Three escape from new Youth Study Center

On the same night community members in and around East Falls hounded the Nutter administration to address security concerns at the Youth Study Center's new temporary home on Henry Avenue, three more juveniles escaped the facility.

The three teen-agers, two 16-year-olds and a 17-year-old, escaped through a first-floor window and ran off the east side of the property at 3200 Henry Avenue Wednesday night around 10:30, Everett Gillison, deputy mayor for public safety, said this morning. Police were immediately detailed to the area but as of 2:30 a.m. today, when Gillison said he left the center, the youths had not been captured.

It was only two hours previously, around 8:30 p.m., that Gillison had concluded a meeting next door at the old Medical College of Pennsylvania, where residents blistered the administration for previous incidents at the temporary site. It has been open for less than a month, and was not welcome by its neighbors. Then two teens successfully escaped on Oct. 18; one is still at large. Another teenager fled last week while being transferred to the facility for a court hearing and was caught within a few hours.

A notification tree for the community was established at the meeting, and Gillison had to use it almost immediately. "There was a lot of fear and tension" at the meeting, Gillison said. "I was trying to alleviate that fear and tension, and then this happens."

One of the escapees was being held for a simple assault, the other for possession of a crime instrument, Gillison said. He did not have information for the third.

Gillison said that changes would be made in both the design of the building and protocols followed both at the Youth Study Center and adjacent courtrooms, and he would meet today with state officials responsible for retrofitting the state-owned property that was renovated at a cost of $11 million shared by city and state.

More than 100 juveniles from the former Youth Study Center on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway were moved to the former Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute on Henry Avenue Oct. 4 to make room for construction of a museum to house the Barnes Foundation collection. The YSC is supposed to move to a new facility in West Philadelphia within three years.

"I cannot believe it," City Councilman Curtis Jones Jr., whose Fourth Councilmanic District includes the new site and who was at the community meeting Wednesday night, said this morning. "We reamed the whole administration about that and they assured us that they were looking into it. Well, the kids were looking into it quicker. They're leaking kids like a sieve up there, and this is a major problem."