From Orphan to Police Officer

By Duane McNeill

Duane was one of six siblings, one of two sets of twins, that were all abandoned when he was a child. He then became a ward of the Memphis, Tennessee, Juvenile Court System. As a child, he lived in a number of institutional settings: foster, group and children's homes, shelters, and detention facilities. In the ninth and tenth grades, he attended predominantly black schools and lived at a children's shelter. During this time of his life, while he was not a minority, he lived as one. At the age of sixteen, his Aunt Mary McNeill became his legal guardian, which kept him from being sent to a reform school. Duane and his Aunt Mary lived in Gulfport, Mississippi. Duane attended Gulfport High School and played on the football team as a center. His senior year of high school the team was undefeated and won the state championship. Duane attended Mississippi State University on a football scholarship. He played on the offensive line and spent one year as a graduate assistant coach. He graduated with a degree in social work and a certificate in corrections. Duane spent thirty-two years in law enforcement. Most of Duane's law enforcement career was with the Austin Police Department in Austin, Texas. This book is about his life's journey from being an orphan to becoming a police officer. The book was written with thanks to others in law enforcement, with hopes that they too, one day, will share their experiences with others in an effort to be sources of encouragement to each other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645848639

Book preview

Chapter 1

Life as An Orphan

Childhood

As one of six siblings, I know my childhood was not one of a traditional family upbringing. At the time of my birth, my twin sister and I were the largest set of twins ever born at the Memphis Baptist Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Our combined weight was nineteen pounds, eight ounces.

When I was three years old, our parents abandoned all six of us. There were two sets of twins in our family. The six of us were close in age (three boys and three girls). Jim was the eldest, followed by my twin sister, Elaine, and myself, my brother Michael, followed by the twin sisters Melinda and Melissa. I never knew why we were abandoned. My mother grew up with eight brothers. She was the only girl. Her family were farmers in rural Mississippi. Years later, my Aunt Mary (my father’s sister) said that my mother had grown up in a struggling environment. All six children were born in rapid succession, and she felt our parents became overwhelmed. From the eldest child to the younger twin sisters, there was only a four-year time frame during which all six children were born, having two sets of twins narrowed the time frame between births. At the time we were abandoned, my father worked for the US Postal Service. In the 1950s, siblings were not kept together but were placed in children’s homes, foster homes, or group homes based on the availability of an opening for an additional child. This was the case with my family. We were separated from one another. I lived in a foster home and a couple of children’s homes with my twin sister. When I was thirteen, I lived in a group home and was separated from the rest of my family from that time on.

In 1958, my siblings and I became wards of the Memphis Juvenile Court. At the onset, my twin sister and I lived together in a foster home. Later, I lived for seven years at Porter Leath Children’s Home in Memphis, Tennessee, and then moved for three years to the Monroe Harding Children’s Home in Nashville, Tennessee. After that, I lived for one year in a group home in Nashville. I always felt that I had a built-in advantage by living with so many other children while growing up. I had plenty of kids to play games with and to develop friendships with, which I did. Although the other kids also came from broken and dysfunctional families, all of us seemed to rise above our initial upbringings to adapt to institutional life. I always felt I was happy in my institutional life and enjoyed being around groups of my peers. During my childhood, I wore a number of labels—juvenile delinquent, incorrigible child, troublemaker, etc. I was disrespectful to the people in authority, fought with other kids, and on several occasions ran away from the children’s homes. At night, I would go out into the community and do things like throwing rocks and breaking windows at the elementary school. I broke into vending machines and stole candy and sodas. One time that I got caught, the director of Porter Leath beat me with a belt. When he was finished, I went outside and hid in some shrubs and cried. The beating was so bad that I couldn’t sit down because of the intense pain to my buttocks. In school, I was disruptive in classes and was constantly in the principal’s office, where I would get paddled by the principal. The director of Porter Leath Children’s Home and the principal at Guthrie Elementary disciplined me with a belt or paddle to my backside or an occasional welt or two on the back. Fortunately, throughout my childhood, none of the other beatings amounted to the same pain threshold as when I was beaten by the director of Porter Leath. I was an out-of-control kid with a lot of rage and hostility.

My houseparents were just overseers who ensured compliance to the rules. I never could talk to them about my personal feelings on various issues. The houseparents disciplined me, but I never recall any words of encouragement or praise from them. They would tell me that I would never amount to anything and that I would end up in prison or dead. Running away, starting fights, disrespecting adults and teachers were things I did constantly.

The children’s homes had fifty or more kids. Over the years, I never did a head count, but the breakdown appeared to me to be about a third of the children females and two-thirds males. We had separate dormitories where we lived. The dormitories were large open rooms with numerous single beds. Younger boys would be in their dorm. The older boys would be in another building and usually had two kids to a room. Everyone would come together to eat meals in one large dining hall.

My sister and I had lived in a foster home for a year or a little longer before we went to live at Porter Leath Children’s Home. My recollection of life back then was that it seemed normal to live with a lot of other children. I could not compare any experiences of growing up in an intact nuclear family, so being surrounded by other institutionalized children seemed to be normal to me. Individual attention was only provided for disciplinary purposes. No one ever exhibited love, care, and/or compassion. Everyone was part of a group, and you were only individually recognized if you were in trouble. In the various institutions I lived in, I never experienced what most children do, that of a parent’s love or individual caring attention from any of the adults.

After we were abandoned, I saw my father once when I was seven years old, when he came to Porter Leath Children’s Home on visiting Sunday. My dad spent a few hours with us and other kids at the children’s home, playing softball. I never saw my dad again until his funeral in 1982. My father was living in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and was in and out of the Veterans Hospital located in Ardmore. He was well-known to the local police. My father was homeless and an alcoholic. He had been arrested numerous times mainly for public intoxication. When my father died, he was found in the hallway of an apartment building. When I saw my father at the funeral home, there were numerous bruises on his face and upper body. I was told by people who knew him that he always wore a watch and had a small amount of cash that he received from his monthly Social Security disability paycheck on him. At the time he was found, he didn’t have his watch on or any money in his possession. After his death, I went to the police department and was told that some tenants of the apartments where my father was found deceased, said my father had been visiting them and was on the couch drinking beer. The tenants decided to leave and go out to eat dinner and left my father on the couch. The story was, when they returned, my father was passed out, so they carried him into the hallway and left him there. When I asked the police about the numerous bruises on his face and upper body, sadly they had no response. I told the police I believed that my father had been killed and robbed of his watch and money. The Ardmore Police had no interest in pursuing what happened to my father. Based on how they handled the case, I believe they were glad to see my father gone, because he had, over the years, been such a nuisance to the police. When I spoke with the Ardmore, Oklahoma, police chief, I was in my third year of policing. I knew before my father’s death that I was going to ensure that I treated everyone the same in my police career regardless of their status. The experience I witnessed with the shoddy police work performed by the Ardmore Police Department just cemented even more so my commitment to ensure I did my best regardless of a person’s lot in life.

The saddest part of my father’s life was that no one had contacted family members regarding him and his condition prior to his death. The funeral home was able to locate his sister, Mary. Aunt Mary and I split the cost of his funeral. My father was indigent at the time of his death and didn’t own a suit or have any money. He was buried in one of my suits and wing tip shoes. My favorite pair of shoes.

My mother had moved to Dallas, Texas. When I was older, a caseworker told me that my mother had moved to Dallas because Texas was one of the few places in the 1950s that didn’t garnish your wages for child support. I know that neither of my parents ever contributed any financial support to the Memphis Juvenile Court for us. Over the years, I saw my mother probably a dozen times. When she went to visit her parents in Mississippi, she would stop by the children’s home in Memphis for about an hour, usually around Christmastime, and give us a gift, like a sweatshirt from a secondhand store. Then off she went to her parents until the next time she would visit, which was usually the following year. Our mother’s visits were unannounced, so I didn’t have any built-up anticipation of looking forward to seeing her. Because the visits from my mother usually lasted about an hour or less, it never created an emotional void when she left, because no bonds were established during these short visits. Most of my youthful years, I had good feelings about my mother. I guess you could say that children want to think the best of their parents. I wasn’t at a stage of my life to really understand the dynamics involving my life growing up in children’s homes instead of living with my parents. I wasn’t reflecting on negatives about my situation or playing the blame game on who was responsible for my current situation. My life in children’s homes was the only life I knew. To me, that was just the way things were and no one was at fault. In my counseling sessions with caseworkers during my teenage years, my family situation became clearer to me. The caseworker would explain why things were the way they were in my upbringing. One caseworker told me the only reason our mother came to see us when we lived in Memphis was that it was on her way to Mississippi and she would never have gone out of her way to visit us. My mother never came to see me when I lived in Nashville. My older brother went to live in Boys Town in Memphis, Tennessee. My younger brother lived in a foster home in Germantown, Tennessee. The younger twin girls lived in a foster home and later were adopted by their foster parents. To say I don’t know my siblings would be an understatement. No one in authority ever brought all of us together for any kind of visit. During this time of my life, I never saw my twin sisters or brothers. Years later, my brothers came to live at Monroe Children’s Home and I was around them for a year before my placement in a group home in Nashville. After this, at the age of fourteen, I never had visits with any of my family or siblings except Aunt Mary.

On two separate occasions, I was sent back to the Memphis Juvenile Court. Since I was a ward of the court, they had ultimate custody of me. Of the two times I was sent back to the Memphis Juvenile Court, I spent two months in detention centers in Nashville and Memphis. The detention center in Nashville housed one person to a cell, and in Memphis, it was two people to a cell (the cells were the same setup as adult jails). In the Nashville Juvenile Detention Center, there was a single metal-framed bed with a thin plastic mattress. It was the same in Memphis, but it was bunk beds in each cell. Each cell had a toilet and sink and no privacy. Both of the detention centers had a large dayroom where people congregated to watch the television. During the daylight hours, everyone spent the day in the dayroom and no one was allowed to stay in their cell. In the dayroom, there was a small library of books to read. I would spend my days reading as many books as I could. The majority of those incarcerated were black males. In the detention centers, it didn’t take much to spark confrontations. I felt the best way to avoid conflict was to keep myself occupied by reading. Reading the various books allowed me to immerse myself with the characters in the books.

Living at the detention center had many challenges. One challenge in particular, dealt with toilet paper. Each day, the guards would hand out a small amount of single-sheet toilet paper. I made a point of saving as much of the toilet paper as I possibly could so at the end of the month’s stay, I had quite a stash of toilet paper. During my various stays at the detention centers, each time as I was leaving the facilities, I would give my allotment of toilet paper to another person in detention who had befriended me during my various stays. I’m not sure why so much emphasis was placed on the quantity of toilet paper one could accumulate, but it was viewed by other people in detention as a status symbol. When I gave the person in detention the toilet paper, it was like he had won the lottery.

My first return trip back to Memphis, I was placed in a shelter home. I was the only white living in this home as all the other children were black. Most of the children in the home were babies that were kept in a nursery and the others were preteens. It was uncommon to have older kids my age living in the shelter home. This home was a temporary stopping point for children who were wards of the Memphis Juvenile Court on their way to a permanent home or placement in a longer-term facility. On a daily basis, the shelter’s home population fluctuated, but it was usually around thirty to forty children.

There are a handful of things that stand out about my early childhood. I did a lot of bad things and was a mean kid. Bad things happened to me. I’ve chosen not to share these experiences with others. I was the victim of crimes that were perpetrated against me. Since I didn’t grow up in a traditional family structure, I don’t know what life would have been like in a stable family environment, but I would have loved to have known the nurturing and love from parents and everyday interactions with my siblings. Only in my mind can I miss what I never had with an intact, loving family. Another memory I have of the time I spent in the shelter home is that dinner consisted of cream of wheat, oatmeal, or Malt-O-Meal on a rotating basis. To this day, I try to stay away from all three of those foods. Living in an institutional environment, I was constantly in trouble. It was explained to me once that the reason I got blamed for so many bad things was that I had a guilty-looking face. As I got older, this guilty-looking face must have stayed with me, because I had numerous experiences in my life where I was falsely accused of incidences when I had nothing to do with the situation.

As a kid, I was mischievous and delinquent. Fighting was a regular thing, and our creed in group fights was to issue a challenge to the opposing group to see if they wanted to knife it, duke it, or rock it. When we would rock it, there would be a little distance between the other group and ourselves. We would throw rocks at one another. On one occasion, I was hit with a rock over my right eye and had to have fourteen stitches. Fortunately, we didn’t have access to guns back then.

A handful of us would amuse ourselves by traversing the Memphis sewer system. We called ourselves sewer rats, and we would travel through the sewers into various neighborhoods and cuss at people walking on the streets and sidewalks. We always felt safe, because people didn’t want to enter the dark, stinky sewers to chase us.

Another adventure was climbing trees. I would climb thirty to forty feet into the trees and then jump from limb to limb. Once, I fell out of a tree and broke my arm. As an adult, I’m fearful of heights, but as a kid, it never bothered me.

Growing up, I never got involved with drugs. I never tried marijuana or any hard drugs. When I was in the seventh grade, I drank an inordinate amount of beer. The rest of the night, I was dizzy and puked all night. Based on that one binge-drinking experience, I avoided beer and other alcoholic beverages as a teenager. As an adult, for a period of six months, I would drink a glass of wine in the evening. When I