“You kind of just have to grit your teeth and push through whatever you have to push through to get yourself out of that situation. Because if you don’t, you increase your chances of just, I’ll put it bluntly, death. It kills out there,” Joey Walters said. Walters says after the foster system failed him in Nebraska, he moved to Wichita to stay with family, but his life quickly fell apart. “Made some mistakes along the way. Done some stuff that I regret a lot. I put me in a situation where they couldn’t really house me anymore. So I ended up homeless,” said Walters. With nowhere else to turn, Joey Walters was on the streets and lived with a group of other young homeless people under a bridge at Murdock and Waco. After about a year of living this way, he met Officer Mariah McCrea with the Wichita Police Department’s Homeless Outreach Team. “It’s good seeing you. You look a lot better than how I found you under the bridge,” McCrea said during a video call with Walters. McCrea says for a variety of reasons, people like Walters often come in from other cities and end up stuck on the streets with no one to help and no way to get home. But she says that’s why the city has a grant-funded program through the Beach Foundation called Finding Your Way Home, and Walters was the perfect candidate. “Ms. McCrea brought to my attention that they could get a bus ticket for me if I had anywhere to go that would be safer off the streets,” Walters said.
Source: KAKE – News
