Troubled Sanctuary : Safety: Shelter that protects battered women and children is facing the possibility of foreclosure.

On this particular Monday, the only shelter in Long Beach for battered women is full. There is room for seven families; this week they took in eight. Two of the families left this morning; two more are due to arrive tonight.

But that does not stop the hot line from ringing on Marie Webb’s scarred wooden desk.

“Yes, Sherry, now what is your situation?” Webb, director of Long Beach’s only domestic violence shelter, says soothingly to the wife of a veteran who has threatened to shoot her.

Hundreds of terrified women and children pass monthly through the YWCA’s Womenshelter, a place with a secret address, an odd collection of furniture and double locks on the front door. But lately, due to prior mismanagement and a desperate lack of funds, the shelter is as much in danger as those it protects.

The house is scheduled to lapse into foreclosure Oct. 18, the shelter program is $30,000 in debt, and a skeleton staff is working double shifts to keep the place afloat. Without $50,000, shelter officials say, the doors will close, leaving the state’s fifth-largest city with no place for its battered women and children to hide.

“These women cannot be left to sit in public view in (welfare) offices. Their children cannot attend the schools they usually attend because the batterer might pick them up there. This is an underground railroad that keeps women and children safe,” said Bobbi Kimble, a member of the new executive board hastily formed last August to rescue the shelter from closure.

On Tuesday, the Long Beach City Council gave preliminary approval for $15,000 in emergency funds to help keep the shelter open and offered the services of the city auditor to put its confused books in order. Board members are organizing fund-raisers and soliciting corporations--not to mention personal friends--for donations.

“It’s a stay of execution,” Kimble said of the city’s emergency money, taken from a $12,900 Health Department reserve and $2,100 kicked in from the mayor’s homeless fund. “But it is not by any means all that we need.”

The shelter, run by the 86-year-old Long Beach YWCA, fell into trouble last May when the United Way cut off $220,000 in funding--half of the shelter’s annual budget. United Way officials said the YWCA had failed to account for its spending.

The home for battered women has been running at a deficit ever since. The staff is working overtime without pay and the mortgage is three months past due, officials said. The new directors are begging for money to keep the place going until November, when they plan to present the United Way with a clean audit and a request that the lost funding be restored.

The shelter is one of 18 domestic violence homes in the county, a network of “safe houses” that shuttles abused women and children as far from their batterers as they need to be, officials said. Loss of a Long Beach facility would leave not only a gap in the network, but 19 fewer beds in a county that currently has just 340 spots for battered women, according to Kimble.

“Studies show that a woman is battered every 15 seconds,” said Elaine McDaniel, the new board’s chairwoman. “Our thrust now is to save this shelter. If we don’t care about our women and children, who do we care about?”

The funding dilemma seems to stop at the shelter’s marred front door. Inside, another sort of desperation prevails.

“Please, please don’t take my picture,” 22-year-old Cheryl begs, her eyes wide with fear. She says her husband has been tracking her and is closing in. She left him when he pounded their daughter until the child’s gums bled.

It is almost 6 and the women gather in the kitchen frying pork chops, ironing and chatting. Children are coloring in a circle in the living room.

Their stay here is 30 days, although extensions are sometimes granted. They are given a clean bed, counseling, legal assistance to obtain a restraining order, help finding an apartment and, in the meantime, a place to hide.

They don’t know what they would have done without the shelter. All except Anne. “I would have killed my boyfriend,” she announced while ironing a bedspread. “I would have killed him for sure.”

Donations to the shelter may be mailed to P.O. Box 32107, Long Beach 90832.