CRIME: Youth

Boys and girls in the upper teens are apparently committing more U.S. crimes. There were as yet no conclusive figures. But the nation’s newspapers and police-station blotters were daily splashed with lurid ink about the deeds of the generation just too young to fight. Juvenile delinquency rose 10% last year in New York and Chicago, was up to 100% in war-boom towns. Case histories of last week:

> In Los Angeles, slick-haired, 18-year-old Amos Raymond Latshaw coolly confessed the murder of five kinsfolk. When his father and stepmother fell to arguing, Amos shot and killed them both; then to cover up, killed his grandfather and grandmother. His eight-year-old brother stood by, crying, “So I let him have it too.”

> In Chicago’s Loop, in “Dead End Kids” movie style, hands up, faces scowling, three hoodlums—”Crabs” Kravish, 17, “Amateur” Schenold, 19, and “Ray” Weglowski, 17—surrendered to the coppers. That day, with two companions who made a getaway, they had stolen three cars, stuck up a priest, kidnapped and released a 17-year-old Chicago heiress, Helen Priebe, and her 18-year-old escorts.

> In a Cleveland jail strutted the Hensger Brothers—Henry, 17, and Robert, 16. They had confessed to 40-odd burglaries, had set three school fires (damage, $60,000). At home they had cached 20 guns, 2,000 rounds of ammunition. When their mother remonstrated, Robert shot her in the back, wounding her seriously.

> In The Bronx, N.Y., a grand jury indicted twelve youths for raping a 17-year-old girl in a crowded movie house. The leader of the hoodlums, Frank Califano, 17, terrorized the victim by twisting a handkerchief around her neck.

> In Manhattan’s lower East Side, schoolteachers noticed that girl pupils, all twelve to 14, were flashing $5 and $10 bills. Police investigation uncovered a vice ring that supplied teen-age prostitutes for middle-aged men. The madam who directed operations was 17 years old.