CLAYTON COUNTY, Ga. — Charges have been dropped against 13- and 14-year-old brothers accused of shooting up a party and wounding a teenager.
The mother of the boys told Channel 2’s Tom Jones they never should have been arrested or treated as adults.
Jailey Fanning says her sons’ faces were plastered all over TV and social media, and they even got death threats.
Now that charges have been dropped, she says it will be hard for them to get their old lives back.
“They never are able to be kids anymore, like they just took their whole childhood away from them,” Fanning said.
She says when police arrested her sons and allowed a Channel 2 camera to record them in court, it caused all kinds of harm to her children.
“This has turned our lives upside down,” she said.
Her sons faced charges including aggravated assault, child cruelty and possession of a firearm.
“I knew my kids were innocent,” Fanning said.
District Attorney Tasha Mosley says witnesses now say it was an adult shooting at the party.
Fanning says the damage is done. Her kids were kicked out of public school, and they were in juvenile detention for weeks.
Mosley says the kids were initially treated as adults because of a new law that says felony aggravated assault had to be prosecuted in superior court for children 13 to 16.
But the court realized when this incident happened, the law hadn’t gone into effect.
Fanning says her youngest was only 12 at the time of the incident.
“I want justice for my kids,” she said. “I want justice for other kids that have been wrongly accused.”
Fanning fought hard to keep her kids out of jail and out of juvenile detention, and she thanked the public defenders who also worked on her children’s behalf.
She says she will now work to fight for other children falsely accused.
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