For his two-part series on children living amid poverty, violence and parental neglect—an increasingly grim prospect for youngsters growing up in large cities—Roe focused on a single street in Toledo. "At first glance," he says, "it seemed to be a lifestyle piece. But more than anything it was a records-search project. I spent several weeks gathering material from documents—juvenile court and police records and census tract records."

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Alan Dietrich,The Blade

Real-Life Games

Tecumseh Street children share their street with drug dealers and the customers of the dealers. The youngsters often witness drug busts. Here, 7-year-old Tracy ties up his 5-year-old sister Rebecca in a game of drug dealer. He is playing the arresting officer, his sister the arrested dealer. Luckey, 9, is a witness for the arresting officer. Tracy says that across the street from their play area is a real drug house

Many of the records were not computerized and he had to go through thousands of individual cards to carry out his idea that developed from a figure he had seen: Each year, 400 local youngsters are sent off to state prisons, more than one a day.

Perhaps, he reasoned, he could find a street from which an unusual number of youngsters graduate to state prison. He found one, Tecumseh Street, which in 18 months sent off eight youngsters. Roe looked at the general picture, and then he zeroed in on particulars.

The general:

• Four of five children are born out of wedlock.
• Median income is $10,856, and in one section of the 1 1/2 mile street, the income is $4,448.
• The street is one of the most crime-ridden in Toledo.

Case Studies

For the particulars, he looked at the eight youngsters who went off to juvenile prison: Five grew up without fathers and four of them "saw one of their parents sent to prison," Roe said. He tracked down families to show that the problems ran through five generations—poverty, school dropouts, teen-age pregnancies.

Here is how his first piece began:

There, in that house, lives a family so poor that the 11-year-old daughter once was arrested for shoplifting socks and underwear. A few years later she was arrested again, this time for selling her body.

Down the street lives a boy who at age 14 was recruited by drug dealers to traffic cocaine. Now he's 17 and doing time at a state youth prison.

Further down lives a boy who says the only time he sees his mother is when she comes into the neighborhood to buy drugs. He's been arrested for receiving stolen property, robbery, and the rape of a 13-year-old girl.

Welcome to Tecumseh Street, perhaps the most difficult place to grow up in Toledo.

"It's rough." says 17-year-old Tecumseh resident Mandrell Walker. "And it's at its roughest point."

Mandrell is awaiting trial on charges that he shot a man in the back of the head.

It's just one street. But this one street in the Central City owns burdensome numbers:

• Court records show that in the last 18 months, officials have sent eight children living on Tecumseh to state juvenile prisons—the most from any street in Toledo.
• Another seven kids are suspected of being members of gangs such as the Bloods, the Buck Street Gangsters, and the Avondale Posse.
• And over the last five years, the street has seen a dozen child-abuse and child-endangering cases.

On top of that, the street lies in one of the poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods in town.

"It almost seems that some kids are doomed before they even start," says Keith Zeisloft, assistant administrator of the Lucas County Juvenile Court.

Neglect

For his second piece, Roe focused on a young man awaiting trial for aggravated robbery, a youth who has been "arrested 15 times, suspended from school 14 times, detained at the juvenile jail six times and sent to state youth prisons twice." Roe continues:

Sounds like a rotten kid.

But what is remarkable is that he is not worse.

Court records show he has only seen his father three times in his life, and his mother is an admitted crack addict who abandoned him when he was 7.

Before she did, the boy says, she and her boyfriends—men he never really knew—put welts on his legs by whipping him with an extension cord.

And the mother—now serving 3 to 15 years in a Cleveland prison for burglary—tells Lucas County Juvenile Judge James Ray in a recent letter that two men once physically abused her son in her apartment building.

"I was there," she writes, "but I was so drunk I didn't hear my son's screams."

There may be problem kids on Tecumseh Street, but often the problem is the parents. "It's terrible," Judge Ray says. "Actually, I'm amazed at the number of kids who survive those situations."

The Aftermath