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Prosecutor Leticia Cortez

To this day, Everett says, he doesn't know exactly why he told the truth the morning he got that cold steel wake-up call. Truth certainly wasn't his habit; he had a long, glorious past of knitting elaborate untruths. "Attack of conscience, honesty, God, I don't know what," Everett says. But he confessed. They were trying to rob the bank. And they had had a gun, tucked in his buddy's waistband. No one at the bank ever saw it, and the sheriff wouldn't have known about it had he not mentioned it, but its existence upped the charge to attempted aggravated robbery.

Debrow: I got involved with guns and having a gun in my possession made me feel powerful. The feeling of power excited me and I wanted very much to be in control of all situations.

I began to jack people for their money and one time I had to shoot a man because he refused to give me his money. I knew that if a person refused to give up the money then I would have to do what was necessary to get it even if it resulted in me taking another human beings life.

One night, Debrow and a buddy picked as their target a white man who'd just bought drugs. But when the man grabbed a crowbar and Debrow's buddy started backing down, Debrow says he grabbed the gun.

The man started to walk up these steps that led to this house. I told him not to move anymore and if he did I was gonna shoot him. He took one more step so I shot him in the back and he fell and crawled into the house so I ran in there after him to finish him off because he had seen my face. When I got inside the doorway to the house I seen around 8 to 10 little black kids so I immediately took off running. I didn't know if he died or not.

I was now leading a dangerous life and my life took an unexpected turn.

On the night of Sept. 21, 1991, on the eastside of San Antonio I killed a cabdriver by the name of Curtis Edwards. I shot him in the back of the head with a 38 caliber handgun at close range.

On this particular night I had been drinking Thunderbird with grape cool-aid and also drinking night train and Mad Dog 20/20. I also smoked a few joints and I was feeling pretty good. I went to this man's house who was suppose to be my uncle. His name was Floyd.

As Debrow tells it, Hardeman suggested robbing the cab driver. When the taxi arrived, they both got in, Debrow sitting behind the driver, his .38 caliber handgun beneath his untucked shirt.

As the cab driver started driving I pulled out the gun and demanded that he give me the money. He refused and instead started driving fast. I shot him in the back of the head while he was driving and the car wrecked into a house. My head was fractured.

Debrow wobbled away from the wreck. A friend's father found him, and eventually he got to the hospital, where he was treated for head injuries. A day after he left the hospital, the police were waiting with questions.

In the early-morning hours, Arthur and Jessie Mae Edwards received a call from the cops; their son Curtis, a grade-school football coach, father of one, a generous man who loved kids and sometimes drove a cab, had been involved in a car accident. They jumped out of bed and raced to the scene of the wreck, arriving in time for Arthur Edwards to identify the body of his son, dead at 33 of a close-range gunshot wound to the back of the head. Ironically, he had been a classmate of Edwin Debrow's father.

While Curtis Edwards' parents were mourning their son, Edwin Debrow Jr., just released from the hospital, was staying close to his mother's side. He even went to work with her that night. At the age of 12 and in the deepest trouble he'd ever been in, Edwin's written recollections speak of bravado -- and a 12-year-old's inability to predict consequences.

He figured the cops would never get him, because they had no evidence. He'd apparently forgotten that he'd left a few things behind that night: a steel six-shooter and a single black tennis shoe, wedged between the back seat and the car door.

The prosecutor tried very hard to prove their case. I learned that they didn't have no pity for a criminal. ... I should of just jumped up and said I'm guilty because I knew that I would be found guilty. They made me look like a 12 year old monster or something. ...

My mother was seated right across from me and after they said I was sentenced to 27 years my mother broke down uncontrollably. She began to cry and the sight of that saddened me deeply. I never wanted to see my mother go through so much pain.

I wasn't scared to go to jail. What bothered me was that I would miss my family and my friends. ... Another thought troubled me also. Knowing that I would never get a chance to spend one day of my teenage life in the free world. That was the saddest part of it all.

Every night of the trial, Sandra Castro-Guerra came home sick. Her fellow jurors in the February 1992 trial had chosen the poised 34-year-old nurse as forewoman, a job no one else wanted.

What caused the bouts of retching was the sight of that "tiny, tiny" boy in the courtroom, betraying not a trace of emotion. "Why is he not acting like a 12-year-old boy?" Castro-Guerra would ask herself. "He didn't show anything--just a blank stare. Like show me a sign of something; show me you're sorry."

Debrow probably wouldn't have been caught had he not bragged to hospital employees about committing some sort of crime.

Witness after witness told similar stories -- recollections that Debrow says are lies. Robert Duncan, a security officer at Southeast Baptist Hospital, said he was called up one night to corral a kid who was running wild through the hospital corridors. When Duncan got there, Debrow was sitting quietly, but he was still cocky. "He said that he had already killed one person," Duncan said, "and that he wasn't scared of me because I had a gun."

Other hospital workers told about Debrow's bizarre attempts to get them to talk about a recent murder. Linda Garcia, a nursing supervisor, testified that Debrow smiled the entire time as they chatted: "Tell me, tell me, tell me about the murder this weekend," he begged.

Someone tipped off San Antonio police, who made the connection with Edwards' murder. Police searched Debrow's house and seized evidence: a dirty sweatshirt later found to be stained with Edwards' blood and a single Troop Club sneaker, size 8 1/2, the precise match of the one found in the back of the wrecked taxicab. Police arrested Debrow at his home a day after he got out of the hospital.

At trial, Debrow's court-appointed lawyer, Andy Logan, tried to shift some of the focus to the boy's much older accomplice -- paroled murderer Hardeman, who was later convicted of aggravated robbery in the Edwards case. Nonetheless, Debrow's jurors needed only 75 minutes of deliberation before answering "true" to the question of murder.

Jurors and prosecutors noted Debrow's cold demeanor. What was left inside him would only come out later, the boy wrote, when he went back to his cell and cried and cried.

In the sentencing phase, jurors finally heard about Debrow's messy family life, his scant schooling, the utter lack of effective adult supervision. Teachers from the "achievement center" he'd hated spoke fondly of a bright boy, a teacher's pet who responded well to structure and was quick to help the other kids. But sparing words about a boy's potential were overwhelmed by four days of testimony about his past. The jury sentenced Edwin Debrow Jr. to 27 years.

Under the state's determinate sentencing law, a boy such as Debrow could be sent to the Texas Youth Commission until he was 18, and, after a court hearing to assess his progress in rehabilitation, could be released on parole, retained at TYC until he was 21, or sent to adult prison to continue his sentence. At the time, Debrow was the youngest person ever to be charged with murder in Bexar County.

Juror Scott Moore, 24, a grocery clerk, couldn't muster any empathy for Debrow. But he hoped some time in TYC would teach the boy some lessons. Others had few illusions about TYC's likely success at rehabilitation.

Debrow's father put it more bluntly: "How can you take a 12-year-old and throw him in with a pack of wolves and expect him to come out a sheep five years down the line?"

An adult in the eyes of the law, Bill Everett knew TYC was never even an option. He got eight years in prison. So far, he's managed to avoid being either wolf or wolf bait. He's pulled it off in part because he's a big guy, some 200 pounds. But it's also happened in part because of something he carried with him besides weight -- his Christianity, adopted the night of the robbery, when his girlfriend's father took him aside and told him it was time to get his life straightened out. Everett knew it was time. "I was relieved," he says. "But I knew in my heart that I was still going to the penitentiary.

"I've been running all my life; I'm tired of running," he says. "I even called my dad when I was locked up, and I told him, 'Don't even bail me out, don't do nothing. I'm going to sit this one out.' " He figures going to prison has been a good thing for him.

He credits three things for the apparent turnaround he has accomplished since the doors closed on him in 1999: his newfound faith, the fact he's in prison at all, and "Miss Coates."

Psychologist Diana Coates was his mentor in TDCJ's Youthful Offender Program. The program is the typical destination of young, low-security inmates. It's set up as a "therapeutic community," and its staff ushers the young men (and women, at the Hilltop Unit in Gatesville) through a packed schedule of school, therapy, and trade instruction. In Brazoria, the program led by Coates has a personal touch and hopeful attitude not found in the wider prison system. Coates got all over Everett for his lying, manipulative ways. Despite his brutal upbringing, she refused to let him shunt the blame. "She has helped me in ways you could never imagine," Everett says. "She has been, to me, a mother figure I could respect and learn from when I needed just that in my life. There's still things I've got to work on, like I have a bad attitude sometimes. But I really think I hold a record in the penitentiary, 'cause I've been locked up three years and I haven't been in a fight yet."

No doubt, somewhere inside Edwin Debrow Jr. was a boy who once wanted to please, who responded to discipline and kindness. In TYC, he says, he fell in love with a middle-aged teacher --neither uncommon nor a particularly lofty emotion in a place where young men behave as though they are mainlining testosterone.NEXT »

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