Jul
15
Throughout teens’ lives, violence was inescapable; Frustration, family troubles dogged suspects in Dunbar Village rape, robbery
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Originally published in The Palm Beach Post on Sunday, July 15, 2007.
By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN, KEVIN DEUTSCH and ALEJANDRA CANCINO
Palm Beach Post Staff Writers
WEST PALM BEACH – In the days after the vicious attack on a mother and son in Dunbar Village, detectives knocked on doors across the city, asking other mothers about their sons.
At least three of those mothers agreed to take their teenage sons in for questioning. And one by one, they were confronted with evidence that their boys had been inside the apartment where the gang rape and torture took place.
The first to be charged in the crime that horrified veteran investigators was Avion Lawson, 14, who police said confessed after they found his DNA in a condom at the scene. Next came Nathan Walker, 16, who denies participation but police say was linked to the crime by a palm print. And then, Jakaris Taylor, 15, who admitted he was at the scene and left a fingerprint inside the home, according to police, but has denied involvement.
Police are looking for as many as seven more suspects.
The three teens who have been arrested grew up in places where relatives could not always shield their boys from the violence around them. Walker’s mother, Ruby, said she was twice raped as a child, and attacked again while walking to a bus stop this year. In 2002, one of Lawson’s sisters killed the father of her child, who relatives said had repeatedly beaten her. Taylor lived in the Dunbar Village housing project, where police were called more than 700 times in the year leading up to the rape.
All three suspects in the gang rape had had previous run-ins with police. Taylor was arrested Jan. 6 on charges of robbery and battery, accused of punching a man in the face and stealing his bicycle near CityPlace. Lawson was also among the five teens arrested in that incident after police saw them running away.
But the victims later changed their story, Palm Beach County State Attorney spokesman Mike Edmondson said, and those cases are no longer pending.
Walker has a previous charge of trespassing after police said he jumped a school fence and was accused of being with boys who were trying to break in, his mother said. She does not think he was involved in that incident. His attorney Robert Gershman says he has two other open charges in juvenile court, both misdemeanors.
RELATIVES EXPRESS DISBELIEF
Family members say they can’t believe that boys they know could have done something as horrible as they are accused of doing in Dunbar Village.
Police say that on the night of June 18, the attackers tricked the 35-year-old victim into opening her door by saying the tires on her car were flat. She says that they forced their way inside, raped her repeatedly and forced her and her 12-year-old son to have sex with each other. They poured household chemicals into the boy’s eyes and over the woman’s body.
The mother and son, who immigrated from Haiti, said that when no neighbors came to help, they walked to Good Samaritan Hospital.
Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer has said he will take the cases to a grand jury to ensure that the teens will be tried and sentenced as adults. Otherwise, a judge would have discretion to sentence them as youthful offenders.
April Lawson sees her nephew’s picture on the news and says she is “still in disbelief” that this is the same boy she knows – the boy who used to climb trees, play football with friends and stay at her house some summers.
“He’s a good kid, a quiet kid,” she said last week from her tidy home near the Barracuda Bay water park in Riviera Beach, still in her work uniform. She prays for Avion all the time now, she said. But, she said, “I know he has to be punished for his crime.”
Lawson was 9 years old when his sister, Tiffany Parker, stabbed her child’s father, Kevin Lester, to death in West Palm Beach. Lester had a history of beating Parker, then 18, family members said at the time, and was twice charged with domestic violence. Witnesses said that Parker and Lester were fighting on the night she killed him with a stab wound to the chest. She pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
April Lawson said she doesn’t know if Avion witnessed the killing.
“Maybe that traumatized him. I don’t know,” she said.
Avion was always quiet, she said, and though his brothers opened up to her, Avion never did.
His mother, Cathy Lawson, has no arrest record. She works hard in a hospital cafeteria to support her children, her sister said, sometimes up to three weeks straight without a day off. Avion was never abused and was not taught violence, Lawson said.
But it wasn’t easy for Cathy Lawson as a single mother of six, said April Lawson, who raised seven children on her own. After-school activities cost money, she said, which they didn’t always have.
“That’s what is wrong,” April Lawson said. “The kids get out of school, and they have nothing to do.”
TROUBLE IN SCHOOL
Ruby Walker, 44, said her family survived on food stamps, sometimes living in abandoned cars and buildings. She has nine arrests on charges including aggravated battery and assault dating to the early 1980s.
Nathan was always slow, she said, and at 16 still has a hard time reading. He dropped out of John F. Kennedy Middle School after three years of trying to pass seventh grade, Walker said. A lot of kids were picking on him because he was old for his grade, she said, and she went to school police to ask if they could keep him from getting jumped all the time.
Walker said Nathan would try at his homework until he cried with frustration. She couldn’t help him, she said, because she often didn’t understand it herself. He eventually stopped going to school, she said.
Without a job, and bored at the family’s spare apartment west of Haverhill Road, he would sometimes go to Dunbar Village to play basketball.
Walker said her son knew Avion Lawson, who came to her house one time, but they were not close. Nathan is a sweet-hearted person, in no way capable of rape, she said. She said her son agreed to the police interview and DNA test, taking the swab of his mouth himself. Walker does not believe the police have any evidence that will implicate her son.
Her mother, Mary McNeal, said Nathan “is no leader; he is a follower.”
McNeal didn’t know who his friends were, but she suspected something was going on with him. She said he would tell her he was going to the park, but she knew he wasn’t there.
“I told him about that project,” McNeal said referring to Dunbar Village. Walker said her mother is angry at her now, because she thinks she shouldn’t have let Nathan spend time there.
Ruby Walker said she was raped herself at ages 7 and 12, and almost again this year, she said.
She said she was walking to a bus stop when a man she had never seen before attacked her, dragged her into his car and tore off some of her clothes before she escaped. Nathan and his sister came with another relative to pick her up, she said.
“He was crying. … He said, ‘I would never do that to anyone,’” she said.
She said she wants to tell the Dunbar rape victim she is so sorry for what happened, though she knows the woman may not accept her apology.
Nathan Walker Sr., a recovering alcoholic, said he wanted to be close to his son but just couldn’t.
His son had a hard time dealing with his addiction, especially because boys used to tease him about having an alcoholic father, he said. When Nathan was 4 or 5 years old, his father left home. Walker Sr. said he decided to get help about seven years ago. He was sober for two and a half years, he said, and decided to start a business. Father and son were talking again. But his business collapsed, and with it his determination.
“My son became more strange to me after the relapse,” the soft-spoken father said outside his home.
About four months ago, he decided to get help again. He kept trying to talk to his son, but Nathan was always hanging out with the boys or his girlfriend.
Two months before he was arrested, he agreed to go to Fun Depot with his father but didn’t say much.
If he had raised his boy, Walker said, things would be different. He wishes he knew more about him, but he is certain of one thing: His son doesn’t have the heart to inflict such pain.
“I do believe in my son. He has a good heart,” he said.
‘I CAN’T DEAL WITH IT’
Taylor’s family moved from Boynton Beach to West Palm Beach about three years ago, settling in Dunbar Village.
Inside their apartment in a run-down building, its doors and windows caked with dust and rust, Taylor’s mother, Jacqueline Minor, foresaw that life in the housing project could lead her son into trouble with police, said a close family friend who refused to give her name.
At some point after he was charged with the robbery near CityPlace, Taylor’s mother sent him to live with his grandmother on Windsor Avenue so he would stay out of trouble, the friend said.
He played youth basketball and football. At one point, he attended the now-defunct Oak Grove Academy, a school in Riviera Beach for students with behavioral problems.
Police linked him to the gang rape and robbery through a fingerprint at the scene, whicht they were able to match to those taken during his January arrest. Police picked him up at his mother’s apartment, just as he was about to leave for summer school, the family friend said.
“I’m just too upset,” Minor, 32, said after her son’s arrest Thursday. “I can’t deal with it.”
She did not attend her son’s first court appearance Friday.
Copyright 2007 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
July 15, 2007 Sunday
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