Rescuing a Boy From the Streets

The boys broke and ran when the policeman arrived -- all but Terrance, who stood his ground and met the officer's eyes. He wasn't stealing, he said, just sneaking around in the closed school "because I don't have nothing else to do."

Henderson had heard that before. Patrolling the streets for the Los Angeles Police Department, he had arrested more than 500 kids: burglars, rapists, drug dealers, robbers. "Hook and book" had become his motto. "I thought juvenile hall was where they belonged."

But he had begun a new assignment the year before: visiting schools for the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, talking to children about gangs and drugs. And in every class, he met boys like Terrance: aimless kids destined to drift into trouble, all energy and audacity. Bit by bit, boy by boy, he was coming to another point of view.

So he didn't take Terrance into custody, at least not in the LAPD sense of the word. That turned out to be a momentous decision for both the boy and the officer.

"Nothing to do?" Henderson said. "Come with me."

He led the boy to the football field. Henderson had recently taken over his nephew's Pop Warner team, because the coach had quit unexpectedly. Already he had loaded it with boys he met on his rounds of inner-city schools.

Terrance shook his head when Henderson asked him to join the squad. His mother wouldn't let him, he said. The family had just spent six months in a shelter for the homeless. There was hardly money for groceries, much less football.

So when practice ended, Henderson drove the boy home and made his mother an offer he had made to other mothers: He'd pay the fees if she would let him join. Like the others, she signed up her son. She was 25 and single, with four children and problems of her own. She knew she needed help with her burly, hard-headed oldest child.

At first, Terrance wasn't much good at football. He was big, but didn't know his left from his right. Still, he seldom missed practice, even when he had to walk the three miles to the park.