April Sundance
April Sundance, 30, started life as a boy in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union. In a classic tale of betrayal, mafia bosses and strong personalities in the family, Sundance fled Ukraine like her father had done, only she fled to the U.S. where she hoped to fulfill dreams of becoming a transgender person, learning about the drug culture and becoming a Hollywood movie producer. On the rainy streets of San Diego at the beginning of a new year, she is two-thirds of the way there. Having relapsed into using meth for the first time in four months, she is freshly released from a mental health facility, and has an appointment with a crisis house, in her effort to stay sober this time. "I want to be a producer. I need to be in Hollywood. First I need to sober up," she said.
Read More
Raymond Caldwell
Raymond Caldwell is one of 14 children in a military family. They were all born in New Zealand, and when he was four, the lot of them moved to Arkansas. When he was 18 both parents died of cancer. The siblings took care of themselves with the help of the community. He was bored with working in a grocery store, however, so when a friend moved to San Diego, he tagged along. But the latent depression he harbored after his parents' death got him in fights and he ended up on the streets. Unable to get solid work, he lives on his SSI disability check, stays indoors for the first part of the month till his money runs out, and now stays out of trouble. The soft-spoken man smiles easily and doesn't ask for more than living one day at a time. He said he isn't on a housing list because he doesn't know how to sign up.
Read More
Cat (Etta)
Cat's real name is Etta, for Etta James. She is one of 13 children, all of whom spent their youth in foster care. She lived in 15 different homes in her first 15 years of life. After that she decided to find her own family on the street. She has an out loud personality, which makes it easy for her to attract friends, but also to stand out to law enforcement. That turned out to be a bad thing when someone recognized her skateboard from a residential burglary. She served one and a half years of a four year sentence and has two more years of parole. So she tries to stay out of trouble, calls her two daughters, age five and seven, living with their fathers, and contemplates how to change her situation. Not ready to go indoors, she feels she needs to earn that privilege herself, not through some program. She's working on a plan.
Read More
Christine Wade
Christine Wade, 31, is raising six children ranging in age from two to 14 years old. Soon it will be seven, when her next child is born in January. Breaking free of the cycle of addiction that her own mother suffered, Wade has worked hard to free herself from the world of adoption and foster care, physical and substance abuse that surrounded her as a child in Arkansas. Working as a real estate agent, then a health care worker, she was the mother in a normal but large family until she learned her husband was running a side job of prostitution and drugs at the apartment complex where he was a security guard. Now Wade is in temporary shelter for the winter, but hopes to find a safe haven for her children and the step-children she considers her own.
Read More
Richard and Ryan
Ryan Kubota, 43, and Richard Beckman, 25, met in line at the Salvation Army in Lodi, CA. in 2012. Bother were in failed relationships with women, seeking refuge and change at the Salvation Army. Beckman's parents were homeless in Brooklyn, New York. They passed him among relatives until he reached five years old and his grandmother gave him to CPS to be adopted out. His adoptive parents were a bit stressful, he said, and they kicked him out at age 18. Not long after that, he was walking home from an AA meeting and was attacked, left for dead. Kubota was by his side when he came back to life; in a body bag. The two were married finally, earlier this month, at First Lutheran Church, surrounded by homeless friends. Their honeymoon was spent on the same tired picnic bench, however. They are hoping to find gainful employment and a home away from the streets together.
Read More
Campground Halloween
About 40 children live at the temporary campground for homeless families and individuals set up in the far east corner of a parking lot for city vehicles. With the security of safe place to call home, that doesn't have to be packed up every day and moved, kids are afforded the luxury of actually celebrating some of the small moments of childhood; like dressing up for Halloween. A representative from the San Diego City Attorney's office arrived to deliver costumes just in time for the children to celebrate a Halloween carnival organized by the Alpha Project, the campground supervising agency. Alpha also supplies three meals a day for those in the campground and gives the children rides to and from school each day.
Read More
Richard Mathis
Richard Mathis, 61, grew up playing in the woods of Little Rock, Arkansas with four sisters and a brother, hunting frogs, building tree houses, chasing rabbits and generally exploring the outdoors. A truck driving job brought him to the west coast but the recession forced his company to cut the workforce, including Mathis. He tried to make it on his own, rather than head back to Arkansas, but housing prices forced him into homelessness. He lived in and out of shelters for 15 years, getting his meals there and his mail at Neil Good Day Center, until one day in February this year when he fell ill. Tests revealed he has congestive heart failure. Alpha Project for the Homeless found him housing for what might be his last six months. For now he has a great attitude and a comfortable home he shares with his fiance and their dog.
Read More
Hayden
Hayden Sumner, 50, joined the Navy at age 19. He saw the good in people and wanted to live a life of service to others. But his mother more closely resembled Ma Barker than June Cleaver. She was wanted by the FBI for credit card fraud. When a fellow sailor discovered Hayden was gay, and told their superior officers, that quickly ended his nearly eight year career in the military. After working two jobs at a time, enduring physical and psychological abuse from a partner for over 12 years, he fled to San Diego where he hid out in a canyon. A VA worker drew him out and set him up with a housing voucher. But he has trouble staying away from the drug scene he wants no part of. He's hyper enough without stimulants, he said. His goal is to bring renewable energy jobs to the homeless so they not only do something constructive for the planet, but regain a sense of pride and self-worth. Now would be a good time to start, he said.
Read More
Kelly and Jacob
Kelly and Jacob share a peanut butter sandwich and a bottle of juice all morning, trying to find some shade. While Jacob might be ready to run into his terrible twos, Kelly has too much on her mind to feel carefree. Only 31, Jacob is her fourth child, and she's trying to create a stable living situation for him, off the streets and out of the Rescue Mission where she contracted lice and the two of them have to be out each morning at 5:30 a.m. with all their belongings. She is also worried about the breast cancer surgery she is undergoing this week, and if they'll get it all. Then there's the ovarian cancer. And the chemo treatment, and the energy it takes to chase after a two-year-old. But she's got a new attitude, she said, "I've learned my life's lesson not to get with the wrong people any more."
Read More
Thomas
Thomas, 55, grew up in San Diego. He went to several different high schools because it was the era of busing kids around the county to better integrate students of different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. He worked at several jobs and ended up as a marketing manager for a technical college. Then he developed lung cancer. He credits his supervisors with great compassion, trying to limit his work load and allowing for long absences. But the chemotherapy just beat the energy out of him. Now he’s on permanent disability, but he lost his job, his home and his car to medical bills. “Just trying to survive is a 24/7 job,” Thomas said. “There’s no showers, no public bathrooms.” More than anything he misses the ability to have a good hot meal, specifically steak, or eggs and potatoes for breakfast. He and his immediate neighbors on a freeway overpass help each other move their belongings each week when the city crews come to clean up. Ironically, he moves three blocks to the sidewalk in front of where he used to live.
Read More
Mark Sheetz
Born in Arizona, his military family moved around and settled in Kentucky. Mark migrated to Texas then Florida pursuing a career in radio, but ending up waiting tables before joining the circus, then catching a bus to San Diego. After a brief stint at St. Vincent de Paul, where he felt the staff wasn't very helpful, and other shelters only had programs for addicts, he went back onto the streets. Eventually he was pressured at gunpoint into smuggling migrants across the border till he was caught and jailed. Now he plays banjo and sings with the homeless Voices of Our City choir, trying to find a place to stay indoors and make an honest living.
Read More
Margarita
Margarita, 42, grew up in San Diego, went to Patrick Henry High. She started working early, at age 12, and married the general manager at a House of Pancakes where she was waitressing at age 22. They had two children. The drug culture in high school stayed with her, and she began using heroin somewhere in between children. When she was in the first of two rehab programs, she was appaulled by the sexual predators that were involved in running the program. When she got out she found some of her six sisters had turned her husband and kids against her, so she fell back into drug use. When she emerged from the second program, her father told her to move back in with him, but there were too many people there, she said, all of them wanting to tell her how to live her life. So she hit the streets. At age 42, she roams the streets with no visible possessions, save the trolley tickets folded up in a jacket pocket.
Read More
Sandra and Gary
Sandra and Gary were sleeping near each other and watched over each other’s stuff on the streets of San Diego for month before they gradually became a couple. Sandra, 44, was born here, and moved with her family to Cancun when she was five. Even with five older brothers and sisters, lots of aunts, uncles and cousins, she had to work two jobs when she was old enough to do so. The work was hard on her because she injured her back at age eight, falling from a playground bar onto the concrete below. She was too young for surgery, they told her, so her back never healed properly. She moved back the the U.S. at age 31 and started working in the fields in Arizona, mostly harvesting broccoli. After three years it proved too difficult, after her husband pushed her backwards, further injuring her back, dislocating two discs. She moved to San Diego to try hotel work again, but only found 12-hour shifts. She sent her two children to live in Cancun while she tried to sort things out. Gary, 55, grew up in Minnesota. He enlisted in the Marine Corps at 18, a combat veteran of Desert Storm who retired after 20 years with an honorable discharge. He isn’t receiving his benefits, however, because it’s difficult to send papers to someone without an address, they tell him. He figures he is due $7,000 in back pay and has been on the list for the VASH housing program for two years, hoping for help soon.
Read More
Sam
Sam, 23, dodged her mother's mental health episodes till she was finally tossed out of her Oceanside home at age 16. On the streets, other young people were jealous of her fortitude, staying away from drugs, refusing to sell her body for favors like a place to stay or getting high. So they beat her up and overdosed her. She ended up in the hospital, dying three times. When she went to retrieve her belongings upon release from medical care, she was arrested and jailed for having drugs in her system. She moved in with a boyfriend who soon started beating her and threatened their baby. He was arrested and she found help with a street mom who encouraged her to go live with her father, which she did. There she "got her shit together", got a job, then moved into her own apartment. Now Sam has a husband in the Marines, her own income from a good waitressing job, and is moving away from San Diego to live with her in-laws while her husband is deployed. "Life couldn't be no more better," she said.
Read More
Alicia
Alicia Lamar, the kind of name a movie star or singer would adopt. Lamar smiles and quietly states “My voice is the voice of angels.” When asked what she likes to sing, she begins muttering about foster care, too many homes, abusive, hitchhiking across country from Boston, a father in the U.S. Navy: Okinawa.
Clutching a lighter in her hand, dropping her pink-and-blue blanket, her deep green eyes watch a growing crowd of Padres fans stack up across the street from the triangle of dirt she inhabits between the library and the Petco parking lot. Now 35, the U.S. Marine veteran of Afghanistan with square shoulders and a thick head of red hair begins to tear up when talking about her home on the East Coast. She circles a collapsed tent a few times like a cat, then grabs one side, lifting it high to spill its contents on the dirt. After a brief struggle she didn’t expect, Lamar says “It’s heavy for a reason. Forget it.” She pauses then says, “I need a tent.”
Read More
Jeff
Ten weeks after Jeff Burrell was born in rural NE Ohio his Welsh-Apache mother handed him over to his French-Canadian father and left. His father, a womanizer, used Jeff as “punching bag,” for everything that went wrong mentally, physically or financially. To escape, he joined the Coast Guard, which put him on an ice breaker in the coldest regions of the planet for over three years. He spent time in Florida driving a forklift, in Missouri at a poultry processing plant and back home in Ohio before arriving in San Diego. Looking for quick cash he fell in with smugglers, moving people north and cars south across the border. That earned him two stints each in federal and state prisons. Now, on the proper medications for bipolar disorder, he's a calmer kinder person, with a service dog that he says shares his Napoleon complex. All he wants now is a roof and four walls to call home.
Read More
Pastor Mike
Mike Little knew he was going to join the seminary by the time he was in high school, carrying a Bible around the hallways. His bronchitis kept him from joining the Air Force, which disappointed him and his career Marine father and his mother: a roller queen with the Bay City Bombers in Chicago. He fell in with a street ministry on the South Side, which lasted till one of the ministers was busted molesting a young girl. He traveled the country preaching, until a bad car accident sidelined him. Though his relationships have been extreme, one partner committed suicide, another was heavily addicted to crystal, and he is homeless now, his mission is to find funding for his dream: a ranch in Julian where homeless can live and learn skills like carpentry, landscaping and metal work, while having a safe place to live.
Read More
Rayonna
Rayonna has been on the streets in San Diego most of her life. She's smart and tough, and sentimental. Especially when it comes to the two children who died shortly after being born, and another stolen by leukemia at age 15. She dedicates herself to her two surviving children and the "street daughters" she's adopted, counseling them not to sell themselves to men for an occasional roof over their heads or food. She is incensed that the local shelters give less assistance to pregnant homeless women than they give to addicts who just go right back out to the street once they're clean. And she's sad that the men on the street are more inclined to con or abuse the women than to protect them.
Read More
Jesse
Jesse, 45, gets tired of people judging him and other homeless individuals. He can see it in their eyes, but tries to not let it get to him. "They threw rocks at Jesus," he points out. And those people judging him, "they're gonna have to answer to St. Peter in the end, just like we are." Jesse has PTSD from a life of struggle, fighting for stability. He was tired of his foster parents telling him what to do and trying to force him to read the Bible all the time. He moved out, but being homeless in New England gets rough when winter temperatures are 20 below. He lived in seven states before landing in San Diego, where he doesn't think the city does enough to help the homeless.
Read More
Thomas
Thomas Burke, 34, was born in Hawaii, into a military family. He loved sports and played football, hoping to make it into onto an NFL team someday. He had two older brothers, but one is now a sister. A U.S. Army veteran, he saw combat during Iraqi Freedom from 2004 to 2006. He left with an honorable discharge, but feels the effects. He said he’s been diagnosed by a psychiatrist with bipolar disorder, ADHD and depression.
He has a temper, he admits, and loud arguments led to a divorce, which didn’t help him being grounded at all. He said his drug of choice is alcohol, and it’s not doing his liver any good. And as for his medications, he hasn’t been taking them for the last month because he lost his i.d., or else it was stolen, and he can’t retrieve medications without it.
Read More
