A V.I. Superior Court judge put several officials from the Justice and Health departments on notice for failing to provide a mental health treatment plan for a minor defendant whose attorney said has been in solitary confinement since his arrest nine months ago.
Angelo Javier Carmona was arrested in June and charged as an adult in connection with the killing of Jordan “Dutty Heart” Jones on the Christiansted boardwalk. Carmona was 15 at the time of his arrest. In December, Judge Venetia Harvey Velazquez ordered the V.I. Health Department’s Behavioral Health, Alcoholism and Drug Dependency Services Division to develop a long-term treatment plan depending on the outcome of a mental health evaluation.
“To date, no plan has been produced,” Velazquez wrote after a competency hearing Monday. According to her order, the government said the plan wasn’t done because the Health Department “took the position that the Defendant is not within its purview, due to his youth.”
Velazquez noted that the officials did not seek to be excused from her previous order and ordered Assistant Attorney General Robert Pickett, Health Commissioner Justa Encarnacion, Behavioral Health Services Director Gesil Ramos, a psychiatrist and a psychologist to show the court why they shouldn’t be held in contempt.
“They’re just ping-ponging this kid between Human Services and Health, and it’s wrong,” Carmona’s attorney, Dwayne Henry, told the Source Tuesday. “Like the judge herself said, ‘this is delaying the administration of justice’ — and that’s exactly what it is. Nobody is being served by them doing this.”
With few mental health resources in the territory, officials from the Justice and Health departments, as well as the V.I. Corrections Bureau, have frequently been ordered to explain delays in court-ordered evaluations and treatment. In one instance, a man who was arrested for arson in November 2024 was quickly found unfit to stand trial, and Velazquez ordered his transfer to a stateside treatment facility. Four months later, officials were summoned to explain why that never happened. An email thread the government filed in court suggests the delay was the result of interagency communication problems and the late processing of per diem checks for the escorting officers.
“At the end of the day, it appears to be the position of BOC that DOH is to blame for processing the payments untimely,” Assistant Attorney General Chad Mitchell wrote at the time. “It appears to be the position of DOH that BOC should have waited to cancel the travel, and that they would have had the per diem checks eventually.”
A January 2025 letter Mitchell and Assistant Attorney General Samantha Vickery sent to the Health Department also suggested a pattern of delays.
“The criminal and family courts have recently been ordering the Department of Health to perform specific tasks by very specific date deadlines. When these deadlines are not met, the court has been inclined to impose sanctions, with the Department of Justice often caught in the middle,” according to the letter.
