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Above: Bill Everett Top: Edwin Debrow Jr.

Not to actually robbing the only bank in the tough little town of Mingus. In their quest for drug money, he and a buddy had forgotten that the inner doors of the bank were always locked. When the teller refused to let them in, they ran off. The teller wasn't even sure it was an attempted robbery, but she called the local constable anyway, and the law found Bill Everett.

He'd come to Texas running from, in order, an abusive father, a series of foster homes, and a string of petty crimes. He'd come looking for his mother, but what he found was a home in the prison system -- not TYC, but adult prison since, just turned 17, he was considered an adult under Texas law. And it was in prison that he found a mother figure and the commitment to help him turn his life around.

Debrow: I knew I was headed in the wrong direction. ... I grew up in San Antonio, Texas in one of San Antonio's poorest neighborhoods. The environment that I was surrounded by seemed too dangerous and I began to get involved into that lifestyle. Back then I could never see my life the way it is now. I could never believe that I would end up in prison. My life took a dramatic turn on September 21, 1991, when I took the life of a cab driver by the name of Curtis Edwards, when I was a 12-year-old kid. I can't seem to understand why I became so violent.

By the age of 12, Edwin Carl Debrow Jr. had witnessed two murders, carried handguns for so long that "the idea of it was very routine," and stayed in a succession of shabby homes where life included having the door busted down by cops as his big brother gulped down $200 worth of crack cocaine in the bathroom.

Psychiatrists and social workers have affixed to him their profession's labels -- antisocial personality disorder, bipolar disorder, impulse control disorder -- and dosed him with an array of drugs -- anything to strangle the "hate built up inside" him.

But this isn't really about nature vs. nurture or fuzzy sentimentalities about the loss of innocence.

Edwin Carl Debrow Jr. isn't having any of it. You toss him a plausible way to shift some blame, and he throws it right back. "I knew right and wrong," he says, repeating the statement several times in an interview and in his own words scrawled on wrinkled theme paper in a 190-page manuscript. Even the title slaps down any urge to sympathize: He has scratched out "Lost Boy" and written "12-year-old Killer" instead.

Debrow is hunched in a plastic chair in an airless, yellow-lit office inside the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Clemens Unit in Amarillo, his hands shackled behind him, a guard at each side. His misdeeds have earned him a spot in the prison's administrative segregation unit, which means he experiences life outside his cell only one hour a day, and gets his meals shoved through a slot in the door. Now 22 and 10 years into a 27-year sentence for murder, he has learned to hold his emotions tightly. He speaks in flat, staccato words, and the only thing that gives away any affect is a constantly jiggling left knee.

He has never told his story before, he says, but now is the time. He clears up a few things right up front: He doesn't blame his mama, even though two of her three sons are convicted murderers and all are in prison; he doesn't blame his daddy. He understands the bit about taking responsibility for his crime. He believes his sentence is fair.

On the other hand, he has a hard time expressing remorse. The "saddest" part of his story, he writes, is not his victim's suffering, but the loss of his freedom; the need to kill is just "reality." In the TYC, he boasts, his brutal behavior made him a "celebrity inmate."

He will say matter-of-factly that every adult in the outside world has let him down, and in many ways he is right. He ends his manuscript with a retort to them, the "fakers and shakers" of the world.

But Edwin Debrow Jr. draws no moral from his tale. He knew right and wrong, and he chose one and not the other.

My grades in school were good but my behavior always seemed to be the problem. I couldn't understand why I was so rebellious and why I defied authority. I was put into a Special Ed. Class because I was labeled emotionally disturbed. I totally disagreed with that label but as I got older I knew something was terribly wrong. ... I felt like I was being treated like an outkast or something. ... I kept up my assaultive behavior and was finally kicked out of the San Antonio Independent School District and was told that I would have to attend an Achievement Center. I hated this school because a yellow bus had to pick me up. ... I thought the yellow bus was for retarded people.

He strains for memories of his early childhood, but nothing comes. It takes his cousin and childhood running buddy, Morris Dwayne Debrow, to locate the tracks of that earlier, forgotten life. Dwayne remembers a "hard life, a real hard life." He sees a one-room house on San Antonio's East Side, home of Seletha Ann Chase Debrow. Her husband, Edwin Debrow Sr., is gone; the tiny house is swarming with children, including young Edwin, whom everyone called Li'l Boo. Seletha Debrow would eventually rear seven children, mostly on her own. "There wasn't nobody there for 'em," Dwayne says. "Everybody in the family turned 'em down."

And not without reason. Edwin Debrow Sr. says he left his wife when he found out she was "an intravenous drug user." In the best of times, Dwayne says, Seletha barely held the edges of her life together. When she was on drugs, the edges would burst apart. Sometimes she was there for her children; sometimes she wasn't. Sometimes the children went hungry. When there was food, it was poor-folks' fare: cornbread, beans, lots and lots of beans. Every time Li'l Boo came over to Dwayne's house, he was hungry. Hungry. Dwayne's parents gave him good food and glimpses of a stable home.

Seletha Debrow didn't show up for a scheduled interview for this story, but court records and the recollections of other family members fill in the picture. At times, she and the children lived in shelters. Dwayne and his cousin roamed the streets of the East Side, trolling for excitement. Dwayne played along when Edwin Dumpster-dived for aluminum cans, which he'd sell. For Edwin "that was something for the house -- bread, meat." He'd also buy snacks for his brothers and sisters, and candy. Edwin loved candy.

At some point, Edwin moved to the East Terrace housing project. There, every Sunday morning, the little kids herded onto what they called the "Joy Joy" bus and bounced along to church, where they got a hearty breakfast of biscuits and sausage. That down-home church had a simple take on keeping the kids out of trouble: Lock 'em in at 10 a.m. and let 'em out after the sun goes down. Outside, temptation was all around, especially in the form of gangs.

When Dwayne was 10 and Edwin about 9, their lives took separate turns. One day Dwayne, hearing fussing outside his apartment, stepped out of his door and ended up shot in the head, a casualty of a domestic fight. Dwayne spent several weeks in the hospital, and it "slowed me down a lot," pulled him off the streets. To this day, the bullet is still lodged behind his optic nerve. This was the heyday of crack cocaine -- the crack apocalypse --'91, '92, '93, when violent crime rates soared and murder statistics in cities such as Dallas and San Antonio set records. After the shooting, Dwayne's mother kept her son away from it. Her stern voice still rings in his ears.

Edwin didn't hear that voice. His mother whupped his tail from time to time, he says, taught him to respect his elders, but with a household of eight to look after and her own criminal problems, the supervision was spread pretty thin.

Edwin would spend a few months with his father here and there, and during those times his schoolteachers noticed cleaner clothes, a better attitude. "I work hard, I take care of my children," Debrow said angrily when told that some family members questioned his commitment to his oldest son. Early on, Edwin and his siblings also lived for a time with their grandmother, Erma Debrow, while Seletha, she says, "was kind of running the streets." Even then, she figured that the children's futures were dim.

She was right. All of Seletha's boys are locked up in state or federal prison today. Erma Debrow doesn't consider that a coincidence. "Hello," she says. "Hello."

Her grandson Dwayne, though, points the finger at both parents. "No food. No house. In the rain," he says, summing up Edwin's childhood. "Always listening to his mama argue, knowing she's on drugs, and the dad is not there." Edwin's father is Dwayne's uncle, and he apologizes for the harsh words. "If anything, people kind of blamed the mother. But I always thought, well, where was his father?"

That left Edwin free to "rip and run" -- and here his memories become thick.

It's Bill Everett's earliest memory; he was nearly 3. In the bedroom of the little house trailer, his mother is reaching into the curio cabinet. "I'm sittin' on that bed and she's got a bag open in front of me, and she's putting all her jewelry and knickknacks in it--little porcelain dolls, little crystal figurines."

Soon afterward, Mom took her three kids and unloaded them at a neighbor lady's house. She kept the bag. She never came back.

That left Dad alone with three kids in a small town north of Santa Fe, N.M. Bad, bad combination.

Dad hit the kids. Smacked them, belted them, threw things, clobbered them with whatever was handy: a dog collar, or the metal crutch he bent when he used it over his daughter's back as she crouched in her closet. "He'd just go into this blind rage," says Jennifer Martinez, Everett's 27-year-old sister. "It was never something you did. He was mad about something else, and he'd just go off."

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