WHEN SHERRY RETZLAFF alighted from a bus last Halloween at the terminal in St. Paul, Minn., she was going home again. After nearly two months on the road, the 17-year-old runaway–out of money, out of prospects, out of hope
–returned to the family from which she had fled one September morning.
”I thought it would be so much fun,” said Retzlaff who, with her boyfriend and a friend, traveled south to Louisiana in a van. ”I was excited the first day, thinking I was really going to see a lot. But after a couple of days you start to realize you have only enough money for gas and a little bit of food. We were sleeping at rest stops in the back of the van. I started to get scared and to worry a lot about what my mom was thinking.”
”It was dumb,” she said. ”I didn`t think it would be as big a deal as it was but it caused a lot of problems for a lot of people.”
By the time Retzlaff decided to return home, she and her boyfriend had parted from the friend with the van. Retzlaff had no transportation. Neither she nor her parents could afford the cost of a trip home for her. But due to a new program designed to reunite runaways with their families, Retzlaff was given a free one-way bus ticket home. No questions asked.
”It was time to go home and get back to school,” said Retzlaff. ”I wouldn`t have been able to without the help.”
THE PROGRAM, Operation: Home Free, is the joint effort of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) and Trailways Corp. Since June 7, when the bus carrier inaugurated its policy of free trips to runaways, at least 1,836 kids have been transported home. Twenty-three of those runaways were returned to Chicago from cities as distant as Los Angeles, Little Rock, Miami and Dallas. Another 17 runaways have been bused out of the city since June.
Any child 18 years or younger who is verified as a runaway by police is eligible for the program.
”The big scare with runaways is that you have young people with few employment skills and very little money,” said Robert Angrisani, who administers Operation: Home Free for the Washington-based IACP and its 15,000 member police departments. ”With little to support themselves they quickly become targeted by criminal predators. A juvenile on the run makes a very amenable drug currier, for instance, and the promise of a place to sleep and a meal can easily draw these kids into criminal errand running. Some of them fall into the hands of pimps and turn to prostitution. Of course, the worst case scenarios are also realized. Some of these kids end up dead.
”Our feeling was that the romance and excitement of being alone in a strange city wear off quickly for a lot of runaways and that there were thousands of kids out there who would willingly return home if they had the means to do so. They hesitate to call their parents and ask for money because that would be an admission of failure. If we could work around that and appeal to the young person`s own conscience and willingness to go home we felt we might have something.”
THE IDEA was that of Richard Voorhees, a captain in the Bridgewater Township, N.J., police department. Voorhees, who had spent nine years on the force as a juvenile officer, was at a county law enforcement conference last February when he heard John Walsh speak. Walsh was the father of Adam, a 6-year-old boy who was abducted from a department store in Florida in 1981 and brutally murdered. Walsh is now a consultant for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
”He blasted us,” recalls Voorhees of Walsh`s address that afternoon.
”He said police agencies in general weren`t doing enough for missing and runaway kids and that we put very little emphasis on it. I can`t even remember what his specific points were, but I came away feeling a little guilty.
”I had had the idea for the free bus rides before but had never done anything about it. That night I went back to the station and jotted down a letter to one carrier explaining my plan. I received a nice letter back saying (no), so I took the idea to another company, Trailways, and two days later they called me totally elated about it.”
(Greyhound Lines, another national bus carrier, does not give free rides but does have a program called ”Don`t Rely on Strangers” which targets teens traveling alone. According to Herb Doherty, a spokesman for the company, 123 of Greyhound`s terminals post information about local agencies that offer medical care, shelter and other social services to teens and runaways. ”A kid who has left home because he was beaten or hassled probably doesn`t want to return,” said Doherty. ”We try to let them know how they can get help where they are.”)
ROGER RYDELL, spokesman for Trailways Corp., said the Dallas-based bus company was looking for a public-service program to institute throughout the 12,000 cities it services when Voorhees made his proposal. ”We thought there might be some need for it, but we didn`t expect such a large response,” said Rydell of the program which has returned about 10 children a day to their parents since it began.
”It is not costing us that much. The face value of the average ticket given out (to the runaways) has been $60, but our buses don`t travel with full occupancy in most cases anyway. We figure we`re getting a lot back in company profile.”
A spokesman for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services cautioned that not all runaways are good candidates for a program like Operation: Home Free. ”Some of them are not real stable to begin with and if you put them on a bus, which makes stops and gives them an opportunity to get off, they might not always make it home.
”Their (program organizers) heart is in the right place; we need more people who care about these kids. But a perfect program–and there is no such thing–would get them on a plane where they can`t get off if they change their mind, or give them a caseworker to accompany them home.”
”It`s true,” said Voorhees. ”The kid has to really want to go home. There have been a couple of cases where they got off buses before they reached their destination, and there`s nothing we can do about that.”
ACCORDING to IACP`s Angrisani, the program is welcomed by police officers who ”were looking for some kind of alternative to the loss of police authority brought about by the 1974 Juvenile Justice Act.” That act, he said, decriminalized truancy and leaving home ”and meant we could no longer take a juvenile off the street against his will.”
”Legally, we weren`t responsible because they hadn`t broken a law,”
said Voorhees, ”but we hated to let them go because if they got into any trouble we would feel liable. A lot of times the officers would pool money to get the kids a ride home. We used to have a fund in our county welfare department for runaways but that dried up. Before this we didn`t have much of a tool.”
According to IACP, 1.5 million children are listed as missing each year in the United States. In October, 16-year-old Tammy McCoy eased the statistic by one when she boarded a Trailways bus in Knoxville bound for her home in Crystal Falls, Mich.
”I remember hearing about the free rides once and thinking, `Oh, what a nice thing,` ” said Marcille Hooper, Tammy`s grandmother and legal guardian. ”I never dreamed at the time that we would be using it.”
