Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
SAUNDRA AMRHEINThe teen was to have gone to the county jail when he was released from a juvenile center. Instead, he was taken home.
LAND O'LAKES - A mistake at the state Department of Juvenile Justice caused the release of a former Zephyrhills football star awaiting trial on murder charges.
Robert Andrew Devonshire Jr., 18, was picked up by his mother, Sharon Giles, from the Marion Youth Development Center in Ocala on Oct. 27 following a six-month stint there on juvenile charges, she said. The center's officials told her it was okay for her to take him home.
But the Pasco County Sheriff's Office had ordered him held at the county jail in Land O'Lakes after his time at the Marion center. Deputies requested the hold because a bondsman revoked Devonshire's bond after he entered the Marion treatment center, as he was again in custody. He awaits trial on a second-degree murder charge in the May 2002 shooting death of Joel Wigenton, 33, of Zephyrhills.
On Monday, Devonshire's family received a visit from a Pasco sheriff's deputy after officials there received an anonymous call saying Devonshire was on the street, according to an agency report.
Giles arranged for her son to call deputies and set up a meeting Tuesday at his bondsman's office, where her son's bond was promptly reinstated at $100,000. He was re-released.
"It wasn't his fault; it wasn't my fault," Giles said. "It wasn't like he escaped or anything. He's been calling the bondsman once a week and going to see the probation officer."
Catherine Arnold, spokeswoman for the state Department of Juvenile Justice, agreed that the agency's employees dropped the ball. The Sheriff's Office had sent a "hold" order to the Juvenile Detention Center in Pasco when Devonshire arrived there before his transfer to Marion in April.
It appears that communication broke down somewhere between the state's Pasco facility and its treatment center in Marion, she said. When Devonshire was placed on conditional release last month, he should have been brought back to the Land O'Lakes jail.
"If that's in fact what happened, that should not have happened and we'll be looking into our procedures" to determine if changes are needed, Arnold said.
She attributed the mixup to the unusual circumstances of the case - a juvenile offender wanted at the same time for an adult crime.
"That is something that doesn't typically happen," she said.
Meanwhile, Devonshire was spending his free time filling out job applications and signing up for GED classes, his mother said. He has a pretrial conference on the murder case in February. In that case, investigators say Devonshire shot and killed Wigenton because he thought Wigenton had cheated him on a drug deal.