Joyce Ginyard hears the slide-click-crash of prison doors. Then the silence.

        Released from prison for the last time in 1998, she vowed to never again hear the echoes of cold metal, and to reunite with the teen-age son who skidded through a troubled childhood trying to find her.

Larry Washington,16, during an interview with The Cincinnati Enquirer. (Glenn Hartong photo)

        The Avondale woman did eventually regain custody of the youngest of her five children, 16-year-old Larry Washington. Then a gun in Larry's hand changed everything.

        Now, their roles are reversed: him in jail, her free, another reunion splintered.

        “I blame myself, 90 percent,” Mrs. Ginyard says of the son raised mostly by relatives, then in three foster homes and nearly a dozen juvenile facilities.

        “I wasn't there.”

        Larry fired the shot that nearly killed 2-year-old Devonte Williams on an Over-the-Rhine street last summer. The near death of a toddler caught in the cross-fire of young thugs was a horrifying low point in months of violence fueled by April's riots.

        “Truthfully, I never saw him,” Larry says in his first interview, as he serves the first of six years in prison at Madison Correctional Institute in London, Ohio. His mother, meanwhile, continues her own recovery from crack cocaine addiction, with a new job, new apartment, but the same old problem: being away from her son.

        “Ain't nothin' I did in my life got to do with how I grew up,” Larry insists. “It's what I chose to do. I'm gonna take responsibility for anything I do.”

        In 1995, Larry nearly became that year's Devonte when a drive-by shooter in Evanston missed him by inches. The friend standing with Larry, Michael McCoy, was shot in the head and died the next day.

        The shooter never saw them.
       

A boy's life

        Ohio inmate No. A416381 had racked up 17 juvenile-court convictions, stemming from 22 arrests, including assault and theft, from age 10 to 15.

Joyce Ginyard holds a scrapbook she has kept since her son, Larry Washington, was convicted in the shooting of 2-year-old Devonte Williams. (Craig Ruttle photo) | ZOOM |

        He was 2 years old when his dad left for good and his mother left for federal prison in Morgantown, W.Va., for stealing checks. A cousin in Over-the-Rhine took Larry. When his mom returned 11 months later, “(Larry) was like, OK, I know this lady, but I don't,” Mrs. Ginyard recalls.

        By kindergarten at Hays Elementary in the West End, Larry knew his colors, shapes and numbers. But in class, he blurted out answers. He was usually right, but he never raised his hand, just his voice.

        Around this time, Mrs. Ginyard began using crack. She can't recall when or why.

        “Everything started going down from there,” she says. “Main thing is, I lost my kids. I didn't want them to see me like that, y'know.”

        But they did see her.

        “We were older, so we always knew what she was doing,” says Larry's sister, Nahiesha Ginyard, 19, of Clifton. “He was younger. It bothered us, but not him.”

        Jon Randol, director of Children Services for the Center for Children and Families, says, “Family is critically important. The older the kids, the more they make independent decisions. But in terms of the younger child, they don't have that foundation.”

        Cincinnati Public Schools labeled Larry “severe behavior handicapped,” and said he suffered from attention deficit disorder and hypertension. In special-education classes at Burton School in Avondale, his report cards showed mostly As and Bs.

        Then he began hanging out with older kids in Evanston.
       

A boy's death

        Larry was 8 in January 1994 when his sister Nikki, 15, started complaining of chest pains. Months of non-answers led to X-rays that showed acute lymphocytic leukemia lymphoma.

Larry Washington as a young boy.

        “It was hard,” Larry said. “I just think she's being sick.”

        Her death took three years. Another death took one day.

        On April 10, 1995, Larry, his friend Michael McCoy and others were standing on St. Leger Place in Evanston. A drive-by shooter named Deatrick Beard, 17, came rolling down the street, looking for the guy who'd stabbed him in the back three days earlier.

        “I just seen the car roll up and down the street. I know from movies they was about to do something,” Larry says.

        “I couldn't sleep for about two weeks, just seein' that.”

        Pop-pop-pop.

        As Michael dived onto a baby girl to shield her, a bullet hit the top of his head. Mr. Beard is now inmate A318417 at the state prison in Lucasville, serving 15 years to life.

        Joyce Ginyard spent that day in Over-the-Rhine, with the gray-blue smoke of crack that tingled in her lungs.

        “My sister called me,” she said. “But at that point, nothin' fazed me. I said, "He'll be all right.'”

        But he wasn't.

        On June 4, 1996, Larry threatened to have his older brother kill Larry's principal at Hoffman Elementary in East Walnut Hills. It was his first arrest.

        “I don't even remember what I said,” Larry says.

        The principal, Michael Ward, didn't either — but he remembered Larry as a troubled but promising boy.

        He also recalled Mrs. Ginyard showing up one day, apparently high, asking how Larry was doing. Larry hadn't been to school for three days. She had no idea.
       

From home to home

        His next home was “20-20,” Hamilton County's juvenile jail named for its address on Auburn Avenue.

        Larry bounced among juvenile facilities in Ohio and Indiana, foster homes in Madisonville, Mount Auburn and West Chester, and apartments throughout the city.

        In 1996, Mrs. Ginyard was arrested in a crack cocaine-trafficking sting.

        “Larry was like, "Ma, I seen you on the news, and they were saying this and saying that. They got the train on the wrong track, don't they?'” she said.

        Mrs. Ginyard was playing cards one day in the Hamilton County Justice Center some time later when Larry showed up waving from the street. It was the first of three times he ran away from foster homes to see her in jail. Once, a man signed him in.

        “She's my life,” Larry says.

        That summer Larry learned the man he always knew as his father really wasn't. Later, he met the man who is.

        “I wasn't mad,” Larry says. “(Expletive) both of 'em. I still feel like that. They just like another person on the street.”

        From June through December 1996, Larry was convicted in juvenile court 12 times.
       

A girl's death

        After eight months in remission, Larry's sister Nikki was back at Children's Hospital Medical Center. On Jan. 4, 1997, the family gathered around her. Nikki was 18.

        “We stood there and watched her die,” Mrs. Ginyard says in a low voice. “Larry kept questioning, "Why? Why her? Take me Lord, I'm the bad one.'”

        “I cried afterward, but I didn't cry in front of everybody,” Larry says.”

        On Dec. 5, 1997, Larry's cousin, Alonzo Davenport, shot Cincinnati police Spc. Ronald Jeter, 34, and Officer Daniel Pope, 35, to death in a Clifton Heights apartment, before shooting himself.

        Watching TV news, Mrs. Ginyard assumed the shooter was an old classmate by that name, “Til they showed his picture, and Larry just started hollering.”

        Larry drew a picture of Alonzo at Nikki's coffin. A gun was pointed at Alonzo — with no one behind it.

        A month later, on the first anniversary of Nikki's death, Mrs. Ginyard relapsed with crack. Three weeks after that, Larry assaulted a teacher for the third time.

        Larry spent a year at Brookville Meadows juvenile facility in Bloomington, Ind., where in March 1999, he got an A-, two Bs, and a B-.

        Later, at the Ohio River Valley Youth Center in Gallia County, Larry on Sept. 9, 2000, earned a 3.25 grade-point average.

        In a diagnostic report obtained by the Enquirer through juvenile court Larry was “committed to the permanent custody” of the Ohio Department of Youth Services, which was suspended on the condition he not break the law.

        He'd been on probation twice, house arrest once and in counseling throughout. Twice, commitments to Youth Services were suspended.

        “Each (facility) helped me in a way,” Larry says. “I can't lie.”

        Last March, he took the Ohio ninth-grade proficiency test, passing writing but failing math, citizenship and science.

        Then in April, Larry saw a bulletin flash on TV's VH-1 about rioting in Cincinnati.

        “They was callin' in the National Guard,” he said. “I was like, Cincinnati? I was glad I wasn't there.”

        On May 21,at age 15, Larry finally was released to his mother, then living in Price Hill. He got a maintenance job at nearby Dater Middle School, and spent his free time visiting cousins in Over-the-Rhine. Mostly, he said, he stayed home at night.

        “I had a feeling something was gonna happen, though,” Larry says. “The day I got out (of detention), I looked around, I told my friend, "Man, this summer is gonna be the most violent.' Just the way everything was going down.”
       

A mother's life

        On July 20, an acquaintance named Dominick Mitchem, 24, jumped from a car and chased Larry up Vine Street, shooting. Larry's cousin handed him a gun. Running and firing wildly, Larry hit the toddler, Devonte, who had just finished an ice-cream cone during a family outing.

        “I saw (Larry's) eyes. It was like he was in a Western,” remembers Devonte's mother, Coko Ross of North Fairmount. “He needs to do his time, but I forgive him.”

        Larry assumed he'd return to the juvenile-court system.

        “A kid like him, he's building up adjudications,” says Judge Thomas Lipps, who ruled Larry should be tried in adult court.

        Larry feared facing a jury.

        “Yeah, just me being a young black juvenile, with my record,” he says. “Ain't no way around. 'Cause the riots, too. They'd say I was doing that. I was locked up.”

        Faced with up to 27 years in prison, Larry hoped for less than 10 years. His attorney, Bernard Wong, arranged a plea bargain of six years. In a separate trial, Mr. Mitchem got eight years.

        Mrs. Ginyard cried Oct. 16 as she watched Larry and a sheriff's deputy disappear down the courthouse hallway.

        At Madison Correction, Larry mouthed off at a guard and spent 15 of his first 29 days in solitary confinement. Since then he has gotten in several fights.

        Today, he's enrolled in school.

        “An intelligent man,” Larry responds, when asked to describe his future self at 22, when he'll be a free man. “I mean, I'm already ready to change, get my life on the right path. This is getting old.

        “When I get out, it'll be a totally different story.”

        His mother will be as he always was: waiting.

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