It sounds like this will be a prelimindary hearing. Q might be able to get a public defender, which will save you some money. In this state they can get a competency evaluation on a juvenile, which is different than the type they use on adults sometimes. For adults, it's to see if they are mentally incompetent in the eyes of the law either due to MH or IQ. For a juvenile it's to see if the juvenile is mature enough to aid in his/her defense and if they can understand things like the difference between guilt/innocence, a misdemeanor/felony, and the different roles of defense, prosecution, a GAL, etc. No way Q would pass that. I'd be asking for one of those if I were you. If the minor isn't found competent the judge can order a "class" to teach them then hold the trial afterwards but they only do that if the kid is a little older and just never learned our court processes; if the kid is younger, has a developmental delay, or otherwise seems farther away from being able to understand it, the judge has to drop the case or order MH services or something- if the kid has never had opportunity to get any appropriate services. In your case, I would think the charges would be dropped- any decent judge is going to throw this out of court. The judge just might need justification though- like the competency evaluation.
. 
