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                                                                                SOCIETY, Page 46

Children Without Pity


The case of Anthony Knighton illustrates how a generation born
of violence creates a brutal legacy

By NANCY TRAVER/VERO BEACH


    Like a child whose mother scolds him for knocking over a
glass of milk, Anthony Knighton has his excuses ready. He was
just playing. It was an accident. He didn't know the gun was
loaded. It could have happened to anyone. Then he admits he shot
a pregnant girl because she wouldn't give him a nickel.

    His trouble started when he went out to buy cigarettes at
a corner grocery in his hometown of Deerfield Beach, Florida, on
Aug. 13, 1990. The store sold them two for a quarter, and
Knighton, then 16, had only 20 cents in his pocket. So on the
way he stopped to ask a neighbor, Schanell Sorrells, 13, for a
nickel. Schanell said she didn't have one. He shouted, "Give it
over." She refused.

    Knighton drew a .22-cal. revolver out of his belt, jabbed
it into her swollen belly and pulled the trigger. The bullet
ripped through her unborn baby's head. Schanell managed to
stagger to the room she shared with her mother and four siblings
in a boardinghouse in one of the oldest, most dangerous
neighborhoods of Deerfield Beach. As she collapsed on a bed,
Knighton took a nickel from her room, strolled back to the store
and calmly bought two Kools.

    There were witnesses, but Knighton persuaded them to tell
police that Schanell had been injured in a drive-by shooting.
He ordered her 15-year-old sister (also pregnant) to hide his
gun in a plastic bag full of baby toys. As he rode to Broward
General Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale with Schanell and her
mother, he told attendants that he was a friend of the family
and had nothing to do with the girl's injuries.

    Doctors delivered the baby by emergency caesarean. The
infant took several breaths, then died; the mother survived and
went home to live with her family. Knighton meanwhile slipped
away from the hospital and made his way to his father's house
near Pompano Beach, where he hoped to hide out for a while. But
his father persuaded him to turn himself in, and the boy was
charged as an adult with second-degree murder and aggravated
battery. He eventually pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and
in April 1991 was sentenced to four years in the Indian River
Correctional Institution, a medium-security juvenile facility
in Vero Beach. Last week, with a felony record, a sixth-grade
education, no skills, a bus ticket and $100 from the state,
Knighton left prison after serving two years.

    Knighton's crime is a statistic -- an isolated act in a
nation where the number of those under 18 who were arrested for
murder has climbed 93% over the past decade, while similar
arrests among adults grew by only 10%. Among black juveniles,
the murder arrest rate rose 145%, compared with 48% among
whites. Police chiefs around the country point to another
frightening trend: the increase in savage, senseless murders,
the kind that occur over a scuffle in a school playground, a
pair of sneakers, a romance gone sour. Like Anthony Knighton who
pulled a gun in a squabble over a piece of change, many
teenagers no longer use their fists or feet to settle disputes.
Instead, they open fire.

    Newspapers are so filled with reports of such crimes that
all but the most horrific lose their power to shock. In
Madison, Indiana, four teenage girls doused 12-year-old Shanda
Sharer with gasoline and burned her alive in January because she
was "trying to steal the affections of another girl." Henry
("Little Man") James, 19, opened fire into a passing car on a
Washington-area interstate because he felt "like busting
somebody." The somebody turned out to be a 32-year-old woman
driving home from work. In Los Angeles two teenage sisters
allegedly killed an elderly neighbor while another sister
allegedly played a stereo to drown out the screams. They have
denied all charges.

    In the inner cities, where weapons are treated like
household appliances, the lessons in cruelty usually start at
home. Psychologist Charles Patrick Ewing, author of Kids Who
Kill, has found that many young people committing seemingly
motiveless killings were themselves sexually or physically
abused. "To brutalize another human being, a youngster has to
have been brutalized himself," he says. Ewing finds that teenage
murderers often don't recall, or won't admit, that they were
once victims. "A street tough would rather go to the gas chamber
than admit to having been beaten or sodomized by a male
relative."

    Anthony Knighton has only vague memories of beatings by
his father, a roofer who now lives in Deerfield Beach. His
sharpest memories of childhood are of neglect more than fear.
After his mother died when he was three, Knighton, the youngest
of six children, shuttled among various relatives in Georgia and
Florida. By the time he was 15, he had moved 30 times. "It
seemed like nobody cared about me," he says, "so I guessed I had
to do for myself." Joyce Moore, 27, a cousin who lives in Delray
Beach, Florida, recalls that "people would say he could come
live with them, but he better not ask for no clothes or money
or nothing, 'cause they weren't gonna give it." Why should it
come as a surprise, psychologists ask, that children thus passed
around have a hard time developing any sense of identity or
stability? A child who doesn't know where he is going to live
from one month to the next is bound to stay focused on his
immediate needs -- like a cigarette or a new pair of shoes, no
matter what it takes to get them.

    Knighton never had much chance of being rescued, even if
someone had bothered to try. By the time he entered sixth grade,
he had attended seven schools. Frank Scalise, director of
guidance counseling at Deerfield Beach Middle School, said
Knighton came to class only 12 days that year. Truant officers
were dispatched to find him, but the family had no address. "He
wasn't in school long enough for anybody to get next to him,
help him or counsel him," says Scalise. "Then he dropped out,
and we never saw him again."

    Knighton was 14 and living with his father when he began
selling crack cocaine. A year later, he was stealing cars and
running a $1,000-a-day drug operation. His life savings -- what
he called his "bank account" -- was $30,000 worth of crack and
a gold Cadillac. As the boy began making big money, he became
a target himself. That inspired him to get his first gun.
Weapons were so plentiful that he never had to buy one but
simply borrowed from friends. Openly proud of the firearms he
has used, Knighton smiles fondly as he recalls each one. "When
I was 14, I started out with a .25 automatic, then got me a .38
snub-nosed, then a 12-gauge shotgun, a .45 automatic and a 9-mm.
But my last gun -- and my best gun -- was a baby Uzi."

    When everyone has a gun, every argument carries the
potential for deadly violence. The fbi reports that in 1990
nearly 3 out of 4 juvenile murderers used guns to commit their
crimes. "A gun in the hands of a 14-year-old is much more
dangerous than in the hands of a 41-year-old," says James Fox,
dean of Northeastern University's College of Criminal Justice.
"He has little investment in his life, and he doesn't know the
meaning of death."

    Knighton does know a lot about the criminal-justice
system. At 16, he had been in juvenile custody 19 times, charged
with aggravated assault, auto theft, robbery, drug possession,
escape and contempt of court. Knighton was sent to the Better
Outlook Center, a halfway house for juvenile offenders in a
Miami suburb. Staff members recall Knighton as hostile and angry
at first; later he began to flourish under the supervision of
caring adults. "Anthony thought it was heaven," says
superintendent Jounice Morris. "It was his first glimpse of
stability." Morris, who gave him the nickname "Peanut," recalls
that Knighton had the reading ability of a nine-year-old. She
says his sister visited him only once during the months he spent
at the halfway house; no other relative appeared. "It was clear
he'd been passed around from pillar to post, sharing apartments
with 12 or 13 other people," Morris said. "There was nobody
there for him -- there had never been."

    After the murder, when Knighton landed in the Indian River
prison, he worked on a cleanup crew six hours a day. Until state
budget cuts forced the prison to eliminate its teachers'
salaries, he took high school classes. Because he was considered
cooperative and well behaved, Knighton had nearly two years
shaved off his sentence. He does not know where his father and
siblings now live, but he still keeps in touch with the staff
at Better Outlook. In a letter to Morris, Knighton wrote, "I
think about that baby I killed, and it hurts real bad."

    Criminologists predict that the population of young
offenders will explode in the decade to come. Just as crime
began to surge in the late '60s, when the postwar baby-boom
generation reached its teens and early 20s, the children of
those baby boomers are committing their first offenses. And for
many of them, pulling out a gun is just a funny game with the
little girl on the corner.