Get Lost!

"They came to my mom's restaurant," Jose recalls. "Then they asked her where my brothers were. She told them, and they collected all three of us and took us to a facility in Adams County."

And so began Jose's life in the system, a seemingly never-ending trek from foster home to group home to detention and residential-treatment facilities. Since 1998, Jose has lived in more than twenty places.

"I'm a runner," he says with a grin. "Always have been. I get sick and tired of being told what to do, and I'll want to see my family, so I'll just run."

But not every new placement was a result of Jose's tendency to flee. There was the home in Aurora that gave him up after his grandmother died and he started talking suicide. There was the foster family in Centennial who moved away and couldn't afford to take him. There were the houses where he was abused. And then there were all the places he ran from just to run, a short-lived series of residences stretching from Boulder to Colorado Springs, some of them rehabilitative, others placements with normal families. And every time Jose ran, it was another strike in his file, strikes that tended to magnify other charges, like when he got busted for selling weed at the fountain behind the Museum of Nature & Science in May 2005, and the cops discovered that he had an outstanding warrant for running.

Soon after that, his mother's rights to her son were terminated legally because she'd neglected her boys, and Jose wound up at the Aspen Living Center, an independent-living program. While there, he attended Westminster High School, where he played varsity defensive tackle. But he got into a gang fight during the season and had to quit the football team and move to another facility. He ran again and was picked up for a drunken altercation on a #31 bus. After Jose bounced between a few more placements, Jose's parole officer sent him to Lost and Found, a Christian youth residential-treatment facility. Jose has been living at Lost and Found's facility, in Morrison, just past Tiny Town, since the beginning of the year. He's never tried to run. "The first few months I felt the urges, but I don't feel that way anymore," he says.

One reason is that Lost and Found gives him occasional weekend passes to visit cousins or his brother living in a Denver foster home. But another big reason is that at Lost and Found, Jose has learned to think before he acts. He tries to remember what his grandma told him: to walk away from trouble, to make better choices, to live a better life than some of his family, to turn out different.

"If all goes according to plan, I'll be getting out of here in July or August and be able to go back to school again," Jose says. "I worry about falling back into some of my old traps, but I think I can walk away from that. I'm able to talk to people now. I can be more open about certain things. I feel like I have things to look forward to. Basically, I feel like I'm just now learning how to be a normal kid."