It's been seven years of 'tough love' for one of nation's youngest convicted killers
Nathaniel Abraham, 13, is escorted from his murder trial in Pontiac on Nov. 9, 1999. In the seven years since Abraham was locked up at age 11 for murder, he's dreamed of becoming a professional basketball player, entertainer, carpenter, lawyer, barber and inspirational speaker who steers kids from crime.
Judge Eugene Arthur Moore instructs 13-year-old Nathaniel Abraham during a 1999 hearing. Moore hopes years of rehab and training at Michigan's juvenile facilities are readying Abraham for the adult world he'll enter in less than two years.
Now 19, Nathaniel Abraham, left, looks back at his family as he stands with his attorney Daniel Bagdade on Jan. 11 in a courtroom in Pontiac. He will remain in juvenile prison for another two years.
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PONTIAC -- In the seven years since Nathaniel Abraham was locked up at age 11 for murder, he's dreamed of becoming a professional basketball player, entertainer, carpenter, lawyer, barber and inspirational speaker who steers kids from crime.
When Abraham appears in court, Judge Eugene Arthur Moore listens to his plans and troubles, nodding, looking him in the eye and interrupting with questions. How? Why? What do you need? And perhaps most often: Who's the only person who can get you there?
Now 19, Abraham still sometimes stares down at the table in front of him and mumbles confused teenage answers. But often he holds his head up, meets the judge's gaze, and answers succinctly. He recently told Moore that he plans to get out of detention, avoid his old neighborhood, go to college and start a business.
"I also want to make you proud and thank you for taking a chance on me," he said.
Since 1997 Moore and Abraham, one of the country's youngest convicted killers, have sat feet apart, exchanging frowns and apologies, promises, ultimatums, encouragement and the occasional spontaneous laugh.
Their relationship has been a strange kind of periodic parenting for Abraham, a virtually fatherless teenager now in the home stretch of his incarceration for murder.
Moore, who has presided over juvenile court in suburban Detroit for more than three decades, hopes years of rehab and training at Michigan's juvenile facilities are readying Abraham for the adult world he'll enter in less than two years.
Some of what Abraham has been learning is basic: how to balance a checkbook, read a bus schedule, behave in a job interview. Other skills require more finesse: controlling his anger, walking away from bad situations, holding down a job.
"One thing that can be said is that the system did not fail him," prosecutor Deborah Carley said. "This court has done everything I've ever seen a court do."
Abraham's mother, Gloria, and his lawyer say Moore has been a "godsend," dishing the strong-willed teenager a consistent dose of tough love.
Over and over, Moore has ordered Abraham to take responsibility for himself. And he demands that the detention center, W.J. Maxey Boys Training School, teach and discipline the teenager and exorcise his self-pity.
"He's continually kept the hammer over Nate, never let up on him, never let up on telling him his responsibility to himself and to society. And Nate has responded," defense attorney Daniel Bagdade said. "He respects Judge Moore and he listens very carefully."
Abraham, whose broad shoulders don't quite fill out the navy blue blazer he wears to court, will receive his high school diploma in June. Moore wants him in classes at Washtenaw Community College, and Abraham says he's interested in cosmetology, which he's learned by helping with barber duties at the detention home.
When the judge ordered community service, Abraham started speaking to groups of at-risk kids about the perils of crime. He tells them that when you're sent away, you don't get to wear Nikes.
But social workers and the prosecutor are concerned that Abraham still has serious problems controlling his temper. Most recently, he was punished for mouthing off and threatening one of his counselors after being fouled during a basketball game.
They hope more anger management training and increased socialization with the outside world will help him prepare to live on his own. He'll be free of all state supervision on his 21st birthday, in January 2007.
When Abraham was arrested after killing 18-year-old Ronnie Greene Jr. in October 1997 outside a convenience store in this gritty city 30 miles north of Detroit, he stood 4 feet 9 inches tall and weighed 65 pounds. Sitting in the defense chair, his 11-year-old feet couldn't reach the ground.
Prosecutors argued that he had hidden the rifle, told people he intended to kill, and been worried about gangs coming after him. He had had run-ins with the system before, authorities said, after pulling a gun on fellow elementary school students, beating a boy with a pipe, and getting involved in arson and burglary. But he was never prosecuted.
The defense argued that the shooting was accidental, that Abraham was aiming at trees, not Greene's head.
In the end, jurors convicted him of second-degree murder, making him the youngest person in Michigan to be convicted of murder as an adult, and one of the youngest in the country.
His also was the first murder case brought under a new state law that gave prosecutors unilateral power to decide whether to try someone as an adult -- previously a judge's decision. A rise in juvenile crime during the mid-1990s had prompted lawmakers nationwide to enact measures making it easier to try and punish juveniles as adults.
Moore faced three options in sentencing Abraham: He could send him to juvenile facilities until his 21st birthday, when he would automatically be released. He could send him to adult prison. Or he could combine the two: juvenile hall until age 21 with the possibility of adult prison afterward.
He stuck with the juvenile system.
The 69-year-old judge believes in it deeply and wants to make it work. His father was a juvenile court judge whose portrait hangs in Moore's courtroom, and he thinks the "vast majority" of children can be rehabilitated. He handles about 50 kids' cases at a time, though few last as long as Abraham's.
"If we can't change a kid's behavior in 8 or 9 years, then maybe the juvenile system needs to take a good look at itself and what we're doing wrong," Moore said in a recent interview.
Like many juvenile judges, Moore meets with his delinquents at least every six months until their time is up, and typically uses a parental relationship as a model.
"There's an old doctrine that the juvenile judge is supposed to provide for the youngster what the child should have gotten in its own home," Moore said. "I think most judges still believe that they have this responsibility."
Moore is blunt. He discards, even disparages, the social-worker language in the review reports brought to him, and demands that case workers translate phrases like "cognitive distortion" into clear English.
Frustrated that he wasn't getting a complete picture of Abraham's successes and failures, he recently took the unusual step of appointing a guardian ad litum to investigate and give him the undiluted facts.
In court with Abraham, Moore sometimes interrupts conversations to ask the teenager if he understands what's going on. Or he'll suddenly order him to regurgitate a complicated set of instructions. Abraham can do it.
"This case is really the ultimate test for a judge, to work with a kid for a long time and pull the kid through the system," Bagdade said. "In this particular relationship, it's probably come closer to some kind of a parental influence than in most of them."
Moore traces his outlook to his father and his grandfather, a Methodist minister, who both believed in squeezing out bad behavior by accentuating the positive.
"Most of us in life make it because we had somebody --whether it's a parent, if we're lucky, or a sibling, or a teacher or a coach or a piano teacher -- that we believe cared about us. If we think that people care about us, then we begin to care about ourselves," he said.
Social workers say Abraham has expressed remorse for his crime, and he has apologized publicly in court.
Though she's concerned about his temper problems, Robin Adams, Ronnie Greene's mother, has forgiven him.
Her family has attended many of Abraham's court hearings over the years, and it's been hard for her to watch him grow up when her own son never got that chance. Greene would be 27 if he were still alive, Adams said.
But she says once she realized she had forgiven Abraham, she was able to pray that he gets his life together, to "be saved, be close to God, take responsibility and be a man."
"I want him to grow up to be everything he can," she said in an interview.
Abraham seems to think he's done fine.
"I don't think the average 11-year-old would have handled it as well as I have ... Not to be arrogant in no shape or form, but I just don't see it," he told Moore.
And lately, he's been thanking the judge a lot.
"I guess I never really looked at it as you being in my corner one-hundred percent, you wanting to see me become the best person I can," he told Moore at February's review hearing. "Now that I'm older ... I can see that."
"You don't need to thank me," Moore responded. "We need to keep you on the road you're on ... then you can thank yourself."
Moore noted that each decision any judge makes is a risk. But in private he agreed that he took a big chance at a time when states were cracking down on juvenile crime.
"Not just for the judge and not just for the kid," he said. "For the system, for everyone involved in the system. Because if it doesn't work, then you've just given fuel to the people who said from the beginning that it wouldn't work."
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