It was the kind of Saturday night you relive in dreams. Bad dreams.
March 7 at the state's serious-offender lockup in the Alexander Youth Services Center started off quiet. There was no hint of the chaos to come.
Seven boys were watching a movie on TV about 7:10 p.m. Youth services workers Faye Higgins and Shanna Talbert were on duty.
The most violent boys committed into state custody live in three units -- Goldstar, Top Gun and Show -- as part of the serious-offender program JUMP. Eight to nine boys live in each unit of the JUMPCottage at Alexander.
JUMP is operated by the Division of Youth Services, a part of the state Department of Human Services.
Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 12, will live in one of these units if Craighead County Circuit-Chancery Judge Ralph Wilson Jr. declares the boys delinquents and decides to keep them in Arkansas. They will stay at the center until they turn 18.
The boys have been at a detention center since the March 24 shooting deaths of four students and a teacher at Westside Middle School near Jonesboro. Ten other people were wounded in that attack. Under Arkansas law, children under 14 cannot be tried as adults.
The average length of stay for boys at JUMP is 624 days, nearly two years.
A psychiatrist comes to the Alexander center on an as-needed basis, and DYS contracts for a University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences' psychologist to hold group counseling sessions. Individual therapy is given to youths held for such offenses as substance abuse or sex crimes.
Youths also attend school on the campus, but classes are held sporadically. For example, all classes for Alexander were canceled three times in a single week.
Many of the boys are returned to their communities, not because they have been rehabilitated but because the bed space is needed for other serious offenders or they have turned 18 and must be released because the state has no facility to keep them until they turn 21.
On the night of March 7, the door between the Goldstar and Show units was open. Higgins had just left to warm her dinner, but something told her to return to the day room.
"You just develop an instinct working here," she said.
Higgins was standing in the doorway between the two units when a vacuum cleaner came flying from the Goldstar unit into the Show unit. One of the boys blocked the vacuum cleaner, which nearly hit another youth services worker in the head.
The workers in the Show unit immediately closed the door and locked their charges in their rooms to protect them and to prevent a fight from escalating.
Higgins and Talbert were caught in a riot, locked inside the Goldstar unit with the boys.
Higgins locked four boys not involved in the melee in their rooms while Talbert called for security. The three boys still in the TV area began cursing and screaming: "The Bloods are taking over. We're going to turn this place out."
Higgins said: "They were just cussing and carrying on. Just throwing things, books and chairs, trying to break the glass in the door between the units. I was jumping out of the way saying, 'You all don't need to do this.' "
The boys turned over a washing machine, a dryer, a table and some bookshelves.
When Higgins tried to call security again, one of the boys snatched the phone from her hand and ripped the phone cord out of the wall.
"I was frightened, very much so. It was an ordeal," Higgins said. "I was scared because Ms. Talbert was new. I was scared she would make a wrong move and they would hurt her. She hadn't been through training. I didn't know what she would do.
"I kept thinking, 'Just be still. Hold tight. Oh, please don't go for that door.' "
Higgins has spent four of her six years as a state employee at the Alexander campus.
"I was very much surprised at these boys," she said. "Everything had been calm. They all had played basketball together early that morning. In a little bit, all of them would be going home."
The boys toppled a computer and a VCR, then tried to attack one of the four boys Higgins had locked in his bedroom. "The boys got mad at him because they said he was supposed to help them kick the riot off. So they started breaking the glass in his door."
The boy crouched behind a closet that jutted out from the wall so he wouldn't be hit with anything. The three boys broke out the observation-window glass but could not get inside the locked door.
About 45 minutes after the riot started, security guards talked the boys into freeing the two women workers.
"The staff can come out, but you all aren't coming in," the boys yelled.
After the women left, the boys barricaded the door with the washing machine.
"They went haywire throwing things, breaking out windows, ceiling tiles, the TV. It was very frightening," Higgins said. "I was afraid I was going to die. After it was over, I was a nervous wreck."
The Arkansas State Police, the Bryant Police Department and the Saline County sheriff's office responded to the call for help. The boys surrendered quickly, then were handcuffed and taken to the Saline County jail.
During the riot, the boy who had been crouching in his room began "acting out" and turned his bed over. He was arrested with the other three boys.
The boys charged as adults with first-degree criminal mischief are Nashid Alif Rasul, 17; Paul Sutton Jr., 16; Justin Ronald Eoff, 16; and Stuart Jerome Phillips, 15.
The charge carries a penalty of three to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000. Trial dates have not been set.
DYS estimates that the boys caused between $3,000 and $5,000 in damage.
The day after the riot, Higgins, who is the mother of three, was involved in a car accident. Her four front teeth were knocked out and her hip was jarred out of place.
"I was off for a month and a half. I had a lot of time to rest and think and calm my nerves down. I had to get nerve pills because I was so nervous," she said.
Two of the four boys charged are back at JUMP finishing out their juvenile sentences as they await trial in adult court.
"They've never apologized to me. It's like a joke to them," Higgins said. "They talk about it like it wasn't anything.
"Don't think I don't think about it every other day. When I come up here I think, 'What am I going to run into today?' "
After the riot, DYS required that a male worker be on duty with the women staff members. A security guard is supposed to walk through the units each hour.
"I have nightmares. I dream about one of the boys doing something to me. I'm locked in a room, and there's no door there. There's no way out," Higgins said.
Within two months of the riot, there were two more riots at JUMP, though the damage was not as extensive.
Boys are not the only ones who have gone on rampages at the Alexander campus.
In July 1997, delinquent girls kept at the Central Arkansas Observation and Assessment Center in North Little Rock were moved to Alexander to create space at the overcrowded O&A center.
START, the girls' serious-offender program at Alexander, was set up to house 16 girls. There were 27 girls after the new arrivals were crammed into a dorm where the air-conditioning system often breaks down.
Four girls got into an argument and tore a bedroom apart. They dared the staff to come and take them out. They finally were subdued when several male staff members arrived from another unit.
Vandalism continued at the START unit until the unit had to be shut down the second week in April to be completely renovated.
What makes Higgins and her co-workers return to a job in which a life-threatening situation can be triggered by a scornful glance or an angry word?
"I like to work with the boys to see if I can get some of them to turn their lives around," she said, perking up. "I talk to them about getting a GED, get an education and be somebody. I try to instill that in them."
There are days when she feels she has broken through to the boys, that they've understood and accepted a bit of advice.
"Sometimes they throw a mad spiel and then you counsel them. The next day they say, 'Ms. Higgins, I thought about that and you're right.'
"You can make a difference. That's what I try to do. Some of them you can talk to. And for some, there isn't any hope."