The boy knew rage. A troublemaking, dope-smoking misfit, "Brad" was in and out of trouble with the law, and more in than out. He ran away from home, stayed out all night, stole. Then there were the fits of blinding anger, a symptom of his bipolar disorder. Doctors prescribed medication, but pills only work when you take them. He didn't, and one night in July 1999, when he was 16, Brad became furious when his grandmother threatened to kick him out of her Garland home after he stayed out all night at a party. He smashed up her living room using a wrought iron chair, then chased her outside, dragged her by her legs across the lawn, and held her hostage in her home until police arrived and arrested him.

It was the latest in a string of increasingly violent episodes, but his grandmother, though shaken, still hoped that someone, anyone, could help her grandson.

"It went from bad to worse. I was at my wits' end. I was so overwrought. I just simply didn't know what to do. If I said he couldn't do something, he simply got out a knife and would do like this," the slight woman says, waving her hand back and forth as if grasping a knife.

Help came in the form of confinement to a juvenile "boot camp" run by Correctional Services Corp., a private company that manages two Dallas County juvenile facilities.

Sent to CSC's program for emotionally disturbed youths in southern Dallas, Brad quickly deteriorated. At one point, he became so emotionally strung out in the camp's isolation unit that director Thomas Brown, flummoxed about what to do with the inconsolable boy, called his grandmother and asked her to come down.

"I just held him in my arms for two hours," the gray-haired 70-year-old woman recalls.

Privately, the boy's group counselor told his grandmother, "I am not qualified. I do not have the education. He needs more than I can give him."   NEXT »

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