Teens on the run

Brianna, 13, left her Stead home more than a month ago.

The middle-schooler, who now lives with some friends, hasn’t seen her mom since the first day of summer vacation.

“I worry about where she is, if she’s OK,” Brianna says of her mother, “if she’s got clothes to wear, food to eat. I love her a lot, and nothing’s going to change that. But I’m not going back to live with her unless she stops doing drugs, gets a job and gets a house—or a place to live.”

Talk about role reversal. Like many runaways, Brianna took off in the midst of a heated argument. Unlike other arguments teens may have with parents, this argument was about food—the lack of it—and drugs. Brianna doesn’t use drugs. Her mother does. She says her mother is a crank (methamphetamine) addict and dealer. Mom’s been in and out of prison, in and out of rehab programs. When she’s using, she doesn’t need food. And lately, Mom’s been using—and dealing.

“She’d never eat, or she’d have just a piece of bread once in a while,” Brianna says.

Mom tends to forget that her two teens, Brianna and her brother, need occasional nutrients.

“We could have gotten $400 [in food stamps],” Brianna says, “but she never went to go get it.”

After losing a home and job in Reno, the family moved in with another single-parent family in the North Valleys. A constant flow of transient men moved in and out of the three-bedroom house. Brianna identified the men by nicknames like “The Cowboy” or by what they contributed to the household—"He was the guy who brought food home, but he had to leave because he kept guns in the house, and my brother kept getting into his stuff.”

Brianna had a dog, Outlaw, but her mom didn’t buy dog food either. Whenever Brianna got some oatmeal or macaroni and cheese, she’d share with her pet.

Now she doesn’t know where her dog is. She doesn’t know where her mom is, as the family was evicted. Her mom thinks that Brianna is living in California with a relative.

Brianna meets with me at a coffee shop on the outskirts of Reno. She drinks a frappuccino and talks about reading Harry Potter. She looks, dresses and speaks much like any other intelligent seventh grader, with an added dose of street smarts. She says she tried getting help from adults, even from social services.

“No one would do anything.”

Brianna left home in early June—the day after school let out for the summer.

On the day she left, she’d been looking for something to eat. The woman with whom Brianna’s family shared a house had hidden food in her own bedroom—"It was for her kids,” Brianna says.

Brianna’s mother was annoyed and upset. First, she raved about how she would share her own food with the friends’ kids if they were hungry. Then she screamed at Brianna, ordering her not to eat any of the friends’ food.

“She said, ‘Oh well, I don’t want you eating that because it makes me look bad,'” Brianna recounts. “I said, ‘You don’t feed me!’ And she started crying. I told her, ‘I’m leaving,’ and I left.”

Reno for runaways

Brianna, unlike most teens who run away, had a place to run to—an adult she trusted who wasn’t afraid to break the law to help. It’s against the law to take in a runaway without notifying parents or law enforcement within 72 hours.

If she hadn’t had a place to run to, Brianna would have stayed with her mom, she says. Even life with a drug addict is safer than life for a 13-year-old girl on the streets in northern Nevada, where a kid could easily end up involved in drugs, theft or prostitution.

Reno doesn’t have a drop-in center for homeless youth or runaways. About a year ago, the Runaway Homeless Youth Mentoring and Equipping program, part of Children’s Cabinet in Reno, began a partnership with Ark-a’ik, a coffee- house on Fourth Street. Kids could stop by to pick up information, to get help in going home or to find another way to get off the streets.

Now Ark-a’ik is no longer playing host to the drop-in center for teens, and RHYME is trying to find a new place to run the center.

In Las Vegas, where around 500 chronic runaways and homeless youth live around the university campus, plans are underway to build a residential shelter for teenagers. The shelter would include dorms for teen moms with babies, for teens transitioning out of foster care and for chronic runaways or teens whose families have rejected them.

Reno doesn’t even have much in the way of a shelter for homeless adult men, let alone teens. Reno also doesn’t make use of a program called “Safe Place,” which offers a handful of businesses that a young person can go—day or night—to ask for help. In Las Vegas, a young person can walk into a Terrible Herbst or a bus station—any of more than 400 places in southern Nevada that post a “Safe Place” sign—and make a phone call for help.

There are no “Safe Places” in Reno, but that may soon change. Melissa Loukos-Asbell, who heads up RHYME for the Children’s Cabinet, says that the Safe Place program is in the works and may be operational by fall.

With so few helps for runaways, it’s not as easy to count kids or to track the homeless problem in northern Nevada.

“Reno’s kind of a hard town to run away in,” Loukos-Asbell says. “There are our strict curfew laws, and we have a lot of law enforcement on the street enforcing those laws. We don’t see a lot of kids on the street like we would in big cities.”

But though the problem looks different, it’s still a problem.

“Just because we’re not seeing youth panhandling on the streets or backpacking around doesn’t mean there’s no problem,” Loukos-Asbell says. “Kids here do a lot of couch surfin’ from one friend’s house to another. I had a youth just tell me that she stayed at a park and slept on a slide, one of those slides that was kind of covered.”

Suburban runaways can move into houses under construction on the outskirts of town.

Two or three times a week, Loukos-Asbell and her staff go to places where kids hang out—skate parks, youth centers and schools. They hand out “snack packs” with fruit and granola bars. They give away hygiene kits with toothbrushes, soap, deodorant and tampons.

Last year, they spoke with 1,900 kids, giving them a number to call if they needed help. RHYME’s hotline, 830-6200, is manned from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week. After 9 p.m., teens can call the Crisis Call line at 784-8090 and receive a referral to the McGee Center.

More than 50 kids contacted RHYME for help last year, Loukos-Asbell says. All of these kids were given case managers to evaluate their situations in order to reunite them with families.

If the young person had left home, say, because grades in school were poor, he or she was offered a tutoring program. Other families were offered anger management courses or family counseling.

Sometimes, a family isn’t the safest place for a child. In Reno, the McGee Center holds beds for kids referred by RHYME who need emergency shelter until a better, parentally approved alternative can be found.

If a young person contacts RHYME and offers people on staff his or her name, then the agency has to inform the young person’s parents or law enforcement. “That’s the law,” says Loukos-Asbell.

But if a teen just wants to ask questions or get supplies, that young person doesn’t need to give any identifying information. Kids who contact RHYME aren’t always worried about remaining anonymous.

“Most of the kids that we’re working with want to contact their parent or guardian,” says Loukos-Asbell. “That’s why they come to us.”

Will runaways get in trouble with the law?

That depends.

Running away is a status offense. Young people can be picked up and released to parents’ custody, Loukos-Asbell says, or they can be cited, given a ticket and taken to the McGee Center. Habitual runaways or kids with prior juvenile records are at risk of going to Wittenberg Hall. If a young person is on probation and ends up being arrested and is found with drugs, that person could end up facing a pile of charges.

RHYME, Loukos-Asbell says, is not just for teens who’ve already run away. The staff also takes calls from kids who are considering leaving home for one reason or another. They’d like to do more preventative work at RHYME.

“Kids don’t just run away for the heck of it. There’s always some reason. Our job is to help them find what that reason is and solve it any way they can.”

Many kids who run away offer family-related reasons: problems with family rules, discipline, or sibling issues, according to the National Runaway Switchboard. Often kids leave to escape an immediate danger. Sometimes they leave with no plans for what to do next.

Teens thinking of running away might threaten to do so. Some pack bags and stow them away or ask for money that they keep in a secret stash. Parents should pay attention to such threats, say folks at the NRS:

“If you are experiencing a turbulent time with your child, try talking to them when you are not arguing or angry at each other. Inform your son or daughter that running away is not as glamorous as it sounds.

“Let them know living day-to-day on the streets with no legal form of income, no food and only the clothes on their back is not only dangerous, it can be deadly. Don’t wait for your child to express their thoughts about running away or show signs that they are devising a plan of action. Proactive is much better than having to be reactive.”

Living quarters

Abandoned building. Downtown Reno. Trash—plastic soda bottles and fast-food bags—accumulates along the fence. Covering the windows are large sheets of plywood intended to keep people out. Word on the street is that a sheet of wood is loose. Homeless youth—and transient adults—slip inside late at night, under the nose of nearby law enforcement.

Nah, that’s just a rumor, says a young guy sitting by the entrance of this building. It’s late afternoon, and the steps provide a shady place to hang out. Michael, an upbeat strawberry blond in a clean red shirt, says he “knows for a fact” that no one’s living in this building.

“Have you ever been inside?”

“No, that would be breaking and entering. But I know people who’ve been inside, and believe me, nobody lives there.”

Michael says he’s 22, but he could pass for a teen if he shaved his blonde goatee. He demonstrates this look by covering his beard with his hand.

He offers some helpful advice. Teens living on the street hang out at the bus station, downtown in front of the Eldorado or at a nearby park. But wait till it’s dark.

“It’s too hot out now,” he tells me. “Everyone’s just kicking it somewhere out of the sun. The mall, McDonald’s …”

He ran away from home when he was 16, but he doesn’t want to tell me his story.

“Shit, it was no big deal,” he says. “I just sold dope.”

“So you could pay for a hotel room?”

“I coulda had three rooms at a time if I wanted,” he says.

Michael says he’s cleaned up his act these days, thanks to Drug Court. He leans forward on the rail near the door of the abandoned building where no homeless teens live. I turn to leave.

“Stay out of trouble,” he tells me.

Child Seekers

A teen won’t stay inside all summer. You might see homeless kids on the streets or at free events downtown. Some huddle in alcoves near Reno casinos to share a cigarette. A few look like they’ve been sleeping on the river. Reno cops have taken in 12- and 13-year-olds who support themselves via “survival sex.”

You could call them troublemakers. Or victims.

Girls outnumber guys three-to-one when it comes to runaways reported to Nevada Child Seekers, a non-profit agency based in Las Vegas. The average age of a runaway in Nevada is 14 years old—and that’s getting younger all the time, says Jill LeMasurier, executive director of Nevada Child Seekers. The agency has received federal funding to open an office in Reno, and LeMasurier was in Reno in June interviewing prospective directors. The office will be open by fall, and the agency is looking for volunteers.

LeMasurier, a native New Yorker, signed on at Child Seekers when she began to realize that few help agencies were tackling the problems of runaways. That was nearly a decade ago.

“It was being shuffled aside,” LeMasurier says. “Every child out there is an exploited child. And most children are not running to something, they are running away from something.”

These days, she says, it’s not unheard of for 12-year-olds to pack up and take off. LeMasurier knows of runaway 8-year-olds. When a third-grader runs away from home, that’s a sign that something’s really wrong—with the home, with our culture.

“That’s just not normal,” LeMasurier says. “I mean, come on.”

Peer pressure

Angela, 16, wasn’t exactly running away. She just wasn’t going home when her parents expected. She’d been gone overnight before without telling her family. Once or twice, she’d disappeared for the entire weekend.

Then one Friday last winter, Angela partied with friends instead of going home after school. She partied with her friends at an apartment in Sparks instead of going home at all. She ended up living with a couple of older adult guys for about a week.

“She’s easily manipulated,” her mom says.

“When your friends say, ‘Let’s just go,’ what are you going to say?” Angela asks. “You’re going to say the first thing that comes into your mind—'Yes.’ “

“It’s peer pressure,” her mom says.

Angela says she was getting high with friends that Friday. When she realized how late it was, she asked for a ride home. No one would give her a ride.

“You don’t want to go home,” they said.

So she didn’t go home.

Her mom called the police and reported Angela as a runaway.

“I’m pacing the house, not knowing if she’s dead or alive,” her mom says. “I’m calling all her friends or people we thought were her friends.”

Angela spent the night at the apartment of a 25-year-old. She spent the next few days drinking and using drugs. On Wednesday, she again asked friends to give her a ride home.

“You don’t want to go home,” they said.

So she didn’t go home.

After another day or two, Angela decided to phone her mother.

Her mom characterizes the message Angela left like this: “I just wanted to call and let you know that I’m OK. These people are taking care of me better than you ever did.”

“I didn’t say that,” Angela says, frowning.

“Yes, you did,” her mother responds.

The two sit on a couch in a tidy living room. The Sparks home is in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood.

Angela came home once, during that week, while her mother was at work. She raided the freezer and pantry for groceries, prodded to do so by her friends who drove her home, then took off quickly with the food.

Angela’s older sister cooked up a plan. She invited Angela to get drunk with her at a party. When Angela arrived at the party, she was arrested by the Sparks police and taken to Wittenberg. She was there for a few weeks.

“That’s not a fun place to be, nuh-uh, oh no,” she says, recalling what she described as fairly frequent strip searches that would occur if, say, someone discovered a missing pencil after a class in the facility’s day room.

“All the girls would line up, stripped down to our underwear,” Angela says, looking embarrassed, “and … uh-huh. Sometimes it was freezing.”

The atmosphere felt scary and the food was nasty—"You don’t get real milk; it’s the powdered stuff.” She was relieved to be moved to the McGee Center, where her biggest concern became defending her supplies of toothpaste and shampoo. At McGee, she went through a 90-day program that she says helped her learn to take responsibility for her decisions.

She’s been home for only a few days, but she’s determined not to go back, not to use drugs. This commitment sets her apart, she says.

“Most of the kids, when they get out, go back to doing whatever they’re doing,” Angela says. She remembers a conversation she had with a friend at the McGee Center.

“What are you going to do when you get out?” Angela asked her friend.

“Smoke a bowl,” her friend said.

“Why?”

“Cuz it’s fun.”

This girl’s life

Before she left home, Brianna says that she (and the woman who ended up taking her in) sought help from a variety of sources. One adult told Brianna that she ought to be used to living with a drug addict—since she’d done so most of her life.

When Brianna repeats this, the woman in whose home Brianna now lives has a quick retort.

“You’re a smart girl,” the woman tells Brianna. “You know how ignorant that is.”

“Yeah,” Brianna agrees, though she sounds less than convinced.

She says she knew that living with drug dealers wasn’t healthy for her. She wanted to do well in school—but it was hard. Her mother bought no school supplies. The middle-school principal gave her a backpack and binders, but these were stolen from her home. A relative bought Brianna another backpack. To make sure it wasn’t stolen, Brianna took the backpack with her everywhere.

She had a hard time getting to school on time. Sometimes, her mother’s friend would promise a ride in the morning. By the time Brianna realized that the woman wouldn’t come through, it would be late. She’d start walking, but it was two miles to school from her house. She was tardy so often that the school threatened to call a truancy officer.

“And sometimes I’d have to stay home and take care of the [mother’s friend’s] kids if they stayed home sick,” Brianna says.

She missed a lot of school but managed to maintain decent grades. She even won an award that she’s proud of, but doesn’t want mentioned in this story. Brianna doesn’t want to be found by her mom just yet. Her adult friend is working to gain custody.

"[My mom] thinks I don’t want to live with her because she doesn’t have any money and can’t buy me the stuff I want,” Brianna says. “That’s not true. My mother is a good person. She’s fun to hang out with. We have a lot in common because …”

Brianna pauses and shrugs.

“She’s my mom.”

Editor’s note: The names of Angela, Brianna and the dog, Outlaw, have been changed to protect the anonymity of these two girls.

Thinking of Running Away?

Before you leave, ask yourself:

• What else can I do to improve my home situation before I leave?
• What would make me stay at home?
• How will I survive?
• Is running away safe?
• Who can I count on to help me?
• Have I given this enough thought?
• What are my other options?
• If I end up in trouble, who will I call?
• When I return home, what will happen?

WHO TO CALL FOR HELP:

RHYME’s hotline: (775) 830-6200, from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week.

Crisis Call Center: (775) 784-8090

National Runaway Switchboard: (800)-621-4000 or www.nrscrisisline.org

Nevada Child Seekers: (702)-458-7009 or www.nevadachildseekers.org