After appeals from mothers of the victim and the shooter, Thaddeus Rout, who shot and killed 13-year-old Justus Suggs last summer, was sentenced to 29 years in prison (five of them mandatory) for manslaughter in the first degree.
If he is imprisoned for the full 29 years, Rout, who is 17, will be released as a middle-aged man of 46.
Felicia and Michael Furlow, Rout’s mother and stepfather, spoke on his behalf at the Friday morning sentencing. Felicia turned to a sobbing Tracey Suggs (pictured with her son’s photo), Justus’ mother, and told her, “Mother to mother, I really feel sorry for you — this is my worst nightmare.”
Her husband apologized for Rout’s crime and stressed the gravity of the sentence.
“You’re not just sentencing him,” Furlow said, “You’re sentencing us too.”
He encouraged the court to look outside of his stepson’s crime, however, to a city saturated with youth violence. “The streets of New Haven are terrible. In addition to directing your hostility to Thaddeus, you need to direct your hostility to the streets of New Haven.”
State Superior Court Judge Richard Damiani sympathized with the Furlows, acknowledging that “the streets of New Haven are a battleground.” But he also sympathized with Suggs, encouraging her to take all the time she needed to read her statement.
“I can’t even tell you the hell I’m living in,” Suggs choked out before erupting in sobs. A lawyer read the rest of her statement, which recounted Suggs’ frequent nightmares about her son’s murder and how she has trouble eating because it reminds her of Justus. “He was a caring, loving, and unselfish child,” the statement read. “Why did he die? Because someone lost a fight and decided to go and get a gun to seek revenge.”
Click here to read about Suggs’ vigil over her son, who lay in a coma for ten days before she took him off life support.
Suggs’ statement begged the court to sentence Rout to a full 29 years without the option of parole. “My baby does not get time off for being dead — why should he for his crime?” Suggs’ lawyer then read a poem called “A Mother’s Love” that Suggs had written for her son.
Tina Weston, Justus’ aunt, addressed Rout directly and asked that instead of just waiting out his time in jail, “You continue your education and strive for forgiveness in yourself.”
Her sister, Tobby Weston, also talked to the Rout family about forgiveness. She knows Felicia Furlow, and they recently ran into each other and had a perfectly pleasant interaction before Thaddeus was charged with Suggs’ death, Weston said.
“I forgive you for what you did,” Weston told Rout, “because I can’t have hate in my heart.”
After reading the lyrics of a song titled “I Won’t Complain,” Weston reminded everyone that virtually no one in the New Haven community is unaffected by youth violence. “New Haven’s a small place,” she said. “Everybody knows everybody. We have to learn to get along.”
At Judge Damiani’s urging, Rout turned to Tracey Suggs, looked her in the eye, and said, “I apologize for what happened.”
The courtroom was filled with friends and family of both Rout and Suggs, many of them teenagers, many of them crying.
After the sentencing, Michael Furlow warily referred to corruption in the police department and pointed out that the boy driving the car when Thaddeus opened fire on a group of kids in the Hill has not been charged with anything. “There are certain facts in this case that still need to be brought to life,” Furlow said. “The message this case sends out is that if you know the right people in New Haven, you can get away with a lot of serious stuff.”
Another message the case sends out, one addressed by Furlow as well as Judge Damiani, is that youth violence in New Haven is only getting worse. “It’s hard to imagine it’s happening on the streets of a civil society like New Haven,” Damiani said in court. “But it is, every day.”
