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Officials to explore if child fully understood actions
The minds of juveniles don’t quite measure up to the minds of adults, a counselor says.
The mind of a juvenile is “typical of a child,” said Greg Cvetkovic, executive director of D&E Counseling Center in Youngstown.
“They have an inability to see the consequences, because they don’t have a long history of learning from mistakes,” he said.
Officials involved in the case of Jordan Anthony Brown, 11, of Wampum, Pa., will explore avenues to see if the child fully understood his actions that resulted in his being charged with criminal homicide.
Jordan is being charged as an adult in the killing of his father’s 26-year-old fianc e and her unborn child. Kenzie Houk was found shot to death Friday in the couple’s Wampum-New Galilee Road farmhouse.
Houk was engaged to Jordan’s father, Christopher Brown, and due to have the couple’s son within the next month.
An incident such as the one involving Jordan in Lawrence County is extremely rare in Ohio, said Anthony D’Apolito administrator and magistrate of Mahoning County Juvenile Justice Center.
“I’d imagine it’s rare everywhere,” he said.
In his 15 years of practicing law, D’Apolito said he’s never seen a case of that magnitude dealt with in Mahoning County.
If Jordan were from Ohio, procedures would have been different. In Ohio, children 14 and under are charged as juveniles and usually tried as such. They would not be put into an adult jail, as Jordan was.
If an 11-year-old is convicted in Ohio, he could get both a juvenile commitment and an adult commitment, D’Apolito said.
While in detention, the child would have the chance to become rehabilitated. If by the time he turned 18, and it was decided he wasn’t rehabilitated, then the child would be placed into an adult system, he said.
A case such as the one involving Jordan “is such a contradiction in your sense of justice,” D’Apolito said.
“You feel for the family of the woman and her baby, and you feel for the 11-year-old,” he said.
Juveniles usually don’t have the same thought process as adults and generally act on whims, D’Apolito said.
“We see a lot of crimes of impulse,” he said.
Children under age 17 tend to act on emotion, rather than a higher understanding or complete knowledge of what they are doing, D’Apolito said.
“The question in this case is, did this juvenile even understand?” he said.
Cvetkovic said he thinks that while Jordan is at a juvenile detention center in Pennsylvania, officials will be looking to answer numerous questions through psychological and psychiatric evaluations.
They will be checking to see if the child had a history of planned destructive behavior and whether harmful behavior was the way he dealt with his emotions in the past. Also, they may test to see whether the boy used any drugs or alcohol, Cvetkovic said.
They might also look for signs of a serious mental problem, for example, checking whether the boy was driven by bizarre thought processes, though that is rare in kids Jordan’s age, Cvetkovic said.