| Casper Star Tribune
Life in the system
By ANTHONY LANE
August 29, 2006
Star-Tribune staff writer
 Five-year-old
twins climbed on counters and chairs in the jail's visiting room as
Lisa Brown talked with their older brother.
"I'm a celebrity's mom," she said,
speaking into a black telephone receiver.
Julius "Donte" Brown, seated behind a
shatterproof window, looked confused. His expression changed to
disbelief and faint amusement as she told him the story.
Days earlier, Lisa Brown had been
riding in a friend's car when another driver crashed into them.
Casper police showed up, and an officer asked who she was. He
reacted strangely when she gave her name.
"Are you Donte's mom?" the officer
asked. She told him she was.
"Hey!" the officer said to a
colleague. "This is Donte's mom!"
Donte Brown's notoriety among local
lawmen is not surprising. After spending his teen years building a
busy record of juvenile offenses, he now stands accused of attempted
second-degree murder. His alleged victim was stabbed nine times.
Brown is the kind of youth who poses
an intractable challenge to Wyoming's juvenile justice system. Yet
his case also illustrates the system's own most-criticized weakness.
The system, its critics contend, is not a system at all, but a
loosely organized cluster of courts and programs with no unifying
plan.
A variety of those courts and
programs have intervened in Brown's life, starting when he was 11.
At times he came under the supervision of two or more judges in
different courts. Now 18, he has graduated to adult courts and an
adult jail.
A long history
Donte Brown is the second of Lisa
Brown's eight children. His father was out of the picture in 1996
when Lisa Brown was sentenced to the Wyoming Women's Center on a
check fraud conviction. So Donte was sent to live with his mother's
family in California.
In 1999, Lisa Brown was released on
parole, and Donte returned to Wyoming. The 11-year-old stayed with
his mother briefly before a judge placed him in foster care.
Since then, Donte has lived with
various families and in at least two group homes. He has served time
at the Natrona County Juvenile Detention Center. He spent roughly 10
months at the Wyoming Boys' School in Worland, an institution where
military-type discipline is imparted with the aim of redirecting
wayward youths.
The Wyoming Department of Family
Services and the state's juvenile court system have been intimately
involved with Donte's life through virtually all of these
placements. While the records of juvenile cases are secret, it seems
safe to say that Donte started in the system as a child in need of
the state's protection. In the years that followed, his case almost
certainly shifted from the category of "child protection" to either
"child in need of supervision" or "delinquency."
The final category is for youths who
are accused of committing crimes. It accounts for the bulk of teens
who, like Donte, are sent to the boys' school.
Because of confidentiality rules,
many details of Donte's passage through the juvenile courts can only
be inferred. Yet his experience in Casper's city court is openly
recorded in a thick, manila folder. Donte was first cited for
getting in a fight when he was 12 and living at a Casper group home.
He was ticketed again for fighting about two weeks later.
Next in the file is June 2003 curfew
violation. In the following months he was cited again for breaking
curfew and was accused of driving without a license, fighting in
public and disturbing the peace.
In August 2004, Donte wrote to the
judge from a group home in Douglas, asking for permission to delay
payment of his municipal court fines. Three months later, he wrote
again, this time from the boys' school. Explaining his situation to
the municipal judge, he said a juvenile court judge had sent him
there "for grand larceny of a vehicle and for not attending school
regularly."
The letter asks the city judge to
convert his fines into hours of community service. Subsequent
documents record his progress working off the time by doing dishes
and other chores at the school.
"I can honestly say that I'm not
happy about being here, but I realize that it's because of my own
choices," his letter tells the judge.
Ambitious plans
Brown was not yet notorious the first
time he was interviewed by the Casper Star-Tribune. In October 2005,
when the 17-year-old Brown met with a reporter in a Casper coffee
shop, he was merely a troubled teen with a typical story to tell.
Two years earlier, with various fines
already adding up, he'd had trouble finding and holding a job. His
probation was revoked for not paying a $300 fine, and he spent a
week in juvenile detention.
He described his experience in group
homes as "day care."
As for the boys' school -- "It
sucked," he said. "That was an even bigger day care."
Donte left the boys' school in June
2005. In the October interview, he described big plans. He and a
friend held several teen dances by renting space at the American
Legion and elsewhere. He wanted to save money and open his own teen
club.
"I know a few people who own some
clubs in Denver," Brown said.
The club would be modeled around a
brand he was creating n "Saucy Entertainment." Donte said he had
drawn up a logo to go with it that he would eventually use to
establish a line of clothing.
"I got a pretty good talent in
drawing," Brown said. His main obstacle at that point, he said, was
financing his projects. "You have to have money to make money."
Donte granted a second interview on
June 2, just three days before the stabbing was reported. The dance
club was on hold.
"I have to redraw everything," he
said. "All my stuff got taken."
He apparently had spent much of his
time since October at the Juvenile Detention Center, partly for a
contempt charge in municipal court. At some point he also got kicked
out of the place where he'd been staying, and his possessions
vanished.
Donte showed up at the interview with
a friend, who asked not to be identified in print. The two had known
each other for years, and both had spent time at the Wyoming Boys'
School -- though in different dorms, seldom seeing each other.
Staff members at the boys' school
maintain an impressive level of order. Students march in formation.
They remain silent during meals, eating quickly before they are
dismissed from their tables.
Donte and his friend, however, said
the strict rules encourage subterfuge. Required to be silent,
students work out signals to communicate and perfect their timing to
exchange food and other items, they said.
"You can't expect a bunch of kids not
to talk," the friend said
Despite arriving at the boys' school
with the attitude that "they ain't changing me for nothing," the
friend said the experience made him think.
"You've got to pick and choose your
battles," he said. "I was fighting over stupid stuff."
Despite dismissive comments about the
boys' school, Donte also seemed to have left the place with a sense
of its mission.
"They break you down, then bring you
back to where you'll succeed," he said.
In early June, Donte seemed to have
developed some notion of what it meant for him to succeed. He said
he'd been fired from his job at an ice cream shop when he asked for
a raise. He was preparing to start work at a fast food restaurant,
but he clearly saw his future elsewhere.
"I hate fast food," Donte said. "I
need to get my own place, get these fines paid, get off probation."
A few days later, he was in jail on
the stabbing charge.
'Hugging, not hitting'
Donte's trial is several weeks away,
but Lisa Brown said she is confident of his innocence.
"Donte is not vicious," she said. "Donte's
a human."
Despite her obvious loyalty to her
son, Brown acknowledges points in his life when things might have
gone differently. She was released early from prison in September
1999, and Donte came back from California to live with her. He
landed in foster care because her probation was revoked only weeks
later.
Brown described her son as
"strong-willed," even when he was much younger. At a group home in
Casper, his stubbornness led to an escalating cycle of consequences.
"He was punished for what? Because
his mom wasn't there?" she asked. "All it did was lead to more
rebellion."
While Brown criticized the system
that sent her son to multiple institutions, she also said she would
change things if she could go back and raise her children again.
"If I had known then what I know now,
I would have been a different mother," she said. "Now, I spend more
time listening. Hugging, not hitting … the opposite of everything."
She referred to the twins, Jesse Jr.
and Nicademus, as her "babies."
"They're 5, and they're still
babies."
She reflected for a moment on Donte
and her older children at the same age, then spoke quietly.
"My kids grew up fast," she said.
Reporter Anthony Lane can be reached
at (307) 266-0593 or at
anthony.lane@casperstartribune.net.
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