Someone's brother...

Now that I'm back working in the downtown, I see them more often.  Sometimes I have felt motivated to hand over a coin or a crumpled up bill... or even talk to them when that works, which it often does not.  Macro public health trend or the sign of a decaying society?  The natural result of deinstitutionalization and mainstreaming?  No matter, they are here and among us.  And I often find myself wondering about the personal stories.  How did this happen?  How could it?  And the more foreign and far fetched the concocted reasons for it, the safer from it I feel.  It could never happen to me.  Never to someone I love.  Right?

But they are all someone's brother or sister.  Son, daughter.  Father, mother.

Here is a story of a Manhattan executive's ill-fated attempt to save her kid brother.

Like any New Yorker, I was no stranger to homeless people. I passed by them on my way to the shiny glass tower where I worked for a glossy women's magazine: the older lady perched atop a milk crate in the subway station, the man curled up in a dirty sleeping bag and clutching a stuffed animal. They were unfortunate ornaments of the city, unlucky in ways I never really considered.

Until one hot summer day in 2009 when my little brother Jay left his key on the coffee table and walked out of his house in West Texas to live on the streets instead. In the days that followed I spent hours on the phone with detectives, social workers and even the FBI, frantically trying to track him down. A friend designed a "Missing" poster using the most recent picture I had of him wearing a hoodie and a Modest Mouse T-shirt, a can of beer in his hand and a deer-in-headlights expression on his face. I created a Facebook group and contacted old acquaintances still living in our hometown of Lubbock, begging everyone I even remotely knew to help me find him. No luck. If it had been me, a pretty young white woman, chances are my face would have been all over the news -- but the sudden disappearance of a 20-year-old guy with paranoid schizophrenia didn't exactly warrant an Amber Alert.

The full piece here.