16-year-old boy held in S.F. adult jail for almost 3 weeks

Love what you read? Love that it was free?

Mission Local will never have a paywall. All our articles are free for everyone, always. Help us keep it that way — donate to our end-of-year fundraiser to make Mission Local free for your neighbors.

Donate today!

Leer o escuchar en español

A 16-year-old was incarcerated in San Francisco County Jail for almost three weeks after he allegedly gave a false name and birthday to law enforcement.

The city took 20 days to verify that the defendant is a minor, despite being alerted to the possibility almost immediately after the boy’s arrest.

In August, the defendant — whom Mission Local is not naming because he is a minor — was booked into jail for allegedly transporting and possessing a controlled substance for sale.

According to booking logs, the defendant, a monolingual Spanish speaker, was 21 years old.

District Attorney Brooke Jenkins charged that defendant with multiple serious felony counts related to narcotics sales. At the time, the DA stated that he was 20 years old. 

But this week, San Francisco Superior Court visiting Judge George Eskin found that the defendant is, in fact, a 16-year-old minor, and that his name was wholly different from what law enforcement and the DA said they were given. 

During the 20 days between his arrest and the judge’s decision, the defendant was kept separated from other inmates in a section of the jail at 425 Seventh St. for people with special needs, according to his father and emails reviewed by Mission Local. 

He was kept there while the city reviewed evidence that he was a minor.

Suspects under 18 in California are not allowed to be detained in jails for adults. Instead, minors in San Francisco must be held at the Juvenile Justice Hall.

This defendant was likely held in a special unit because the Sheriff’s Department could neither allow him to mix with adults nor confirm his age and move him to Juvenile Hall, attorneys familiar with the case said. 

That specialized unit, C Pod, includes psychiatric housing and “safety cells,” which are cells for people who require regular safety checks. Several former inmates and jail workers have said staying in C Pod is particularly undesirable, in large part due to its isolation. 

When the defendant was first arrested, his father told support staff at the courthouse his son’s age, according to advocates who provide reentry services. The teenager was then moved to C Pod for his safety.

While the man professing to be the defendant’s father possessed childhood photos, a photo copy of a birth certificate and a passport, their relationship has not been officially confirmed by city agencies or attorneys. 

Emails showed that the defendant passed the time in C Pod with crossword puzzles provided by support staff. His request for a Bible and a tablet could not be fulfilled, given limited deputy staffing over the Labor Day holiday weekend, one worker wrote. 

The sheriff’s department declined to comment on the specifics of the case, given the strict protections in place to ensure juvenile privacy. Juvenile cases are more focused on rehabilitation than adult cases, and are closed to the public. 

Rani Singh, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department chief legal counsel, said the court informed her of the identification issue after it was discussed during a hearing for the defendant and his two adult co-defendants last week, two weeks after the boy’s arrest. 

It is not unheard of for a defendant to be misidentified by law enforcement or to provide false information, especially with a language barrier, juvenile defense attorneys said.

But it is “rare for kids to claim to be adults,” Kirk Earl, a DA prosecutor, said at a recent hearing.   

Nevertheless, that’s what happened in this case, Earl said. The defendant claimed he was born in 2000 and gave a different name, Earl told the court, so it was his defense attorney’s burden to prove otherwise, not the DA’s.

At a hearing last week, another judge decided that a photocopy of the defendant’s purported birth certificate provided after his arrest was insufficient evidence. This certificate, after all, had a different name than the one given to the court. 

This week, defense attorney Paul Dennison carried to the stand a sealed white envelope with a birth certificate from the embassy of the defendant’s home country. 

Dr. Greg Mar, a former San Francisco police captain and a retired forensic odontologist — a dentist who often testifies in legal matters — testified via Zoom that he’d reviewed a panoramic X-ray of the defendant’s teeth and found him to be a minor. 

“You can’t imagine what I’ve had to do in the last four days to get this done,” said Singh, who found Mar. 

The envelope containing the birth certificate was opened in court, and Dennison and Earl peered over it together. The defendant’s birthdate, it said in Spanish, was in 2009, a year whispered down the line of attorneys waiting in the center of the courtroom for their case to be called. 

Almost three weeks after the defendant’s arrest, Eskin ordered that he be transferred to juvenile hall and held on $10,000 bail.

Before the hearing, the defendant’s father shared photos of the boy in a cap and gown at his sixth grade graduation in 2020, alongside a certificate of academic excellence for being in the 92nd percentile of his sixth grade class.

Other photos showed the teenager standing in front of balloons on his 16th birthday and sitting on a brightly patterned couch with his family. 

The defendant who appeared before the court in an orange sweatsuit still looked like that boy, but the angles of his once-round face were sharper. He waved to his father at the back of the courtroom before a deputy escorted him away.  

Additional reporting by Mariana Garcia.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the age of the defendant as 17. He is 16.