The mother of a teenage girl who was recently arrested and told she would go to jail by a judge in Detroit because she wouldn’t stop sleeping and showing him “attitude” talked about why her daughter was probably tired this week.
Latoreya Till told the Free Press on the phone Thursday that her family does not have a stable place to live right now. And due to what took place in the courtroom of 36th District Judge Kenneth King, Eva Goodman, 15, is scared.
“My daughter is hurt.” It makes her scared. She didn’t want to work. She thinks that her friends turned against her. “She was really scared and nervous,” Till said.
“Right now we have to move around because we don’t have a permanent address.” That’s why we got in a little late that night. But before she goes to work, she typically plants trees or does something active.
There is a charity group called The Greening Project that Goodman works for. Their goal is to make the city’s “green infrastructure” better. (A statement from the charity on Wednesday said that Goodman was 16 years old when he was actually 14.) Goodman and other project members went to King’s courtroom on Tuesday to watch the case and learn from the judge.
King saw Goodman sleeping while he was talking to the teens. A video from King’s trial showed that he yelled at her to wake up, but she was still asleep a few minutes later. At that point, he told them to arrest her.
Till said that her daughter admitted to sleeping, but she didn’t know how serious things were. It was explained by Till that she had never been to court or been in trouble before.
Goodman was led out of the room by court staff, who told Till’s daughter to take off her clothes and put on a green jail outfit. Till said that her daughter wouldn’t take off some clothes, but she was given a room to change in that was empty. There were no workers in the room watching the child change, but Till said her daughter thinks there was a security camera.
As soon as Goodman changed, she was handcuffed. A video shows that she was not in King’s courtroom for about two hours before he brought her back. After that, he held a meeting and asked a defense lawyer to help her. He then scolded her for sleeping and said she would go to jail if she didn’t stop.
Goodman was finally allowed to leave by King, but not before she asked her friends to raise their hands if she should go to jail.
King told the Free Press on Wednesday that he thought what he did was right.
“The girl wasn’t getting in trouble. King told CNN on the phone Wednesday afternoon, “What I was trying to do was to serve as a deterrent.”
“I wanted to instill in this kid that this is not a joke, this is a very serious situation.”
But Till said her daughter didn’t need to learn that lesson because she is a nice, smart, funny, and sporty teen.
“(King) basically was being a big bully to a child that was sleeping and unaware of the etiquette of a courtroom, because she’s never been there, she’s never been in trouble,” Till stated. “She’s not a problem child.”
It was taken down from YouTube by the court on Wednesday afternoon, but Till said she watched some video of the event and didn’t see her daughter being loud or rude to the judge. King told the Free Press that her body language was the main reason he felt disrespected.
The head of The Greening of Detroit, Marissa Ebersole Wood, slammed King for how he acted.
“The judge was trying to teach a lesson about respect, but the way he did it was wrong.” “He should have just told the students to leave the courtroom if he thought they were being rude,” she said in a statement released Wednesday by a public relations firm.
It was still fresh in their minds, Till said, that she and her daughter. A lawyer is also going to meet with them.
