The Cartel Lawyer by Dave Daren (ebook reader below 3000 TXT) 📕

when I was upset was a habit I’d learned from my mother, but there was nothing left for me to clean, so it was time to dive into more research on the Everson Juvenile Detention Center.

Despite what the website said, and the claims of the supposed personal testimonials, I knew that the facility couldn’t be that perfect. Even if it was one of the best, there would be plenty of complaints from parents and teens alike. There was no way that they could please everyone, and like any Amazon vendor would tell you, there’s always someone who hates the product. And then there was the fact that the accounts were just a little too polished to be believable, especially to anyone who’d been to a juvie center before.

The outdated posters in the teen’s rooms bothered me more than the flawless testimonials. The company should have more recent photos on their website, and the fact that they used the old ones was a major red flag that made me think there was something they wanted to hide.

Another Google search of the center showed that it was recommended in a few blogs, though the glowing reviews could have been bought. One link I clicked on was an entire first page filled with paid blog posts that raved about the facilities and the results that they received, and links to quick blurbs about different juvie centers in the Miami area.

It wasn’t until I was halfway down the second page of results that I found a website that looked promising. The summary said it was a petition to close the facility, and though it could simply be a page created by a disgruntled teen who’d been sentenced to a long stint, at least it offered something besides happy, smiley faces.

When I clicked through, I was greeted with a black header and bright red capital letters. ‘Close Everson Now!’ screamed at me from the page, and I was convinced that the site had indeed been created by an unhappy inhabitant.

But just beneath the header were pictures of the facility taken at odd angles. Each one revealed that the rooms that the teens were kept in were more like cells from a maximum security prison. They managed to squeeze four beds into each room by having twin bunk beds to the left and right of the barred doors. The bathroom was a filthy toilet and a small sink that offered no privacy for the young men that would use it.

I clicked through the pictures of the cafeteria, all of them taken at low angles, like someone had snapped them from underneath a table when the guards were distracted. There were a couple of blurry shots that showed the food the center served consisted of soggy vegetables from a can, fruits so old that they’d lost all their color, mystery stew that even my old elementary school wouldn’t have served, and rolls that looked like small stones.

It was a nightmare, like something that I would see on Dateline, or one of my courtroom dramas where the cops or lawyers would try to shut it down. Of course, the pictures could be doctored or taken from somewhere else and attributed to the Everson Juvenile Center by an angry parent or teen, and I had to remind myself to view them with that in mind.

But if the pictures were real, then I needed to get Camilo out of there fast. Whether Osvaldo threatened me or not, I couldn’t have a client in such a terrible facility, especially not a fourteen year old boy. I couldn’t believe that the judge would send them there, and I hoped that if it really was that awful, that the old magistrate would change his sentence.

I left the pictures behind to explore the rest of the website for more concrete evidence than blurry, questionable photos that would be thrown out in court. There was a link to a page called ‘Personal Stories’, so I followed that, and found most of them were rants from teens that confirmed the place was unsafe, but it was hard to tell how much was accurate and how much was exaggeration.

There was one story from a mother that captured my attention, though, and I read it twice just to make sure I’d understood. Her son had been sent to Everson’s when he was fifteen after he’d been arrested for theft.

The boy had stolen some milk and cereal because he’d been hungry and didn’t have any money to buy food. His mother had been at her second job at the time, and she hadn’t realized that she had forgotten to leave him money as she usually did. The boy and the mother were known at the market, and the owner had let them run a tab in the past when money was tight. But the store had been bought by a mega corporation that frowned on such things, and the son had been told that if he couldn’t pay, he couldn’t take the items from the store.

For the simple act of trying to eat, the young teen had been sentenced to the max sentence of two years even though it was his first offense.

The mother claimed that her son had been kind and sweet when he’d gone there, but that when he’d come back two years later, he was a completely different person. He had scars on his back and one long gash across his face, and he’d lost the innocence he’d once had.

The boy had joined a gang while he was in juvie, and when he was released he’d become a dealer for the group. He’d been arrested a few more times before he’d been killed in a driveby.

I searched the post for the judge’s name, sure that the woman wouldn’t forget the name of the man who’d sentenced her son to such a long stint just for being hungry. After all, she