Eliza Jennings saw the future slipping away for the teenage great-nephew she'd been raising. He was depressed and angry, cutting school, running away from her home in Rosedale.

When he turned 16, the arrests began, mostly for dealing drugs in the city. Jennings appealed to the juvenile system for help, writing a letter in April to Baltimore's top prosecutor.

"I have already had to identify Davon by [police] photograph," she wrote. "I pray that I do not have to identify him by way of the City Morgue."

Jennings wrote another letter this month. It begins: "On September 4, 2007, my nephew Davon Leroy Qualls age 17 became the 211th homicide victim for Baltimore Maryland."

Jennings lost her great-nephew to violence, and, she believes, to an uncaring juvenile system.

After Davon was arrested twice this spring, once with marijuana and once with cocaine, Jennings said, she asked juvenile judges and case workers to place him in a locked treatment facility.

Instead he was released, first to a woman who didn't know the teen's real name, then to a 26-year-old man he called his "home boy," Jennings said. Both times, Davon was assigned to live in the 1500 block of Carswell St., just west of Clifton Park. It's a five-minute walk from where he was fatally shot in the head.

Davon is one of 20 Baltimore youths age 17 and under to be killed so far this year. Twenty-eight were killed last year, all but a handful in street shootings.

Hundreds more teenagers are caught up in the city's adult and juvenile courts, accused of crimes such as murder and burglary - the last charge against Davon before he was killed.

"I know they've got thousands of young people in the system," Jennings said in an interview. "All I was asking them to do was just save one."

Now Jennings wants to know why Davon was placed on probation and sent into a dangerous city neighborhood instead of being given the kind of intense mental-health treatment she said he needed. Under the care of 26-year-old Dominic Pierson, Davon was arrested at least three more times.

The judge in charge of Baltimore juvenile court and a state Juvenile Services spokeswoman said the system strives to place teenage offenders who aren't a danger to public safety in the least restrictive setting possible.

"That's what we always look at, and that's what we looked at in this case," said Judge Edward R.K. Hargadon, who signed the orders releasing Davon after Master Julius Silvestri heard the case and made the recommendation. Hargadon said he was speaking on behalf of the court and Silvestri.

Tammy M. Brown, spokeswoman for the state Department of Juvenile Services, said Davon's caseworker, the juvenile equivalent of a probation agent, regularly met with and spoke to the teen, who she said was complying with probation terms.

Juvenile Services reviews every case in which one of its youths dies to see whether mistakes were made. Brown said she was unsure of the status of Davon's review.

Jennings wanted a much different fate for Davon, a child who had endured so much in his short life.

His father, Wilbur Qualls, died of a seizure disorder when Davon was 8. Months later, his mother, Tanya Qualls, died of a massive heart attack. He was an only child.

His maternal grandmother raised him until her health began failing in 2003. She died in 2005, and her lifelong companion - whom Davon considered a grandfather - died the next year.

Davon didn't like to hug people or say he loved them, Jennings said, adding, "He told me that every time he became close to someone, God took them away."

Jennings, Davon's great-aunt, started caring for him in 2003, along with her grandchildren, ages 24, 16 and 11. She enrolled him in Baltimore County's Overlea Senior High School and sought counseling for him but never filed paperwork to be his legal guardian.

Since birth, Davon was a member of Grace Memorial Baptist Church on Eden Street in Baltimore.

"In some ways he was really the ideal kid," said his pastor, the Rev. Irvin Pope, who used to take Davon to the Inner Harbor to talk. "He was quiet, thoughtful."

At the same time, Jennings said, "Davon was an angry young man" who hated authority. He resisted the junior ROTC program she had enrolled him in, she said, and was increasingly disruptive at school.

A retired BGE employee, Jennings, 64, said she was taken aback when the teenager started referring to himself as "a man."

More and more, he was disappearing for stretches of days or weeks or even, once, for three months.

Police reports and court papers show that Davon was drawn to Coldstream, a triangle of tough streets bound by The Alameda, Loch Raven Boulevard and 25th Street.

Perhaps it was nostalgia for the neighborhood of his childhood.

For 40 years, his grandmother, Henrietta McCullough, owned Retta's Bar on Gorsuch Avenue, near Memorial Stadium. His parents worked there, and the whole family lived on the second floor, Jennings said.

Much has changed since then.

In the past 120 days, police have been called to a three-block stretch of nearby Carswell Street - 1500 to 1700 - 85 times for "mostly juvenile disturbances," said Agent Donny Moses, a police spokesman, citing assaults, dice games, stolen cars and thefts.

Davon was arrested March 23 on suspicion of dealing cocaine. He gave police the name "Jamal Jenkins" and was released to Roslyn DeShields, who lived in the 1500 block of Carswell and referred to herself as an aunt, Jennings said.

Jennings said that the woman is not a blood relative and that she does not know who she is. Efforts to find DeShields in the neighborhood were unsuccessful, and calls to a phone number listed for her were unanswered.

Davon was arrested again April 7, this time for marijuana possession. By then, Jennings had learned of the arrests and came to the court hearing before Silvestri.

She said she told a juvenile case worker about DeShields and told Silvestri that she thought Davon needed to be in a "therapeutic residential facility" because of his depression and behavioral problems.

Silvestri instead asked Davon's public defender to find a guardian for him. The next hearing was to be May 7.

"It was like no one wanted to hear about his background, about him as an individual," Jennings said.

Then, at an April 27 hearing before Judge John Carroll Byrnes, a retired Baltimore Circuit judge sitting in juvenile court that day, Davon admitted guilt for the cocaine charge and was placed on probation.

He was released to Pierson, who also lived in the 1500 block of Carswell and said he was a relative of Davon's.

Jennings said she does not know who Pierson is. Messages were left for Pierson during two visits to his house, but he did not respond. Two teenagers who answered the door said that Davon had lived there but declined to comment.

Jennings said she was not notified of the April 27 hearing, and when she found out about it - and that Davon had been released to a man he called his "home boy" - she wrote to State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy. She asked why a child would be released to a person who isn't a relative.

In a response May 10, Jessamy wrote that once the prosecutor on the case became aware that Pierson was not a relative, she requested an immediate review of the court order.

There were three more reviews, each before Silvestri, and each time, Jennings said, she asked that Davon be placed in a treatment facility.

But Davon told the court that he wanted to stay with Pierson, she said. (Juvenile court matters, unlike adult court proceedings, are not taped.)

Hargadon said that juvenile masters and judges frequently allow teenagers on probation to live with nonrelatives to keep them in their own communities. He said caseworkers investigate such placements to ensure that they are safe and appropriate.

"This isn't jail," he said. "We don't just lock kids up because they do something. Unless there is a severe danger to the child or to someone else, we will work with them in the community."

He added, "There lots and lots and lots of children with a mental illness who are not locked up. And they shouldn't be."

But Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, the city health commissioner, said there are few mental-health services between casual counseling and in-patient facilities.

Sharfstein declined to specifically discuss Davon's situation, saying he did not know details. In general, he said, when a child has a stable home to go to, such as with Jennings, therapeutic intervention at home can work.

Baltimore, he said, is "very deficient in that level of care."

Jennings echoed Sharfstein's frustration with the lack of options. "It just seemed like I kept asking for help, and no one would listen," she said.

While living with Pierson, Davon was arrested three times, most recently Aug. 19 on a burglary charge. The other two arrests, said Brown of Juvenile Services, were "resolved at intake," meaning they wouldn't have affected his probation status.

Brown also said Davon appeared to be compliant with probation, enrolling in two court-ordered youth programs.

She said he attended a meeting for one of the programs Aug. 14 and met with his caseworker Aug. 21, although there was no indication that he had mentioned his arrest two days earlier.

Brown said that since Davon was processed as an adult that time, the caseworker did not know about the incident. "Sharing information between the systems is something we're working on," she said.

On Sept. 4, just two weeks after Davon met with his caseworker, he was shot to death in the 2500 block of Garrett Ave. Stuffed animals wrapped around trees in front of two boarded-up houses mark the crime scene.

Police arrested Michael Blackwell, 27, who lives about three blocks from the Carswell home where Davon was staying. He is charged with first-degree murder.

In an Oct. 4 letter to Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Jennings wrote that she holds "the Juvenile Justice System accountable for Davon's death."

After reading the letter, Cummings wrote in a statement to The Sun that there is "no excuse for our system to have so clearly failed this young man." A spokeswoman for Cummings said the congressman plans to seek more answers from Baltimore's juvenile court.

Jennings is left with the memory of her last conversation with Davon, on Aug. 27, when he seemed to know he was in danger.

"He said, 'Aunt Eliza, I just want to let you know that I'm OK and that I love you,'" she recalled, wiping tears from her eyes.

"I said, 'Davon, I love you, too. Why are you out there? You've got a home to go to.'"

julie.bykowicz@baltsun.com