A 19-year-old Louisiana boy has been identified three days after he brutally wounded a female guard and escaped a juvenile detention center in New Orleans, FOX 8 reported.
For days, officials were silent.
“If you don’t release that information, people don’t know about it. They can’t protect themselves,” Joel Friedman, a Tulane law professor, said.
People living near the detention center were left unnerved due to the lack of information about the incident.
“We’re afraid,” one neighbor told FOX 8. “My daughter and my grandkids are afraid to come around here.”
An anonymous source revealed the escapee’s identity to FOX 8 as 19-year-old Jonathan Sheard Jr. of New Orleans.
According to the source, Sheard was serving time for multiple offenses including simple burglary, illegal carrying of a weapon, theft of a motor vehicle, and simple escape.
Sheard, who is still on the loose, reportedly asked three other juveniles to help him beat up a female guard and jump the fence at the Bridge City Center for Youth facility, which has been riddled with escapes and assaults over the last several months.
Sheard’s escape comes less than a month after five incarcerated youth escaped the facility on March 17, an incident the detention center attributed in part to “human error.”
In November last year, three other youth detainees escaped the Bridge City facility.
“These are violent criminals,” said Jefferson Parish Councilman Deano Bonano, who called the delay in releasing the information absurd.
“When he escaped that facility, the people need to know what he looks like… what clothes he was wearing, so they know what to be on the lookout for,” Bonano said.
The Office of Juvenile Justice (OJJ) said the agency is not permitted to release the identities of incarcerated juveniles at the facility.
“State law is pretty specific,” Deputy Secretary of OJJ Bill Sommers says. “We can release pictures to law enforcement. I cannot release to the media. Law enforcement can release to media.”
The OJJ says it released the identity of the escaped man to the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office and Louisiana State Police. According to Louisiana law, whenever a child escapes from a juvenile detention center, law enforcement agencies are authorized to release to the public their name, age, physical description, and a picture.
“It does not mean you are obligated to reveal that information, so there is a discretion there,” Friedman explains. “But I would ask why exercise that discretion and retain that information and not make it public?”
