members have been questioning ever since. Johns was braiding Cloude's hair one night and strangled him. To be sure he was dead, Johns tried to cut him in the neck, too. The body was found around 3:30 a.m., while prisoners were being released for breakfast. Half of Cloude's head was in plaits; the other half wasn't.
"He's crazy. To put him in a cell with anybody, let alone a younger, smaller guy - that's insane," said Alexander R. Martick, a Baltimore attorney representing Cloude's mother in a wrongful-death claim against the state. "Who runs the joint? Who's in charge? They don't care about the protection of the inmates under their care."
The only explanation given for the Cloude killing was some sort of "contract with the devil, signed by himself and ... purportedly signed by Satan," authorities said.
In Johns' second sentencing hearing, the Feb. 1 proceeding for the killing of Cloude, Deputy Washington County State's Attorney Joseph Michael told the court: "This is a murder that the defendant says he'll do again. ... If he's willing to express to the officers that if he just simply has a cell buddy in the Division of Correction that they will be back for what he will do to that person, and all of the records indicate that it didn't take much impetus for him to kill his uncle or to kill Mr. Cloude.
After Johns' grandmother died in 1995, his behavior began to deteriorate. "He experienced nightmares following her death," Raifman wrote. "He made suicidal thoughts public and undertook suicidal gestures, such as tying a string around his neck."
For most of 1999 and much of 2000, Johns was living at the Regional Institute for Children and Adolescents in Catonsville. While there, sources said, he shared a 15-bed cottage with Philip Parker, another troubled youth. When Johns was in a structured environment such as the institute's, officials reported, he did well. He earned a high school diploma.
Goldie Brown, who worked at the institute during Johns' stay, was asked at the Feb. 1 sentencing hearing whether he was "known to be violent."
"No," she answered, "he wasn't violent at all."
Before Johns turned 18, he ran away from the program of the moment and didn't return. He joined the ranks of thousands of children in Maryland who have essentially been raised by the state and have little idea of how to function when they are no longer institutionalized.
"Like bad sausage, they're mixed up," said Stacey Gurian-Sherman, a lawyer and juvenile justice advocate. "There's no transition back to the home. We spend an enormous amount of money to fail people."
Johns went to live with his mother on Furrow Street, but mostly hung out with his uncle, Robert Lee Percell. "We drunk together, played pool together, smoked weed together, talked to females together," Johns relayed to a counselor who interviewed him in the Baltimore City Detention Center. "He tried to be threatening and smart sometimes, but I didn't pay him no mind."
Transition into adulthood was hard. He was out on the streets without medication. He moved on to illegal drugs. His mother turned out to be no more involved with him than before. The state's exhaustive report on Johns called him "a time bomb waiting to explode on February 2, 2002."
That night - three years to the day before Parker died - Johns was living in an abandoned house on Frederick Avenue, about two miles from Parker's mother's home. Johns spent the day at a bar drinking and later hung out with his uncle at the house. Percell had been accusing him of taking money, Johns would tell authorities, and he tired of it.
"The devil voice started just then," he told a counselor.
Johns took off his belt and started to strangle his uncle. The belt snapped, he told police, so he put Percell into a choke hold. "And then I thought he would come back alive," Johns told detectives. So he searched for something to cut with and went after Percell's throat with an old saw he found. "And I thought that wasn't working 'cause it didn't feel right so I went downstairs," Johns said, where he got a box cutter to finish the job.
In a March 2003 plea bargain, Johns was sentenced to 35 years in prison and got a referral to the Patuxent Institution, where some of the most seriously mentally ill inmates are sent. It was a brief hearing, just 12 minutes. Johns thanked Baltimore City Judge John M. Glynn for making him eligible for parole down the road - even if it wouldn't be for 3 1/2 decades. "I'd like to thank you for the opportunity you gave me and the chance to see society again," Johns told him.
Johns' mother made an appearance, too. She proclaimed her son's innocence before he was taken away.
Kevin Johns was sent to Patuxent, but in October 2003 he was reassigned to the Maryland Correctional Training Center, a medium-security prison in Hagerstown. A Division of Correction spokeswoman wouldn't say why he was transferred, but soon he had a cellmate named Armad Cloude.
The Baltimore boy was just 16, serving a 12-year term for second-degree murder. Cloude pleaded guilty in 2002 to fatally shooting another teen, 17-year-old Corey Mason, in a botched robbery attempt. Cloude was just 14 at the time and should have been at home. But days earlier Cloude had slipped out of the home detention electronic monitoring device the court forced him to wear for his drug-trafficking offenses.
Johns, a violent 21-year-old, and Cloude, now 16, were cellmates in January 2004 - something prosecutors and family members have been questioning ever since. Johns was braiding Cloude's hair one night and strangled him. To be sure he was dead, Johns tried to cut him in the neck, too. The body was found around 3:30 a.m., while prisoners were being released for breakfast. Half of Cloude's head was in plaits; the other half wasn't.
"He's crazy. To put him in a cell with anybody, let alone a younger, smaller guy - that's insane," said Alexander R. Martick, a Baltimore attorney representing Cloude's mother in a wrongful-death claim against the state. "Who runs the joint? Who's in charge? They don't care about the protection of the inmates under their care."
The only explanation given for the Cloude killing was some sort of "contract with the devil, signed by himself and ... purportedly signed by Satan," authorities said.
In Johns' second sentencing hearing, the Feb. 1 proceeding for the killing of Cloude, Deputy Washington County State's Attorney Joseph Michael told the court: "This is a murder that the defendant says he'll do again. ... If he's willing to express to the officers that if he just simply has a cell buddy in the Division of Correction that they will be back for what he will do to that person, and all of the records indicate that it didn't take much impetus for him to kill his uncle or to kill Mr. Cloude.
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