As Howard County police walked 15-year-old Terrell Coleman out of Oakland Mills High School in handcuffs in October, his mother was at home getting ready for work, unaware of his impending arrest.
It would be more than three hours after the teen-ager was taken into custody before a Howard police detective tracked down Shelley Young at her janitorial job to tell her that her son was in custody.
By then, Terrell had confessed to committing an armed robbery in which he now says he took no part. The 10th-grader subsequently missed six months of school before the charges against him were dropped.
Maryland law says that parents should be contacted "immediately" in cases such as Terrell's, but police and school officials said that what happened at Oakland Mills High is common.
"The rule of thumb is that parents will be called, unless, if the parents were called, it would interfere with the police investigation," said Howard County school system spokeswoman Patti Caplan. "We have an understanding with them [the police] that we will defer to their needs, based on the circumstances."
And police stressed that they did, eventually, notify Young of her son's arrest, saying that there was no "undue delay."
"As soon as [the detective] was finished, he had someone go to the mother's job and let her know what was going on," said Pfc. Lisa Myers, a police spokeswoman.
But Columbia lawyer Clarke Ahlers, who represents Terrell Coleman, said he believes that police and school officials failed to obey the law, and that his client suffered as a consequence.
"You can't simultaneously hold parents responsible for their children and interfere with communication between parents and children during a time of crisis," he said.
The Code of Maryland Regulations (a state agency rulebook) requires school officials to "immediately" notify parents after an arrest on school property. Maryland law requires police to also "immediately notify" a parent after a child is taken into custody.
But a police agency in the state can still interrogate a child without a parent present.
Shelley Young said that she believes that had someone called her earlier and allowed her to corroborate her son's alibi - that he was home with her at the time of the robbery on Thunderhill Road - he would not have missed so much school, had to forgo playing organized sports or be facing failing grades.
Her normally cheerful teen-ager is bitter, she said.
The youth's experience is common in Maryland, juvenile justice experts say.
They say investigators will arrest a youngster and interrogate him without a parent present, calling the mother or father to retrieve a child only after questioning is complete.
But while a child might claim later that a confession was coerced - that he was told he could go home if he said he committed the crime - often, there is no tape of the police interview to back up either side, the experts said.
"I think a lot of things go on with kids in the juvenile justice system that the general public doesn't know," said Odeana Neal, an associate professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law. "The thing that's really tragic about this story is that the child ended up losing a year of his life."
Terrell Coleman was not allowed back into school until April, when prosecutors decided to drop the case after a juvenile master barred them from using other testimony in their case.
"He's angry, he's very angry about this," said Young, 41, a maintenance worker at Dasher Green Elementary/Owen Brown Middle School. "He liked going to school. He was upset while he was home."
Young said school officials told her that it was up to the police to notify her of her son's arrest. But police told her and the boy's father, Anthony Coleman, 43, that it was up to the school. Transcripts of a February hearing confirm the confusion.
"Nobody called me," Young said. "That's my main thing. I was home. There was no reason for someone not to call me."
Even if a parent is called right away and allowed into the interview room, Neal said, it might not make a difference. Parents often urge their children to tell the police what they want to know, she said.
Nothing in the law would stop police from questioning a teen-ager while they look for his parents, even if they begin the search immediately, she added.
Children are susceptible to police tactics in an interview room, to suggestions that they can go home if they acknowledge wrongdoing, experts said. And some juveniles will sign acknowledgments that they understand their constitutional rights "because an adult says, 'Sign it,'" said Avery Berdit, an assistant public defender in Howard County who handles juvenile matters.
"A lot of kids can't comprehend these nebulous constitutional rights," he said.
The states are all over the map on how they handle juvenile interrogation, Neal said. Some states view a youngster's request to see a parent as akin to a request for a lawyer, she said.
While out of school from October to April, Terrell was tutored two hours a day, twice a week - an alternative education plan in accordance with the school system's policy governing students charged with "community or reportable offenses."
But once he returned to school in the spring, he struggled to pick up where he had left off, his parents said. His new, angry attitude served only to push him further behind, his parents said.
Young is worried that her son will have to repeat 10th grade or go to summer school to catch up. Terrell's father is more worried that he will not.
"There's a lot of work he missed," Anthony Coleman said. "If he really needs to go to summer school, then he needs to go."
School officials would not discuss the case specifically, noting confidentiality rules. Caplan said the school system's practices of not calling parents and "suspending" students until they are proved innocent in court are "perfectly reasonable."
"Agencies have to work together on things," she said. "You can't have a firm rule about it because the circumstances change, and there are gray areas. And that's life.
"If this decision had gone the other way, nobody would've second-guessed that."