District Attorney Jason Williams and his Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office failed to bring a case against Kendall Myles in a timely matter.
Myles is the 17-year-old accused of escaping Bridge City Center for Youth, then carjacking and twice shooting Uptown resident Scott Toups.
Toups spent a harrowing month and a half in a coma and is slowly making a recovery.
Police say Myles and 16-year-old Kayla Smith carjacked Toups as he was unloading Mardi Gras beads into a recycling bin in July. After gunning down Toups the pair are said to have left him and sped away in Toups’ car which they crashed hours later in the Seventh Ward while trying to get away from State Police. Both were apprehended.
Meanwhile Toups was hospitalized in critical condition.
DA Williams decided to try the two as adults, a first for his office.
But the paperwork was not filed within 30-days of the youths arrest and Judge Raymond Bigelow quashed the indictment and dismissed the case.
"We're just trying to do right by these kids," Defense attorney Jerome Mathews told the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate. "Whatever happens should be happening in juvenile court. They are both juveniles."
Williams meanwhile says he will appeal the decision, calling the crimes egregious and violent.
Myles escape from Bridge City, along with five other inmates, was his second time escaping and also the second to take place at Bridge City in a month.
There will be a hearing on the state’s case to try Myles and Smith on April 3.
