OAN’s Brooke Mallory
3:18 PM – Sunday, September 3, 2023
On the same day that a judge denied bond for a 16-year-old girl accused of fatally stabbing another adolescent in Washington, D.C., after what police believe was a disagreement over a McDonald’s sauce packet, the nation’s capital started enforcing its juvenile curfew enforcement pilot program on Friday.
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However, at the time of the attack, the D.C. Juvenile Curfew Enforcement Pilot was already in the works and being looked over by officials.
At around 2:10 a.m. on August 27th, a stabbing involving two young women transpired over what sounded like a minor dispute at first.
For the 16-year-old girl charged with second-degree murder and other offenses in the death of 16-year-old Naima Liggon, a second judge in the D.C. Superior Court declined to issue bond on Friday.
According to a detective’s testimony, a quarrel over “dipping sauce” outside of the 24-hour McDonald’s at U Street and 14th Street Northwest was what led to the stabbing.
Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington, D.C., made the announcement on Thursday, without mentioning the incident specifically, saying that the juvenile pilot program would concentrate on seven neighborhoods chosen by the Metropolitan Police Department and “that have experienced a substantial increase in the number of young people involved in criminal conduct such as robberies or carjackings.”
However, just hours after the trial program went into action, gunfire broke out in the 1300 block of 7th Street shortly before midnight, leaving two teenagers dead and a third hospitalized in serious condition.
The two victims were Mikeya Ferguson, 19, and Cle’shai Perry, 18. A 16-year-old girl is also reportedly in critical condition.
Thanks to the new program, minors under the age of 17 will no longer be allowed in public areas or on business properties from 11:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. on Sunday through Thursday and from 12:01 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday.
Officers who discover youth breaking the curfew are required to take them to Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services “achievement centers” as part of enforcement tactics, which started on September 1st.
Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said last week that his office will start prosecuting 16-year-old and 17-year-old carjacking and robbery defendants for adult crimes.
The juvenile curfew enforcement pilot program, according to a press statement from Bowser on Thursday, “will relieve MPD officers of this responsibility, allowing them to return to patrol during crucial hours.”
Prior to the pilot program, police were forced to take minors who had been caught breaking the curfew into custody and hold them at the police station until a parent or guardian could be contacted.
The mayor announced that officers will, from this point on, take children to a “safe space” before returning to the neighborhood to resume patrol.
“The vast majority of our young people are doing the right thing – they are back in school, they are involved in extracurriculars, and in the evenings and at night, they are where they need to be – supervised and safe. But we need that to be true for all of our young people, and if we have kids and teenagers who are not in safe situations, we need to connect with those families,” Bowser said in a statement Thursday. “I’ve shared before that when I was young, my father used to tell me: There’s nothing good in the street after 11 o’clock. We want our kids home, we want them safe, and if they’re not – we want families working with us to get their kids the help that they need.”
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