The cost of failure

$314,000 couldn't save Liquarry Jefferson.

That's how much the government spent on the 8-year-old's family in the last year of his short life.

That's how much it cost to keep his no-good, so-called father in jail. To try to put another of his staggeringly dysfunctional mother's gangbanger boyfriends away. To pull his older brother Jayquan away from the same life, through near-constant meetings with an army of adults who cared about him. To try to guide the boys' mother on how to raise her kids, a job that social workers had been doing for her for years. To send little Liquarry away to camps and out of the mess that was his home.

All of that money and more proved wasted on June 24, when Liquarry was shot to death by his 7-year-old cousin, who had gotten hold of Jayquan's loaded gun.

The immense efforts of police, social workers, and other government agencies to save this sprawling, broken family are laid out in distressing detail by Scott Allen and Maria Cramer in today's paper.

A team of police and social workers singled out Jayquan and his siblings as having the potential to escape the generations-long tradition of violence in their family, and then focused intense resources and attention on them. They tried to lock up the hardest cases, and to keep what was left of Liquarry's family together, in a neighborhood they didn't want to leave.

It looks like they failed.

It's tempting, in light of everything we know now, to scoff at what the cops and the social workers from the Youth Services Providers Network were trying to do for Liquarry Jefferson's family, to say their amazing commitment met with one swift kick to the face, from a family who didn't deserve the investment.

It's tempting to pronounce Superintendent Paul Joyce, who champions this pricey approach to crime control, called the Comprehensive Community Safety Initiative, hopelessly naive for thinking it could work in a neighborhood like Grove Hall, where the same small group of people show up again and again on arrest warrants.

It's tempting to say now that they should have pulled the poor kid out of that screwed-up family years ago.

But before you do, consider the girl who police and social workers call Grace.

They won't reveal her real name, they say, because having the neighborhood know who she is would undo all of their efforts.

The gregarious girl was 11 when police and social workers spotted her five years ago, an island of composure in another messed up, crime-ridden Dorchester family. Her three brothers and two sisters had all been locked up for drug dealing and gang activity.

They swooped down on her family just as they did on Liquarry's. They arranged for weekly therapy sessions, where Grace talked about feeling responsible for her family. They connected her troubled mother with services. They made sure her brothers and sisters got transitional help when they got out of detention. They got Grace into after-school programs and summer camps. They made sure the whole family got counseling when relatives were murdered.

The whole time they were working on saving Liquarry Jefferson's family, they were working on Grace's family, too.

Grace's mother has a job now. Grace, 16, has made the honor roll at her high school. She wants to go to college, and her grades are good enough to get her there. She hasn't gotten pregnant.

In her precarious neighborhood, where inching improvements count as victories, Grace is a huge success story.

Why is the program that failed to save Liquarry Jefferson working so well for her? Part of it is Grace's own resilience. Part of it is her mother's willingness to change. But part of it is dumb luck. And in the end, luck was something Liquarry Jefferson didn't have.

No program, not even one as noble and innovative as this one, could have predicted that.

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com