What Then Can Be Done?

"He's so peculiar and yet charming and a lost soul. It's hard not to get attached to him."
"He's going to get a significant amount of therapy. I hope he will face up to what he did and come out as undamaged as possible."
"He was born with a very troubled spirit, a lot of anger. He was unable to control his anger from the time he was tiny."
"He's been calling people racial names and referencing Hitler and Nazis. His response to situations that frustrate him is to respond with violent and aggressive conduct."
Michael Soccio, California State prosecutor

"It's clear he knows more than the average child about guns, hate and violence. This was not a naive little boy unaware to the ways of the world."
"This is an individual with exceptional needs."
Judge Jean Leonard

"This is a complete miscarriage of justice."
Punam Grewal, the accused's defence lawyer

He is now thirteen. Three years ago he held a .357 Magnum, taken from his parents' bedroom. He descended the stairs of his family home to approach his father, sleeping on a sofa, at 4:00 a.m.  Unlike most boys of ten, this one knew how to use firearms. His father would take him sometimes from their California home to the U.S.-Mexico border to practise shooting. He pointed the weapon at his sleeping father for a purpose. And he fulfilled that purpose.

Jeffrey Hall, his son, and his wife, at home; Jeffrey Hall's YouTube photos

A killer, at age ten. He had already distinguished himself as a boy given to violence. When he was half that age, he stabbed a teacher with a pencil. It was his first day in kindergarten. On another occasion he made an attempt to strangle another teacher, with a telephone cord. That night in May of 2011 his father was sleeping off a drunk. And his son shot him at point-blank range.

Children are known to be very sensitive about their home life suddenly undergoing radical change. As it would when parents decide to separate and/or divorce, and the child feels somehow responsible and fearful for their future. It seems that the boy informed investigators that he feared what would become of him, not knowing whether he would be left with his father or be given over to the care of a stepmother if the prospect of divorce became reality.

His father, Jeffrey Hall, was a region leader within the National Socialist Movement, his specialization being the organization of Nazi rallies in downtown Riverside, California. The boy's defence lawyer pointed out that the boy was routinely beaten by his father. Who might have been as perplexed and challenged as authorities are now about how to deal with his wayward son. The apple, to be sure, falls close to the tree that bore it; in all likelihood Jeffrey Hall wanted to control his son.

He did manage to inflict upon him the same vicious racist pathology that he himself suffered from. The boy doesn't appear to have been troubled by his father's bigotry and racial hatred; he learned to share it. His troubling incapacity to control his emotions of acting out rage resulting in violent outbreaks was evident when he attacked female teachers at the Riverside Juvenile Hall, while awaiting trial.

Premeditated murder would have earned him 40 years to life in prison if he had been an adult at the time he shot his father to death. As a juvenile he can be held until age 23, no longer. He was sentenced on a charge of second-degree murder, to be confined in a juvenile lockdown facility. He will be eligible for parole in seven years at least, depending on good behaviour.

Good behaviour is not in his emotional vocabulary. His defence wanted him to be installed in a residential treatment centre. How that might have worked out could be inferred logically by the fights he started with other students at the Riverside Juvenile Hall. Prosecutors agreed this was a tragic case, that the young boy had uncontrolled raging outbreaks even before his father became a white supremacist.

In seven years' time the thirteen-year-old -- with responsibility for the murder of his father ten years in his past -- will be an adult of twenty. If no remedial psychiatric treatments have been successful during his time in incarceration, he will represent as a still-troubled, violently dangerous man released to society. Veteran prosecutor Michael Soccio claims he plans to visit the boy to try to help him.

For the purpose of attempting to ensure that by the time he is released from prison and faces his future as an adult he will be "as undamaged as possible". How possible that is with a child already dreadfully damaged is anyone's guess. Which is quite the commitment. Quite the challenge, for a man to take to himself, obviously having been affected by the boy's plight; his inability to control the demons raging within, yet presenting as a child in need of understanding and support.

His lawyer, Punam Grewal, feels the punishment that Judge Leonard thoughtfully felt she had no option but to impose upon her young client, takes exception to what she considers harsh confinement. As the youngest prisoner in the juvenile system his education would default since there is no tutoring for middle school available at the facility. That being so, is there adequate availability of psychiatric counselling?

"Are things going to get better?", she relates he anxiously questioned her, two days before his sentencing. The state and county juvenile lockups have evidently left him feeling vulnerable, so much younger than other incarcerants. "They will [get better], but not right now", she had assured him. But will they? As starkly dreadful as his crime was, this child-with-a-dangerously-short-fuse will be exposed to older juveniles who may be psychopaths in far worse shape than himself.

And what happens in seven years' time when this child-turned-adult, who seems not to fully appreciate the crime he has committed, is set loose on society?