She’s Taken Her Empathy and Turned It Into Action

It’s the nature of the holiday season to care, but like the coming and going of winter, the season of caring also passes. Few are touched deeply enough to continue any kind of emotional commitment to a cause, a group or a person. One notable exception is Phyllis Daugherty.

She just can’t stop thinking about Rodney McAllister.

Even today, nine months after he was killed by a pack of dogs, her voice chokes when she talks about the incident in St. Louis that cold day in March.

“When I heard about it,” she says, sitting on the deck of her small Echo Park home, “I couldn’t stop crying. The pain that little boy went through ....”

Rodney was a bright, caring 10-year-old who lived in a dilapidated section of St. Louis. A teacher described him as “a sweetheart of a kid.” She said, “You couldn’t not like Rodney.”

On that chilly afternoon last March, he was playing alone on a concrete basketball court when neighbors heard “something suffering out there.”

What they heard was that sweetheart of a kid being torn apart by 10 dogs. But no one bothered to look. And the boy’s mother, notified of his death the next morning, hadn’t even known he was missing.

Rodney McAllister had died alone.

St. Louis is a long way from L.A., and though the story had momentary impact, it soon whistled off like a passing breeze to fade in the distance of both time and memory. Except for people like Phyllis Daugherty.

A small, energetic woman of 61, she embodies the qualities of those who are able to absorb the pain of others. She was born on the top floor of a tenement building in South-Central L.A., tended bar at the old Blarney Castle for a while, and now works nights at the post office’s bulk mail center.

Her childhood was one of poverty. Raised by a grandmother who sewed to support them, she wore donated clothing and was given $5 a month by a foundation that paid poor students to keep up their grades. That money represented the difference between eating and not eating, between a roof over their heads and being homeless.

About 30 years ago, while she was tending bar, someone brought in a stray dog that had been abandoned in the rain. Daugherty dried it off, hid it behind the bar and later snuck it into her apartment.

That simple gesture was the beginning of a long career as an animal activist, but not the kind whose sympathies are limited only to animals. As unpaid director of an organization called Animal Issues Movement, she helps rescue animals, trains their owners in caring for them and is active in working for legislation on behalf of animals. She lectures gang kids in her neighborhood on how to raise pets.

But it’s the deeply human part of her, not the activist part, that brought me to the modest home Daugherty shares with an elderly woman, an invalid, she cares for not for pay but because the woman, an immigrant from the Ukraine, has no place else to go.

It’s the same kind of empathy she felt for Rodney McAllister. No one, like the old lady she cares for, should be alone in the world. And no one, like Rodney, should be forgotten.

After reading of the boy’s death, Daugherty called not only his teacher but also the St. Louis policeman who had ultimately identified what remained of him. “He was a compassionate man,” she said that day on a deck built over her garage. “He had been a homicide detective for 27 years but said this was the worst thing he had ever seen.”

What emerged from her investigation was the image of a small, vulnerable child who, on his own, was avoiding gang elements and trying to help others do the same. On the day he was killed, he had walked his retarded older brother home from school and, only after seeing him safely in the house, had he gone to shoot baskets alone in the court across the street.

In her empathy, Daugherty shuddered not only for the pain Rodney must have felt as the dogs tore at him but at the icy winds that blew around him. Though Rodney is gone, she reasoned, the cold winds continue to blow through the neighborhood where he lived, where families can’t afford warm clothing for their children.

Daugherty did what so few do, translating her feelings into action. She wrote a check for $1,500 and sent it to St. Louis’ Public Schools Foundation for its Children in Transition program, specifically for warm clothing.

It strained her budget to do so, she says, but she wanted to show that people who love animals aren’t blind to the needs of humans. She hopes others will do the same.

“I grew up poor,” she said softly, gazing at the towers of the city in the hazy distance. “I know how one person caring can change a life.”

Christmas has come and gone, and with it the ritual season of compassion. But a light continues to glow in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles long after the music of the carols has faded. It shines for Phyllis Daugherty.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.