This blog takes a totally different direction. This is a story of a buddy of mine, Steve Tyler. I met him over a decade ago when I joined the Blue Knights Motorcycle Club, Illinois XI. We traveled to many places around the country with the club. A good time had by all and a great friend made.
He showed great friendship, when he was able to help me get into Area 3, Detective Division, Chicago Police Department. I have been there for quite awhile now and am proud to serve the citizens of Chicago there. I can never thank enough the person who was able to make one of my dreams come true, my friend, Steve Tyler.
Like all of us, Steve Tyler has his story. His is a very good one and I want to share it with everyone. I hope that you see how lucky I am to work with such wonderful people like this. He didn't do this story for personal fame but to help get the word out for a superb institution, Mercy Home for Boys and Girls. He is a selfless person and has devoted his life to helping others. This is his story:
From Chicago Sun-Times
Part I
A mercy mystery
Cop who grew up in home for troubled kids finds his past isn't all he was told
March 9, 2010
MARK BROWN markbrown@suntimes.com
Steven Tyler was 16 years old and out of options when a parish priest told him about Mercy Home.
He'd spent the previous several nights sleeping in a friend's backyard in Bridgeport, having run away from the latest of three foster homes that took him in after his relatives finished passing him around.
Tyler had grown up without a mother in the care of an alcoholic father who treated him with such contempt that the boy decided he'd be better off as a ward of the state than spending another minute where he wasn't wanted.
Then that didn't work out either, which is why Tyler made the long walk by himself that summer's day in 1980 all the way from the Bridgeport church to Mercy's residential home for troubled youth at 1140 W. Jackson, his mind reeling with worried thoughts about where he could turn next.
At first, he was told there was no room for him at Mercy as well. He'd have to wait six months for a bed to open up. The distraught look on the boy's face must have caused someone to reconsider. Come back Tuesday, they said, and so he did.
Tyler, now 46 and a veteran Chicago Police detective, will tell you that was the turning point of his life.
At Mercy, he found not only a home but a family, not necessarily the family he'd always envisioned with a loving mother and father, but one made of three dozen boys facing the same troubles he had, some even worse.
And in their company, he found a peace he'd never found anywhere else. At Mercy he could talk about the abuse he had suffered with peers who wouldn't judge him.
"I didn't feel all alone. There was more of a common ground. You felt almost equal," the soft-spoken Tyler told me this past weekend over coffee and doughnuts in a Mercy conference room.
"That was the first time in my life I was able to slow down," he said. "I felt a bond with the kids that were here."
After two years living at Mercy and several more working there as a handyman, Tyler would go on to the conventional life he had craved: a good job with the Police Department and a family of his own with a wife and four children.
Tyler is telling his story now not for sympathy but to raise public awareness for Mercy as it enters its annual "Shamrocks for Kids" fund-raising campaign.
Yet, there are more sympathy-inducing twists and turns to his story that I think you'd want to hear. For that, we'll circle back to the start.
Tyler was born in 1963 at the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium, where his parents had met, both having contracted the disease.
All Tyler ever knew about his mother was what he was told: that she had died when he was an infant. He assumed it was related to TB.
His paternal grandmother raised him until age 4½, when she put him in the car one day and dropped him off with his father, who had since remarried and had rarely even seen the boy to that point. Both father and stepmother made it clear he wasn't wanted, confining him to his room, even for meals.
"I hate to say this, but my father literally hated me, and I came to hate him," Tyler said.
His father's drinking became worse until he could no longer hold a job. Tyler took a paper route. His father took the money.
"That money I made paid for his cigarettes and beer and probably the rent," Tyler told me, more by way of explanation than out of resentment.
All the while, Tyler longed for his mother. "I always had that thought with me as a child that things would be better if she were here," he said.
Instead, he tried living with relatives, then foster families, the arrangements failing mostly because of his own internal restlessness and anger. I've already explained how that led him to Mercy.
Fast forward to 1994. Tyler, by then eight years a policeman, was newly assigned to the Narcotics Division when his unit attempted to serve a warrant at a suspected drug house.
Tyler was shot three times, the worst of which ricocheted off the floor and under his bulletproof vest, penetrating his colon, liver, diaphragm and lung. It was touch and go for a while, but he made it.
While recovering, though, an aunt made a seemingly innocuous observation about it being too bad his mother wasn't there with him. Something in the way she said it caused Tyler to press the point.
To his shock, the aunt let the cat out of the bag. His mother hadn't died. She had left him.
Thus began Tyler's obsessive search for his mother, which ended just last week.
For that part of the story, you'll have to read tomorrow's column.
http://is.gd/aa6HI
Part II
Search for mom leads detective to few answers
He showed great friendship, when he was able to help me get into Area 3, Detective Division, Chicago Police Department. I have been there for quite awhile now and am proud to serve the citizens of Chicago there. I can never thank enough the person who was able to make one of my dreams come true, my friend, Steve Tyler.
Like all of us, Steve Tyler has his story. His is a very good one and I want to share it with everyone. I hope that you see how lucky I am to work with such wonderful people like this. He didn't do this story for personal fame but to help get the word out for a superb institution, Mercy Home for Boys and Girls. He is a selfless person and has devoted his life to helping others. This is his story:
From Chicago Sun-Times
Part I
A mercy mystery
Cop who grew up in home for troubled kids finds his past isn't all he was told
March 9, 2010
MARK BROWN markbrown@suntimes.com
Steven Tyler was 16 years old and out of options when a parish priest told him about Mercy Home.
He'd spent the previous several nights sleeping in a friend's backyard in Bridgeport, having run away from the latest of three foster homes that took him in after his relatives finished passing him around.
Tyler had grown up without a mother in the care of an alcoholic father who treated him with such contempt that the boy decided he'd be better off as a ward of the state than spending another minute where he wasn't wanted.
Then that didn't work out either, which is why Tyler made the long walk by himself that summer's day in 1980 all the way from the Bridgeport church to Mercy's residential home for troubled youth at 1140 W. Jackson, his mind reeling with worried thoughts about where he could turn next.
At first, he was told there was no room for him at Mercy as well. He'd have to wait six months for a bed to open up. The distraught look on the boy's face must have caused someone to reconsider. Come back Tuesday, they said, and so he did.
Tyler, now 46 and a veteran Chicago Police detective, will tell you that was the turning point of his life.
At Mercy, he found not only a home but a family, not necessarily the family he'd always envisioned with a loving mother and father, but one made of three dozen boys facing the same troubles he had, some even worse.
And in their company, he found a peace he'd never found anywhere else. At Mercy he could talk about the abuse he had suffered with peers who wouldn't judge him.
"I didn't feel all alone. There was more of a common ground. You felt almost equal," the soft-spoken Tyler told me this past weekend over coffee and doughnuts in a Mercy conference room.
"That was the first time in my life I was able to slow down," he said. "I felt a bond with the kids that were here."
After two years living at Mercy and several more working there as a handyman, Tyler would go on to the conventional life he had craved: a good job with the Police Department and a family of his own with a wife and four children.
Tyler is telling his story now not for sympathy but to raise public awareness for Mercy as it enters its annual "Shamrocks for Kids" fund-raising campaign.
Yet, there are more sympathy-inducing twists and turns to his story that I think you'd want to hear. For that, we'll circle back to the start.
Tyler was born in 1963 at the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium, where his parents had met, both having contracted the disease.
All Tyler ever knew about his mother was what he was told: that she had died when he was an infant. He assumed it was related to TB.
His paternal grandmother raised him until age 4½, when she put him in the car one day and dropped him off with his father, who had since remarried and had rarely even seen the boy to that point. Both father and stepmother made it clear he wasn't wanted, confining him to his room, even for meals.
"I hate to say this, but my father literally hated me, and I came to hate him," Tyler said.
His father's drinking became worse until he could no longer hold a job. Tyler took a paper route. His father took the money.
"That money I made paid for his cigarettes and beer and probably the rent," Tyler told me, more by way of explanation than out of resentment.
All the while, Tyler longed for his mother. "I always had that thought with me as a child that things would be better if she were here," he said.
Instead, he tried living with relatives, then foster families, the arrangements failing mostly because of his own internal restlessness and anger. I've already explained how that led him to Mercy.
Fast forward to 1994. Tyler, by then eight years a policeman, was newly assigned to the Narcotics Division when his unit attempted to serve a warrant at a suspected drug house.
Tyler was shot three times, the worst of which ricocheted off the floor and under his bulletproof vest, penetrating his colon, liver, diaphragm and lung. It was touch and go for a while, but he made it.
While recovering, though, an aunt made a seemingly innocuous observation about it being too bad his mother wasn't there with him. Something in the way she said it caused Tyler to press the point.
To his shock, the aunt let the cat out of the bag. His mother hadn't died. She had left him.
Thus began Tyler's obsessive search for his mother, which ended just last week.
For that part of the story, you'll have to read tomorrow's column.
http://is.gd/aa6HI
Part II
Search for mom leads detective to few answers
But on journey, he finds ways to help -- as Mercy helped him
March 10, 2010
BY MARK BROWN Sun-Times Columnist
If his mother was alive, Steven Tyler always told himself during a childhood spent with an abusive father in Bridgeport, things would be different.
If only she hadn't died when he was just an infant, he could be living a "normal" life like the other kids.
He clung to that thought during those rough early years with his father and later as he bounced between relatives and foster homes. Later yet, it would sustain him through his turnaround years at Mercy Home, the Catholic charity that gave him safe haven, as it has for countless homeless and troubled children since 1887.
Imagine then how devastating it must have been for Tyler to discover as a 31-year-old Chicago Police detective that his mother hadn't died as he'd always been told. She had left him.
An aunt let the truth slip while Tyler was at home recuperating in 1994 from serious gunshot wounds suffered in the line of duty when he served a warrant at a suspected drug house.
Even as he struggled to recover from his injuries, Tyler was immediately consumed by a need to unravel his past. What was so bad that his mother had felt the need to abandon him? Why?
First, though, he'd have to find her, no easy task under the circumstances. The trail was cold, with Tyler knowing little more than her name, Tina Marie.
He brought his own police skills to bear --and enlisted a former policeman who now specializes in that type of work.
He learned his mother had lived in Detroit for a time, but the addresses didn't check out.
Finding her was an obsession, one that would come and go these past 16 years. At times, he would make headway, then hit a dead end and give up for long periods.
Tyler's search led him to more family. Tina Marie had given birth to twin boys by another father two years after he was born -- and had abandoned them also.
He traced one of his half-brothers to a Cicero address and went there expectantly, only to find he was too late. The half-brother, Richard, had died six months earlier of a heroin overdose. The other half-brother had died in infancy.
But Richard had two children of his own. Tyler kept in touch with them. When he became concerned later that his teenage niece was taking the wrong path, Tyler and his wife took her into their home with their own four children. Tyler is proud that his niece went on to graduate from high school and join the Air Force.
Tyler also kept busy by founding a support group for police officers shot in the line of duty. Drawing on his experiences in group therapy at Mercy, Tyler knew the value of talking about his troubles with others facing the same issues. The Police Survivors now number about 85 members who were traumatically injured in shootings or car accidents on the job.
Still, the unresolved issue of his mother hung there, never far from his thoughts, although he was losing hope, given that she would now be in her 80s.
"I'd come to the resolution she probably was dead," Tyler said.
That's where things stood when the staff at Mercy Home told me Tyler was willing to tell his story to help publicize the organization's important work, which he credits with turning around his life.
It wasn't until we met that I learned Tyler had found his mother a week earlier.
He had gone back to his former detective friend, who found her address -- and other information as well. Tina Marie had been married four times, it turned out. Tyler's father was her second husband. She and her fourth husband were living in a small northern Wisconsin town.
Tyler drove there unannounced on his next off day. The couple weren't home, but he waited. When they returned late that evening, he approached them in the drive as they headed for the door.
"Who are you?" asked the husband.
"Steve, I'm from Chicago. I'm your son," he said directly to Tina Marie, the way he'd always heard himself saying it.
"I have no children," she said.
But Tyler was ready for that, too. He showed her a copy of a wedding photo with his father.
"I remember him," she said. "He was mean. He punched the walls."
He showed her a copy of his birth certificate.
"That's my signature," she said. By then, Tyler had talked himself inside the house.
Over the next hour, he would learn much about his mother. She'd been an artist, a painter specializing in landscapes, with her own studio on Diversey. She'd lost it all when she contracted tuberculosis and landed in the sanitarium where she met his father. She was fluent in numerous languages but uncertain as to her own ethnicity. She was an orphan herself, she explained.
But there were no answers for Tyler's big questions. Exhibiting signs of possible dementia, Tina Marie gave no indication she remembered giving birth, let alone why she abandoned him.
Tyler came back the next day, but the story was the same. It made it harder that she was nice. Not only did he miss out on the answers he'd long sought, neither was there any place to direct his anger.
"There's a part of me that's happy for her, and another part that's a little upset," he told me. "Glad I found her. Don't know what's going to happen from here."
http://is.gd/aa7tj
Detective Steve Tyler is trying to inform people to help Mercy Home for Boys and Girls:
Mercy Home for Boys and Girls
1140 West Jackson Boulevard
Chicago, IL 60607
(877) 637-2955
For more info==> http://is.gd/aa9bY
March 10, 2010
BY MARK BROWN Sun-Times Columnist
If his mother was alive, Steven Tyler always told himself during a childhood spent with an abusive father in Bridgeport, things would be different.
If only she hadn't died when he was just an infant, he could be living a "normal" life like the other kids.
He clung to that thought during those rough early years with his father and later as he bounced between relatives and foster homes. Later yet, it would sustain him through his turnaround years at Mercy Home, the Catholic charity that gave him safe haven, as it has for countless homeless and troubled children since 1887.
Imagine then how devastating it must have been for Tyler to discover as a 31-year-old Chicago Police detective that his mother hadn't died as he'd always been told. She had left him.
An aunt let the truth slip while Tyler was at home recuperating in 1994 from serious gunshot wounds suffered in the line of duty when he served a warrant at a suspected drug house.
Even as he struggled to recover from his injuries, Tyler was immediately consumed by a need to unravel his past. What was so bad that his mother had felt the need to abandon him? Why?
First, though, he'd have to find her, no easy task under the circumstances. The trail was cold, with Tyler knowing little more than her name, Tina Marie.
He brought his own police skills to bear --and enlisted a former policeman who now specializes in that type of work.
He learned his mother had lived in Detroit for a time, but the addresses didn't check out.
Finding her was an obsession, one that would come and go these past 16 years. At times, he would make headway, then hit a dead end and give up for long periods.
Tyler's search led him to more family. Tina Marie had given birth to twin boys by another father two years after he was born -- and had abandoned them also.
He traced one of his half-brothers to a Cicero address and went there expectantly, only to find he was too late. The half-brother, Richard, had died six months earlier of a heroin overdose. The other half-brother had died in infancy.
But Richard had two children of his own. Tyler kept in touch with them. When he became concerned later that his teenage niece was taking the wrong path, Tyler and his wife took her into their home with their own four children. Tyler is proud that his niece went on to graduate from high school and join the Air Force.
Tyler also kept busy by founding a support group for police officers shot in the line of duty. Drawing on his experiences in group therapy at Mercy, Tyler knew the value of talking about his troubles with others facing the same issues. The Police Survivors now number about 85 members who were traumatically injured in shootings or car accidents on the job.
Still, the unresolved issue of his mother hung there, never far from his thoughts, although he was losing hope, given that she would now be in her 80s.
"I'd come to the resolution she probably was dead," Tyler said.
That's where things stood when the staff at Mercy Home told me Tyler was willing to tell his story to help publicize the organization's important work, which he credits with turning around his life.
It wasn't until we met that I learned Tyler had found his mother a week earlier.
He had gone back to his former detective friend, who found her address -- and other information as well. Tina Marie had been married four times, it turned out. Tyler's father was her second husband. She and her fourth husband were living in a small northern Wisconsin town.
Tyler drove there unannounced on his next off day. The couple weren't home, but he waited. When they returned late that evening, he approached them in the drive as they headed for the door.
"Who are you?" asked the husband.
"Steve, I'm from Chicago. I'm your son," he said directly to Tina Marie, the way he'd always heard himself saying it.
"I have no children," she said.
But Tyler was ready for that, too. He showed her a copy of a wedding photo with his father.
"I remember him," she said. "He was mean. He punched the walls."
He showed her a copy of his birth certificate.
"That's my signature," she said. By then, Tyler had talked himself inside the house.
Over the next hour, he would learn much about his mother. She'd been an artist, a painter specializing in landscapes, with her own studio on Diversey. She'd lost it all when she contracted tuberculosis and landed in the sanitarium where she met his father. She was fluent in numerous languages but uncertain as to her own ethnicity. She was an orphan herself, she explained.
But there were no answers for Tyler's big questions. Exhibiting signs of possible dementia, Tina Marie gave no indication she remembered giving birth, let alone why she abandoned him.
Tyler came back the next day, but the story was the same. It made it harder that she was nice. Not only did he miss out on the answers he'd long sought, neither was there any place to direct his anger.
"There's a part of me that's happy for her, and another part that's a little upset," he told me. "Glad I found her. Don't know what's going to happen from here."
http://is.gd/aa7tj
Detective Steve Tyler is trying to inform people to help Mercy Home for Boys and Girls:
Mercy Home for Boys and Girls
1140 West Jackson Boulevard
Chicago, IL 60607
(877) 637-2955
For more info==> http://is.gd/aa9bY
He is also one of the founders of The Police Survivors.
If you want more info on this organization please follow this lead==> http://is.gd/aa9X7
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