Why did Judge Linda Teodosio fire a model detention officer?

She remembers Asbury dressing her down, reminding her that she was just "a cupcake from the suburbs."

"They'll eat you alive in here," the counselor told her.

Asbury always gave first-timers the worst of her "professionally paid bitch" routine, hoping they wouldn't come back. Most didn't. But Stokes would become a Dan Street fixture. "That first week was rough," she says. "I had to earn my frequent-flyer miles before she warmed up to me."

The girl would spend more of her teenage years at Dan Street than in her own bed. The more she messed up, the more time she spent with Asbury. "She was just real open and honest," Stokes says. "She didn't sugarcoat anything, didn't give you any bullshit. She just told you like it is."

Even after she was released, she would call Asbury for advice. The counselor would prod her into accepting responsibility for her fate.

But it would take the ultimate error for Stokes to understand. She had run away again, squatting and partying with friends in Toledo. That's when she was raped.

She turned herself in. Asbury picked her up at a corner in Kent and delivered her to Dan Street for her last stint in detention.

Soon after, Stokes gave birth to a baby girl, conceived with a boy she was no longer dating. Asbury got her into a Job Corps program, where she earned her GED and learned to become a building manager, responsible for everything from drywall to carpet installation. She hasn't had a legal run-in since.

"If it wasn't for Miss A, I just — I don't know how I would have done it," Stokes says. "She'd go out of her way to help, to give you anything you needed."

It's a sentiment shared by numerous former inmates, who speak glowingly of the amazing Miss A. But the same traits that drew girls to Asbury also drew the ire of her bosses.

The real trouble started in 2003. That fall, Linda Teodosio was elected to replace Judy Hunter as Summit County Juvenile Court's lone judge, responsible for overseeing Dan Street.

In Akron, the Teodosio name is akin to Russo in Cleveland. Her father-in-law, Al Teodosio, was the longtime chairman of the Summit County Democratic Party.

Linda Teodosio served five years as a municipal court judge before running for the juvenile court. She promised to reduce detention overcrowding by diverting inmates to programs with names like "Crossroads" and "Project: Greenhouse Effect."

But if her words were sunshine and lollipops, her behavior was old-school patronage pol. Before Teodosio even set foot in the office, she fired a whopping 39 court and detention center employees, replacing them with the Democratic faithful. The detention center sank into chaos.

She seemed a judge better suited for press releases than management, issuing a blizzard of new policies that confused staff.

In 2004, Teodosio fired three people, including Carl Cannon, who'd worked at Dan Street for more than a decade. Cannon often worked as a "floater," responsible for everything from shuttling kids to the courthouse to grabbing toilet paper from the janitor's closet. For years, floaters would sit in the probation offices during slow weekend shifts, reading or watching TV until they were dispatched.

But Teodosio had issued a rule that made the probation offices off-limits to "unauthorized" personnel. One problem: She neglected to say exactly who was "authorized" — or to even let staffers know the rule existed.

So when Cannon sat down to play guitar and read his Bible on a Super Bowl Sunday, he didn't realize he was endangering his job. "It was all on camera," Cannon says. "We knew we were being recorded every time we were in that office. There was never a problem."

Yet now there was. Cannon was fired — as were Martin Owens and Tommie Gusman, though none were even aware of the rule.

While veteran workers lived under the fear of first-strike termination, Teodosio's handpicked employees seemed to have diplomatic immunity.

In the fall of 2003, dispatch received a call from the mother of an inmate. The woman had apparently caught the eye of detention officer Willie Hawkins, a Teodosio hire, during a visit to her son.

Hawkins dug up the woman's phone number from her son's file and called. She complained to his supervisors that she felt violated and harassed, but instead of a reprimand, he received a promotion. (Hawkins no longer works at Dan Street and could not be located.)