Los Angeles Times
 
 
 
 
 

Crashing Hard Into Adulthood


Crashing Header

Story by PHIL WILLON, Times Staff Writer
Photos by GAIL FISHER, Los Angeles Times


These are the foster-care leftovers . . . kids who were too old and too troubled to be adopted by parents looking for cuddly babies, but too vulnerable to be returned to their unfit families.

Passed from relatives to foster families to institutionalized group homes, they have ridden the system to the very end--an 18th birthday or high school graduation. Within days, many will be on their own.

They include kids like , a former chubby-cheeked Girl Scout who started her six years in foster care after she tried to bludgeon her aunt with a claw hammer.

And , the castaway child of a heroin-addicted mother. She became a mother herself at 15.

And , sheltered in group homes since sixth grade, when his father put a diaper on him and paraded him around his school as punishment for not doing homework.

Beginning in the summer of 2000, The Times tracked Jesse, Janea and Monique during their first year of freedom, when they faced homelessness, violence, drugs and poverty; when the choices they made began to define them as adults...



Or, follow their stories person by person:

Janea




 Monique




 Jesse