According to Garrett, her 12-year-old client has had no prior contact with the justice system, no issues in the juvenile detention center, and would be starting school soon.
“My client is not a threat to society,” Garrett said. “He’s a 12-year-old boy. Anything that may have occurred, occurred between two young boys that were friends and were playing together. He’s not a threat to anyone. He has loving parents and he deserves to go home while this is pending.”
Butler County Juvenile Court Judge Kathleen Romans denied the request.
Romans said she was concerned that the victim lives in the same mobile home park as the defendant and that, because the complaint indicates that the alleged crime occurred at 7 a.m. in the morning, she had a “huge concern about what kind of supervision is in the home.”
Romans also stated that she doesn’t know how long the 12-year-old’s mother, who moved to Butler County from Kentucky in May, intends to stay in the area, though the mother stated under oath that she planned to remain in Oxford.
“I have to send you back to (the Butler County Juvenile Detention Center), but I’ll get you the quickest (hearing) date we can,” Romans told the boy. “I understand you’re behaving well. Keep it up. That’s important to me.”
Romans also granted Garrett’s motion for a competency evaluation, which she requested because of her client’s young age and inexperience with the criminal justice system, and ordered that it be done as soon as possible.
“If there would have been some adult supervision this woud never have happened,” the defendant’s mother said after the hearing. “My child was spending the night at (the victim’s) house and all three adults were in bed when this happened. The children were playing. It was an accident.”
The alleged crime occurred the morning of July 21, when the 12-year-old boy allegedly pushed his 9-year-old neighbor, Jackson “Jack” Loyd, off the roof of a trailer home, causing him to fall onto the edge of a trampoline.
“He had a friend staying the night, and boys being boys, they went up on the roof, and they were going to jump off, but when Jack refused to do it, he was pushed,” Jack’s mother Julie Loyd previously told this news outlet. “And when he landed, he landed on the hard bar that held the springs together on the trampoline.”
Loyd was airlifted to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, where his spleen and kidney were removed, and stayed in the hospital until July 31.
He is now at home and, according to Julie Loyd, “slowly getting back into the swing of things. He has a long, long road to recovery and he is in pain, but we are managing that.”
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