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"You mean you did 6,000 deals?" asked psychologist Corinne Alvarez- Sanders.
"Yeah, I sold crack to 6,000," Arnie replied tersely.
Arnie then revealed that the man he gunned down was not just another street character but a relative of sorts, the uncle of his sons.
"You killed their uncle and forgot to tell us about it?" asked the psychologist. "What were you hiding? You didn't want to deal with that, did you?"
Hall maintained his facade, but as the hours wore on, a hint of remorse flickered. He admitted to feeling "bad" and "shocked" about his many crimes: "I wanted power and control. It was all dumb." Hall broke into tears when another 17-year-old killer forced him to acknowledge that his mother was a "dope fiend" who repeatedly told her son he was a "mistake."
"Your mom was shooting up just like your victims," shouted therapist Lydia Barnard. "Were you taking it out on all of them because of her?"
But Hall's sobbing didn't faze the group. They didn't think he had gone deep enough. "You're not mentally retarded!" snapped Alvarez-Sanders. "You're holding back. You're using a bunch of words to cover up what's inside. Tell us what's made all of your rage."
The therapists wanted Hall to see his rampages as a release of the trauma and pain bubbling from a nightmarish childhood. Seeing this won't excuse his crimes, they told him, but it will set them in clearer context. "The killing is easy," explained Alvarez-Sanders. "But feeling the effect of what happened is much more difficult." Said assistant superintendent Stan DeGerolami: "Getting the boy to understand why he committed the act is essential to preventing him from ever doing it again."
Chairs were pushed back, and Hall was handed a blackboard eraser to simulate the pistol he used in the crack-house murder. Another youth, playing the role of murder victim, begged for his life, leading Hall on: "Please don't kill me; I'm family. Please!" Hall "fired a shot" by flinging the eraser against a wall. He repeated the act again and again. But each time his actions were strained and mechanical. "You're cutting off your feelings, just like when you shot him," shouted a therapist. "You don't look like you give a damn." Kneeling at the side of his dying victim, Arnie was passive. "Call an ambulance, talk to him, do something," another boy shouted. "This is your kids' goddam uncle, man. Is his life worth just $9?"
Arnie could not muster a reply, and afterward, slumped on a bench outside, he admitted that "I hid my feelings. But it was too painful." A fellow prisoner said, "You ain't feeling nothing. You looked like you didn't give a damn." Observed Alvarez-Sanders: "He blew it. He didn't see his victim as a person -- just an object." Said Barnard: "It allowed him to kill once, and it will again."
Other boys in the program, however, seem to have made the connection. Alan Bacon, 17, lived his own private hell -- cigarette burns and memories of a broken arm at the hands of a drunken father, being thrown out of his home when he was 12, living on the streets, dealing cocaine and robbing motorists. "I was taking it all out on these innocent people," he concluded. "I would call them bitch, whore and punk just like I was called. It made me feel powerful. Now I just wish that I could bring back the guy I shot. I never realized how many others I was hurting too."