The boy sits alone in a bare, linoleum-tiled holding room in back of Cook County Juvenile Court.
His right hand is shackled to a plastic chair. His left floats through his hair, then down the ashy, mottled skin of his jaw.
His white high-top sneakers are weathered and cracked. The laces are untied.
Asked why he is locked up, his forehead wrinkles and his eyes roll toward the ceiling. He shrugs and bites his lower lip.
“Because I shot someone?”
He shrugs again and grins apologetically.
From the day he was born, two months premature and with jaundice, it was obvious that Darnell Price suffered from profound mental disabilities.
His mother, Linda Price, told court officials that she drank a six-pack of beer a day when she was pregnant with him at 17. He was slow to walk, she said, and when he finally began to talk, he stuttered and barked out sentences in incomprehensible chunks.
Made to repeat kindergarten, Darnell got a little bigger his second time through, “but he still couldn’t talk that good,” his mother said. “He didn’t know nothing, but they passed him on.”
Every year as he drifted through the overcrowded classrooms of Chicago’s public schools, the boy’s need for special education grew more conspicuous.
But the cash-strapped schools offered little help.
The dozen or so state agencies that serve disabled children are so overburdened that kids who most need help are instead often shuttled through a round robin of delays, deflections and denials.
And Linda Price, unmarried and raising six children on public aid, did little more than wait for the state and schools to take over.
“I was fixing to teach him,” she said, “but I got five other kids at home.”
And so, at 14, her oldest child tumbled into the harsh, chilly arms of the state’s caretaker of last resort: the streets.
There are some 50,000 Darnells in Chicago and 120,000 more statewide. They are part of a new, needy and violent population whose names are being added daily to Juvenile Court docket sheets and the rosters of state child-care agencies.
Now, society must figure out how to educate and heal them. Or whether to.
Across the state, some 159,000 schoolchildren were identified last year as having mental disabilities, up 5 percent since 1987, while public school enrollment increased just 1 percent to about 1.8 million.
In Chicago, some 35,000 kids have been identified as mentally disabled, an increase of 8 percent in the last five years, while public school enrollment dropped by 2 percent to about 411,000.
Though all the identified kids get some special help, it is often inadequate. And Chicago officials estimate that an additional 15,000 to 40,000 mentally disabled children are sliding uncounted through the public schools, as Darnell did for 14 years.
A small percentage ultimately may be diagnosed with classic mental illnesses like schizophrenia or manic-depression. And some suffer from what has been called “retardation,” a term that is falling out of fashion.
But the explosion in the numbers of such kids cannot be explained by the natural rate of such disorders in previous generations. These children, experts say, suffer from cognitive and emotional disabilities that are fueled by the measurable escalation of family breakup, poverty, parental drug use, violence, abuse and simple neglect-traumas that ravage young minds in ways that scientists are only beginning to understand.
Children who experience two of these risk factors are four times as likely to suffer mental disabilities as risk-free children, and those who experience four factors are 10 times as likely, University of Michigan professor Arnold Sameroff found.
Those who develop emotional disabilities are nine times more likely to drop out of school than their non-disabled peers, state records show. And they are in large part responsible for the recent rise in juvenile crime: More than half the youths in Illinois detention centers have mental disabilities like Darnell’s, officials say.
In schools, they are given the sketchy, ill-defined labels of “learning disabled,” “emotionally disordered” or “mentally handicapped.”
Teachers describe them as the kids who come to school unprepared to study and unable to cope socially. They can’t pay attention or control their actions. They lash out in frustration, tune out in despair, or simply fall apart.
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They present a host of daunting moral and financial problems.
One year of intensive special education in a state-funded day school typically costs about $13,000, more than twice as much as the average for teaching a non-disabled child. Over 13 years of elementary and secondary school, the tab can be $165,000 per child.
But given special help, many of these kids can hold jobs, live independently and contribute to society, studies show. Without the extra aid, they are likely to accumulate a lifetime of public aid checks and bills for drug rehabilitation, prison, and state psychiatric care. Such a person can cost taxpayers between $600,000 and $1 million, studies show.
Although roughly the same proportion of kids are identified as mentally disabled in Illinois as in other states, delays and breakdowns in serving them have occurred here on a scale unmatched in other parts of the country.
Federal education officials are reviewing whether to withhold funds from Chicago schools because of such long-standing problems. The city has not come close to the standard set by other systems, where children are often assessed and placed within days.
During the 1980s, as the Illinois population of needy children grew, funding to the schools and state agencies that serve them failed dramatically to keep pace. Illinois ranked 42nd among states in the growth of education funding during the decade, one study shows. It ranks 44th in current funding for mental health, another study shows.
Even attempts at reform have fallen victim to bureaucratic trench wars. A campaign-trail proposal to restructure the system died on Gov. Jim Edgar’s desk, in part because of sniping from entrenched private-care providers and officials who were comfortable with the status quo, according to the governor’s aides.
Three years later, Edgar received a $200,000 private grant in February so that he could appoint a task force to study ways to coordinate services to needy kids. “Our child-welfare system is not broke, it’s broken,” he said upon acquiring the money.
“Every year, more children are exposed to abuse and violence, and more are born with in-utero exposure to drugs, but every year we see the system that cares for these kids contract another degree,” said psychologist Joannie May of the Community Counseling Centers of Chicago. “Things have steadily gotten worse, and they’re at their worst today.”
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Raised in a grimy apartment on an Englewood side street that has more vacant lots and abandoned buildings than homes, Darnell was chased to school every day, and then chased home again.
“He had to run his way in and run his way back home with a bunch of them behind,” his mother said. “People were always making fun of him because he couldn’t talk. And when you can’t talk, you’re always going to find yourself in a fight, ’cause people still gonna be talking about you.”
And so she taught her boy the lesson she learned as a child:
“Fight to the last. That’s the only kind of sense he have: fighting sense. Otherwise, he’s lost from everything.”
Told in court records, school reports and psychiatric evaluations, his is a saga of unremitting violence.
At age 9, Darnell was hospitalized for a week with a broken rib and had to be retaught how to walk. His mother told a court worker that he “fell,” according to a report. “He’s had trouble with accidents,” she said.
A few months later, his jaw was broken, and he was hospitalized while it was rewired. Linda Price told doctors that Darnell had been knocked down by football players while standing along a sideline during a neighbohood game.
Darnell’s father, who is listed in court records under various names, did not live with the family.
“He say the kids get on his nerves,” Linda explains.
For months at a time, she sent Darnell to live with her sister in a public housing high-rise in the Robert Taylor Homes.
As Darnell grew, his mother said she went constantly to the principal’s office trying to get a school evaluator to examine her son. “I say, my son is very slow. Darnell need a special school. Do you have a speech therapist here? He need all of that.”
Instead of special help, he was assigned to repeat 4th grade.
June Johnson, a 6th-grade teacher at Fulton School, 5300 S. Hermitage Ave., also tried to get Darnell into a special class for children with learning disabilities, but the services were “not available,” she said.
“He would have done better in a classroom for kids with behavior disorders,” Johnson said, “but the (Chicago) Board (of Education) mainstreamed him.”
His 7th-grade teacher, Jacqueline Huff, recalls a boy who wore the same ratty sweater for weeks on end and didn’t talk much because other children teased him when he did.
“He needed special ed services but had to be kept in a regular classroom,” Huff said. “It’s unfortunate, but I’ve had many like him. There are lots of Darnells in this neighborhood.”
By 8th grade, he could barely add two-digit numbers, and the only words he could write with confidence-those of his name-were printed in a wide, loopy scrawl.
Sitting in Betty Mason’s overcrowded 8th grade class on the dreary, undecorated third floor of Yale School, 7025 S. Princeton Ave., Darnell practiced a theater of extravagant indifference: He drummed his fingers on a desk, yawned loudly, and pulled up his shirt to scratch his belly.
“He was an obnoxious kid, just obnoxious,” Mason said. “We’d be singing `The Star-Spangled Banner’ and he’d be up there popping his fingers, acting like a clown.”
Mason sent Darnell to the principal almost every day because “it was either that or hurt him,” she said.
After three months of suspensions, disciplinary reports and utter classroom failure, officials evaluated Darnell and decided he had every mental disability in the public school lexicon: He was classified as behavior disordered, mentally handicapped and learning disabled.
They transferred him to Montefiore Special School, 1310 S. Ashland Ave., the public school for youngsters with behavior disorders. But the Board of Education does not provide buses for Montefiore children; instead, the kids are given CTA tokens. The mentally handicapped, speech-impaired boy had to make the 7 1/2-mile journey on his own.
In his first 4 months at the school, Darnell was absent 105 days and tardy 33, Montefiore records show.
The 14-year-old was living on the streets.
He told a court psychologist that the teenage boys who stand like sentries at the base of his aunt’s Chicago Housing Authority high-rise would tuck small packets of crack cocaine into his pockets and use him as their courier and lookout.
He explained that they weren’t a gang, they were an organization.
By the time he was 5 feet tall and weighed 120 pounds, Darnell had been picked up 13 times by police, records show. He had tried to steal other children’s jackets and to intimidate them into joining the gang. He was charged with hitting a girl in the face with a bottle.
One freezing night in February, police found him passed out on the sidewalk near his aunt’s building. He had been drinking wine coolers with some boys who deserted him when he fell down drunk.
Twice after no one showed up at court hearings, a notice was published in the Tribune classified section that unless a parent appeared at his next hearing, Darnell would be declared a ward of the court.
No one answered the ads.
On an August afternoon in 1991, someone shot a gun while riding a motorcycle through the Taylor Homes, wounding a teenage boy and girl who were walking through a fire lane between two buildings.
Five days later, police arrested Darnell and charged him with 10 counts of attempted murder, aggravated assault and armed violence.
As Darnell awaited trial, a Juvenile Court judge ordered that he be given a battery of psychological tests.
Brought in handcuffs to the University of Chicago, psychologists noted that Darnell’s disheveled appearance, short attention span and lack of social judgment suggested that he may have been suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome.
Evaluators measured his IQ at 50 and reported that he had the word-comprehension skills of a 2nd grader and the problem-solving skills of a 5-year-old.
He was asked, “At 8 cents, how much would three candy bars cost?”
“They don’t cost 8 cents!” he said.
He was told, “Show me how to look through a telescope.”
He said, “There ain’t no telescope here!”
Asked by court psychologist Ascher Levy to draw himself and his family, Darnell left out himself.
Reviewing his school record, Levy concluded that there was a “failure of this youth to obtain appropriate services.”
Court psychiatrist Daniel Schiff concluded: “Darnell needed special educational help and failed to receive this.”
“I do not believe or feel that this young man is a threat to society,” social worker Doris Merrity wrote in a letter to court officials. “Children use him. He is not violent, but wants to be accepted by others, not ostracized. Please give him a chance.”
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“You show the least amount of interest in him, and he lights up like a Christmas tree,” said his attorney, public defender Julie Hull. “Once he senses that you like him, he’ll follow you anywhere.”
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Hull said she does not believe that Darnell shot two people while riding a motorcycle through Taylor Homes.
Tests suggest that the clumsy, maladroit youth was probably not coordinated enough to control a motorcycle, let alone shoot a gun accurately while riding one.
When neuropsychologists at the University of Chicago asked Darnell to put small grooved metal pegs into a pegboard, he “got agitated and started dropping the pegs on the floor,” they reported.
He had a “severe deficit in fine motor dexterity in both hands.”
Hull said that if she had fought the case, there is a good chance she would have won. “But what happens to Darnell if I won? He’d go back on the street.”
And so with his mother’s consent, Hull pleaded Darnell guilty to one count of attempted murder. On June 17, 1992, Juvenile Court Judge Harry Aron sentenced him to 5 years’ probation, during which time he was to be placed in a residential special education school.
“I am in the unique position of convincing a child, in essence, to tell a judge he did something he didn’t do in order to ensure that he gets the services he hasn’t been afforded in the past,” Hull said.
Linda Price agreed that this was best.
“He keeps saying he didn’t do that, what he’s in here for,” she said. “He say, the day those people got shot, he wasn’t even around. He was somewhere else. He want a trial. But he do not talk good enough for no trial.”
Darnell remained in the juvenile detention center through the summer and fall, progressing academically.
When he graduated from 8th grade, his mother did not attend the small ceremony, but Hull did. She wept.
In December, school officials decided to transfer Darnell to the Lord’s Ranch, a therapeutic boarding school set on a rocky Arkansas farm. The city sends about 200 mentally disabled children to such facilities in Chicago, Downstate and sometimes out of state.
On the door of one boy’s dorm are “15 Commandments,” including, “Thou shalt not listen to secular radio and tapes.”
In the five years it has accepted Illinois children, the ranch has had a stormy relationship with state officials.
DCFS tried to withdraw kids from the facility in 1989. Untrained, convicted felons were working as counselors with children, state officials said in court records. State education evaluators reported that children were put in the Lawrence County Jail for discipline.
But attorneys for the Cook County public guardian’s office showed that DCFS had no better place to put the children, and the children testified in court that the ranch was a supportive, loving place.
The state education board finally gave full approval to the Lord’s Ranch’s license in February 1992. DCFS no longer sends children there, according to an agency spokesman, but the Chicago Board of Education and other public school officials do.
Darnell remains there today, nearly 500 miles from home.
“It’s strange,” he said. “I was born in Chicago, and I was raised in Chicago. That my hometown. But I’ll do better here.”
Months before he left for Arkansas, Darnell sat one morning with his mother in a Juvenile Court holding room.
Asked what she thought would be his future, Linda Price sighed.
“I don’t really know,” she said. “Most I can say, I hope it get better. After he get out of this here, I hope he will pull his life back on track and get his life together.”
Short and round-bodied, she wore bluejeans and a weather-beaten waist-length jacket. A small crescent-shaped scar hooks over one eye.
“That’s from being bad when I was coming up,” she said. “I put my mother through pure hell. I can talk about it and grin now. Used to run out, be gone three weeks. I ain’t been to no jail, nothing like that. But I been in situations.”
It was giving birth to Darnell, she said, that changed her life.
“I had Darnell, I was 17. I put that on the shelf. You get older, you change,” she said.
“Now I’m a mother. I got six kids. I straightened my little life out, and I feels good.”
She touched the sleeve of Darnell’s white cotton T-shirt.
“He had started getting interested in little girls, and that change you,” she said.
Darnell ducked his head.
His mother leaned close to him and said she heard he got a girl in the neighborhood pregnant.
Darnell waved a hand and grinned shyly. “Ain’t mine,” he said.
He named another boy.
“It’s yours, baby,” his mother said. She patted one of his knees.
“You getting to be a man now.”
———-
Next: Into the criminal class.