IN PERSON : Rescuing At-Risk Youths Is His Reason for Living

It took Roy Alvarado half a century to change his life from a free fall of drug addiction, crime and imprisonment into a quest to save troubled kids. And he does not intend to give up his newfound calling, even as his life slips away.

The colon cancer he was diagnosed with five years ago has spread to his liver and lungs. Chemotherapy has failed to stop the disease’s progress.

“I compare it to somebody on death row, because doing time was such a big part of my life,” Alvarado said with the unwavering voice of someone who has faced life-threatening situations and survived. “There’s always a chance for a stay of execution.”

Alvarado spent a combined 13 years behind bars for crimes stemming from drug abuse and gang activity. But the 60-year-old Costa Mesa resident now has a decade of recovery behind him. After his last release from prison on a weapons conviction in 1986, Alvarado became a state-licensed drug and alcohol counselor and has since labored to earn the gratitude of schools and communities, hoping to repay a debt that weighs heavily on his conscience.

Alvarado finds it ironic that cancer is threatening to end his life, now that he is contributing to the society he had victimized for so many years.

“It’s kind of like a soldier coming back from Vietnam and getting run over by a car,” he said laughing. “This is very definitely a terminal disease, but I’m going to try and fight it off as long as possible.”

The walls of Alvarado’s modest home are decorated with awards and citations. An Outstanding Alumnus Award engraved on a brass-and-wood plaque from Saddleback College sits on a bookshelf near a photograph of Alvarado alongside honored members of Leadership Tomorrow, a public service organization.

Alvarado, who once could not get through the day without an injection of heroin, stands shoulder-to-shoulder in the photo with the best and brightest of his community, a man reborn. He is determined to continue his job as a drug and gang counselor for the Newport-Mesa Unified School District as long as he can, even though there are days when he feels too sick to get out of bed.

“I’ve had some bad days where I’m ready to be sick all day long and just kick back. Then I get a crisis call from one of my kids and, before I know it, I’m saying: ‘Wait for me and I will be there and we will deal with it.’ So I jump up and I go and take care of it. About an hour or so later, I’m thinking: ‘I was sick, I was dying, and yet I don’t feel sick now.’ That’s what keeps me going.”

But Alvarado is steadily cutting back on his work with community organizations to focus on the 100 or so youths he still makes contact with each week. Alvarado wants to save as many young people as he can, as long as he is able. He is their confidant of last resort, after the rest of the world has given up on them.

“Their problems are the same problems I had as a kid. Kids will come to me in the middle of the day and tell me that they’re drunk and want to get sober. Kids will beat up somebody and they come to me and they tell me. They’ve told me they’ve got guns or drugs that they want to get rid of. They come to me when their parents have kicked them out on the streets and they don’t know where to go, they don’t know what to do.

“The parents will call me after their kids get arrested. I go to Juvenile Hall, and I contact the parents when I come back. If there had been somebody like that for me, I would have turned my life around a lot sooner.”

Alvarado was reclaimed from a life of crime that began at age 10 with a two-year sentence at the California Youth Authority. Personal intervention by members of Alcoholics Anonymous and a court-assigned counselor, also an ex-con, convinced him he could change his life at 50.

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Personal intervention is now his guiding philosophy. He believes that even the most hard-core juvenile offenders can be rescued if there is someone around to earn their trust and show them a way out.

“Our neighborhoods, our cities, our counties--all of us must take responsibility for our own kids. We should develop a program for our kids that would be far-reaching enough to help them even when they go to prison, so that when the kids come out of prison, we are ready to help them back into the system.

“Instead, we send them to prison and we forget about them, like it’s all done. So they come back bitter, angry and well-schooled in crime.

“There’s no jobs for them and there’s no way that they can connect back to the system. The family is devastated and has had no kind of support system to understand why their kid went to prison in the first place. They feel their kid is the victim, even though the kid had the gun. So if the family has that attitude, the kid in prison is going to continue to feel like a victim and blame the world for his actions.”

Alvarado talks straight to his kids. He tells them there is no way to avoid responsibility for their actions. But his example also gives them hope that regardless of the mistakes they’ve made, redemption is possible.

“I’m not the same guy who was in San Quentin,” Alvarado said. “I’ve forgiven myself for all the trouble that I created, because I did a lot of bad stuff. I hope that, if for nothing else, people will remember me as an example of something that can be done, someone who could change a bad life into a good life.”

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Profile: Roy Alvarado

Age: 60

Hometown and residence: Costa Mesa

Education: Drug and alcohol counseling certification from Saddleback College

Family: Four sisters and three brothers; three grown children

Background

* Served 13 years in various California prisons

* Was a successful hair stylist in the 1960s and ‘70s

* Sentenced to Chino State Prison in 1983 for possession of a concealed weapon

* Began working as a state certified bilingual drug and alcohol counselor in 1987 for various county medical centers and recovery hospitals

* Founded first Latino Alcoholics Anonymous chapter in Costa Mesa and the Latinos Costa Mesa, a community organization now called Todos Hermanos

* Developed Project STOP, a program for Latino families of high-risk students

* Founded Familias Unidas drug-abuse support group and the antigang group Madres Costa Mesa

Personal goals: “To give back to the community as much as I took, to do the best that I can with what I have to work with. My main focus is the young people, to give them an opportunity to be the best that they can be.”

Source: Roy Alvarado; Researched by RUSS LOAR / For The Times

Los Angeles Times