From a jail cell in the basement of Milwaukee County Children’s Court Center, an armed sheriff’s deputy led Marlin and Don Dixon upstairs into Courtroom 1410. The boys, Marlin, 14, and Don, 13, had been charged as adults with first-degree reckless homicide, two in a mob of 15 arrested for the beating death of Charles Young Jr. The defendants, ranging in age from 10 to 32, were accused of committing unthinkable acts, acts that, due to their brutality and the ages of those who carried them out, sent swells of shock and anger through the community and beyond.
On this first day of November, exactly one month after Charlie Young’s death, the Dixon brothers had been ordered to appear before Circuit Judge Christopher Foley. Instead of cracking open a textbook or taking jump shots on a playground basketball court, the boys would hear the testimony of Milwaukee County Medical Examiner Jeffrey Jentzen. Dr. Jentzen would explain with horrific specificity how repeated blows to Young’s head tore apart his corpus collosum and nearly split his brain in half.
Dressed in crimson sweatshirts, khaki pants and laceless canvas-top shoes, each brother sat at a table next to his court-appointed defense attorney. Marlin Anthony Dixon stared emptily at the wall ahead. His appearance – and life experiences – belied his age. He is taller than most of his peers, possessing the sure comportment of a boy turned man. Though just 14 when he was arrested, Marlin is the father of a baby daughter and the son of a father who contributed his surname but was miserly in his affection.
Don James Dixon, or “DJ,” fidgeted in his chair, softly drumming his fingers on the wooden table. DJ is 15 months younger than his brother and noticeably more child-like, standing 5 foot 3 inches to Marlin’s 6 feet. As he awaited the coroner’s testimony, he surveyed the courtroom side to side with a wide-eyed and careless gawk.
Seated against the back wall of the courtroom, the boys’ mother, 47-year-old Doris Williams, smiled faintly at Don. She was almost cheerful, buoyed by the presence of her sister and in-laws, family from which she had been estranged for years. At her side was one of her seven children, 18-year-old daughter Tezra, soon to have her second baby.
But as the testimony began, Doris’ mood visibly changed.
Reading from an autopsy report, Jentzen described the condition of Charlie Young’s battered corpse. Abrasions to the forehead. A four-inch vertical laceration along the right side of the face. Partial amputation of the left ear. A crushing injury to the left back area. Bruises to the left forearm and left hand. Bruises and contusions to the lower left leg and left thigh. Contusions to the brain stem. Sheet-like hemorrhaging on the left side of the scalp. An expansive contusion at the crown of the head. A tearing of the tissue that joins the two halves of the brain.
“He died,” said Jentzen, “as a result of closed-head injuries relating to blunt force trauma to the head,” consistent, he added, with the force of a blow from a broomstick, a two-by-four, a branch, the wooden handle of a rake or the steel blade of a shovel – all confiscated by police near the crime scene.
Based on his knowledge of medical science, Dr. Jentzen explained with precision and authority how Charlie Young died. But unexplained, and maybe inexplicable, was the more problematic question: Why?
The medical examiner stepped down and a clumsy silence filled the courtroom, reflected discreetly on the faces of those in the room as outrage, shame, embarrassment, pity – as if no one knew what to make of these recent events and those who were involved.
Marlin sat trance-like at his lawyer’s side, Don frowned quizzically and shook his head and the boys’ mother dipped her chin into her hand and closed her eyes.
Doris Williams has lived in Milwaukee all of her life. She was born the 10th of 12 children – seven boys and five girls. Her father was a trash collector for the city; he died from cancer when Doris was 8. To provide for her family, her mother cleaned houses and collected welfare off and on.
Anthony Dixon, Marlin and Don’s father, was one of 10 children. His father worked as a junkman. His mother died shortly after giving birth to twins when Anthony was just 3. Following her death, Tony and his siblings were split up and placed into different foster homes. Tony lived with a minister and his wife for most of his childhood.
Doris Williams met Tony Dixon when she was 9 and he was 10. They went to the same school and lived in the same neighborhood, near 10th and Locust.
Tony quit school after 10th grade. When he was 14, he found a job as a meat cutter, working his way up to journeyman butcher at Kohl’s Food Stores and Patrick Cudahy. He also was known to be a talented cook.
Doris graduated from North Division High School in 1974. “My mother, she was real strict on us girls,” says Doris, “to keep us out of trouble, away from the boys.”
She moved out of her mother’s home when she was 22 and soon after had a child, a daughter, by another man. Doris and Tony began living together and a few years later had their first child. With five more children to come, the Dixons became a family of two girls and five boys. Marlin and Don were the first-born sons.
Doris and Tony never married, and Tony became an intermittent father. “Some days he had time for the kids, some days he didn’t,” says Doris.
Doris received Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) over the years, and when W-2 kicked in, found work as a housekeeper. Three years ago, she finished training to become a certified nurse’s aid.
“I stayed at home with my kids until they all got old enough to go to school,” she says. Her youngest child is now 10.
Doris keeps to herself. “I don’t like hangin’ out,” she says. She’s distant from her own siblings. When her sons were arrested, none of her sisters or brothers accompanied her to court.
Over the years, Doris has moved with her children from address to address, partly to separate herself from Tony, who beat her “many times,” she says, sometimes in front of their children. “He beat my face in,” says Doris, once cracking a cheek bone.
In December 1992, Tony was arrested for battery after punching Doris “numerous times in the face with a closed fist,” according to court records. But she refused to testify and the charges were dropped.
In September 1994, Tony attacked her again, pushing her head into a wall, hitting her in the stomach and threatening to kill her as he covered her mouth with his hand so she couldn’t scream, say court documents. A judge granted her a temporary restraining order to keep him away.
But nine months later, she was forced to file for a restraining order again when he came at her in her home, hitting her in the mouth and head.
“It stopped that last time he jumped on me. I was literally thinking about taking his life,” says Doris.
For years, Tony struggled with a heroin addiction. In 1997, he was arrested for possession at a Milwaukee drug house. Two and a half years later, he was stabbed to death on the sidewalk outside a methadone clinic.
Judge Christopher Foley would like you to sit in his courtroom for a week, for a day, even just an hour. He’d like you to see the kids that pass through Children’s Court.
“The perception is these kids are little monsters,” says Foley. “And sometimes they are, sadly enough. Kids can do terrible things. But sometimes you get kids who are not monsters. The values of the streets jump up and grab their souls, and getting them back is a very difficult proposition.”
Foley is the presiding judge of Milwaukee County Children’s Court. He has been at the Watertown Plank Road complex nearly 13 years and has seen thousands of cases, some of the worst – the 13-year-old girl who murdered the Ameritech repairman, the 16-year-old boy who blew the head off a woman in the parking lot of Popeyes Chicken.
But among the monsters, he’s seen salvageable children, too.
“The simple answer for me has been, and forever will be, family,” says Foley. “If you’re looking for a smarter answer, I don’t have one. Children live what they learn. As long as you have a family, you have a chance with a kid. But I’m no Father Flanagan. If you don’t have family, you don’t have much to work with.”
To rescue a child from a life of crime, the child must connect with a caring adult – if not a parent, then an older brother, a teacher, a coach, a lawyer, a judge.
Foley himself regularly plays basketball with kids he once sent to prison. He brings juvenile offenders into his Wauwatosa home for dinners with his wife and their seven kids.
But, as he says, he’s no Father Flanagan.
“I’m busting my ass to solve these problems, doing what I can,” says the judge. “But the community’s got to step up, too.”
Minutes past midnight on the last day of September, a City of Milwaukee ambulance lurched to a stop at 2021 N. 21st Ln. on the near North Side. Paramedics found 36-year-old Charlie Young Jr. lying face down on the porch, unconscious, struggling to breathe.
As the first on the scene, the paramedics initially thought Young had been shot in the head, judging by the large, dark wound to the crown of his skull. Considering the drying blood pooled on the porch and splattered on the exterior walls, ceiling, sidewalk and a nearby car, they also surmised that Young had been lying there for quite some time.
As police pulled up, Young was lifted onto a stretcher and transported to Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital, where he was placed on life support in the neurointensive care unit. He was brain dead.
An hour and a half earlier, Marlin and Don Dixon were returning to their home on Vine Street, six blocks away. The boys were late. Their mother, Doris Williams, had expected them in the house by 9 p.m. and had been outside looking for them. When they finally walked in around 10:30 p.m., she was getting ready to leave for her third-shift job at a Glendale health center.
Marlin’s mouth was bleeding and she stopped to take a look. Somebody had punched him and knocked out a tooth, he told her. “Can you take me to the hospital?”
“I’ve gotta get to work. I’ll take you tomorrow,” said his mother. “Who was it that hit you?”
“This older guy,” he said, “guy called June.”
Doris went to work, leaving the boys in the care of their older sister. As she walked out of the house, Marlin went upstairs to his bedroom and stashed a pair of blood-spattered Nike Air Max basketball shoes in his closet.
His brother, meanwhile, had already ditched his shoes, lifting a manhole cover on Lloyd Street and dropping his bloodied Rockport sneakers into the hole below.
Police recovered both pairs of shoes the next day.
It’s not hard to make judg-ments, not to be shocked and angered by the savagery of Charlie Young’s attackers.
“But in these situations, a sense of normalcy doesn’t exist,” says Milwaukee Ald. Fred Gordon, who represents the neighborhood where Young was attacked. Institutional role models, parental discipline, a rigid curfew, a daily homework regimen, regular family meals – “these kids haven’t had those normalcies.”
With little else to guide them, teens will follow the code of the streets, dependent on survival instincts, swayed by older peers, drawn into conduct they think will make them look tough and hard and real.
“The need to belong becomes paramount,” says Gordon. “They’re emulating what they see older kids do. They go along to get along and they get caught up in events. It’s spontaneous, it’s visceral, it’s violent.”
Frequently, the father figure is tangential or out of the picture altogether – living elsewhere or crippled by drugs and alcohol or locked up in prison or dead. In the father’s absence, the role of family head shifts to an older sibling or grandparent or single mother who struggles to support her children and sometimes her children’s children.
“There is a culture of poverty that has developed over the last 30 or 40 years,” says Gordon, exacerbated today by substandard schools and the state’s W-2 program, which pulled away the safety net for some families.
How can that cycle of poverty, of rootlessness be broken? “That’s the $100,000 question,” he says. Too often intervention comes too late – when a young offender is placed in the back of a police car or led into a courtroom.
Gordon and his sister were raised in Milwaukee without a father by their mother and grandmother. Through discipline and an emphasis on education, the women brought order and stability to their lives, he says. His family moved just three times in his childhood, a notable contrast to some central city families who live hand to mouth, moving month to month, children transferring from school to school.
In April 2001, the father of Marlin and Don Dixon was admitted to the trauma unit at Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital with a stab wound to his chest. Tony Dixon’s clavicular artery and all of the nerves to his right arm were severed. Surgeons successfully repaired the lacerated artery, but he continued to bleed out.
Tony had been stabbed at the methadone clinic at 27th Street and Atkinson Avenue. Paramedics found two hypodermic needles and a heroin kit in his wallet.
According to police reports, he had argued with 51-year-old Edward Barnes on the sidewalk outside the clinic.
“I believe you’re the guy who broke all the windows out of my car,” Tony yelled as he stamped toward Barnes. “Bitch, you broke my windows!”
Witnesses told police Tony punched Barnes in the chin and knocked him to the pavement. As Barnes lay on the ground, Tony kicked him in the back and stomped on his face.
“Stop it! You’re killing that man,” shouted a woman who worked in a hair salon nearby.
Tony backed away. But as Barnes got up from the sidewalk and stumbled toward the clinic, Tony came at him again. According to police, Barnes pulled a penknife from his pocket and stabbed Tony once in the chest.
“Don’t f— with me no more,” Barnes hollered.
Anthony Dixon died on April 23, 2001 from renal failure and pulmonary difficulties due to the stabbing. He was 46. His teenage daughter was called to the county morgue to identify the body.
Barnes pleaded guilty to homicide by negligent handling of a dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to seven months in the House of Corrections, seven years of probation and 200 hours of community service.
In 1989, Cleo and Donel Bost opened one of the city’s first after-school programs, the Northwest Training and Resource Center. Last year, Cleo was awarded the YMCA’s Strong Kids Award for her contributions to the community. But the center closed soon after when it lost its state funding.
Both in their late 60s, the Bosts are a proud couple. They raised five children – one is a Milwaukee police officer – and took in more than 75 foster children over the years, says Cleo. They’ve seen what violence can do to their community and to their own family. One of the Bosts’ grandsons was shot to death in 1995, his body discovered in a burning garage.
Donel Bost is the great uncle of the Dixon brothers; Don, in fact, was named for him. Donel was the uncle and a mentor to the boy’s father, Tony Dixon. But he lost track of Tony and never really met his sons until the day the Dixon children gathered at the hospital when their father was stabbed.
Still, the Bosts are related to Marlin and Don and visited them in jail after their arrest.
“They didn’t have a man in the house, that’s the reason why those boys had to try to obtain their manhood by themselves,” says Donel. “They wanted to be wanted. They wanted to be part of something.”
The Bosts fear for the younger generation.
“The dope man’s looking for these kids,” says Donel. “And as soon as mama’s out the front door going to work, he’s coming in the back door.… The young ones that are coming on, they’re going to need protection. Because, I’m telling you something, we are killing ourselves.”
It was Sunday, September 29, around 7 p.m. Marlin Dixon was hanging out at the corner of 22nd and Brown streets, talking to the mother and a cousin of his 13-year-old friend, Artieas Shanks, nicknamed “Bump.” According to a statement Marlin gave to police, Bump suddenly came running down the street, with Charlie Young chasing behind. Nicknamed “Junior” by his family and known in the neighborhood as “June,” Young held two knives – box cutters, as Marlin described them.
Young caught up with Bump and knocked him to the ground. Bump apparently had riled Young by pelting him with an egg.
Marlin tried to stop Young, grabbing at one of his arms and reaching for the box cutters. But Young swung at him, Marlin said, nearly stabbing him in the stomach before running away. Marlin and three other boys in the neighborhood chased Young down the block to the back of his girlfriend’s house, where he ducked out of sight.
Young hid in his girlfriend’s apartment for two or three hours, while outside a crowd formed – 10, 15, 20 young African Americans, all of them male, most of them teenagers, some of them children, roaming the streets and calling for Young.
“Where’s he at?” yelled one of the man-boys.
“I think he ran through there.”
And in their hands they carried weapons: a tree limb, a fence post, a garden rake, a milk crate, a folding chair, a beer can, whatever they could find.
Eyewitnesses gave varying accounts of what took place that night. Some told police that Young had been mocking Bump before he threw the egg. Some said Young had a single knife, a kitchen knife with a serrated blade. Others made no mention of a knife at all.
No doubt the circumstances will be sorted out in a courtroom. But drawing on statements given to police from witnesses as well as suspects, a picture emerges of a night that reeled out of control.
“Tell me your dreams for the future. What would you like to be doing when you’re 18?”
It’s a question Circuit Judge Joseph Wall asks nearly every child who enters his courtroom, and a question that yields blank stares.
“Most of the kids don’t have an answer,” says Wall. “They don’t dream. They’ve lost the imagination because they’ve lost the hope.”
Wall is a newcomer to Children’s Court. He took the bench in August 2001. Once a prosecutor in federal and state courts who put away the bad guys, Wall now runs “a judicial ER ward,” he says, with delinquents, foster children and abused and neglected kids his daily patients. Last year, he finalized more than 50 petitions for the termination of parental rights.
“In many cases, we have to move ahead without the parents,” he says. “We just have to admit to ourselves and say, ‘There are no parents here, now what are we going to do as a community?’ ”
As a starting point, Wall says, the community needs to get kids off the streets and out of unsafe homes, get them into after-school programs and job-training classes.
“There is no such thing as a bad child,” he says. “There are only negative influences and bad role models.… Kids are born happy, they’re born full of hope, they’re born with a feeling of endless possibilities.”
To cultivate those possibilities, the community must prioritize. “We need a dramatic reallocation of public and private resources away from sports and entertainment centers to programs and activities that will help save the upcoming generation.”
As his mother admits, Charlie Young was no angel. For shoplifting, he did 45 days in the House of Corrections. For a parole violation and resisting police, 60 days. Carrying a concealed weapon, 20 days. Operating a vehicle without a license and fleeing the police, 20 months in a state prison.
“Even so, he knew right from wrong,” says Fannie Young. “He didn’t have to die like he did.”
Young raised five children on her own after her husband died of a heart attack. She has worked as a janitor and cook and received Social Security and medical assistance, she says. For a while, she was on AFDC and food stamps. She owned a house until she couldn’t keep up with the mortgage payments.
Charlie Young dropped out of high school after 10th grade. He lived with his sister on the Northwest Side but hung out with friends in the Johnsons Park neighborhood where he was beaten. In fact, he knew all of his attackers, says his mother.
“Somebody was trying to compare me and Charlie with these kids, but you can’t do that,” she says. “I whupped my children, I chastised my children and I told them I was going to do it because God gave me permission. When Charlie got to where he didn’t obey, I told the judge, ‘Take him.’ ”
Before he was a teenager, he was sent to St. Charles boys’ home in Milwaukee.
The boys who attacked her son were undisciplined, says Young. “Some of the parents were scared they were going to go to jail, going to be accused of child abuse. But those kids should’ve been in the home. They got TV, they got video games. They should’ve been inside watching that instead of outside.”
Her son had a temper, she says. A few days before his attack, he “got into it” with an adult near Johnsons Park. “But he didn’t hold no grudges. He didn’t have any animosity in his heart.”
Steven Lelinski has been a Milwaukee cop for 13 years. Lately, he’s seen a dramatic drop in the ages of the kids he arrests. “I’m being sent to shootings where the victim is a school-age child and the actor involved is a classmate or a friend, also a child,” says Lelinski, who once patrolled the neighborhood where Young was attacked.
He’s not big on government-sponsored after-school programs. “Sure, they’re nice diversions,” he says. But he’s seen some turn into “breeding grounds” for older teens to recruit younger kids into gangs. When he was growing up, he says, there were more social events organized by faith-based groups – Catholic Youth Organization dances, for example. “I see that lacking nowadays.”
But even the best outreach programs or the most conscientious parents can’t turn some children around, says Lelinski. Kids need to recognize that wrongful acts have consequences. Unfortunately, he says, there’s no vaccination against stupid and immature behavior.
Don Dixon had spent the weekend at a friend’s house. He was walking home that late September evening when he ran into a few kids he knew.
“You seen my brother Marlin?” asked DJ, and they pointed to the corner of 22nd and Brown. There, DJ found his brother and joined the mob as they hunted for Charlie Young. Along the way, DJ picked up the broken handle of a broom.
The crowd banded together in the middle of Brown Street, questioning anyone who passed by about Young’s whereabouts. It had been hours since he disappeared and it was well into the night, well past the brothers’ 9 p.m. curfew.
Suddenly, there he was, Charlie Young, “June,” walking down the street toward the crowd. He had been drinking. And again, say witnesses, he had a knife.
Young was angry at the teens for chasing him down. He approached the pack shouting and swearing; some of the boys backed off. Marlin sat on the porch of a house, his head resting on his arms. He didn’t seem to be paying attention to Young. But Young saw Marlin and went straight for him. Without warning, he swung at the Dixon boy, punching him in the face and dislodging a tooth.
Marlin fell back onto the porch and the mob moved in on Young, surrounding him, swinging at him with the weapons they had found. Someone swatted the knife from his hand and Young began to run.
The mob followed.
Why do some kids become violent? Start with the biological issues, says Dr. Bruce Axelrod, a Milwaukee pediatrician and psychiatrist who has treated more than 400 children and teens from impoverished and abusive backgrounds. Children of poverty have a higher risk of being born addicted to cocaine or with fetal alcohol syndrome, he says. They also face a higher risk of malnourishment or exposure to lead poisoning.
Next, look at the psychological factors. Children who are victims of abuse or neglect or witness violence can be traumatized. Kids who are beaten or watch violent movies or video games can become desensitized to violence, says Axelrod, incapable of caring about another person’s peril or pain.
Next, look at the environment, the familial, educational and social contexts. Are there role models? Is there a sense of belonging, a sense of community?
Combined or separate, all of these factors can lead to developmental problems, such as hyperactivity or impulsive behavioral traits.
Add to a child’s life a sense of futility and hopelessness, place him in a “contagious environment” thick with crime and bad influences and you have the pathology of what Axelrod calls “ready, shoot, aim kids.”
“They don’t have the filters to prevent themselves from committing violence,” he says. “This is the recipe for mob mentality.”
Marlin and Don Dixon live for basketball, says their mother. Don’s got his three-point shot down, while Marlin, though hospitalized with asthma at age 1, is the flashy one, dribbling behind his back and between his legs. If they have dreams of the future, they dream of being NBA stars.
In the classroom, Don likes to draw, says Doris. Marlin is more interested in reading and writing. She doesn’t remember what books they’ve read lately, but she’s sure they both could sit and watch movies all day long.
The boys’ educations have been inconsistent at best. Marlin’s in particular has been spotty, marked by absenteeism, truancy and poor grades. In eight years, he attended six different schools. He repeated second grade and sixth grade. As a sixth-grader at Fritsche Middle School, he was absent 92 days out of the 2000-’01 school year, the year his father was killed. His GPA that year was .098.
Last school year, after two warnings, he was kicked out of an alternative middle school, Silver Spring Academy, because of poor grades and excessive absenteeism.
In second grade, Marlin was found to be mildly retarded, scoring a composite IQ level of 69-79. In grade 3, he was examined by a Milwaukee Public Schools multidisciplinary team and found to meet the criteria for cognitive disabilities programming. A summary of his social behavior states, in part: “Low self-esteem may be contributing to a defensive attitude and tendency to become easily provoked. Marlin tends, however, to be a follower and is easily influenced and highly impressionable.… Marlin is usually respectful toward adults. According to his mother, however, Marlin does exhibit a very bad temper. When angry, he will argue and threaten others.”
As a private investigator for criminal defense attorneys, Lori Gonion spends her days visiting the families of people accused of crimes. By practice, she’s an expert on the age-old debate of nature vs. nurture. When asked to explain why some kids go bad, she comes down firmly on the side of nurture.
The ravages of the dysfunctional homes she visits are stark and pervasive, whether the family is white, black, Hispanic or otherwise. “The chaos is unbelievable,” says Gonion. The TV is always on, a radio is blasting, a baby is crying, a mother is hollering.
She has seen the cause and effect, seen a family of three generations crowded into a single apartment, seen toddlers walking naked in an alley, seen children not yet in their teens ordered to stand guard for neighborhood drug dealers, seen a mother fling her baby against a sofa cushion.
“I wish I could call social services, but I don’t,” she says. “I know nothing will be done. The abuse has to be so severe.”
Gonion doesn’t carry a firearm, but after two decades in the trenches, she’s learned a thing or two about personal safety: She doesn’t work after dark, wears sneakers in case she’s forced to run and steers clear of household pets. They are so mistreated that they lash out at anyone who tries to pet them. “They don’t know how to react to kindness,” she says. “It’s just foreign to them.”
In November 2001, an anonymous caller filed a child neglect complaint against Doris Williams. According to the complaint, Doris’ upstairs flat at 20th and Brown was filthy. “There are holes in the wall,” claimed the caller. “Garbage on the living room floor and hallway. The residence is rat and roach infested. There is little food in the household. The kitchen is visibly dirty and full of dirty dishes. The children wear dirty clothes. And their bodies are visibly dirty. The children’s bedding is visibly dirty.”
A case worker was assigned to inspect the home and interview the family. A week after the complaint was called in, the case worker arrived at Doris’ door for a scheduled visit. Doris made the worker wait outside for 20 minutes before letting her in, and when she entered, one of the younger boys was mopping a “very dirty” kitchen floor. Except for bags of clothes in a back bedroom, though, the home seemed orderly and the kitchen was stocked with food.
But there were other problems. “The gas was cut off for non-payment, so there is no heat in the home and the stove doesn’t work,” according to the case worker’s report. “The family cooks in an electric fry pan.”
The report paints the portrait of a family in crisis. Doris had lived in the run-down house for four years. The baby of her teenage daughter, Tezra, had been exposed to lead paint that had peeled from the ceiling. Her oldest daughter, then 24, had cerebral palsy but received no social service aid. To “get away,” Doris would frequently visit her boyfriend, leaving her younger children in the care of a daughter.
Two home visits were scheduled in late November 2001. “The heat is still disconnected,” reads one report. “Doris was wearing a jacket. She was holding her 1-year-old granddaughter [who] appeared glossy-eyed and coughed during the visit. The home is very cold.”
Doris told the case worker the utility company had refused to turn her gas back on because she could not pay the bill, yet she declined to meet with the worker to apply for emergency energy services. Finally, two and a half weeks after the initial home visit, Doris agreed to a repayment plan that met the requirements for emergency energy services. Heat was restored, but according to state records, Doris owed $7,000 to the gas and electric company from years of past bills.
“Doris seems to love her children,” the case worker concluded. Yet she “lacks knowledge, skill and motivation in parenting.” Moreover, Doris, who worked part time, did not have the resources “to meet basic needs.”
A case worker was appointed to meet with Doris weekly for two to four months. “Williams is overwhelmed and in a rut,” stated a report.
A year later, days after the death of Charlie Young, another case worker visited Doris’ home. Months before, Doris and her children had moved into a newer two-story home on Vine Street. It was just blocks away from their former address, but in Doris’ world, it was a huge move. Housing conditions had improved, though the household was crowded. Doris’ sister and two children were staying with the family temporarily and a daughter had moved back home with her baby after living with her boyfriend’s mother. For a short while, 12 people were packed into the four-bedroom house.
The two older boys had drifted out of Doris’ control. “Don and Marlin often did not follow their mother’s directions and ran the streets without permission,” according to the case worker’s report.
“Kids love discipline, kids love structure,” says community activist Larry Moore. “They know that it means they’re safe.”
Raised fatherless by his mother in Milwaukee’s central city, Moore was fortunate to be taken under the wing of his wrestling coach at West Division High School, who helped him get into college.
Lacking in some kids’ lives, though, are the most basic of needs – housing, food, clothing – and a parent’s capacity to show love, says Moore, who is executive director of the Metcalfe Park Residents’ Association and who’s raising six foster children with his wife.
Needs that go unmet can breed frustration, which can breed rage, which can breed violence.
Moore has known that rage. He once tried to plunge a knife into another man’s chest, only to have the blade deflected by the victim. He was arrested and pleaded guilty to battery. He put aside his anger and put his energy into working for his neighborhood.
For people on the margins, the remedies aren’t working. Social service agencies, the business community, schools, police, courts, unions – systems that could help lift the institutional barriers are failing, he says, corrupted by self-interest, hampered by budget constraints, mired in inefficiency.
“Society is not only at fault, there’s got to be some parental responsibility in all of this,” says Moore. “But society is equally at fault.”
At around 11 p.m. on Septem-ber 29, Charlie Young ran north on 21st Street and then cut through a vacant lot. The mob was on his heels. He jumped a fence, landed on 21st Lane and bounded onto the front porch of a two-story home.
According to a witness who was upstairs at the time, Young called out to the resident in the flat below. “Help me!” he said. “Let me in. Let me in.”
“No man, I don’t want this at my house,” answered Anthony Brown, a resident downstairs. But Young managed to force himself into the flat and hid in a back hallway.
The mob of boys swarmed onto the porch. “Window action!” yelled one boy, and a front window was smashed.
Again, what happened next is sure to be debated in court. Don Dixon and others say a few of the assailants – including Marlin – crawled through the window and into the house. One boy, Marlin’s friend Artieas Shanks (“Bump”), told police that Young pulled Marlin into the house, brandishing a knife. Other boys say they all went through the front door, maybe a dozen of them, hitting Young with sticks, boards and a baseball bat as he desperately tried to get away.
“Drag him outside, drag him outside,” hollered Don, according to one witness, and Young was heaved onto the porch floor.
Once he was on the porch, there was no escape. Like a scene taken from William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies, the mob descended upon Young without hesitation or mercy, wielding a crude but lethal arsenal of weapons forged from the streets.
The blows were delivered by many in a furious blur. One of the attackers, Levar McNeil, hit Young with a shovel, according to police reports. Another boy, Jemeral Andrews, hit him over the head with a stick five or six times until the stick broke in two.
“This is for knocking my guy’s teeth out,” shouted Andrews as he swung the stick in the air, said a witness.
In the thick of it were the Dixon brothers. One defendant told police he saw Don kick Young over and over again in the back. One neighborhood witness said he saw Marlin hit Young “with all his might at least nine times in the head.” More than one witness said Marlin stomped on Young’s head with both feet and then kicked him in the face.
Young was struck 50 to 60 times as he lay on the porch, pummeled about the head and body until somebody yelled that he was “out.”
The mob scattered, dropping their weapons as they ran.
According to several witnesses, Marlin, Don and two or three other boys turned and climbed back onto the porch to kick and stomp Young again before running home.
North 21st Lane is more alley than lane. Narrow and inconspicuous, though only a minute from the corner of North and Fond du Lac avenues, the street cuts along a row of tumble-down houses and vacant lots in one of the most desolate-looking blocks in the city. Newspapers clump at the base of chain-link fences. Cars without tires rust away on cinder blocks. Sheets of gray-weathered plywood cover shattered windowpanes in duplexes long deserted.
Most of the boys involved in Young’s death live within blocks of North 21st Lane.
Yet the neighborhood, as the cliché goes, is truly “in transition.” Just blocks away stand cheerfully painted two-story homes, part of an urban renewal project on North 21st, North 22nd and Barbee Street, named for Milwaukee civil rights activist Lloyd Barbee.
The Dixon brothers live in one of the newer homes on West Vine. Within the family’s 16-square-block census tract, crime is relatively low, thanks partly to housing renewal. Yet statistics show a neighborhood challenged on many other fronts:
• Nearly half of the residents are 19 or under. More than one third of those 16 and older are unemployed.
• In a third of the homes in the neighborhood, mothers are heads of the households, with no husbands present. Of those households, nearly half live below the poverty level, with 29 percent earning less than $10,000 annually. Grandparents are caregivers in 57 percent of the families.
• The families are highly mobile; 58 percent of the residents lived in a different home five years ago.
Citywide, health conditions are equally dire. More than 3,600 children in 2001 were found to have elevated levels of lead in their blood, according to the Health Department. Between 1996 and 2000, 759 “cocaine babies” were born in the city. One out of every three births are to women who didn’t finish high school. One of five births are to teens.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee criminologist Stan Stojkovic became a media darling following the Charlie Young killing. He was called upon to wax theoretical by USA Today, Dan Rather, Connie Chung and Bill O’Reilly.
Along with his 15 minutes of fame came some 500 e-mails. “People were saying crazy stuff,” he says, “and most of that crazy stuff wanted to explain this by looking at the kids.” Lock them up forever, give them the death penalty, arm yourself against them – the outrage was sky high.
But “context is everything,” says Stojkovic. “Violent crime is actually relatively rare among teenagers.” Physical violence represents 10 percent of all crimes by juveniles. The mob beating was an anomaly. “But the barbarism of the event was so overwhelming it was national news.”
Stojkovic takes the view that the beating death cannot be explained in terms of individual responsibility. He shifts the focus to broader issues. Look at the conditions of the perpetrators and figure out what can be done to change those conditions.
“As those institutional bonds grow weak, there are no controls,” he says. “It’s unbelievable it doesn’t happen more often.”
On an even broader level, poverty and race come into play.
“Most people below the poverty level don’t commit this type of act, and most people of color aren’t criminals,” he says. Yet race and class are highly correlated. Low wages and the shrinking number of jobs in the central city contribute to poverty, which can lead to unstable homes, which can push juveniles into risky environments and criminal behavior.
The institutional failures pile up.
“How many times do you want to kick these kids?” says Stojkovic. “You can keep them off the streets, but then you’ve got to get them into programs, into schools.” In MPS, he says, nearly half of all ninth-graders entering high school will not graduate.
Finally, the role of the victim cannot be dismissed, he says. A 13-year-old boy threw an egg at 36-year-old Charlie Young. Young chased the boy, pulled a knife, punched a 14-year-old and knocked out his tooth.
“And it unraveled,” says Stojkovic, shifting from a fairly innocuous assault to fierce and murderous aggression. “The dynamic changed. Control was gone.”
In November, Stojkovic spoke about the Charlie Young case to the Milwaukee Kiwanis Club. The audience, he says, was made up largely of “middle-class white guys, the dudes with the money.”
But the “dudes,” he says, didn’t want to hear his message. Not one of them stopped to speak with him after the luncheon.
In Doris Williams’ eyes, the tired eyes of a heartbroken mother, her sons are innocent. The boys had a minor encounter with police when they were 7 and 8, arrested with two teenagers for vandalism in the summer of 1996. But nothing more.
Until Charlie Young.
“I try to spend lots of time with my kids,” she says. “When they come home from school, I sit them all on the floor in a circle and ask them, ‘What did you do today? What did you have to eat? What did you do in school?’ ”
She has laid down the law, she says, insisting that her children obey her curfew: “In the house by 9, in the bed by 10.”
Last November, Doris wrote letters to the court on behalf of her sons, pleading with the judge to try Don and Marlin as juveniles. She described their interests in basketball and music, described how Marlin once helped a family escape from a burning apartment building across the street from their home, how neighborhood gangs chased her sons through the streets when they first moved to 20th and Brown.
“My kids’ father and I had to actually go and find our sons because of others chasing them,” she wrote.
In her letters, Doris also vouched for the other boys involved in Young’s beating: “As you know, some of the media and the state prosecutor and all the rest of the system is painting these children as monsters and criminals. These children are none of these things.… My son [Marlin] was struck by a grown man in the mouth with the result of a tooth being knocked out.… If Marlin hits someone, it would have to be because someone wants to hurt him.…”
The boy’s sister, Tezra, now 19, also wrote letters to the court on behalf of her brothers. In one letter, she describes Marlin and his relationship to their father:
“Marlin has a lot of love to give, but his heart is scarred, too. When Marlin was younger, my dad, Anthony Dixon, denied him as being his child. My dad never took out time and raised him to be a young man.… He wouldn’t have anything to do with Marlin. When he was a baby, Marlin would cry his self to sleep before my dad would pick him up. My mom and I raised him practically. My dad use to verbally and physically abuse Marlin for no reason. He done me the same way. I think Marlin is emotionally hurt because what happened to him as he was growing up. He had no father figure in his life.… He swore to his self to never be like my father and from what I have seen he has been nothing like him.”
Neither Marlin nor Don Dixon went to school the day after the beating. Police found them at home in their upstairs bedroom. The boys were taken into custody, questioned at police headquarters and arrested for attempted homicide.
In a signed statement, Don told police he hit Young with a two-foot broom handle about six times. He hit him because Young hit his brother. There were others involved, he said, but he didn’t know their names.
Marlin Dixon’s admission of guilt carried a suggestion of self-defense, or at least a justification for his actions. He was knocked out by Young’s sucker punch, he told a police detective, and when he came to, he staggered to where the mob had caught up with Young and saw him lying on the porch. Marlin said he picked up a stick and struck Young four to five times in the head and kicked him twice in the stomach. He was mad at Young for knocking out his tooth, he said, and called him a “bitch-ass nigger” as he struck him.
In his statement, said police, in his own hand, Marlin wrote these words of regret: “I feel kind of bad because I did not know he was hurt that bad to make him die. If I had known he was beat that bad, to tell the truth, I would not have touched him at all. I’m going to pray on his soul because I think some of this was my fault. Maybe if I didn’t hit him at all, I would not be no part of that. I do not want him to die because my tooth is not more important than his life is. I’m sorry.”
On October 1, the day after Marlin wrote his apology, Charles Young Jr. was removed from life support at Froedtert hospital. The charges against the Dixon brothers were upgraded to first-degree homicide.
Because of the ages of the alleged attackers, the size of the mob and the weapons they used, the Charlie Young killing was atypical, says E. Michael McCann, Milwaukee County district attorney. Had Young been shot, the story would’ve been a two-paragraph brief buried inside the daily paper.
“We’ve become tolerant of it,” McCann says.
By far, the drug trade and the availability of firearms still account for the majority of homicides in Milwaukee. With the introduction of crack cocaine in the late 1980s, homicides surged, topping 100 in 1989. They haven’t dropped below that mark since.
Even after more than 33 years as DA, no murder escapes McCann’s outrage. “Every killing makes me sad,” he says. “Every killing destroys the quality of life for all of us.”
Last fall saw a rash of killings on the city’s North Side – a 69-year-old woman shot in a robbery attempt, a minister shot in his car by a stray bullet, and Charlie Young. If the deaths would have taken place in a white suburb, “There’s no way they would have been tolerated,” says McCann.
“The common good should be a real issue to all of us,” he says. “Violence that isn’t addressed aggressively will come back to haunt all of us.”
Doris Williams does her best to keep her family together. She still works part time at a Glendale care center, third shift so she can be home before and after her children go to school.
She stops to pray at a neighborhood church, though she doesn’t belong. And every day she drives to Wauwatosa to visit her sons in the children’s detention center.
She sits with Marlin and Don at a round metal table, locked inside a windowless basement room for an hour, and they play cards and talk about family plans.
Rarely do they discuss anything about the night of September 29. “We really don’t talk about it,” says Doris. “What’s done is done and you can’t change that.”
Kurt Chandler is a senior editor of Milwaukee Magazine.
