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State examines juvenile center death

Investigators await autopsy results but say the 17-year-old boy appears to have died of natural causes.

By CATHERINE E. SHOICHET and ABBIE VANSICKLE
Published October 15, 2005

LECANTO - The state on Friday continued investigating the death of a 17-year-old boy at the Cypress Creek juvenile detention center.

Department of Juvenile Justice officials said a guard conducting a routine check about 4:30 a.m. Thursday discovered Willie Lawrence Durden III motionless in his bed at the Cypress Creek Juvenile Offenders Correctional Center. Durden was taken by ambulance to Citrus Memorial Hospital in Inverness, where he was pronounced dead.

"Based on what the staff saw, we have no reason at this time to believe that this was anything other than a natural death," Juvenile Justice spokesman Tom Denham said Thursday. "There was no suicide note. Our staff saw no bruises on the body, no evidence of suicide and no reason to suspect any type of foul play."

The last time anyone saw Durden alive was when a corrections officer saw him go to the bathroom between 2 and 2:30 a.m. Thursday, said Citrus County Sheriff's spokeswoman Gail Tierney.

No one noticed anything unusual, she said.

Guards are required to check inmates every 10 minutes, Tierney said. When a guard stopped at Durden's cell at 4 a.m., he appeared to be asleep. At 4:10 a.m., the guard still thought he was sleeping but noticed he wasn't moving.

Ten minutes later, he still wasn't moving, and the guard entered his cell and shook him to see if he was all right, Tierney said.

He wasn't breathing, the guard later told deputies. Officials started CPR and called 911 at 4:31 a.m. The dispatch came in as a signal 7, a dead person.

Tierney said an autopsy was performed Thursday, but the medical examiner is withholding the results until a toxicology report is completed.

Investigators were not aware of any pre-existing medical condition or mental illness and found nothing in Durden's cell that would point to a suspicious death, Tierney said.

Corrections officers told investigators there had been no altercations with Durden on Wednesday, and he wasn't acting strange.

Durden had been at Cypress Creek for nearly a year, Denham said. He was arrested in September 2004 after committing an armed robbery of a Domino's Pizza deliveryman in Jacksonville.

According to an arrest report from the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, the delivery man was surrounded by four men, one of whom held him at gunpoint, demanding his money and pizzas. Durden admitted to helping plan the robbery and striking the delivery man in the face.

Denham said news of Durden's death shocked Cypress Creek staff and inmates alike.

He was scheduled to be released from Cypress Creek in April, Denham said. But a case manager at the facility was getting ready to file paperwork to request an early release in January.

Contacted at her home in Daytona Beach on Friday, Durden's grandmother said the family had no comment. Cypress Creek principal Erica Moore said Durden was a straight-A student who regularly kept a journal and was admired by his peers. He had received a scholarship to play football at a private Jacksonville high school and was planning to go there after his release.

"He recently told me his purpose in life was to help other children," Moore said.

At Cypress Creek, Moore said Durden often talked other kids out of getting into trouble.

"He challenged them all to do the right thing ... He just had that kind of effect on people," she said.

The Citrus County School District sent grief counselors to Cypress Creek on Friday to help inmates and staff deal with the teen's death, Denham said.

Cypress Creek, which opened in 1995, is a Level 10 juvenile detention center, a rating that means it houses the state's most hardened juvenile criminals: rapists, armed robbers and repeat felons among them.

The 96-bed facility is on Woodland Ridge Drive in Lecanto, just down the street from the Citrus County jail.

G4S Youth Services, LLC, a private company based in the United Kingdom, runs the facility through a contract with Juvenile Justice.

Hasselbach said G4S Youth Services is also conducting an internal investigation of Durden's death.

Catherine E. Shoichet can be reached at cshoichet@sptimes.com or 860-7309. Abbie VanSickle can be reached at vansickle@sptimes.com or 860-7312. Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

[Last modified October 15, 2005, 01:15:22]