Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.
Dismiss
Middle School, Pick-Up Football and a Brutal Murder= TNB
764 views
Skip to first unread message
sheets3inthwind
May 1, 2000, 3:00:00 AM5/1/00
to
Middle school, pickup football -- and in between, a brutal
murder
Monday, May 1, 2000
By Ken Kolker
The Grand Rapids
Press
BALDWIN -- At 14, Martez Stewart is Michigan's youngest
prison inmate, the state's youngest-ever lifer. He stabbed a
neighbor girl 33 times with kitchen knives in her home.
The next
day, nearly a week before police suspected him, he knelt and
prayed with a teacher at a memorial of flowers and crosses in
front of the girl's house.
He was 13 then, a seventh-grader who
played pickup football games in the schoolyard. And he was a boy
who killed like a man.
Stacy Davis, the neighbor girl, was 14,
one grade ahead of him at the Middle School at Parkside in
Jackson. She was an honor student and a clarinet player.
These
days, Martez is known as Inmate No. 292877 at the privately run
Michigan Youth Correctional Facility near Baldwin.
He spends
most of his days in a classroom, in his 7-by-12-foot cell or
watching cartoons with other prisoners in the day room, which
looks like a cafeteria with steel tables bolted to the concrete
floor.
A former guard says he's usually well-behaved, though
he's gotten into some minor scrapes.
In Jackson, a tree grows in
the middle school courtyard in Stacy's memory.
Stacy's parents,
Rickey and Sharon Davis, never returned to the old, two-story
house in Jackson where she died. They moved to a subdivision of
new homes north of town.
They've attended her band's concerts,
including the first after she died when her chair was left
empty.
For lawmakers, Martez and Stacy are poster children for
why they made it easier three years ago to send younger
criminals to adult prisons.
Child advocates argue Martez should
not have been sentenced to adult prison. They say the judge
should have locked him up with other boys in a juvenile
facility, where counselors could have tried to unlock the source
of the rage that led to the killing.
If he wasn't rehabilitated
by age 21, then he could have been locked up in prison, they
say. Such a "blended sentence" is allowed under state
law.
"Martez needs a mental health facility," said Elizabeth
Arnovits, executive director of the Michigan Council on Crime
and Delinquency. "Most children don't have their first crime be
a violent crime. If you've got a 13-year-old who blew off and
stabbed somebody 33 times, you've got a serious mental health
issue here.
"The chances of getting treatment in prison are
pretty limited."
Broken knives
Nobody knows why Martez, with no
criminal record, walked into the Davis home after school on
Sept. 10, 1998 -- eight days into the school year. The Davis
family had banned him from their home after he'd beaten up their
10-year-old son. Only a driveway and narrow strip of grass
separate their homes.
Martez, who stood 5-foot-6 and weighed 115
pounds, claimed he stabbed Stacy after she caught him breaking
in.
Prosecutors believe he forced his way in as she opened the
back door after school. Her father was due home in 30 minutes
from his job at Consumers Energy Co. Police found her clarinet
case, book bag and a pop bottle at the back door.
"I think very
likely that Stacy confronted him in the kitchen, said she was
going to call her father, and I think he panicked," Jackson
County Assistant Prosecutor Susan Dehncke said.
He stabbed her
in the dining room with a kitchen knife from the butcher block.
When that knife broke, he ran into the kitchen for a second
knife. When that knife broke, he ran back for a third
one.
During a forensic evaluation, he told a state psychiatrist
he stabbed her again and again "because he didn't know how many
times it took to kill somebody," Dehncke said.
Stacy's father
found her body in the dining room, along with bloody footprints
on the linoleum kitchen floor. Twenty minutes later, Martez was
playing a pickup football game with friends at school.
"It
rocked us pretty good," said Jackson Schools Superintendent Dan
Evans, who was middle school principal at the time. "Right away,
they didn't catch the kid. There was that interim period where
people were wondering who did it. There were a lot of kids and
parents who were full of fear. Teachers were full of fear."
And
there was the loss of Stacy, who was among the more popular
girls in school.
"She was just a wonderful gal, an All-American
kind of kid, loved by everybody," Evans said. Her father helped
coach her in basketball.
"Here's this honor student with all
these accolades, and she's here today and gone tomorrow," Evans
said.
The community donated $6,000 to the middle school band in
her name -- some of which was used to set up the Stacy Davis
scholarship fund for woodwind players. The band will use some of
the money to commission a musical piece written in her
memory.
"It keeps her name going," said Steve Brattain, senior
band director at the middle school.
'He doesn't have a
heart'
Martez, on the other hand, was a little bully who
admitted to breaking into a house and some cars, though he was
never arrested. His father was in prison for felonious assault,
and the boy was raised by his single mother, a former prison
guard who recently married.
At the end of the previous school
year, the boy's sixth-grade teacher asked Jackson schools to
send him to an alternative school due to his bad behavior. The
district allowed him to go to the middle school instead.
"His
mom came in and cried and said, 'Please give him a chance,'"
Evans said. And for the first eight days of school, Evans said,
"We felt it was the right choice."
Six days after the killing,
Jackson Police Detective Maurice Crawford was interviewing
students at the middle school when Martez walked into the
police-liaison office by mistake. Crawford noticed his Nike
shoes resembled the bloody footprints in the Davis home.
Police
searched Martez's home and found bloodied boxer shorts in a
grocery bag behind the garage and bloodied gym shorts in a
grocery bag in the basement.
At 13, Martez was a year too young
to be tried in adult court, but a 1997 state law allowed
prosecutors to try him as an adult in juvenile
court.
Prosecutors in Oakland County, near Detroit, used the
same law to try Nathaniel Abraham, who received national
attention at age 11 when he shot and killed a man. Unlike
Martez, whose case received little attention outside Jackson,
Nathaniel didn't go to prison.
Oakland County Probate Judge
Eugene Moore criticized the state for giving up too soon on
kids, then sentenced Nathaniel, by that time 14, to a juvenile
program. He must be released when he turns 21.
But Jackson
County prosecutors said such a sentence wasn't enough for
Martez.
"Martez Stewart is a much better example of when you
want to sentence someone as an adult," Dehncke said.
Standing in
front of the judge, Stacy's father demanded justice, slamming
down so hard on the courtroom's glass podium that he shattered
it.
"You can't give him a heart," he told the judge at
sentencing. "He doesn't have a heart."
After the murder, Jackson
County Prosecutor John McCain took sleeping pills so he could
sleep at night. "In my 14 years (as prosecutor), there's never
been a case that caused me to wake up in the middle of the night
in a cold sweat," he said. "I've got daughters myself."
He said
Martez never showed remorse.
"I think he will kill again. Would
you want that kid living next to you when he's 21, and now
5-foot-10 and 180 pounds? I think he needs to be in prison for
the rest of his life."
Martez pleaded guilty to open murder.
Probate Judge Susan Vandercook ruled it was second-degree murder
and sentenced him in July to life in prison, though he'll be
eligible for parole in 15 years.
Vandercook said a juvenile
sentence would have meant freedom in seven years.
"Is that
sufficient punishment in light of what he did?" she said. "And
what kind of message does that send to other 12-, 13-,
14-year-olds who might do the same thing? What he did was so
devastating to our community."
A blended sentence would have
left her with too many questions. After seven years of juvenile
programs, how could she know for sure that he wouldn't kill
again?
Prison, she said, was her only choice.
"I didn't send him
there because I thought it was a place he'd get the best
treatment," the judge said. "I knew he wouldn't get the same
type of treatment that he would in the juvenile system."
A
14-year-old settles in
At first, Martez caused few problems in
prison.
On Aug. 8, less than a month after he was sent to
prison, a 15-year-old cellmate at the Thumb Correctional Unit in
Lapeer accused Stewart of threatening to "kill him in his sleep
by cutting his throat with a razor blade," a major misconduct
report states.
An officer found a razor in Stewart's part of the
cell.
But a hearing officer found that the cellmate, serving
time for armed robbery in Saginaw County, wasn't getting along
with Stewart and made up the report.
Martez moved to the youth
prison three days later. Since then, he's received five major
misconduct tickets, most involving the same school teacher. He
bad-mouthed her once, turned her classroom lights off and on
another time, and was cited for sexual misconduct in January
while turning in his school work.
"He was throwing his sheets of
paper on my desk," the teacher wrote. "After he each, he said,
'I want a kiss for this. A hug for this.'" And then his language
deteriorated to include body parts.
Martez's mother, Michelle
Brown, and her husband, Willie Brown, said they visit the boy
once a month. He seems to be getting along fine in prison, they
said, but they refused to comment further.
Debra Gutierrez,
Martez's court-appointed attorney from the State Appellate
Defender Office, said prison records indicate he's taking
pre-GED classes but no counseling.
"It's kind of frightening
he's not getting any counseling," she said. "Depending on what
might have motivated him, possibly he could be rehabilitated, if
he gets counseling. Due to his youth, we owe it to him to try to
get him some counseling."
She's appealing the law that allowed
the state to try Martez as an adult. The appeal is
pending.
Meanwhile in Jackson, a woman who once coached Stacy in
basketball, and whose daughter was a pallbearer at the girl's
funeral, said she will attend parole hearings to make sure
Martez isn't set free.
"I know he's a child, but the Davises are
never going to get their daughter back," she said. "He took
something very, very precious."
murder
Monday, May 1, 2000
By Ken Kolker
The Grand Rapids
Press
BALDWIN -- At 14, Martez Stewart is Michigan's youngest
prison inmate, the state's youngest-ever lifer. He stabbed a
neighbor girl 33 times with kitchen knives in her home.
The next
day, nearly a week before police suspected him, he knelt and
prayed with a teacher at a memorial of flowers and crosses in
front of the girl's house.
He was 13 then, a seventh-grader who
played pickup football games in the schoolyard. And he was a boy
who killed like a man.
Stacy Davis, the neighbor girl, was 14,
one grade ahead of him at the Middle School at Parkside in
Jackson. She was an honor student and a clarinet player.
These
days, Martez is known as Inmate No. 292877 at the privately run
Michigan Youth Correctional Facility near Baldwin.
He spends
most of his days in a classroom, in his 7-by-12-foot cell or
watching cartoons with other prisoners in the day room, which
looks like a cafeteria with steel tables bolted to the concrete
floor.
A former guard says he's usually well-behaved, though
he's gotten into some minor scrapes.
In Jackson, a tree grows in
the middle school courtyard in Stacy's memory.
Stacy's parents,
Rickey and Sharon Davis, never returned to the old, two-story
house in Jackson where she died. They moved to a subdivision of
new homes north of town.
They've attended her band's concerts,
including the first after she died when her chair was left
empty.
For lawmakers, Martez and Stacy are poster children for
why they made it easier three years ago to send younger
criminals to adult prisons.
Child advocates argue Martez should
not have been sentenced to adult prison. They say the judge
should have locked him up with other boys in a juvenile
facility, where counselors could have tried to unlock the source
of the rage that led to the killing.
If he wasn't rehabilitated
by age 21, then he could have been locked up in prison, they
say. Such a "blended sentence" is allowed under state
law.
"Martez needs a mental health facility," said Elizabeth
Arnovits, executive director of the Michigan Council on Crime
and Delinquency. "Most children don't have their first crime be
a violent crime. If you've got a 13-year-old who blew off and
stabbed somebody 33 times, you've got a serious mental health
issue here.
"The chances of getting treatment in prison are
pretty limited."
Broken knives
Nobody knows why Martez, with no
criminal record, walked into the Davis home after school on
Sept. 10, 1998 -- eight days into the school year. The Davis
family had banned him from their home after he'd beaten up their
10-year-old son. Only a driveway and narrow strip of grass
separate their homes.
Martez, who stood 5-foot-6 and weighed 115
pounds, claimed he stabbed Stacy after she caught him breaking
in.
Prosecutors believe he forced his way in as she opened the
back door after school. Her father was due home in 30 minutes
from his job at Consumers Energy Co. Police found her clarinet
case, book bag and a pop bottle at the back door.
"I think very
likely that Stacy confronted him in the kitchen, said she was
going to call her father, and I think he panicked," Jackson
County Assistant Prosecutor Susan Dehncke said.
He stabbed her
in the dining room with a kitchen knife from the butcher block.
When that knife broke, he ran into the kitchen for a second
knife. When that knife broke, he ran back for a third
one.
During a forensic evaluation, he told a state psychiatrist
he stabbed her again and again "because he didn't know how many
times it took to kill somebody," Dehncke said.
Stacy's father
found her body in the dining room, along with bloody footprints
on the linoleum kitchen floor. Twenty minutes later, Martez was
playing a pickup football game with friends at school.
"It
rocked us pretty good," said Jackson Schools Superintendent Dan
Evans, who was middle school principal at the time. "Right away,
they didn't catch the kid. There was that interim period where
people were wondering who did it. There were a lot of kids and
parents who were full of fear. Teachers were full of fear."
And
there was the loss of Stacy, who was among the more popular
girls in school.
"She was just a wonderful gal, an All-American
kind of kid, loved by everybody," Evans said. Her father helped
coach her in basketball.
"Here's this honor student with all
these accolades, and she's here today and gone tomorrow," Evans
said.
The community donated $6,000 to the middle school band in
her name -- some of which was used to set up the Stacy Davis
scholarship fund for woodwind players. The band will use some of
the money to commission a musical piece written in her
memory.
"It keeps her name going," said Steve Brattain, senior
band director at the middle school.
'He doesn't have a
heart'
Martez, on the other hand, was a little bully who
admitted to breaking into a house and some cars, though he was
never arrested. His father was in prison for felonious assault,
and the boy was raised by his single mother, a former prison
guard who recently married.
At the end of the previous school
year, the boy's sixth-grade teacher asked Jackson schools to
send him to an alternative school due to his bad behavior. The
district allowed him to go to the middle school instead.
"His
mom came in and cried and said, 'Please give him a chance,'"
Evans said. And for the first eight days of school, Evans said,
"We felt it was the right choice."
Six days after the killing,
Jackson Police Detective Maurice Crawford was interviewing
students at the middle school when Martez walked into the
police-liaison office by mistake. Crawford noticed his Nike
shoes resembled the bloody footprints in the Davis home.
Police
searched Martez's home and found bloodied boxer shorts in a
grocery bag behind the garage and bloodied gym shorts in a
grocery bag in the basement.
At 13, Martez was a year too young
to be tried in adult court, but a 1997 state law allowed
prosecutors to try him as an adult in juvenile
court.
Prosecutors in Oakland County, near Detroit, used the
same law to try Nathaniel Abraham, who received national
attention at age 11 when he shot and killed a man. Unlike
Martez, whose case received little attention outside Jackson,
Nathaniel didn't go to prison.
Oakland County Probate Judge
Eugene Moore criticized the state for giving up too soon on
kids, then sentenced Nathaniel, by that time 14, to a juvenile
program. He must be released when he turns 21.
But Jackson
County prosecutors said such a sentence wasn't enough for
Martez.
"Martez Stewart is a much better example of when you
want to sentence someone as an adult," Dehncke said.
Standing in
front of the judge, Stacy's father demanded justice, slamming
down so hard on the courtroom's glass podium that he shattered
it.
"You can't give him a heart," he told the judge at
sentencing. "He doesn't have a heart."
After the murder, Jackson
County Prosecutor John McCain took sleeping pills so he could
sleep at night. "In my 14 years (as prosecutor), there's never
been a case that caused me to wake up in the middle of the night
in a cold sweat," he said. "I've got daughters myself."
He said
Martez never showed remorse.
"I think he will kill again. Would
you want that kid living next to you when he's 21, and now
5-foot-10 and 180 pounds? I think he needs to be in prison for
the rest of his life."
Martez pleaded guilty to open murder.
Probate Judge Susan Vandercook ruled it was second-degree murder
and sentenced him in July to life in prison, though he'll be
eligible for parole in 15 years.
Vandercook said a juvenile
sentence would have meant freedom in seven years.
"Is that
sufficient punishment in light of what he did?" she said. "And
what kind of message does that send to other 12-, 13-,
14-year-olds who might do the same thing? What he did was so
devastating to our community."
A blended sentence would have
left her with too many questions. After seven years of juvenile
programs, how could she know for sure that he wouldn't kill
again?
Prison, she said, was her only choice.
"I didn't send him
there because I thought it was a place he'd get the best
treatment," the judge said. "I knew he wouldn't get the same
type of treatment that he would in the juvenile system."
A
14-year-old settles in
At first, Martez caused few problems in
prison.
On Aug. 8, less than a month after he was sent to
prison, a 15-year-old cellmate at the Thumb Correctional Unit in
Lapeer accused Stewart of threatening to "kill him in his sleep
by cutting his throat with a razor blade," a major misconduct
report states.
An officer found a razor in Stewart's part of the
cell.
But a hearing officer found that the cellmate, serving
time for armed robbery in Saginaw County, wasn't getting along
with Stewart and made up the report.
Martez moved to the youth
prison three days later. Since then, he's received five major
misconduct tickets, most involving the same school teacher. He
bad-mouthed her once, turned her classroom lights off and on
another time, and was cited for sexual misconduct in January
while turning in his school work.
"He was throwing his sheets of
paper on my desk," the teacher wrote. "After he each, he said,
'I want a kiss for this. A hug for this.'" And then his language
deteriorated to include body parts.
Martez's mother, Michelle
Brown, and her husband, Willie Brown, said they visit the boy
once a month. He seems to be getting along fine in prison, they
said, but they refused to comment further.
Debra Gutierrez,
Martez's court-appointed attorney from the State Appellate
Defender Office, said prison records indicate he's taking
pre-GED classes but no counseling.
"It's kind of frightening
he's not getting any counseling," she said. "Depending on what
might have motivated him, possibly he could be rehabilitated, if
he gets counseling. Due to his youth, we owe it to him to try to
get him some counseling."
She's appealing the law that allowed
the state to try Martez as an adult. The appeal is
pending.
Meanwhile in Jackson, a woman who once coached Stacy in
basketball, and whose daughter was a pallbearer at the girl's
funeral, said she will attend parole hearings to make sure
Martez isn't set free.
"I know he's a child, but the Davises are
never going to get their daughter back," she said. "He took
something very, very precious."
* Sent from RemarQ http://www.remarq.com The Internet's Discussion Network *
The fastest and easiest way to search and participate in Usenet - Free!
Spectre
May 1, 2000, 3:00:00 AM5/1/00
to
The rat. Notice how we have second generation criminals coming
from their criminal father spawn.
And the black community is full of pre-criminal young negroe
timebombs waiting to go off.
from their criminal father spawn.
And the black community is full of pre-criminal young negroe
timebombs waiting to go off.
JJ Lipari
May 1, 2000, 3:00:00 AM5/1/00
to
Your first generation white savage criminal murderer friend richard
baumhammers just did a number in Pittsburgh and murdered 5 (FIVE) people.
Talk about a hell spawn caucasian savage.
JJ
Spectre <spectre...@pacbell.net.invalid> wrote in message
news:0d575695...@usw-ex0102-015.remarq.com...
baumhammers just did a number in Pittsburgh and murdered 5 (FIVE) people.
Talk about a hell spawn caucasian savage.
JJ
Spectre <spectre...@pacbell.net.invalid> wrote in message
news:0d575695...@usw-ex0102-015.remarq.com...
Dratster
May 1, 2000, 3:00:00 AM5/1/00
to
So what do we do? SHould we imprison the offspring of convicts before they
commit crime?
commit crime?
dratster
Roque
May 2, 2000, 3:00:00 AM5/2/00
to
Dratster <drat...@pacbell.net> wrote in message
news:390E084F...@pacbell.net...
> So what do we do? SHould we imprison the offspring of convicts before they
> commit crime?
No. Just castrate them at birth.
0 new messages