Violence Engulfs Lives of 3 Troubled Youths

The California KwikMart was the fifth stop on Sergio Medina’s route that day, and it was all wrong from the start.

A rock blocked access to the garbage bin he needed to empty. Blood-stained cardboard littered the surrounding enclosure. Blood poured out of the bin when its contents dropped into his truck.

There, among the garbage, lay a dead boy, his head covered with blood.

Sheriff’s detectives arrived at the strip mall on Las Virgenes Canyon Road in Calabasas at 11:15 a.m. Aug. 27, 1997. They began to mark evidence: a tooth, a bloody rock, bloody footprints.

“There was blood all over that crime scene, literally everywhere,” Sgt. John Greenwood said at a court hearing. “It was tracked all over. It was pooled. There was splatter.”

As they searched, they received a report that a boy matching the victim’s description had disappeared during the night from a group home for juvenile delinquents less than a mile away.

*

Gregory Smith, Brandon Sewell and Rodney Haynes had met at the Passageway Group Home in Calabasas the week before. They shared the splintered family background of many “throwaway kids.”

Each had been abandoned by his parents in one way or another. Two had been raised by grandparents, one by a foster mother.

They all found trouble by the time they had reached the fifth grade.

Their paths crossed only briefly, but the result was disastrous: one dead, the others facing murder charges and a lifetime in prison.

The crime shone a light on the placement and supervision of juvenile offenders, a system that county officials admitted had failed, prompting broad reforms.

Trial is set for January, not to resolve who killed the boy, but how and why he was killed and to what degree each defendant is responsible.

Prosecutors call it willful, deliberate and premeditated murder. The proof, Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol Chizever said, lies in the details of the crime itself.

But defense lawyers Larry Williams and Jeff Kelly will argue that their clients did not intend to kill, pleading the case for the lesser crimes of manslaughter or second degree murder.

Interviews, hearings, court records, juvenile probation reports and taped confessions reveal in ample detail the short aimless lives of three boys and the brutality that eventually engulfed them.

*

At 17, Greg was the eldest of six boys living at Passageways. The staff considered him a “role model” and relied on him to help keep order among the younger boys.

He struck one probation officer as a “quiet, pleasant, soft-spoken, somewhat withdrawn young man.”

His father died when Greg was 4, and authorities said his mother could not care for him because of “emotional and physical problems.” Court files show she was imprisoned after attacking his grandmother with a skillet.

The overweight teen with a mild mental disability grew up in South-Central Los Angeles with his grandmother and great-aunt.

An older brother said his great-aunt doted on Greg, even sending him to private school at one point. But he grew up mostly alone and made few friends.

At 11, he got in trouble for petty theft, at 13 for armed robbery.

Three months later, his grandmother beat him with an extension cord after she found him with a half-naked 2-year-old neighbor. The police were called.

Greg admitted that he had sexually assaulted the girl. He said he tried to rape her, but stopped when the toddler cried, “Ouch.”

A judge made Greg a ward of the court, ordered him removed from his family and sent him to a group home, which along with probation is the least restrictive of four options open to juvenile judges. Other choices are camp and the California Youth Authority.

A psychologist worried about Greg’s “desire to embrace and glorify a street mentality”--the boy identified himself as a Rolling 60s street gang member.

In a profound report, she described Greg as “a very depressed and immature boy who is preoccupied with issues of power and control, a common theme among adolescents who inwardly feel inadequate and insecure. . . . Greg makes light of issues that have to do with harming others, not from a malicious position but from an inability to empathize with those in pain.”

Greg went through nine group homes over the next three years, being tossed from each after just a few months mostly for stealing, fighting or running away.

Exasperated county workers recommended camp, locked facilities surrounded by barbed wire fences, which are just a step below the California Youth Authority--the toughest and most restrictive options for juvenile delinquents. Greg completed Camp Afflerbaugh in March 1997.

“He has few skills to prepare him to be a useful citizen,” one probation officer wrote that year.

Passageways in Calabasas focused on helping teens get jobs and teaching them everyday living skills. Greg was sent there to learn how to make it in the world.

*

Passageways was Rodney’s second group home in as many weeks.

The path that took the 12-year-old there appears to have begun with the death a year earlier of his foster mother, Doris Cross. She had raised Rodney from the time he was 8 months old, after his mother was found unfit.

Rodney was not a great student, but a generally good kid who loved his “mama” and baseball, his guardian said. He played Little League with the Compton Devil Rays.

After Cross died, her daughters took Rodney in, but her death had changed him, they said.

He started skipping school. His grades slipped. He claimed membership in a gang. He experimented with marijuana. He was suspended from school.

In February 1997, authorities said Rodney served as a lookout while three friends attacked a Compton video store clerk with brooms and emptied the register.

He was given probation but kept skipping school. He ran away from home. County workers sent him to a group home, saying Rodney needed 24-hour supervision, said Diedra Lampley, his guardian.

“This was supposed to show him a lesson: This is what happens to you when you don’t go to school,” Lampley said. She thought he’d be back home in a few months.

Rodney had been at Passageways less than a week and already had a reputation as a loudmouth, of always “talking trash,” one friend said.

Cocky and brash, Rodney was not inhibited by his youth. He gloated when Greg, five years older and about 150 pounds heavier, smashed a hole into a wall while playing with a pool ball in a sock.

“Now you’re going to have to pay for that out of your allowance,” he teased. Greg told him to shut up before he smashed him, according to another boy.

“I couldn’t say I didn’t like him,” Greg once said, “but to a certain extent, he does get on my nerves.”

Rodney unquestionably got on Brandon’s nerves.

The pair got into a shoving match at a park when Rodney refused to get into the van going back to Passageways and the staff sent Brandon to get him.

*

Brandon began his long arrest record when he was 10 for breaking into neighbors’ homes and for theft.

Grandparents had raised Brandon since he was 2, after his parents split up and the boy’s mother reportedly told them “to come get him or she would kill him.”

His father said he took the boy in when he was in elementary school. But Brandon was soon sent back to his grandparents after stealing from his stepmother’s purse, his father said.

Records show Brandon was arrested for shoplifting expensive baseball cards, setting fire to a toy at home and stealing a counselor’s $300 electronic organizer during a session, all in the span of a month. He was sent to juvenile hall, given community work and put on probation.

The stealing, drinking and marijuana use surged after his half-sister died when Brandon was 14. He ran away, disobeyed his grandparents and stole from a teacher. He joined a small Ventura gang.

Authorities sent Brandon to group homes, but he would run away or get thrown out for theft, drug use and “being out of control.”

One court-appointed psychologist thought Brandon had a learning disability and determined the boy was “the product of an unstable family background.”

His father disagreed.

“I would just say he’s pretty mean. I know kids that are raised by grandparents and they came out just fine,” Dennis Sewell told The Times in an interview. “Sometimes kids are just bad kids. The prisons are full of them. It’s not necessarily anyone’s fault but their own.”

Brandon was sent to Passageways on Aug. 18, 1997. He was 16. He and Greg were paired up as roommates and began hanging out together.

A few days later, they slipped out after the 9:30 p.m. curfew and met some girls at a nearby shopping center.

On Aug. 26, they decided to go back, and Greg asked the other boys if they wanted to come along.

“Rodney jumped up,” 12-year-old Davonni Jackson, one of the boys, said in a court hearing. “Greg was like: ‘No, you can’t go because you’re going to slow us down.’ ” But Rodney wouldn’t give up. He “kept on pestering” Greg and Brandon.

After the older boys had stepped outside, Davonni saw Rodney stuffing their beds with clothes to make it look like the teens were asleep.

*

Nobody told this to the homicide detectives who arrived the following day, however. The boys said only that the victim didn’t like Passageways because there were too many rules.

But shortly after the investigators left the home, Davonni noticed a few things were askew. What bothered him most was a boot print and what looked like a blood stain by a back door.

That’s when he decided to come clean. He approached the group home’s owner, who in turn called police.

*

In separate interviews with detectives, Greg and Brandon denied involvement. Then the investigators told them they’d found bloody shoes and pants and boots with diamond-print soles, which were sure to match bloody prints at the shopping center.

That was all it took.

“I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do that,” Greg told the detectives. Then, piece by piece, he admitted what he’d done.

None of them was old enough to buy alcohol, but they had a plan: Greg and Brandon would buy cigarettes and candy, keeping the clerk busy while Rodney stole some beer.

They were standing behind the store, working out the details, when Rodney mouthed off.

“He was just talking s---, talking about ‘Oh, I can do it my damn self, whoopy-woop-boop,’ ” Brandon told the detectives. “He tries to act stupid. And I gave him a little push and he tried to swing.”

So they ganged up on Rodney.

“Greg put him in a head lock and then I just took off on his face,” Brandon said, according to a transcript of his confession. “And he connected with my face a few times.”

Brandon said he punched Rodney about a dozen times before the boy seemed to black out. Greg let him fall to the ground.

Then, both boys said they started kicking Rodney. They kicked him in the body and face. Rodney tried to fight back.

Brandon said Rodney seemed to lose consciousness again, so they stopped kicking and dragged him 20 feet to the enclosure surrounding the garbage bins.

“And he started talking; he was mumbling stuff,” Brandon said. “He was just saying, ‘F--- you,’ and, ‘This is AGC [a street gang],’ and I told him, ‘F--- your hood.’ ”

The teens started kicking him again. Brandon said he kicked Rodney so hard and so many times it hurt his foot.

Brandon said he found a football-sized rock, which he picked up and threw at Rodney several times. He said Greg threw the rock, too, but the older boy denied it.

“I didn’t throw no rock,” Greg complained to authorities. “I got a stick, and I started hitting him in the chest.”

It was the rock that probably killed him, authorities said.

When the beating stopped, the teens said, Rodney was bloody but still making noises.

“What do you think he was trying to say?” one detective asked.

“I don’t know,” Brandon responded. “Probably: ‘F you.’ ”

Greg and Brandon picked up Rodney and threw him in the garbage bin. Then they went to a nearby McDonald’s to wash the blood off their hands and walked back home. They said they were too scared to call an ambulance. “You might have saved his life,” one detective pointed out.

“He would have snitched on us,” Brandon replied.

Still, Brandon assured the police that he didn’t mean to kill Rodney, that he was sorry he was dead.

“Look at the mess it got me into.”

*

Court-appointed defense lawyers argued that the teens should be judged in Juvenile Court, which could only take away their freedom until their 25th birthdays, rather than adult court, where they could face life in prison, as prosecutors wanted.

“I think he’s a chronic follower,” a lawyer who had represented Greg at one time told a juvenile judge. “There’s no indication that he’s the prime mover or assailant here. He is clearly not the person who set out to do this.”

Brandon’s lawyer argued that Rodney’s death was not a premeditated murder, just a fight that spiraled out of control. He told the judge there was time to rehabilitate Brandon in juvenile programs.

One probation officer wrote that Greg “showed no remorse whatsoever. . . . In fact, when interviewed, the minor was laughing and seemed pleased at all the attention he was receiving from the staff at the hall.”

Nor did Brandon, who said he “feels he has some brains when not intoxicated, and he still wants to stay in the juvenile system so he can get out while he is still in his 20s and do something with his life,” a probation officer reported.

His grandmother agreed, telling authorities that Brandon “is not a dumb person, and he could make something of his life if he put an effort into it.” She wanted him tried as a juvenile.

But Dennis Sewell showed little sympathy for his son.

“If [Brandon’s] old enough to take a life,” he said, “he should be tried as an adult.”

Two months after Rodney’s death, Los Angeles County’s probation director announced improvements in its supervision of troubled youths with delinquent pasts, acknowledging many of the changes should have been initiated years, if not decades, ago.

The reforms included separating juvenile delinquents of different ages and backgrounds, requiring probation officers to inspect the residential facilities where their charges are sent and requiring 24-hour supervision at group homes.

Lampley, Rodney’s guardian, said she takes some comfort in knowing his early death served a larger purpose.

“The only good thing about this is that, hopefully, the system will be changed so no other child or other family will go though this again,” she said.