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Todd Henry's death in a Tyler classroom last September was a predictable horror story.
Cops and educators, judges and doctors, counselors and prison guards shuffled a throwaway kid named Byron through institution after institution until he buried a butcher knife in the special education teacher's chest.
Even Henry saw it coming, saying weeks before he died that a kid in his class was going to kill someone. Describing the voices that told him to kill, Byron told a psychologist last month: "People already knew that something was going to happen like this."
Long before the classroom killing, state and local agencies exhaustively documented the 17-year-old's descent into madness and violence.
At 9, Byron tried to stab his brother. At 13, he brought a knife to school, fought without provocation and choked a child on a school bus. At 14, he chased his brother with a meat cleaver. Months later, he stabbed his younger sister in the back with a steak knife.
In a Texas Youth Commission juvenile prison, Byron repeatedly attacked guards and other inmates and was caught with razor shards in his cell. After his arrest on murder charges at 16, Byron taunted juvenile jail guards, saying he could kill them if he felt like it. This spring, he was caught pocketing a plastic knife in a mental hospital.
Yet bureaucrat after bureaucrat seemed bent on making a deranged child someone else's problem. Byron was pushed from school to treatment center to prison and back in a pattern that, on paper, looks like treatment by transfer.
"He hasn't just fallen through the cracks. The system keeps throwing him through the cracks," Huggler said. "Everything set up to prevent what happened to Mr. Henry was broken."
Experts say such disconnects are sadly common. The head of a Michigan juvenile agency recently told Congress that the problem of juvenile offenders getting little coordinated care until they commit horrific crimes is "the hidden secret that nobody wants to talk about."
Experts who reviewed Byron's history for The Dallas Morning News say the lack of consistency in his care and the absence of information sharing were like throwing gasoline on a fire.
The News examined 7,000 pages of Byron's records to understand what led to the killing. Byron's mother allowed access to files from schools, mental health clinics and hospitals, and juvenile agencies. Byron's family name isn't being used because he is still considered a juvenile in the court system.
His mother declined to be interviewed for this story.
The agency forms, memos and reports a five-foot pile of paper that weighs 70 pounds trace a descent into chaos.
Dangerous Texas teen shuffled from jail to clinics to class, and then a teacher was stabbed to death | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Texas Regional News