Children Without Pity

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LIKE A CHILD WHOSE MOTHER SCOLDS HIM FOR KNOCKING over a glass of milk, Anthony Knighton has his excuses ready. He was just playing. It was an accident. He didn't know the gun was loaded. It could have happened to anyone. Then he admits he shot a pregnant girl because she wouldn't give him a nickel.

His trouble started when he went out to buy cigarettes at a corner grocery in his hometown of Deerfield Beach, Florida, on Aug. 13, 1990. The store sold them two for a quarter, and Knighton, then 16, had only 20 cents in his pocket. So on the way he stopped to ask a neighbor, Schanell Sorrells, 13, for a nickel. Schanell said she didn't have one. He shouted, "Give it over." She refused.

Knighton drew a .22-cal. revolver out of his belt, jabbed it into her swollen belly and pulled the trigger. The bullet ripped through her unborn baby's head. Schanell managed to stagger to the room she shared with her mother and four siblings in a boardinghouse in one of the oldest, most dangerous neighborhoods of Deerfield Beach. As she collapsed on a bed, Knighton took a nickel from her room, strolled back to the store and calmly bought two Kools.

There were witnesses, but Knighton persuaded them to tell police that Schanell had been injured in a drive-by shooting. He ordered her 15-year-old sister (also pregnant) to hide his gun in a plastic bag full of baby toys. As he rode to Broward General Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale with Schanell and her mother, he told attendants that he was a friend of the family and had nothing to do with the girl's injuries.

Doctors delivered the baby by emergency caesarean. The infant took several breaths, then died; the mother survived and went home to live with her family. Knighton meanwhile slipped away from the hospital and made his way to his father's house near Pompano Beach, where he hoped to hide out for a while. But his father persuaded him to turn himself in, and the boy was charged as an adult with second-degree murder and aggravated battery. He eventually pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and in April 1991 was sentenced to four years in the Indian River Correctional Institution, a medium-security juvenile facility in Vero Beach. Last week, with a felony record, a sixth-grade education, no skills, a bus ticket and $100 from the state, Knighton left prison after serving two years.

Knighton's crime is a statistic -- an isolated act in a nation where the number of those under 18 who were arrested for murder has climbed 93% over the past decade, while similar arrests among adults grew by only 10%. Among black juveniles, the murder arrest rate rose 145%, compared with 48% among whites. Police chiefs around the country point to another frightening trend: the increase in savage, senseless murders, the kind that occur over a scuffle in a school playground, a pair of sneakers, a romance gone sour. Like Anthony Knighton who pulled a gun in a squabble over a piece of change, many teenagers no longer use their fists or feet to settle disputes. Instead, they open fire.