Finally, last week, the police announced that a suspect had pled guilty. He had been biking toward the corner of 22nd and Sigel streets at 7 p.m. June 13, and had gotten into a verbal altercation with another young man. They had pulled out their weapons; he had fired into the street and his bullet had hit an innocent child in the leg. The city breathed a sigh of relief: Justice could be served.

But it is hard to feel a sense of resolution. In the coverage of the guilty plea, details about the gunman emerged. Vaughn Wylie was two weeks past his 13th birthday. At age 11, he had shot himself in the hand while playing with a gun, and during his 12th year, was arrested not once, but twice, for weapons and assault charges (these cases were thrown out or withdrawn; one due to issues recovering the gun, and one due to failure of victims to appear in court). And on that night in June, he was biking around his neighborhood with a .38 in his backpack, willing to argue with someone who might shoot at him, and willing to shoot back. In retrospect, he seems like a time bomb. How could a 13-year-old like this slip through the cracks?

I don't know Vaughn Wylie, but I wasn't surprised by his sad story. For the past three years I have worked as a middle school special education teacher in Philadelphia. In this capacity, I know what it's like to look at a child and feel like you're watching a train wreck in progress. It's not hard to tell which students are probably on a criminal trajectory. The boys who slip from disobedience to violence are the same boys who spend their childhoods cultivating a tough facade and a "who gives a fuck?" attitude. They are the ones whose files are thick with discipline referrals and requests for parent conferences. They accrue weeks of absences every year, bring knives to school and get transferred to disciplinary placements, then come back 180 school days later. Walk into any school. Everyone knows who they are, down to a name.

I have sat in hours of meetings with teams of professionals whose job is to salvage these students: psychologists and behavior specialists, Department of Human Services workers and mental health case managers, therapeutic support workers and mobile therapists. Often, students have so many agencies involved that it takes weeks just to schedule a meeting. Everyone compares notes, draws up plans and signs in to document their efforts. But when a child's behavior progresses from unruly to dangerous we don't know who is in charge or how to stop it. The path of least resistance often involves "second chances," which I have come to see not as charitable but as a straight-up failure of the system. Boys are escorted out of school in handcuffs, or taken away to crisis treatment centers in ambulances only to return to school the next day with dark circles under their eyes and a sense that they need to push harder for the adults around them to take notice. These are children who are deeply involved in the mental health and juvenile justice systems. But the systems are failing them.

The city's network of services to address the needs of at-risk youth is substantial, but it is also uncoordinated. There is a lack of communication and a diffusion of responsibility. And even when everyone is at the table, there are few meaningful protocols to follow before a crisis occurs. Not all troubled children will end up like Vaughn Wylie. But until we learn to intervene effectively, many of the students who seem headed for disaster will certainly arrive there.

The city is going to see more violence. There will be more arguments, more gunfire and more police officers knocking on doors, asking residents to name the angry adolescents who discharged their weapons without thinking. And while the city will be outraged if no one identifies them, perhaps the real tragedy is that we know their names already.

(editorial@citypaper.net)