Unsupervised: Juvenile escapes plague many communities with limited tracking nationwide

(InvestigateTV) — As Becky Everton prepared for an annual New Year’s Eve party she planned to host the following day, her telephone rang with news that left her reeling.

“There was an intruder, and all we know is that someone has been shot,” she recalled the relative telling her.

There had been a shooting at the Baton Rouge, Louisiana home of Everton’s 74-year-old mother, Angela Haymon.

Around 9:30 p.m. on Dec. 30, 2019, when Haymon emerged from the house to investigate a noise coming from the carport, she encountered 15-year-old Xavier Cade trying to get inside her car.

Court documents show Haymon and Cade struggled over a stolen gun he was carrying, and that’s when investigators believe the juvenile got spooked and opened fire — shooting and killing Haymon.

Haymon’s husband, Everton’s stepfather, heard the gunfire and drew his own weapon to fire back, hitting the teenager in the abdomen.

Everton, who lived two states away in Georgia at the time, said she immediately began trying to call her mom, desperately in need of answers.

“I had just lost my dad six months prior, and so it was almost like I couldn’t connect in my brain that this was happening again and that it was a murder,” Everton said. “I had never known.... anyone that was murdered ever.”

“This was stuff on TV. Literally, this was on TV shows and movies.”

Unknown to Everton at the time, the juvenile who pulled the trigger was facing charges for stealing a car two months before the murder. Cade was only 14 years old at the time and had been suspended from school for possession of marijuana. Cade was ultimately expelled, according to court documents.

Following the shooting, Cade spent a week in the hospital recovering before being booked into the East Baton Rouge Parish Juvenile Detention facility, though he was ultimately indicted as an adult by a grand jury and charged with second-degree murder.

Cade eventually was released on bond and fitted with an ankle monitor, and in the months that followed, the teenager continued to rack up charges for crimes that ultimately landed him back in juvenile detention despite the fact he was being tried as an adult for Haymon’s murder.

In late 2021, Cade and four others escaped from that facility after stabbing a guard.

InvestigateTV found that when the teenagers broke out, they joined the long list of juveniles who have escaped from detention facilities across the country — many of whom went on to commit additional violent crimes.

Despite the fear such escapes have caused communities coast to coast, federal tracking of these events is limited.

While experts have pushed for changes to the juvenile justice system to promote rehabilitation over incarceration, the patchwork of methods and the often-limited resources mean many states are only seeing the number of repeat young offenders grow.

A LOVING MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER

Angela Haymon was not afraid of hard work, her daughter and son-in-law recall. Everton joked that her mother had a type of charisma that was contagious — even talking Walmart managers into giving her a job that did not exist — doing arts and crafts in the craft department of the store.

Haymon was even featured on the cover of a local newspaper one holiday season for her craftiness.

“I grew up with my mom as a single mom,” Everton recalled. “She worked very hard to take care of me, and I was the only child. It was hard for her in that era to have an only child and be divorced.”

She fondly remembers her childhood memories.

“My mom was a lot of fun. She loved music, to dance, loved Cajun dancing and loved Louisiana,” Everton said as she looked at pictures of her mom. “The culture, LSU, everything about it. She was a very good lady...she loved her kids, grandkids, and stepdaughters.”

According to a detention order filed with the juvenile court, Cade — who had actually lived down the street from Haymon — was charged with attempted armed robbery, first-degree murder and illegal use of a weapon.

On March 12, 2020, a grand jury returned a felony indictment charging Cade as an adult with second-degree murder. Cade remained in the juvenile detention facility, despite the 15-year-old no longer being tried as a juvenile.

Court records show on July 16, 2020, a bond was filed for $150,000, and the teen was released.

“We were just appalled that they send this child home that had committed murder, and they just let him go home with no conditions on his release,” Everton said. “He just went home and was going to school.”

Cade was initially released with no conditions according to Haymon’s daughter, but court records show the teen started causing trouble almost immediately. Roughly a month after being released from the juvenile facility, documents show that Cade disappeared, and prosecutors eventually pushed to have him outfitted with an ankle monitor.

In December of 2020 — almost a year to the day that Haymon was killed — Cade stole another car.

On May 6, 2021, Cade’s bond was revoked after prosecutors said he was caught with a dead ankle monitor trying to buy a gun.

According to court records, Cade was sent back to juvenile detention — again despite being charged as an adult in Haymon’s death.

Five months later, Cade and four other juveniles staged a massive jailbreak that left a guard who was watching them severely injured and put the entire community of Baton Rouge on alert.

“October 21, he broke out,” Everton recalled. “He and another juvenile, they shanked a guard using a homemade knife they had ... and busted out with five of them total, and stole the keys, the truck keys of the guard, and then went on a joy ride.”

News reports at the time indicated the teens also locked one of the guards in a cell. Cade was on the run for several days before his mother turned him in.

When he was returned to custody, court documents note that Cade had been evaluated multiple times for his mental health, sanity and “flashing out.” The court ultimately found the teen was competent to stand trial, and prosecutors filed formal requests to have him moved to an adult facility.

A national problem

InvestigateTV found the events that unfolded in Baton Rouge are not isolated events, identifying numerous escapes from secure facilities across the country where juvenile offenders went on to be charged in additional crimes — many of them violent:

• In January 2024, Tayshon Holmes, 17; Jashon Jones, 15; and Robert Smith, 16, broke out of the Henley-Young-Patton Youth Detention Center in Jackson, Mississippi. According to reports from WLBT, the escapees allegedly shot a woman in the neck and back after she refused to give them her cell phone. The station reported the trio — who had reportedly also escaped the year prior — had been involved in a different carjacking prior to being detained, and Holmes recently pleaded guilty to a 2021 murder
• In March 2022, four teens broke out of the Rosewood Youth Academy in Nashville, Tennessee. WSMV reported that a group of boys assaulted a staff member at the juvenile facility and left in one of the worker’s cars. It was the second time in 2022 that teens ran away from the facility.
• In October 2021, a 17-year-old was arrested after a violent escape from the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility in Honolulu, Hawaii. Hawaii News Now reported that the teen was in class when he walked up to the instructor and started punching him in the head and chest. The teen then snatched the teacher’s keys before jumping on a table and kicking out a window. The teacher managed to alert security outside the room but not before the boy escaped.
• In August 2020, Rashad Taylor and Jabari Williams cut a hole in a security fence and took off from the Bon Air Juvenile Correctional facility near Richmond, Virginia. WWBT reported that Taylor, 18, and Williams, 20, used a cord to choke a security staff member - who briefly lost consciousness - before they took the staff member’s keys to get outside the building and to the hole in the fence where there was a waiting vehicle. The teens, who were scheduled to be transferred to an adult facility once they turned 21, were found in Michigan.

While examples abound, InvestigateTV found there are gaps in how escapees from juvenile detention facilities are tracked both pre- and post-conviction.

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which was created in 1974 under the U.S. Department of Justice, does not track escapes from juvenile detention facilities, according to a spokesperson.

The Interstate Compact for Juveniles — a federal program that regulates the interstate movement of juveniles who are under court supervision — logs escapes only if juvenile escapees cross state lines. The compact is part of a commission from all 50 states who work together for child welfare and public safety.

The compact provides requirements for the supervision and return of juveniles who are arrested in one state, but who are on probation, parole, or have escaped from a facility in another state.

Since 2021, the organization has tallied 89 instances where juveniles convicted of crimes escaped secure facilities and were found in another state.

Because that figure only includes cases where escapees crossed state lines, the compact’s executive director MaryLee Underwood said it could be a notable undercount of the overall number of escapes nationwide.

At the state level, the tracking of escapes from juvenile detention facilities varies.

InvestigateTV reached out to all 50 states and the District of Columbia to ask whether the state tracks such escapes, and how many occurred from 2021-2023.

The 42 that responded saying they keep track at the state level reported a total of 223 escapes from secure facilities during that time period.

New Jersey and Delaware said they had no escapes from secured state facilities but reported they had 23 and 13 escapes, respectively, from lower-security facilities, and Alabama reported three such events at contracted facilities with reduced security.

Some states keep tabs on escapes but the tracking is less concrete — Michigan, for example, reported 19 escapes from secure facilities that contract with the state and use its data system, but a spokesperson said there are other, non-contracted facilities in the state that don’t use that system.

In California, escapes are now tracked at the county level after the state realigned its juvenile justice system. The state recorded 14 escapes from secure facilities in 2021-2023 and another 105 from camps and lower-security detention methods.

Tennessee reported four escapes from the John S. Wilder Youth Development Center in Somerville, which is the only state-operated juvenile detention facility in the state, with officials stating any others are privately-run.

However, in other parts of the country, the numbers remain unclear.

Hawaii reported zero escapes, despite news reports that indicate otherwise.

Officials in Florida told InvestigateTV the state does track escapes but would not provide a total number from 2021-2023 because, a spokesperson said, the state does not “have a report or data aggregation on escapes.”

Kentucky said there were no records available regarding escapes, but did not respond to follow-up questions about whether the state tracks them. South Dakota responded by saying all juvenile detention facilities in the state are “privately owned,” but did not clarify if that means escapes are not tracked.

Massachusetts denied InvestigateTV’s request for information, and the remaining seven states never responded.

Rehabilitation vs. Incarceration

Some experts say the heart of the problem with juveniles escaping detention is the approach these facilities use, and the greater question of whether there’s a need for stringent incarceration at all.

In the 1970s, Missouri dramatically changed its approach to the juvenile justice system — switching from a traditional correctional approach to a more therapeutic model focused on rehabilitation, mental health and substance abuse treatment, and education.

Mark Steward, who now has more than four decades of experience in the juvenile justice system, helped launch that model after seeing the realities of the state’s facilities at the time.

“It was lockdown cells, isolation, physical abuse, a lot of other kind of abuse,” Steward recalled.

Eventually becoming the director of the Missouri Department of Youth Services, Steward worked to pioneer a system that focused on rooting out and treating the causes of delinquency with a more therapeutic approach.

Visitors to Missouri’s youth facilities may note the premises look much like schools — there is no barbed wire, and a welcoming sign saying “Home of the Falcons” adorns the front of the facility.

“We have dorms open, dorms in Missouri have had for 40-50 years where everybody can see each other,” Steward said. “They’re not in cells. The kids work together as a group.”

Steward, who worked under five different governors and with state lawmakers in a bipartisan manner, said leaders saw the benefits.

“There was buy in from the legislators, the judges, all those people,” Steward said. “And again, they knew it worked.”

Rates of recidivism — where individuals re-offend and return to incarceration — dropped, and education metrics increased.

In recent years, Missouri’s data indicates about one-quarter of juveniles re-offend once they are released, whereas states like Texas and Arizona see rates double that number — and Steward said Missouri has not had a single youth suicide in their juvenile justice system since the model was implemented.

This success, he said, is no accident.

“What makes it so successful is we’ve been able to do this for decades, and it’s ingrained in the culture of the staff that work there,” Steward said. “The staff’s what makes it work. The staff are trained to do it. It’s in their heart and their head.”

After retiring from the juvenile corrections system, Steward started a non-profit to help states grappling with the problems in their own systems.
So far, Steward said his non-profit, the Missouri Youth Services Institute (MYSI), has worked with Colorado, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Louisiana, Virginia, New Mexico, California and the District of Columbia to help implement the “Missouri Model” there.

As states began to catch on to what Missouri was doing, Steward said he began working with them to help implement the Missouri model.

Some, he said, have seen notable success — the nation’s capital, for example, saw zero escapes from 2021-2023.

But other states have struggled, and stakeholders like Steward say that is often due to a lack of leadership buy-in, resources and facilities to really make the model work.

One of those states, Steward said, is Louisiana — which had 61 escapes from juvenile detention centers from 2021-2023, the highest number identified by InvestigateTV.

Around 2005, Steward said a delegation from the Bayou State visited Missouri’s facilities, even taking time to meet their juveniles in an effort to explore implementing the program.

But Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit later that year, and ultimately only bits and pieces of the plan were put in place.

Steward said it was not fully rolled out, which limits how effective it can be. It’s a sentiment echoed by a longtime juvenile court lawyer who spent years working for the Office of Juvenile Justice.

“So it’s kind of like a stool without having all four legs on,” Steward said. “If you do one or two or even three, you’re not going to get it done. So a lot of times, people have the right intent, but they don’t know what to do or how to do it.”

Despite the high number of escapes in recent years, including one in New Orleans in September, a spokesperson for the Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice said the state agency does utilize aspects of the “Missouri Model” it gleaned from MYSI in its juvenile facilities, and that the program — known as LaMOD — has seen success.

“The Office of Juvenile Justice (OJJ) remains committed to implementing LaMOD programming across its secured facilities. This program has proven effective in shaping positive outcomes for youth under our care,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

“Through strategic partnerships with higher education institutions, we offer vocational training that equips youth with invaluable skills. The dedication and expertise of OJJ’s frontline staff play a critical role in the ongoing success of this initiative.”

Even with a strategy that has proven effective over the years, Missouri has still had escapes, and current officials said those numbers have been inching upward.

Scott Odum, the current director of the Missouri Division of Youth Services, reported 20 juveniles escaping from their secure facilities from 2021-2023. He called that a historical high for all the years the model has been active.

And some, including Everton, whose mother was shot by a teenager, are concerned about the consequences of focusing on rehabilitation if it means a threat to public safety.

“Obviously the therapeutic model has not caught up with the level of criminal action that’s happening,” Everton said.

A call for change

Xavier Cade, who shot and killed Everton’s mother Angela Haymon, negotiated a deal with prosecutors to have his second-degree murder charge reduced to manslaughter.

In June 2022, Cade pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 25 years “imprisonment at hard labor” — meaning he would be incarcerated at a state prison, rather than a parish facility.

He has not escaped since beginning that sentence.

This summer, Cade’s lawyers filed a post-conviction petition for his conviction to be thrown out. The brief claims the teenager was mentally ill and experiencing a crisis during the time he committed his crime sprees, argues his age — 15 at the time — prevented him from knowing right from wrong, and that his guilty plea was coerced by his being held in an adult detention facility.

As of publication, Cade has no pending court dates.

Even on the other side of her family’s pursuit of justice, Everton said the frustration lingers.

She said she initially found it difficult to truly grieve her mother’s death — because every couple of months something else would unfold and reopen the wound.

“It’s re-traumatization,” Everton said. “It was enough that my mother was killed, but having to go through, you know, living through him getting out, and having this happen multiple times, it was just horrible. It was just awful.”

Everton eventually took her frustrations to state lawmakers, pleading for better oversight of juvenile offenders who have committed violent crimes.

Louisiana State Rep. Debbie Villio responded a few hours later and said she not only agreed with Everton but wanted even stricter prosecution and sentencing standards for juvenile offenders.

Everton said she felt compelled to speak up and fight for change. She said she strongly opposes any diminution of Cade’s 25-year sentence for the killing of her mom.

Editor’s Note: After initial publication, Tennessee and Ohio provided information about the tracking of escapes from juvenile detention facilities. This story has been updated to include those numbers

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