JOHNSON: A killer maybe, still a kid

By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published September 5, 2007 at midnight

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The absolutely last thing I want to do is stick up for this 15-year-old knucklehead. What he allegedly did was horrendous.

Yet, after considering it a bit, I have concluded I must defend him for the lone reason so many people too quickly want to forget, the least among them being the Weld County district attorney:

He is a 15-year-old boy.

A kid.

To be sure, he is a kid who may have killed somebody's 9-year-old daughter, God rest her.

He reportedly stole the keys to his daddy's red Dodge truck and ran over her, stupidly fleeing the scene with the girl and her bicycle lodged for a while in the truck's undercarriage.

If you think about the senselessness of it too long, it will give you the shakes.

His name is Carlos Manzo, a line I absolutely hate typing because he is a child, but one I can now do so since the Weld County DA on Tuesday charged him as an adult in the death of Jasmine Hernandez.

She was riding her bicycle on East 25th Street Road in Greeley on Aug. 27, and her cousin, Ibeth Rodriguez, was on her scooter when the red Dodge roared up the street in reverse, knocking over Ibeth and badly injuring her before chewing up Jasmine.

Carlos Manzo, it is alleged, turned the truck's wheels and headed back up 25th, finally dislodging the fatally wounded girl. Witnesses took down the license plate number, and police officers quickly found the truck and the boy about six blocks away.

The DA on Tuesday charged him with a laundry list of crimes, the most serious being vehicular homicide, a mixture of charges that could land him in prison from 10 to 41 years.

Locking up children along with the adult dregs of this society is just so much anathema to me.

It implies a child has the same decision-making ability as society's dregs, which I will admit, given the two knuckleheaded groups, is a quite shaky and arguable peg on which I am hanging my hat here.

Yet it is also the reason we pay judges and others to run the juvenile justice system, a system predicated on the notion that children are incapable of making fully informed decisions about right and wrong. It cannot be just for kids who steal a Snickers bar from the corner five-and-dime.

Maybe Carlos Manzo is a bad kid, one who is constantly in police custody, a child police officers all know by name.

This is what I wanted to know from Weld County DA Kenneth R. Buck.

"The facts of the case are severe enough to charge this young person as an adult," the DA said simply, adding that the law gives him discretion to charge juveniles as adults if there is a vehicular homicide or crime of violence.

In this case, he said, there were both.

The law did not allow him to tell me whether the boy had been in trouble before.

And community outrage over the girl's death, he insisted, was not a factor in his charging decision.

I checked with Denver.

Charging a juvenile as an adult is hardly an arbitrary decision, said Lynn Kimbrough, spokeswoman for Denver DA Mitch Morrissey. "It is used with discretion and only on the most serious of crimes."

That means murder, attempted murder, aggravated robbery and violent sexual assault, she said. Denver leads the state in the number of juveniles charged as adults but only, she said, because of the sheer volume of crime that is committed in the capital city.

In 2003, 28 kids were charged as adults. In 2004, it was 29. The number in 2005 jumped to 57 cases for 36 juveniles, some charged multiple times.

Last year, the number fell to 23 and, so far this year, 11 have been marched into adult court.

"We consider everything, from the circumstances of the crime, the child's criminal history," Kimbrough said. "It's a judgment call, and not one that is taken lightly."

It should never be.

It is completely understandable to be outraged whenever a young child dies needlessly. Jasmine Hernandez should not be dead today.

The question I have is whether that 15-year-old boy set out to kill her. Did he ever think that by stealing his daddy's keys he might end up killing someone?

Of course he did not.

Kenneth Buck, during our interview, said he had decided that what the boy did was "a reckless act."

I say that is precisely why we have separate courts for adults and juveniles.

You and I, blessed with the experience of adulthood, of course consider and weigh such things. Children haven't that capacity. It is why we do not let them sign up for credit or join the Army.

They - and this is the bottom line - even in the most horrendous of incidents really do not truly know any better.

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763

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