Rebellious teenagers face more charges

Keith Paul

Monday, June 4, 2001 | 9:52 a.m.

Teens who made a getaway to the hot roof of a youth jail Friday, apparently upset over stricter release requirements, now find themselves facing additional charges and likely longer stays in confinement.

Officials at the Summit View Youth Correctional Center believe the escape to the roof about 11 a.m. Friday was planned after the teens were told of the enhanced requirements, Warden Jason MacIntyre said Sunday.

The corrections facility gives the boys goals in education, behavior in the facility and correctional therapy they must reach before they can be released. MacIntyre said the boys knew about new goals well before Friday's incident.

"All of those children committed additional crimes, and we're following through with pressing charges," he said. "By doing what they did, the residents displayed they cannot make the appropriate decisions. We believe they had planned this."

The 19 teens will face conspiracy to escape and malicious destruction of property charges. The teen who escaped were held out of the general population as the investigation continued, MacIntyre said.

About 11 a.m. Friday as the teens were moving in a line through the facility, on Range Road north of Nellis Air Force Base, they scaled a fence around an air conditioner by the building, jail officials said.

The teens then hoisted each other up to the roof. The boys never made it out of the facility nor did they attempt to climb the perimeter fence topped with razor wire, jail officials said.

There were about a dozen unarmed corrections officers guarding the 68 teens in the facility. When the 19 boys went starting climbing the fence around the air conditioner unit, guards called Metro Police, locked down the other inmates and started to talk to the boys on the roof.

The teens then started ripping apart pieces of the roof and pipes on top of the building. When Metro Police arrived, a standoff began, with the officers surrounding the building.

The best weapon the police had was the 100-plus degree weather. The boys started throwing the pieces of metal and plastic pipes at the officers. But about 90 minutes into the standoff, some of the boys started coming down and were taken into custody.

"The sun and Mother Nature did the negotiating," Officer Steve Meriwether, a Metro SWAT team crisis negotiating coordinator, said.

By about 2 p.m. all 19 had been taken into custody and put into cells, MacIntyre said.

SWAT officers were called to the jail, but they didn't take any action.

About 25 to 30 Metro patrol officers equipped with non-lethal shotguns that fire beanbags and pepper spray shot both at some of the teens who didn't succumb to the heat, Officer Tirso Dominguez, a Metro spokesman, said. They were then taken into custody.

The uprising came at the facility's one-year anniversary, but most of the inmates likely didn't realize that, said Willie Smith, deputy corrections administrator for the state Division of Child and Family Services.

Operation of the 96-bed state facility is contracted out to Youth Services International, a private company based in Sarasota, Fla.

The maximum-security facility is used to house offenders ages 13 to 18 from across the state for offenses ranging from non-violent to felony violent crimes, Smith said.

"Those here are generally chronic offenders or have failed at other facilities," Smith said.