THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 24, 1996 TAG: 9601240364
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY NANCY LEWIS, CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Long : 160 lines
``No diapers,'' says Don Ramos, shining his flashlight through a 3-inch gap in the wooden boards enclosing a room-size space beneath the Oceanfront pier.
``That means no babies,'' explains Ted Baroody, throwing his voice back over his shoulder.
``Just some beer bottles and pizza boxes,'' says Ramos, switching off his light and ducking down to avoid bumping his head on the thick beams as he backs out.
The pair sometimes find teen girls with newborns in the boarded-up space where the pier abuts the Boardwalk. It's one of the few places along the resort strip that offer makeshift shelter.
The two men will hike the nearly deserted Boardwalk and adjacent streets twice weekly all winter, looking for the homeless youngsters they call ``throwaway teens.'' And when summer comes, they'll be hard-pressed to keep up with the new arrivals.
``They're not runaways, they're throwaways,'' says Ramos. ``Nobody wants them, but they never admit they're homeless. It's hard to say, `No one loves me.' ''
Ramos, Baroody and about 10 other volunteers for the Hampton Roads chapter of Stand Up For Kids befriend these youths of the street, provide themwith food and clothing, and help them find jobs and a place to live. But success is rare.
Most of the teens, Baroody says, become victims, trading sexual favors for the necessities of life, usually within 48 hours of being relegated to ``the streets.'' Most never live to adulthood, he says. The majority come from abusive homes.
Ramos, 39, is a self-described ``house husband'' who cares for his four small children while his wife earns their living as an insurance adjuster. Baroody, 27, is promotions director for Benchmark Communications.
Together they are the moving force behind the local nonprofit group, an autonomous arm of a national organization that aims to give street kids a new lease on life.
On an all-but-moonless mid-January evening, Ramos is joined by Rick Koca, founder of the organization and national executive director, who is in town for the week. They've hooked up at Flipper McCoy's, an arcade on Atlantic Avenue, where they hope to make contact again with a 14-year-old street kid Ramos has met several times during the past week. The girl has begun to trust them, and they want to find her a place to live before her humanity fades into a statistic. Ramos has brought some undergarments the girl requested.
She's been on the streets for months and worked as a prostitute, so finding a place where she will thrive will not be easy, Ramos says.
``She wants to go back to school,'' he says.
Michael Peterson and Devon McClenahan, teen volunteers with Stand Up For Kids, tell Koca and Ramos that they saw the girl several hours earlier. She was with ``some guys,'' Peterson says, but they haven't seen her since.
Nationally, 1.3 million to 2 million teens are homeless, Koca says. One-fourth to one-third are younger than 15; 70 percent are male. Ninety percent are white. About one-third have been homeless for more than three years. But most don't last that long.
Virginia Beach police don't keep such statistics locally, but they do deal with thousands of runaways each year, according to Detective William Chambers of the city's Major Crimes Unit. ``Well over 2,000'' are from Virginia Beach, he said. Since running away from home is not against the law in Virginia, when police pick up an apparently homeless teen - usually for breaking the curfew law - - they check the National Crime Information Center to determine whether the youth is wanted for a crime in another state or if he or she has been reported as a runaway. In the latter case, parents or the reporting agency are called, and the youth is held for return.
Otherwise, the youths are free to go.
Ramos and Baroody say the teens who show up on the streets of Virginia Beach and Norfolk - the two cities they now ``work'' - learn quickly how to survive. They pimp, they steal, they run drugs, they sell their bodies to the highest bidder. At first, they sleep in cars, on rooftops, in dumpsters. Then they discover that, in exchange for sexual favors, they can live more comfortably, in an apartment or motel room, and even eat regularly.
The volunteers' goal - admittedly difficult to attain in most cases - is to earn the kids' trust, then steer them in the direction of real independence. Sometimes this means helping them learn such basic life skills as how to cook, buy groceries, care for a child. Sometimes it means helping a kid get emancipated, or declared legally independent, from parents.
``We don't send a lot of kids home,'' Baroody says. ``That's where the problem is. It's not a pretty place. Every adult in these kids' lives has screwed them over.''
It's the successes, few though they are, that keep Ramos and Baroody walking the streets of Virginia Beach and Norfolk, winter or summer.
With light in their eyes, they cite the case of 17-year-old Rachel, a single mother of three girls. Ramos and Baroody helped her with food and clothing and made weekly contact with her at the cheap motel room she took, so that she'd know that someone cared. ``There's one we really made a difference for,'' Baroody says. They lost track of her last fall after she moved into public housing.
Then there is Jeff, a younger street teen who was dealing drugs to survive. In and out of the program for two years, he is now getting his life together.
But a look of concern comes over Ramos' face when he speaks of Nick, a 17-year-old he and Baroody ran into several years ago.
``We met him playing Mortal Kombat at Flipper's. He was a child prostitute, performing sex acts for money,'' Ramos says. ``We'd be walking and talking with him, and a car would pull up, and he'd say, `Gotta go.' In his own words, `You gotta do what you gotta do.' ''
Neither of the men knows what became of Nick, but they believe he was one they got to too late. His history is like that of many kids lost to the streets, Ramos says.
``It's $50 an hour compared to $5 an hour at McDonald's,'' he says. ``Someone comes along and tells the kid that he can have his own room, play Nintendo all day, not have to go to school if . . .'' Ramos winces as he pauses.
Then, Ramos says, the boy - usually 12 to 14 years old - is ``off the streets until he's 17, not a kid anymore. Then, adults are no longer interested, and he's homeless,'' with little or no education and few skills. ``The kid's outgrown the sugar daddy stage.''
Ramos' eyes are watery now. He stares into space. ``You can pick them out of a crowd. They look at you with hungry eyes. They're proud, have to show you they can't be bought, but you know they can.''
Ramos and Baroody have made contact with as many as 20 new kids in any given week. They count successes on one hand, but feel that they've ``helped'' each one they've met, in one way or another.
``It's about walking and talking, rapport, friendship,'' Koca says. ``We want to show them we care and get them off the streets. No, it's more than a friend, it's a kick in the heiney. The problem is, they can be kicked out of the house by Dad, but they don't know how to get off the street. Getting them off the street is easy, actually. It's keeping them off that's the hard part.''
Koca, 53, is retired from the Navy after a 30-year stint. He became interested in helping street teens when he read an article on homeless kids and said to himself, ``We can do better than this.''
The Stand Up For Kids program he started in San Diego to help kids who lived in the sewers won the J.C Penney Golden Rule Award several years ago.
At any given time, he says, between 400 and 500 teens nationwide are being helped. But it's not enough.
What is needed, Koca says, is centers for street kids in all major cities - centers where they can shower, sleep, be taught how to care for themselves. Of course, all of this would require money, but he, for one, considers it a good investment.
It's after 8 p.m. now, and Ramos and Koca have rejoined Peterson and McClenahan at Flipper McCoy's. Outside, a cold wind whips down Atlantic Avenue, picking up debris and dust and spiraling it into the air. The two men have walked up and down the street looking for the girl they'd met earlier in the week, but they've had no luck.
``Did she show up here?'' Ramos asks Peterson, who shakes his head.
The girl's future, just now, is on the line. Like thousands of other homeless teens, she may soon be just another statistic. But maybe not. Ramos and Koca will be back on the street tomorrow, trying to find her - trying to convince her and others like her that they are loved, wanted and, yes, needed. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
CHRISTOPHER REDDICK/The Virginian-Pilot
Don Ramos searches under the fishing pier on the Oceanfront where,
sometimes, runaway kids take shelter for the night.
Volunteers Michael Peterson, 18, and Devon McClenahan, 16, from
Salem High School chat with organization's founder, Rick Koca.
KEYWORDS: RUNAWAYS TEENAGERS VIRGINIA BEACH by CNB