A little stupidity goes a long way for nine teens

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News that nine Brewer High School students soon could be felons astonished no one more than the nine themselves.

They were “good” kids, honor students and athletes among them. They were kids who did not expect to get caught.

Even after they were caught and confessed, they did not seem to grasp the consequences.

One of the boys told police that he wanted to face up to his crimes, then put it all behind him. He wanted to be a cop someday.

Steve Barker, the Brewer police captain, felt bad. There was little joy in cracking a crime ring when the perpetrators turned out to be kids messing up their lives.

Then this one sat in front of him and said, in all sincerity, he wanted to be a cop. Barker did not have the heart to tell the boy that the door to a career in law enforcement seldom opens for a convicted felon.

There is time enough for these nine to find the question, on job application after job application, “Are you a convicted felon?”

Of course, none of them has been convicted yet. Only two have been charged; police expect the other three adults to be indicted by next Monday.

The four who are 17 or younger may be processed as juveniles and, therefore, escape the burden of a lifetime record.

But for the five who are technically adults, the confessions and nine-way corroboration make convictions seem likely.

Astonishing.

It started, apparently, with some enticing item in an unlocked car at the Bangor Mall.

“They stole something out of a car. It scared them,” Barker said — scared them a lot. “But they got away with it.

“They did a few more. It became more and more comfortable — it became a sport for them,” he said.

It was easy. The cars — more than two dozen of them ultimately — were unlocked, with expensive toys such as cellular phones in plain sight. The owners were far from view, away for hours at the movies or shopping. Before long, the kids had accumulated thousands of dollars’ worth of other people’s belongings.

Some of them threw away their take. Others unloaded it at pawnshops, no questions asked. Easy.

Finally, one or more of them broke into a house in Brewer. One of them allegedly took something from another house where he was living to finish out the school year.

Sunday night, police got the information they needed, and called in the first of the suspects. He confessed. One by one, they brought in the rest, and each told a similar story. By Monday, they all had confessed.

It is not a new story for the Brewer police, or any police. Detective Dave Clewley, who also worked on the case for Brewer, says that something like three-quarters of the department’s theft and burglary investigations lead to juveniles. Ninety percent for the last two months.

Though it is often kids who are down and out, these are not the first honor students and athletes to do stupid things.

But saying it is easy and saying it is common does little to explain how these nine kids became burglars.

“They all have different reasons,” Barker says. “But it all gets back to a social thing, this group of friends.”

Clewley adds that kids’ lives have changed, even in Brewer, Maine.

“If there’s more crime, it’s because there are more kids on the street. There just seems to be more kids out and around, and more parents who don’t care or can’t control them.”

There is one more thing, too — apparently these kids don’t get the idea that some things are wrong.

Wednesday morning an older couple from Bangor came into the Brewer Police station. They had heard about the case, and wanted to see if police had found something that had been taken from their car.

They spoke in whispers while they waited, unsmiling, heads bowed. Crime, even small-time crime, does that to people.

It would be interesting to see nine kids explain to this couple why they decided to take things out of cars, to explain their thinking.

I expect the explanation would be that they were not thinking at all.

“They didn’t have a clue that going into somebody’s car was a felony,” Barker said.

It must have been astonishing for them to hear that each burglary could get an adult one to three years in prison. It must have been shocking to see it on the front of the paper. It must be surprising to them to think that this little bit of stupidity could grow so big.

But they’re young — they have a lifetime to get used to the idea.