Familiar Tale of a Future Gone Astray

Tonya Bell was 12 when I met her in 1989. She had been one of the best bakers and salespeople at Champs Cookies, a youth entrepreneurial program in Southeast Washington that I wrote about at the time. She was smart and witty, with a smile that could charm and warm your heart. A bright future seemed assured.

When I saw Bell again Monday, she was standing before D.C. Superior Court Magistrate Milton C. Lee, a walking-wounded 30-year-old dressed in a hospital gown and wearing a surgical boot on one foot. She'd injured herself allegedly driving a car under the influence of crack cocaine and plowing into a crowd at a street festival. Gone was the sparkle in her eyes, which were darkened and lifeless. Her once-radiant complexion had become discolored with a greasy tinge, and her lips appeared misaligned, as if years of smoking crack and PCP had erased the muscle memory of her smile.

Of course, we're all angry with her. Many innocents were injured. But her case is more complicated: This is a troubled person who sought help over and over and didn't find it in her city.

"She's always been a really good person, deep down," Anthony Brooks, 33, who was Tonya's cookie sales partner in 1989, told me yesterday. "She was trying hard to get herself together."

I have seen the look she had in court on enough other faces to know that the problem is bigger than just one girl gone astray. You see it on the faces of young men who hang out on street corners; on inmates in the D.C. jail; on students in public school classrooms. It is the look of despair, of dashed hope and lost potential -- a sullen and hollow-eyed indictment of a city that has failed to serve and protect its youth.

More than 100 people were arrested in the District this weekend -- Bell was just one -- and held over for arraignment Monday. The vast majority were young black men and women facing drug possession and assault charges. Shackled and shuffling their way to Judge Lee's bench, they made for a veritable chain gang of modern-day slaves to dope and self-destruction.

But the drugs are only symptoms. Many of our children are so obviously in pain that it ought to be a crime for us not to heed their cries. For allegedly injuring about 40 people with reckless driving, Bell finally got the attention that she'd been screaming for since her teenage years: The courtroom was packed with spectators; so many news reporters showed up that we overflowed a double row of seats in the jury box.

But when Bell struggled to get help, where were we then? Friends and former employers said she tried to get help from the District's mental health system; it was dysfunctional. She tried drug treatment programs; they were overcrowded. She tried child and family service workers; they were overloaded.

When Judge Lee entered the courtroom, he quipped at the news media, "Why are there defendants in the jury box?" It was funny but in a way also true.

According to court papers, Bell began smoking marijuana at 14, even as she was excelling at the cookie business. About the same time, she got pregnant. Not long afterward, the baby's father was shot and killed. Then her mother and grandmother died in a house fire.

"After her mother and grandmother died, she tightened up, stopped talking and started holding everything in," Brooks said. "What she needed was somebody to talk to about her feelings, but she didn't know how to seek that kind of help."

You'd think that when a teenage girl loses her mother and grandmother in a house fire, someone would just assume that she needs help and make sure she got it.

"She wanted to be an entrepreneur, and she had everything it took to become a great one," recalled Ali Khan, founder of Champs Cookies. He was in the courtroom, a hand held over his mouth as U.S. marshals escorted Bell from a holding pen. "She had her whole life ahead of her, and now it's come down to this."

The headline on the column I wrote about Champs read: "Cookie Business Helps Young People Build Futures That Won't Crumble." But remember that Bell is a human being, not a cookie, and shattered lives can be put back together again.

E-mail:milloyc@washpost.com