Street Shepherd

Street pastor Richard Honeycutt doesn’t blink. He looks you right in the eye and preaches the Gospel from the porch of the aging Mid-Wilshire apartment building he manages that serves as a grass-roots drug rehabilitation center.

“My mom told me that Pastor Honeycutt never blinks his eyes and you know what that means,” said neighbor Tonja Knight, who lives across the street from the Great Shepherd Outreach on Normandie Avenue near 9th Street. “That means he is telling the truth.”

Knight had walked over to the two-story building to get one of the bags of groceries that Honeycutt and eight former and recovering drug addicts distribute to neighborhood residents twice a week. On Monday and Friday mornings, Honeycutt drives a run-down Volkswagen Rabbit to a Hughes market in Van Nuys to pick up the free food.

Honeycutt seized a brief moment of media attention three weeks ago when Los Angeles City Council members Laura Chick and Nate Holden and City Atty. James K. Hahn held a press conference in front of an abandoned building next door that was considered a nuisance. Honeycutt stepped out of his apartment house and launched into a passionate, scathing attack on the city for what he said was its lack of concern for the downtrodden.

“Why worry about that building where no one lives, when this building is full of life, full of people who are trying, but need a little help?” exclaimed Honeycutt, who is not affiliated with an organized church. For a full 20 minutes, he spoke without pause, earning the fleeting attention of reporters and several television news crews.

“If you don’t believe people can kick heroin, can beat cocaine or stop gang-banging, then you should come right here,” Honeycutt said to the cameras.

On Monday morning, after getting up at 5:30 to drive to the San Fernando Valley for the food that is given to anyone who goes to Great Shepherd Outreach, Honeycutt, decked out in a Junior Seau San Diego Charger jersey, was checking up on an old friend who had come to seek his help last Friday.

In a small bachelor unit, Leonard Adams, who said he is 42, was shivering and sweating profusely in bed. He was on Day 3 of kicking heroin.

“You ain’t 42, tell him the truth, man,” laughed Honeycutt, who has known Adams for over a decade. “We don’t use any medication here,” said Honeycutt, who is 40. “He is kicking on love and prayer.”

Juan Hurtas, who has lived in the fading neighborhood for a decade, has come to get a bag of food. Like the 50 other bags, it is full of oranges, bananas, potatoes, onions, eggplants, rice, chili peppers and, somewhat bizarrely, a La Brea Bakery baguette. (“That’s the best bakery in town,” an Outreach resident proudly said as she prepared the bags of food.)

“They are helping people in the right way, helping the hungry eat. When someone needs something to eat around here, they know they can come here,” said Hurtas. “We call him Mister Pastor.”

Born and raised in Hattiesburg, Miss., Honeycutt credits his mother for his religious passion. He grew up in a single-parent home, he says, where the atmosphere was always positive.

“We lived in the ghetto, but the ghetto was not part of our life.”

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After he arrived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, the street life of Los Angeles near Jefferson High School did become a part of Honeycutt’s life. A big, bad part, he said, including cocaine use.

Honeycutt recalls one incident as being pivotal.

An ex-convict, angry that Honeycutt had spoken disparagingly to his girlfriend, came after Honeycutt with a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun. In a dank stairwell of a South Los Angeles tenement, he fired the buckshot at him from five feet away.

“Right before he shot, I asked the Lord, ‘If you can get me out of this, I’ll devote my life to you,’ ” Honeycutt recalled. “I looked down expecting to see my guts, and I wasn’t even wounded. I didn’t find the Lord, he found me.”

Shortly after, Honeycutt entered the grass-roots program he now heads. There he kicked his habit and met program founder Steve Reyes, a huge admirer of Honeycutt.

“He has a tremendous testimony,” said Reyes, who says he acts as an advisor now that Honeycutt is in charge of the program, which receives no government funding. “He has done a great job.”

Across the street from the Great Shepherd Outreach is a seven-story apartment house that has hired two armed guards to provide security for residents.

“Before Pastor Honeycutt came to this neighborhood, his building was full of gangs selling dope,” said guard Luciaus Owens, who said the street is much safer since Great Shepherd Outreach moved there in January from its previous quarters in East Los Angeles. “The pastor is a very spiritual and uplifting man and he just cares about people,” said Owens.

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Honeycutt, who is 6 feet tall and 240 muscular pounds, said he knows he has a rough road ahead of him feeding the hungry and helping people off drugs, but he is tough enough for the challenge.

“When someone hot breathes me, I don’t scare,” says Honeycutt, who bears a few scars from the street fights of his youth. “I know now how to bob and weave. A lot of people think just because you are for Jesus, they think you might be a cream puff.”

In June, Honeycutt plans to marry his fiancee, Alisha Lewis, whom he credits with helping him keep the outreach alive.

“I don’t make any money feeding people and she helps me with whatever she can,” he said, adding that he sleeps on the floor so the rehab patients can have all the beds as they go through their often hellish recovery.

“The bottom line is help,” he said.

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The Beat

Today’s centerpiece focuses on the Great Shepherd Outreach, a grass-roots drug rehabilitation program operated by street pastor Richard Honeycutt in a Mid-Wilshire apartment house. For more information, call (213) 365-2797.