Sergi made an arrangement with him whereby her office paid him the equivalent of what he made on the building sites in exchange for him devoting himself full-time, six days a week, to Roy. Linwood would turn up at Roy’s mother’s place, where he now slept, early in the morning. He would wake Roy up, groom him and dress him, ride on the school bus with him, spend all day at school with him, bring him home, settle him down. Roy attended a special school for children with handicaps and disabilities of all sorts.”In Roy’s household he could do what he wanted when he wanted His mother didn’t have time to wash him or feed him The mother had boyfriends, lots of boyfriends And the four sisters, well .. There were a lot of things going on at Roy’s household At the school it was only white kids I wasn’t treated well because I was a black man. When OJ was acquitted they would look at me with anger and say white people should riot But they needed me to control Roy He acted up badly He was real violent He would beat and punch the women teachers He was 14 but he couldn’t read or write. His writing was chicken scratch.”Today Roy understands why he was such a problem kid He still has problems He has a speech impediment. Because of the medication he has to take he jumps his consonants, has a watery way of speaking.”It was because I lost my father It was growing up without a man in the house But men did come to the house Spanish guys They would pay my mother’s bills They would get drunk and they would break things.

Or they would punch my mother if she didn’t cook their meals There was a guy called Buddy who would take out my sister He wanted to have sex with her The guys wanted to have sex with me My mum put a restraining order on Buddy Tony, the police came and took him away So there was no man in the house to look after me. When my dad died it was a real big one.”Roy mistrusted Linwood at first, like he mistrusted all men. Linwood being black made it worse, because Roy had never been in the company of black people before. Linwood was tall and corpulent, a basketball player long since out of training.”I didn’t look forward to him at first I was scared, very scared I’d never seen anyone so big. But after a week I saw he was doing things for me no one had ever done before He took me to the zoo He made me my first hamburgers on a barbecue He bought me an ice-cream. No one had bought me an ice-cream before.”Linwood kept at it for two and a half years, six days a week Roy got better He lost weight He learnt to read and write.

He received awards at school for most improved student, student with the best attendance record.”I went with Roy to the Bronx Zoo Before he just wanted to hurt animals Now he got to like them.”Then, one day, disaster struck. When Linwood wasn’t around, Roy met a youth adviser who told him he could be free, end his dependence on all supervision, live a normal teenage life But he had to end his dependence on Linwood first So he came up with a plan He pretended Linwood was beating him up He hit himself with a baseball bat. Linwood backed out, went back into the construction business Chaos followed Roy went berserk He fell apart. On the walls she has pictures of mountains and beautiful lakes She is a child of the Sixties But she is also tough She won the battle with the psychiatrists. She has been working with abused and neglected children for more than 20 years She wears jeans and T-shirts to work. Her hair is long and blonde and falls in a fringe over her brow. Her office is like a greenhouse, dense with large, leafy potted plants.

I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could give Roy some hands-on care?’ But everyone at the hospital said, ‘no way’. We had fight after fight with people who sincerely believed they were proposing the best course of action for Roy, though in some cases there were egos on the line too.”Sergi has a Master’s degree in psychology. There are never enough staff so they compensate by prescribing heavy medication, the easy answer. It became our goal, our battle to get Roy out of the residential set-up To establish a precedent. See what happened if you gave a child like this unrestricted, unconditional care. The doctors at the hospital said Roy could not live outside an institution. The head psychiatrist said he could not let Roy go because he would become a rapist.