SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN

SHORTAGE OF SHELTER SPACE HITS THE YOUNGEST OF THE HOMELESS

As a dozen families settled into a makeshift shelter for the homeless on the second floor of the Reeves Municipal Center one night last week, Barbara Terrell cradled her frail 2-month-old, Monte, stared at the red light on his heart monitor and whispered how desperate she was to get him into some kind of secure room of his own.

Mother and child spent six days shuttling between two shelters, the mother more desperate and the child sicker than ever, before they were finally placed in a temporary apartment.

Another infant from the shelter, a 5-week-old boy, was found at Children's Hospital to have pneumonia. And a physician at Community Health Care Inc., after examining still another wheezing 6-week-old girl from the shelter, handed her mother a note Monday that read: "It is unfitting and unhealthy and potentially dangerous for a 6-week-old baby to be in crowded living conditions in a shelter, when it is cold and the baby must be taken outside every day in the winter after breakfast to wander the streets. I strongly recommend a safer environment." The presence of those and other frail babies -- some considered medically "high risk" infants -- has outraged advocates for the homeless and sent officials scurrying to make reforms, with all in agreement that the District's emergency shelter system for homeless families is in dire need of radical surgery.

"It's a very scary thing to me, if this is the model of how our society is supposed to be responding to people who are in such desperate need," said Patricia Mullahy Fugere, executive director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless.

Janelle Goetcheus, medical director of a nonprofit group called Health Care for the Homeless, said: "Any young child like that who's at risk should not be in that type of emergency setting. It's not acceptable, for this child or any other spe\cial-needs child. There needs to be a plan for the immediate placement of them in transitional housing." Terrell and her struggling infant were among 80 homeless people, most of them young children and infants, who returned to Hagan Hall on the campus of St. Elizabeths Hospital over the weekend after the heating system was repaired. Most of them had spent four nights last week sleeping in makeshift shelters at the Reeves Center, on 14th Street NW, and at the John A. Wilson Building, on Pennsylvania Avenue NW. But even with Hagan Hall back in operation, the advocates said, the heat is barely adequate, there is no hot water, and homeless mothers still must drag their children out of the facility immediately after breakfast before being allowed to return each day after 6 p.m.

Fugere and other advocates say the D.C. government has reneged on a promise to provide a suitable public facility for use by homeless families 24 hours a day this winter -- an allegation Vernon E. Hawkins, interim director of the D.C. Department of Human Services, denied last week. Hawkins's department, in any event, is no longer responsible for running shelters and other programs for the homeless.

That responsibility was turned over early this year to the Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness, a nonprofit organization created and funded by the U.S. De- partment of Housing and Urban Development and the D.C. government. The idea, when it was announced more than two years ago, was to create a national model for serving the homeless -- not warehousing them -- by melding the resources of government with the commitment of nonprofit advocates for the homeless. But just as the Community Partnership was assuming control early this year, the District's fiscal crisis forced the city to cut its pledge from $14.5 million to $10.5 million a year. The result: Programs for homeless families were heavily cut, with almost 500 families now on a waiting list for shelter and transitional housing the partnership just can't afford.

Sue A. Marshall, the partnership's executive director, said in an interview Monday that high-risk infants should not be allowed to stay at Hagan Hall. She also said a three-mem\ber team consisting of a doctor, a social worker and an official from the Community Partnership would immediately begin reviewing all cases involving high-risk babies for appropriate emergency placement.

"Yes, I agree there is a breakdown in the system, starting with the inappropriate discharge of that baby from the hospital, and we will be working on that," Marshall said. She said temporary housing was found Monday night for Terrell and her child at the transitional facility the Coalition for the Homeless operates in Anacostia. But beyond new procedures for high-risk children, she said, the partnership is "frantically" in search of a 24-hour facility for the winter.

Marshall agreed with Fugere's contention that the city had promised the partnership a public building to meet that need. Without any payments from the D.C. government thus far in the budget year that started Oct. 1, the partnership cannot rent one on its own, she said.

Hawkins agreed that 24-hour services should be provided. But he insisted that the Barry administration had never committed to provide any facility other than Hagan Hall.

"I have no other facility in my inventory that would be suitable," Hawkins said.

Nonetheless, he said, the partnership will be able to rent a building that meets its needs once a contract is signed this week committing the city to its $10.5 million payment, which should free $1.5 million immediately, he said.

Still cradling Monte in her arms, Terrell said Monday that doctors at D.C. General Hospital allowed her to take her son home two weeks ago only after she had a secure place to go. That place, she said, was a friend's house that turned out to be anything but secure.

Her friend had three children of her own in the three-bedroom, rent-subsidized home. And her friend's sister was there with her two children. Along with their father.

The arrangement lasted less than a week, with Terrell's friend asking her to leave Dec. 12.

That was the day she carried her child and his bulky heart monitor down to 25 M St. SW, the intake center for the partnership's family shelter system, and got a number, 2,064. The center was placing in transitional housing those with numbers in the 1,500s, which meant Terrell -- without intervention by advocates for the homeless -- could have been waiting for months.

"Look at my son -- he won't eat anything," she said Monday. "He's been like this all weekend. His face is all swelled up. How can I drag him out in the cold? He's going to die."

With similar concerns about the health of their children, four other women at the shelter considered the cold the lesser of two evils Monday morning and headed straight for the emergency room at Children's Hospital.

Patricia Mallory, 35, arrived with her 10-month-old daughter, who needs tubes put in her ears to drain infections but has been too sick with a cold to have the surgery performed.

Katrece Edwards, 25, came with all five of her boys, the 3-month-old coughing and the 3-year-old suffering from severe diarrhea.

Nadine Green, 26, showed up with her two girls, ages 6 and 9. The 9-year-old, her mother said, had severe diarrhea after eating too much spoiled shelter food.

And then came Tracey Harmon, 22, and Bilal Ibraheem, 29, carrying their heavily swaddled 5-week-old twins, one of whom had been coughing for almost a week. It didn't take long for a doctor to confirm that the child, Hassin, was suffering from pneumonia.

Later in the day, after advocates for the homeless lodged loud protests about the twins' presence in the shelter, a van from the Community Partnership arrived and took them and their parents to their own room in a transitional housing facility.

After a week shuttling between Hagan Hall and the Reeves Center, where his family slept on cots in a drafty conference room, Ibraheem was quietly delighted.

"We are," he told his other little twin, Hussain, "going to be able to put you in a warm bed soon."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.