Independence Day

After a lifetime in foster care, how does a teenager learn to be a man?

Private Disasters

On a winter Saturday in 1993, when the streets of Cincinnati were piled high with snow, two look-alike tow-headed brothers spent all day locked in the bedroom of their foster home. They picked up and dropped the few baby toys scattered around the room, napped on twin beds, stared at the ceiling, whined -- "I'm hungry," "I need to pee" -- rolled over, thumbs in mouths. When the younger brother wet himself, they panicked and stuffed the clothes at the back of the closet.

Triston Day, nine, and his seven-year-old brother had been removed from a neglectful family in a ramshackle corner of Cincinnati, where they'd lived with a mostly absent father and a mother plagued by mental health problems. As the oldest of five, Triston had scrounged money around the house, bought cereal and milk with it, and poured out servings for the younger children. He and his brother initially were delighted with the plentiful food at the foster home. But they quickly saw that the foster mother doted upon her own son and ridiculed the foster children. "Oh! Look who wet the bed again!" she'd say at breakfast. Or, "He's an idiot." On weekends, she pretended the Day brothers disobeyed as an excuse for locking them in the bedroom.

Suddenly, after dark on that endless winter Saturday, the foster mother burst in upon the boys. "Get up off those beds!" she shrieked. "Go stand in the corners like I told you."

"Why? We weren't doing anything," cried Triston. "We're hungry." The woman grabbed his arm and twisted it, then stormed out. The brothers whimpered in the corners. Little by little, they slid over to the second-floor window, shoved it open, climbed up on the sill, and crouched there. In the distance, the Ohio River was crusty with ice, the darkening street empty. Shivering with cold and fright, the boys counted to three and jumped, landing hard on a parked car. They then slid into a snowdrift and took off.

Fast-forward nearly a decade. Triston Day is a teenager. He is on the verge of leaving the foster care system again -- not by jumping out of it this time, but by "aging out." He is about to turn 18, a birthday that will trigger his "emancipation" from the custody of Ohio's Hamilton County Department of Job & Family Services (JFS). He has never forgotten the yearning for home that propelled him out of a second-floor window into the snowy air years earlier. He has not forgotten, because in some ways he has not yet landed. Triston Day is still looking for a home.

He is not alone. As many as 25,000 teenagers in America's foster care system turn 18 and "age out" of state custody every year. Obligated by law to leave their foster families, group homes or juvenile shelters, thousands of these young people make a tragic, almost invisible migration. For many, the need for permanent homes is going to be met by homeless shelters, jails, psych wards, flophouses and the streets. One 1998 survey found that more than 25 percent of Wisconsin males who had been in foster care ended up in prison. And on any given day in America, an estimated 12 percent of the homeless are former foster care kids.

These young people and their private disasters won't be part of the media reporting on a broken foster care system. But their unwanted pregnancies, their addictions, their armed robberies, their tragedies are symptomatic of the failures of the programs designed to protect and raise them.

Triston Day finally found a pair of kind foster parents. John Urban is a forensic chemist with the FDA, and his wife, Darla, is a social worker. Triston came to them that same year he jumped out the window, and they raised him as an older brother to their three biological children -- Jacob, Katie and Sarah -- in a warmly disheveled, middle-class, split-level house. Art projects are banked against a wall of the dining room; a basketball hoop hangs near the driveway. "You're not my foster brother; you're my real brother," Katie Urban told Triston once, and it brought tears to his eyes.

Meanwhile, Triston's year-and-a-half-younger biological brother grew up in a series of foster homes. Three of Triston's siblings were luckier. They were adopted and found families they could call their own.

The foster and adoptive families arrange an annual reunion of the Day children. One of the siblings is brought from another state to Cincinnati for the event. The brothers and sister, some with new names, all of whom look alike, linger shyly apart for the first few moments, until Triston sets them all laughing with horseplay and tickling.

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