Four years ago, Alejandro Salazar left Toledo, Ohio, for America's most famous modern-day orphanage, Boys Town.
It was supposed to be the 14-year-old's big break, a chance to escape the pattern of petty crime that had ensnared him after his mother and grandmother died and he was pressed into the drug trade at age 7.But things didn't work out that way.
Expelled from Boys Town's idyllic campus near Omaha, Neb., after only five months, Alejandro returned to Toledo and life on the streets. Today he is in Lucas County jail, facing charges of felonious assault and aggravated robbery.
His story and those of others at Boys Town offer a rare glimpse at the track record of one of America's top homes for troubled children at a time when such institutions are being touted as part of the solution to the child welfare crisis.
In the 1938 movie "Boys Town," which helped create an enduring image of against-all-odds success, Boys Town founder Father Edward Flanagan rescued even the most difficult boy.
But a review of confidential court records obtained by The Blade suggests that the real-life Boys Town - home to 556 abused, neglected, and abandoned children - is no panacea.
Boys Town has expelled six of the 13 Toledo area boys and girls who have lived there since 1990.
Five of these children went on to serve time in juvenile prison, and even those youngsters who achieved satisfactory discharges were not immune to trouble.
One boy was arrested for drug abuse only nine days after a satisfactory release.
No one interviewed for this article blames Boys Town, which accepts some very challenging young-sters, many of whom already have minor police records for crimes like shoplifting.
But some experts, including Ronald Feldman, dean of the Columbia University school of social work, say that The Blade's findings are important despite the small pool of children involved.
Among the reasons: Residential treatment centers like Boys Town can cost $40,000 or more a child annually, while welfare costs only about $3,000.
And such institutions are the focus of growing interest in Congress, on radio talk shows, and right here in Lucas County, where a court official recently expressed interest in establishing a mini-Boys Town.
"Clearly, if rates of failure (at child care institutions) are higher than what we have commonly expected, we have to look very closely at whether the proposed solutions are indeed cost-effective," says Feldman, who served as director of Boys Town's Center for the Study of Youth Development in the 1970s.
Boys Town officials say that the 46 percent expulsion rate involving the Toledo area youngsters does not reflect Boys Town's national average, and they also question The Blade's findings in Toledo.
But they say they keep no data on the number of children expelled.
Instead, they report an 80 percent success rate based on children's improvement while at Boys Town. A child may be counted as having improved even if he or she was eventually expelled.
"We think, based upon our data, at least 80 percent of our kids go away gaining substantial amounts of positive insight and healing, and the other 20 percent probably gain little ground, if any," says Boys Town director of home campus programs David Shanahan.
By any measure, Boys Town, a voluntary, live-in treatment program, has achieved great success with young people like Yvette Neyland, who attended from 1987 to 1989.
"Without Boys Town, I believe I would have been a teenage mother on welfare," says Neyland, now 23 and an honors student at Peru State College in Peru, Neb.
But it's not unusual to hear about former Boys Town residents like Neyland, who has represented the orphanage on NBC's Today show and in a 1989 NBC news special report with Deborah Norville on girls and crime.
In contrast, stories about residents like Alejandro Salazar go largely untold.
For him, the path to Boys Town began in Corpus Christi, Texas, where he spent his early years. One day, a few hours after his mother left to go fishing, a police officer came to the door to say there had been a car accident. The family went to the hospital, and, there, Alejandro, 6, got a chance to see his mother one last time
"She was on machines," he says softly. "I think she was already dead."
Alejandro's biological father wasn't in the picture, so, for a while, Alejandro and his older brothers and sister were cared for by his grandmother. But within six months, she, too, was dead.
After her death, Alejandro stayed with his grandfather, but he was away during the day ad a female relative would come over and sell drugs out of the apartment. Soon, Alejandro says, the woman was forcing him to help.
By the time he was 9, his relative was giving him samples of cocaine and marijuana to try.
Around this time, his mother's former boyfriend asked Alejandro to come live with him and his new wife. Alejandro agreed, and he and his stepparents moved to Toledo when he was about 12.
By age 13, he was running away from home "all the time" and missing school - 123 days in a single year.
He also started to show up in juvenile court on a string of minor charges: fighting, vandalism and stealing an $18.47 toy from Kmart.
His stepfather, Alex Benavides, 45, says that while he and his wife tried to help the boy, they couldn't keep him off the streets.
Despite Alejandro's problems with the law, he remained a polite youngster who was capable of good behavior. During a 235-day stay at the Child Study Institute juvenile jail, he impressed staff with his sensitivity and patience.
"To me, he was just a 13-year-old youth who was very sweet and appeared to be lost," says Patricia Abdo, who used to work the evening shift at the jail.
Here, it seemed, was a boy who wanted to do well but had never gotten a proper chance. Here was a candidate for Boys Town.
Officials at Lucas County Juvenile Court send very few children to Boys Town, a voluntary program that is considered treatment, not punishment.
They eliminate violent criminals, then look for very troubled children who are basically what Juvenile Court Judge James Ray calls "the orphan type," kids whose parents have "really physically or emotionally abandoned them."
Finally, they look for kids who sincerely want the one-on-one caring and support offered by Boys Town's $40,000-a-year a child program, less than a third of which is paid for by local taxpayers.
"The kind of kid that loves to be hugged" is how Lucas County Juvenile Court administrator Dan Pompa describes the ideal candidate. "They're the kids you can make a difference with."
Children can be expelled by Boys Town for a wide range of offenses, from persistent refusal to do homework and obey other basic rules to sexual misconduct or violent behavior.
Successful local applicants enter Boys Town's national selection process, which is based in part on the youngster's commitment to positive change.
Alejandro was selected, and, at the age of 14, he arrived at the 1,000-acre Boys Town campus, complete with a lake, a working farm and spacious Tudor homes.
"It was great," Alejandro says. "It was the best thing that ever really happened in my life."
He was placed with a "family unit" that included a team of married professional parents and about six other boys. There were patient teachers to help Alejandro with schoolwork, as well as opportunities for him to go camping, ride horses, and pursue his interest in art.
But the good times didn't last. Alejandro cried when he was expelled after only five months for behavior he says seemed normal to him.
"I was so used to a criminal life. The people who cared for me - I used just to `dis' them. I wasn't brought up like that, like people care for you and you care for them right back. I was just so used to being in the streets."
In many ways, Alejandro, 18, remains the same caring, well-meaning child who was bundled off to Boys Town four years ago, according to Jeff Arman, a former supervisor of the boys' floor at the juvenile jail.
"His heart is bigger than his body," says Arman, who lives in Columbus and gets a collect call from Alejandro every night. "He has a difficult time expressing that, but I'm able to get him in tears in about three minutes."
All Arman has to say is "I can't wait until you come home, buddy." Or "When you get out, I need you to fix my car stereo, Alex. There's something wrong with it," and the tears start to flow.
"He's a baby is what he is," says Arman. "He's still 10 years old."
Alejandro's troubles began not long after he returned home from Boys Town in 1991. He fell in with his old friends, he says, and things went downhill from there.
Within nine months he was arrested on a charge of receiving stolen property. He was not convicted, but the case was treated as a probation violation, and he was sent to juvenile prison.
Two additional juvenile prison terms followed, both for receiving stolen property.
The new charges, felonious assault with a firearms specification and aggravated robbery with a firearms specification, are more serious. Alejandro is accused of knowingly attempting to "cause physical harm to another, by means of a . . . handgun" and of having a handgun "on or about his person or under his control" while "attempting or committing a theft."
The charges stem from an alleged attempted car theft by several people in July during which no one was physically harmed.
Although Alejandro was a juvenile at the time of the alleged crime, he was transferred to adult court. Transfers are made when a judge finds that a youngster is not amenable to rehabilitation in the juvenile system and that community safety may require incarceration beyond the age of 21.
While Alejandro's is perhaps the most dramatic local Boys Town story, it is by no means the only disappointment.
One case involved a girl with a minor criminal record who said her mother was beating her severely with "a big stick." Her mother had lost custody of another child after the child was hospitalized for bone fractures due to battering.
The girl was expelled from Boys Town for aggressive behavior and went on to serve time in juvenile prison for aggravated robbery.
Juvenile Court officials say it's unrealistic to expect Boys Town to succeed with every child, and they heap praise on the home for its success with some very troubled youngsters. Still, for some, Toledo's Boys Town experience is further evidence that there is no magic bullet when it comes to the child welfare crisis.
"How many kids fit into the Boys Town model?" asks Pompa, the Juvenile Court administrator.
"In Toledo, we send 13, and half of them don't fit."