As Circuit Judge Terence Perkins imposed a 60-month prison term on Brendan Depa, who’d sat at the defendant’s table for nine hours and has been in jail for the last 17 and a half months, Depa wrote on a piece of paper: “I’m going to die in jail.”
The sentence was for beating Joann Naydich, Depa’s paraprofessional at Matanzas High School, in February 2023, when Depa was 17. The incident was captured on surveillance video, the video circled the globe, and the case drew so much international attention that when Gene Lopes started tutoring him at the county jail last November, Depa asked him: Everyone hates me. Why don’t you?”
Not long after he got back to the Flagler County jail Tuesday evening, Depa, who is severely autistic, was Baker Acted and sent to an Stewart Marchman Act facility in Daytona Beach, according to his mother, Leann Depa. He has remained there since. He was able to spend time with his parents and was expected to spend time with Lopes today.
A Baker Act is the involuntary commitment of an individual to a psychiatric unit when the person is at risk of harming others or themselves. His mother said jail staff made the decision to Baker Act him because of what he’d written at the end of the hearing. She had not seen the piece of paper. But she had spoken to him about it. Is Brendan worried that he would be harmed by others or by his own hands? “He’s afraid of both, including self-harm,” his mother said.
Lopes, a volunteer tutor and retired special education teacher who’s spent about 200 hours with him since November, spoke to him Wednesday evening. “He’s upset, he’s frightened, scared, but I dont think he’s surprised,” Lopes said today, shortly before he was to see him in Daytona Beach. “He did exactly what he was going to do. He’d told me on Thursday that he was going to accept what was going to happen on Tuesday. I think he did.” But it was only then that the reality of the impending prison sentence took hold, Lopes said, especially as he heard the wording of Perkins’s sentence and the rationale behind it, much of it angering Depa, because it wasn’t true.
“Mr. Depa has never expressed not even a single bit of remorse before this court in any of our many court proceedings, not once with regard to remorse,” the judge said. As he did so, Depa could be seen protesting at his attorney, Kurt Teifke, and seemingly demanding to speak as he held up a sheet of paper, twice audibly saying “I don’t care.” The attorney was talking him down.
The reason he was upset, his mother and Lopes both said separately, is that before the May hearing, Depa had written an apology letter saying exactly what the judge claimed he’d never shown: regret, remorse, apologies. Lopes had helped him start it, then walked away, purposely opting to let Depa write it all in his own words, at his own pace, with his own understanding (and occasional misunderstanding) of the situation. Depa has particularly good writing skills, Lope said, and the result was “profound apologies to Naydich, regret for what he did, and in no way did he blame her,” though in the past he had, just as he had been abusive and had spat on her in the immediate aftermath of the beating, as caught on video. It’s those moments that Perkins seized on, ignoring what may have been said or written since, since it was not in evidence.
It could have been. Toward the end of the day Tuesday, Teifke told the judge that Depa intended to read a statement–that same letter he’d written before the May hearing–to the court. But after a short break, as court reconvened, Teifke said that there would be no statement. Lopes said the attorney had dissuaded Depa from reading it, because if he had done so, Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark would have had the right to cross-examine him, and the defense did not want to let that happen. That may have been why Depa was saying “I don’t care.” He was trying to intervene as the judge spoke, and Teifke was telling him that that window had closed.
Depa was clearly upset after the hearing. The full courtroom emptied, the judge and the attorneys left, deputies took Depa out a side door, then, the courtroom almost empty but for a few reporters, brought him back to be fingerprinted and swabbed for DNA, as required for Department of Corrections records. During the hearing on several occasions he had paused and smiled for photographers. This time, on his way out, he twice flipped the finger at one of the photographers, his only juvenile outburst in his several appearances and hours in court since last August.
The letter’s contents have not been made part of the court record. But Depa’s intention was undeniable, Lopes said. “He clearly takes responsibility for what he did, and he’s not–as much as I am more than willing to put some blame on her, he’s not doing that, he’s not doing that anymore,” he said, referring to blaming Naydich (who sat in court throughout the sentencing hearing, the last hour with State Attorney R.J. Larizza sharing the same front-row bench.) “He was angry about the judge initially, about the million dollars, now he’s, ‘oh, the judge did what he had to do.’ He’s come a long way with everything going on.” The court had imposed a $1 million bond on Depa, ensuring that he would spend the entirety of his pre-trial period incarcerated.
That, oddly, has worked to his advantage in two ways, at least to some extent. First, he has had a stable and remarkably productive year, at least since he was transferred to the Flagler County jail last August, when he turned 18. 9It was a different story in juvenile lock-up in Jacksonville, where he was in solitary confinement most of the time.) One violent incident aside, early on at the Flagler jail, he has thrived under the protection of Chief Daniel Engert, Lopes, and supportive corrections deputies. He was halfway through his GED.
Second, the 17 and a half months he’s accumulated in jail will be credited to his prison sentence, knocking sown the 60 months to 42.5. He is also eligible for what’s called “gain time,” or time off for good behavior. He may shorten his sentence by up to 15 percent. Gain time is calculated from the time detention begins–not the time the prison sentence begins. So the 60 month sentence is calculated back to the February day in 2023 when Depa was jailed. If he qualifies for all 15 percent, that knocks off another nine months from his sentence, bringing it down to 33.5 months, or almost half the official sentence the judge imposed.
On the other hand, one of the prosecution’s witnesses–to the disgust of the defense attorney and of Lopes–pointed to prison as a preferable environment for Depa than group homes, with the stability of the last year as evidence.
“I’m terribly upset that it appears the work I did with him that helped him get through jail was used against him,” Lopes said. “It was used as: see, he can control himself. Well, he can control himself when he has the tools in place. And every one of the settings proved it.”
Thirty-three months in an adult prison is still more than two and a half years in one of the most punishing and dangerous environments in the country under any circumstances even for adults without mental health issues, let alone for an autistic 18 year old with a series of disorders. He is to be transferred out of the county jail to one of the a Florida prison system’s “reception centers,” as they are called, where he will be classified and transferred again weeks later to a more permanent prison.
Meanwhile, he remains at the SMA facility in Volusia County. “We honestly don’t know, we have no idea how long this is going to be,” Lopes said. “I’m hoping that this setting can be for a little bit anyway, because it’ll help him to prepare for the future.” A sharp, bright rainbow had taken shape against a slate-gray sky to the east, visible from the courthouse, as Depa was taken back to the county jail. The rainbow’s ironies were as numerous as its colors.
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