On a cool September night in 1995, as he took his blind dog, Prissy, for a walk in his quiet Fort Worth neighborhood near Ridglea Country Club, Woodrow Willard Pratt's peaceful upper-middle-class life came to an unthinkably violent end. Hit by a single blast from a 12-gauge shotgun as he fled an attempted robbery that had come to naught, he was left to bleed to death where he fell. He was 63.

A motorist saw the beam from Pratt's flashlight and found him face down on the asphalt, but it was too late. His ill wife, Susan, who had set out to look for him when he didn't return, followed the lights from the emergency vehicles to the place where he lay dead, still guarded by their dog. "There was tremendous bleeding.... He did not die instantaneously," Tarrant County Medical Examiner Nizam Peerwani would testify later. Pratt's murder shocked the city not only by its abject cruelty and senselessness -- the gunman bragged that he shot Pratt because he didn't think to carry his wallet as he walked his dog that night -- but also by the ages of his three attackers: 14, 15, and 16.

The youngest, Robert Valle Jr., was in the back seat of the car that night when the three, high on alcohol and marijuana, spotted Pratt and decided to rob him. "Little Robert," a solidly built, muscular kid, jumped out of the car, ran up to the older man, hit him, kicked him, and knocked him down. When he discovered that Pratt had nothing of value, he got back in the car, told his 16-year-old relative, "Big Robert" Valle, that the man didn't have any money, and said, "Let's go."

The third teen, Ellex Arevalo, who was driving the car, later claimed that both he and Little Robert urged the older teen to "come on, let's go." Big Robert's response was, "Fuck that."

The 16-year-old jumped out with the shotgun, took aim at Pratt, who was now running for his life, and shot him in the back. By then, Little Robert said, he was out of the car and running in the opposite direction.

The two older boys, tough-acting gang members with prior records, stood trial as adults in a criminal court and went to prison. Valle Jr., who had just turned 14 and had never been in trouble before, was convicted of capital murder by a juvenile court jury under a provision in the Texas Family Code known as "determinate sentencing." The sentencing program, first created in 1987 for juvenile murderers and rapists, was expanded in 1996 to encompass nearly two dozen felonies. Under the law, young criminals spend a minimum determined amount of time at a Texas Youth Commission facility after which judges have the option of sending the offender to an adult prison following his or her 16th birthday without going through a criminal trial. Prior to 1996, the age of transfer was 18.

In 1995, Valle and his jury were assured that by his 18th birthday, if he had proved to TYC's satisfaction that he could turn his life around, he would not be transferred to a state prison. As he approached that magic date, the youngster had become a poster boy for the youth agency's rehabilitation programs.   NEXT »

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