Children Without Pity

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.