Still Waiting to Live a Life That’s Been Stolen

One of these days, somebody, somewhere, is going to listen to Brenda Jack, believe her story and do something to help this young woman wake up from this nightmare. Give her her name back. Give her her life back.

It could be a day when a cop picks up a woman for prostitution, for disorderly conduct, for armed robbery or worse, puts Brenda Jack under arrest--again--and finally, finally, realizes that it’s the wrong Brenda Jack.

That it isn’t the woman who worked as a teacher’s aide for 10 years at a Watts elementary school.

That it’s an impostor who stole her identification and has spent much of these last 10 years committing crimes, receiving illegal aid and ruining the real Brenda Jack’s reputation and credit.

“She’s lived my life for me,” says Jack, 30, on the phone from Las Vegas, where she has just moved in with her mother, having lost her Hawthorne apartment.

“I’m still waiting to live my life.”

Until then, she looks for work, trying to explain to employers--again--why her record is what it is.

She looks for a way out, trying to explain to lawyers--again--why she can’t pay the fees they require because she’s still being billed for fees she shouldn’t owe.

And she wonders how to explain it to her two children if she gets taken away from them, should the phony Brenda strike again.

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For the last 17 years, Alfreda Hunter has been a teacher at Miracle Baptist, grades kindergarten through eight. She loves her job. She loves the kids.

And she loves Brenda Jack.

“My friend of 40 years employed her,” Hunter says, speaking of Mamie Henry, the school’s retired principal. “She saw wonderful potential in this girl. She was pretty much a diamond in the rough.”

As a part-time aide at the private school, Jack quickly warmed to the job, and it to her.

Almost from the start, according to Hunter, “she was a natural. Her demeanor, the way she worked with the children . . . she was wonderful. Children need solid people. She had that quality. The children wanted to please her. These kids adored Brenda. They all wanted her approval.”

Brenda needed approbation herself.

She was living under a dark cloud. A woman she had known briefly back in the late ‘80s--a woman who had a child with Brenda’s brother--had begun assuming her identity.

Brenda says the woman stole her driver’s license and Social Security card. Using these cards, Brenda believes, this woman was able to obtain credit cards, incur debts, even have child welfare payments mailed to multiple addresses.

She also accumulated arrests.

“The woman has a rap sheet as long as this house,” says Hunter, at her home in South-Central L.A.

Under as many as two dozen different aliases, the impostor reportedly has been arrested for armed robbery twice, for prostitution on countless occasions and for welfare fraud.

It’s the last charge that complicates matters for Jack most. Because at 19, she says, she committed an act of welfare fraud herself. It was not a large amount of money and was repaid in full.

Beyond that, she swears, “I never did a crime a day in my life. Never.”

But try telling this to a judge, when you’ve been summoned to court on even a jaywalking rap, as Jack was in July, and you say it wasn’t you who jaywalked, and you get asked if you’ve ever committed a crime, so you say yes, and even your public defender tells you to just pay the $84 fine.

“I’m getting put out of my apartment because I have no money, but they want me to pay a fee for somebody else’s crime. Just like they want me to repay the $30,000 she owes from receiving illegal aid at three different places.

“God forbid if this lady commits a murder.”

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Jack has exhausted herself, seeking solutions. She consults lawyers she cannot afford. She beseeches welfare officials who seek restitution from her. She contacts politicians. She begs authorities to double-check fingerprints and photographs when they arrest a woman using her name.

“I ride around with a little green card, identifying me, with my fingerprints on the back. I ride around with detectives’ [business] cards, in case I get accused again.

“I go to court for one thing I didn’t do, they try to arrest me there and put me 15 months in a women’s prison for something else I didn’t do.”

Brenda Jack wants her life back.

“I try to be strong, for my children,” she says. “But I’m losing my mind here.”

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com