Shelter’s Teens Want to Make Sense of a Troubled World

Looks are deceiving. From the outside, it’s just another house on the corner. Hedges frame the walkway and bright flowers adorn the porch. Come inside, though, and hear about a world that isn’t very pretty.

Sit in the living room of the CSP Youth Shelter in Laguna Beach and listen to several young teens discuss violence and death. To hear the detachment in their voices, you’d think they were talking about geometry. Would that it were so. Instead, they’re reflecting on the shooting death last week of a 14-year-old Tustin boy and the subsequent arrest of three teens in connection with the killing. Authorities have said the shooting resulted from a dispute over a music sound system.

The shelter residents are what society calls “troubled teens,” usually the products of broken or violent homes or, maybe, just kids who have run away or dropped out and need a place to stay.

To help them, you have to first see what they see. I spent part of Friday morning with five of them (seven is capacity at the home), but Lisa, 13, and David, 14, did most of the talking. From here on in, their names are the only thing I’ve changed.

“I’m not shocked [about the Tustin boy’s death],” Lisa said. “Because it happens all the time. It gets to the point where it doesn’t really matter anymore. It’s like it does matter, but people are not going to prevent it from happening. Nowadays, kids fight over the stupidest thing. Like radios; even clothes. I can understand killing people for certain reasons, but it would have to be a big important reason.”

Asked by shelter director Suzanne Jones if there is ever justification for killing someone, Lisa replied, “If they deserved it, then, yeah.”

A teen’s death doesn’t horrify her? “You get used to it after a while. Everybody has their time. If they die, it’s their time. It was meant to happen.”

I told David, who’s grown up in Los Angeles, that we had tough kids when I was growing up too. “But did they have access to guns?” he asked. “People approach you on the street and ask if you want to buy a gun. A friend started with cap guns. Now that he’s older, he’s got his own gun.”

I asked how old his friend is.

“Fourteen,” David said. “He’s in a gang now, and he’s got to live up to gang expectations. He’s only 14 and he’s got a sawed-off shotgun under his bed. I try and talk to him and say, ‘Man, it’s not worth it,’ but he’s been shot at, shot at a lot of times. He’s pretty much into protection now, because other gangs know where he lives and what he’s done.”

Despite the fatalism in their language, it’s helpful to remember that these kids haven’t given up. By being in the shelter, where the maximum stay is two weeks, they’re telling someone that they want to turn things around.

It’s also worth noting that their tone isn’t one of swagger; if anything, it is devoid of emotion. My reading is that they also have a core of articulateness and glint of intelligence that casts a ray of light through their darkness.

“I’m really violent,” Lisa said. “I fight a lot. Over the stupidest things. I get so angry and I have a short temper, so things set me off really, really easy. I was kind of like that when I was little too because my dad hit me. I’m just like him. When he hits me, I don’t fight back, so all the anger he gives me, I just take it out on other people.”

I asked the kids if family problems are the recurring theme in their friends’ lives. “It’s always the same: ‘I hate my mom. I hate my dad,’ ” David said.

David chose to come here because he wants to play football and knows he needs to go to school. Besides, he said, “I wouldn’t call getting shot at fun. At first, it was. I don’t know why, but it was like, ‘Wow, we got shot at.’ You’d go brag to your friends and they’d say, ‘Who did it? Let’s go after ‘em.’ ”

At the shelter, he said, there are people he can talk to. “Your friends are only going to say what they know, which isn’t a whole lot more than you know,” David said. “It was either the street or here, so I came here. I guess I’m getting tired of getting shot at and friends getting shot at.”

The shelter works intensively with the teens’ families, Jones, the shelter’s program director, said. In the downstairs playroom, board and parlor games are in abundance, although the residents’ ages range from 11 to 17. The games, especially things like jigsaw puzzles, lend order and structure to their lives, Jones said. “A lot of them have missed their childhood because of the way things have been in their family.”

She condemns the TV and movie industry for what she considers a desensitizing of this generation of youngsters to violence. Shelter residents aren’t allowed to watch violence on TV. “It’s a very peaceful home, for starters,” she said of the shelter, “where their homes often are chaotic, unpeaceful and violent, more often than not. We are not like that, so we set a tone that helps.”

Talking with kids like this gives you a perfect chance to decide if you’re a person who sees the glass half empty or half full.

The morning was gone when I drove away from the pretty house on the corner. Within two weeks, this group of teens will leave too, heading back into a world that somebody out there must make more beautiful for them.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.