![]() ![]() Neither remembers what schools the boy attended. Keeping track of Luis was beyond either parent. ''He thought nobody loved him,'' his father said. He fought constantly with his brothers, broke windows in the apartment buildings where the family lived and stole from members of the family: $140 and some food stamps from his mother, an expensive watch from his father, a $500 radio from the woman with whom his father now lives. Luis, his parents said, would not obey them. His only concern was that he might have the bad luck to attack someone armed with a gun, or that he might be caught. He never worried about the terror he inflicted on his victims, or about their physical loss. Stealing is the only kind of work Luis has ever done. He moved on to shoplifting, tried burglary, snatched gold chains, mugged and held up a jewelry store, he says. By the age of 8 he was working as a lookout for shoplifters. Luis's earliest memory is of cutting classes. Once, one of Luis's sisters was bitten by a rat as she slept. Sometimes there was no food at all in the house. Meals and bedtimes could come at anytime. Neither parent paid much attention to the children. The family moved from one dilapidated tenement to another. ![]() ''My mind go blank.'' Like many other young criminals, Luis grew up in a family with little structure. He was never anxious, never afraid, he said the other day in a bare visiting room at Rikers Island. Such things never concerned Luis when he was carrying out a mugging. But sometimes, major offenses are still referred to the Family Court, where most juvenile crimes are handled and where the maximum penalty is no more than 18 months of confinement. Three years ago, New York State stiffened its penalties for 13-, 14- and 15-year-olds convicted of such major crimes as armed robbery, rape and murder. Some say a complete overhaul of all the social services, including the schools, is needed. Specialists in the field offer little hope of reversing the trend of growing violence by young people. So, for now, he remains in custody at Rikers Island. His history made him a natural suspect for the police in the slaying later that month of a 38-year-old lawyer in a robbery in a riverside park near Avenue D, and he spent two weeks in jail before three other youths were arrested in the crime.īefore the murder charge was dropped, the authorities discovered that eight months earlier Luis had violated probation for an armedrobbery conviction by running away from a sort of halfway house for juvenile delinquents in East Harlem. ![]() He was arrested in September on charges of stealing a teacher's purse at a public school. Luis Guzman is one of tens of thousands of violent youths who prowl the streets of the nation's cities, instilling fear and limiting in countless ways the manner in which urban Americans live their lives.īy this fall, at the age of 16, Luis Guzman had become a familiar figure to the police. It was where he headed first after he got out of Rikers Island and other institutions. 32-caliber revolver, for $75, and where he and his friends planned raids into the Upper East Side to mug and snatch gold chains. It was the guerrilla base where he ''hung out'' as a member of the ''Little Wild Boys'' gang, where he bought his first gun, a.
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