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On May 1 Circuit Judge Terence Perkins will sentence Brendan Depa on a charge that carries a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison. The punishment will be nowhere near that: the sentencing guidelines don’t call for it, the incident doesn’t warrant it, and Perkins is not a hanging judge. The question is whether he will impose any prison time, and whether reason and justice, not mercy or vengeance, will prevail.
Brendan Depa has severe autism and numerous mental health issues, among them a din of disorders that, if unmanaged, can make him an occasionally violent person. He was attending Matanzas High School on February 21, 2023, when he was disciplined sloppily and in violation of his education plan over an electronic game he was allowed to bring to school. Guidelines were set out about that game that he and his faculty had to follow, just as guidelines were set out about how to discipline him, and how not to: doing so in front of his classmate was an immediate trigger, and a violation of his plan.
Neither he nor the faculty followed those guidelines. In that regard alone, there’s ample guilt on both sides. But the charge excises context, exonerating everyone but Brendan, the adolescent with a behavioral disorder: He lost his temper and attacked a teacher’s aide, Joan Naydich, knocking her unconscious and brutalizing her enough to crack two ribs in a horrendous sequence caught on surveillance video.
The released video circulated around the globe: a big, Black boy whaling on a smaller, unconscious white woman, moments later calling her names and threatening her life. The attack was appalling. Some of the public response was vile, and continues to this day. It was racist, referencing Brendan’s size, color and hair. It vomited all the familiar tropes: animal, savage, thug–every code word evoking the n-word. It was not a reaction to a beating. It was a lynching. The rope-enraged wanted more.
It is unfortunately to that reaction that the State Attorney charged Brendan as an adult, as he would not have had there been no video. We know this for a fact. A special education student with Brendan’s disorders lost his temper and broke his teacher’s arm some years ago at Flagler Palm Coast High School. But the student was white. His parents were prominent in the community. One of them was an elected official (with a temper I witnessed, incidentally). The boy was not charged. He was not even suspended. More than that: the school built him special accommodations. Jacob Oliva was the principal at the time. He became Florida’s education chancellor and is now the secretary of education in Arkansas.
But Brendan Depa is facing prison.
So let’s not pretend like Brendan’s skin color or humbler station has nothing to do with this. Add to that what we’ve learned since: the school, which has gotten off scot-free, failed to implement Brendan’s legally required Independent Education program as prescribed. The electronic game allowance had even been part of one of his earlier IEPs. Essential questions have been raised and not answered about the qualifications of Brendan’s faculty team. We also now know, thanks to the lawsuit filed on behalf of Depa this week, that he was a train wreck at Matanzas from Day one, that he’d assaulted students and faculty before, that police were called before, that he’d been disciplined and suspended before, all to no avail because all along, his plan was poorly followed or his behavioral and psychological needs were poorly addressed.
He had free reign. He was a “ticking time bomb,” as the lawsuit states. Either the school should have altered the plan accordingly or Depa shouldn’t have been there, as the school determined too late. The school itself, according to the lawsuit, held a determination hearing just before his arrest “and the district found that the conduct was a manifestation of his disabilities.” That should’ve meant no arrest, as had been the case previously. But it was too late. The whims of injustice were in motion.
With a dismal school board that covers up its ignorance and laziness with pandering bans of books and safe spaces (thank you not, Christy Chong), we can’t expect the serious, intelligent work of providing proper resources and trained personnel to address the special needs of human beings. So you can only blame Matanzas so far. But blame and responsibility are two different things. Remove blame, if you like. The district’s responsibility in braiding the rope of Brendan’s lynching remains.
Add to that a criminal charge that was arbitrary, political and reactionary, and we get the spectacle that’s been the Brendan Depa case. He has been in jail for 14 months, the first seven in a more gulag-like juvenile detention hellhole in Jacksonville. He’s been more fortunate in Flagler County, where Chief Daniel Engert runs a civilized institution. But Brendan’s mother is right: even a light prison sentence in state prison is death for Brendan–if not for his person, then at least for what’s left of his humanity. His demons aside, that was never a small portion of who he was.
So here we are, facing a sentencing that should have never been–at least not in this court: Brendan should have appeared with others in his class, among those lawbreaking students John Fanelli, the district’s student support director, regularly takes before a family or county judge to be disciplined in proportion to the crime, not the emotions, not the publicity, not the bigotry. Not, in sum, the vengeance.
Vengeance has no place here because vengeance isn’t justice. It is merely adding barbarism to injury. Mercy has no place here, either, because mercy implies forbearance for an outright crime whose responsibility falls entirely on the perpetrator. And mercy is the purview of gods, not law-abiding judges.
There’s no question that Brendan committed a crime. But he was the uncontrolled, unhinged and barely knowing instrument of a crime whose accomplices bear a disproportionate part of the responsibility. That’s why on May 1 when the courtroom gallery fills with fury and indignation, which yet have their place, none of it should cross the bar. And that’s why, if there is a silver lining in this tragedy, it is in Brendan Depa’s open plea to a judge too respectful of the law to confuse punishment with pandering, or to let empathy become a zero-sum game. Brendan Depa has suffered enough, not just in jail, but as the palimpsest of a million slanders, which he feels as if they were razored on his skin.
He has done the world a service and he doesn’t know it. He has opened a window a little for us into a depth of agony and sorrows young people like him and their families live with on a margin we impose, because it’s too difficult to deal with. Easier to segregate or punish. Sentencing over, the window will close. For Brendan it won’t be over. It’ll never be over, even if spared prison. He is going to suffer for the rest of his life with a condition he can only control so much, in restrictive behavioral health homes already prepared for him, should he see the outside again. It is prison enough. It is prison plenty. It just isn’t vengeance.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece aired on WNZF.
