A Boy Money Can’t Buy : Impoverished Youth Turns Down $100 Offer to Sell Drugs

It would be hard to imagine a child who needed $100 more than Sixto Perez.

Home is a trailer park in La Puente, where he lives with his mother and five siblings. Often, teachers say, his only meals are free school lunches.

Although only 12, Sixto does odd jobs after school. Last fall, he was sweeping and stocking a mini-mart for $20 a week when temptation rode up on a bicycle. A man flashed a wad of bills, offering him $100 to sell drugs at his school, Los Robles Elementary.

Sixto knew all about drugs from a school program called SANE (Substance Abuse Narcotics Education) run by sheriff’s deputies. Though scared, he didn’t think twice. His teacher, Jeanie Thiessen, said Sixto told the man: “I only make a little bit of money, but I do it honestly.”

Then he ran inside to the store owner, who chased the drug dealer away.

Today, Sixto will be honored for his integrity. The sixth-grader, who is bright but has severe dyslexia, will receive a $500 savings bond from the Bank of California and become an honorary deputy.

“I don’t know how many adults could turn down $100, and I have never heard of this happening with an impoverished kid,” said Deputy Terry Matthews, who taught Sixto’s SANE class. “He made us all very proud. This is the kind of kid who makes my year.”

Sixto, always shy, appears embarrassed by all the attention. “I said no,” he said outside the family’s trailer, which is wedged between auto repair shops and a flood channel. “I don’t want to sell drugs. I don’t want to get into trouble.”

His mother, Ifigenia Perez, looked on with approval. “That man told my son he was crazy to work for so little money,” she said in Spanish. “But I’m happy. I’d rather have him honest.”

Matthews says the La Puente drug dealer probably tried to recruit Sixto because children are less suspicious to police and can move freely on school campuses.

The Perez family lives in the flatlands along industrial Valley Boulevard where children play near dumpsters scrawled with graffiti.

One recent day at lunchtime, the only food on the table for the entire family was two cans of infant formula and a pack of tortillas. Sixto’s father is a migrant farm worker in Northern California who sends money only sporadically to help feed the children, who range in age from 14-year-old Raulio to 9-month-old twins Martin and Juan.

Sixto has worked since last year to help buy milk for his younger sisters and shoes for brother Pedro, ignoring the toes that poke through his own sneakers.

Mini-mart owner Yolie Jean befriended the earnest little boy when he began buying food at the store, but says she didn’t realize how poor the family was until Sixto nearly fainted from hunger one afternoon. Now she feeds him at the market and gives him day-old bread and bruised fruit to take home.

I told him: “Sixto, I can’t pay you much but I want you to work for me,” Jean said. “We would talk and I would tell him, ‘Sixto, drugs don’t take you anywhere but jail or death.’ ”

After the incident, deputies investigated, but the man could not be found. Meanwhile, Sixto told the story to the aide who helps his teacher. The aide told Thiessen. The teacher, who has taken up collections to buy the family food, launched a letter-writing campaign to publicize what he had done. She also bought him a pair of blue jeans to wear when he receives his award today.

Sixto is excited about the award, which he hopes will help him fulfill his dream of becoming an auto mechanic. When he clambered into Thiessen’s car, he quizzed her insatiably about its inner workings.

Thiessen said she hopes the $500 savings bond will encourage the boy to stay in school.

“These kids live in such poor surroundings,” she said. “Sixto is trying to make everything work out for his family. He’s a good kid. . . . That’s why he didn’t take any money from that drug dealer.”