update:
PB Post Story
WEST PALM BEACH ? Saying she is "an out-of-control drug user," a juvenile court judge this morning ordered Girl Scout cookie money thief Stefanie Woods confined to a high-security juvenile treatment facility for up to three years in order to address substance abuse and mental health problems.
No beds are available at any of the state facilities designated by Juvenile Court Judge Moses Baker Jr., but he had Woods taken into custody immediately. She will remain in secure juvenile detention until there is a vacancy at a state-run treatment facility. That could be a month or two, a Department of Juvenile Justice worker told the judge.
Woods took the news stoically at first. But after she had to remove her earrings, after her tearful mother hugged her goodbye, after court deputies took her fingerprints, the realization hit Woods that she would be confined in a jail setting. She began crying. She asked her attorney, Lewis Hanna, if she could get out after an appeal. Then she was taken away.
Woods and Hanna had asked Baker to allow her to voluntarily enter a residential substance abuse facility in Fort Lauderdale. Afterward, Hanna was stunned and angry.
"I am devastated. I'm at a loss for words," he said. He accused the Department of Juvenile Justice of recommending a stricter sentence in court than it had earlier. "I felt totally ambushed by the department," he said.
Baker convicted Woods earlier this month of petty theft and two counts of violating probation after a non-jury trial on her role in the stealing of $168 from 9-year-old Girl Scout Gracie Smith in January outside a Winn-Dixie store in suburban Lake Worth. Woods was a juvenile at the time. A girlfriend, also a juvenile, took an envelope containing the cookie sales money and got into a car that sped off with Woods at the wheel. The next day, Woods and her friend boasted and showed up for television camera crews, and found themselves making national news.
Some of Woods' prior scrapes with the law were known. She was on probation for criminal mischief and battery at the time of the cookie caper. But today's court hearing depicted a young woman far more troubled than was generally known. Woods told a psychiatrist for a report prepared for the sentencing that she began drinking at age 14 and using a cornucopia of drugs that include marijuana, cocaine, heroin, Xanax and LSD.
"If all that is true, you should be dead," Baker told her. "Either you are the biggest liar that ever lived, or the biggest exaggerator that ever lived, or you're in serious trouble."
That's why, the judge said later, he was incarcerating her until there is space for her in a treatment program. He said he feared she could end up dead if allowed to remain free in the interim.
"I've never seen a child abusing this many substances," the judge said