When he failed to impress her, he got flustered and shot her. One of the other boys, Jamel, felt humiliated by a 14-year-old girl. He fired, he said, when he thought he was going to be beaten up. "They are easily threatened," she said, "and when they feel threatened they pull the trigger." They are not good at sorting out life's everyday problems. Liz Giordano, the director of Harlem Valley, sees a lot of boys like these. Their initial reaction after the shootings was not sorrow or remorse, but survival: How do I get out of this? 'When They Feel Threatened' But they also did not seem to care much, one way or the other. Neither Andre nor the other boys seemed to have thought about the consequences of pulling the trigger and they seemed surprised at the results. Psychologists say that just having a gun provides a sense of security and power and that many youths never visualize using it.
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Yet they never bothered to learn much about guns or how to handle them. The boys, who are serving life sentences with parole possible after as little as five years, their parents and the Division for Youth, which runs Harlem Valley and three other maximum-security prisons for teen-age boys, insisted that they not be fully identified.įor all three boys, who now live behind razor-wire-topped fences at the center in Wingdale, N.Y., a gun was easier to get in their rough New York neighborhoods than a new pair of sneakers. Their stories yield a rare, intimate glimpse into a kind of thought and behavior that lie at the core of the violence eating away at the nation's cities. With the calm detachment of spectators, Andre and two other young killers talked recently about their experiences with guns and crime, how they got the weapons, what led them to shoot and how they felt afterward. Now, state officials estimate, it is 60 to 65 percent, and researchers at the Federal Centers for Disease Control say that shootings by teen-agers are contributing significantly to the nation's rising homicide rate. A decade ago, when an exchange of punches was a probable outcome of two boys' facing each other down, 10 to 15 percent of the teen-agers who got into serious trouble in New York were carrying guns.
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