Learning to trust again; Samaritan tries to `rescue' woman left homeless after sad childhood

Author: Rachel Abramowitz Los Angeles Times

Dateline: LOS ANGELES

Her mother tried to throw her out of a third-story window when she was 3. She spent five years in an orphanage in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, then five years in U.S. foster homes - including a traumatic stay in Indiana. She stayed at a psychiatric hospital and a lockdown facility for troubled kids. But Milena Slatten, 20, is faring incredibly well.

Two years ago she was homeless, but she's earned her GED and works full time as a clerk in the Los Angeles County courthouse. She has no criminal record. She doesn't drink. She doesn't smoke or do drugs.

Most important, she has a friend - an impressive, reliable one - which is a rarity for former foster kids. He is Thomas Higgins, 65, a career prosecutor responsible for almost all the arraignments in the city of Los Angeles. She calls him Tommy.

Although studies have shown the importance of positive adult role models for kids leaving foster care, a 2004 report by the Government Accountability Office described how difficult it was for states to recruit people to serve as mentors. Higgins, for example, has been spending 50 to 60 hours a month for the past 11 months essentially trying to rescue Slatten.

For all her progress, there are continual pitfalls. For Higgins, it is a test of faith and fortitude; for Slatten, it is a struggle to learn to trust.

"I am the type of person to usually obliterate or basically ruin a relationship because I feel someone is getting close to me," she said.

Slatten met Higgins when he showed up at a mixer for potential mentors at Covenant House, a Hollywood homeless shelter where she was living. She called him the next day about a job, and he hired her for $8.50 an hour.

On most days, she works at the prosecution table in Division 30, one of the city's busiest criminal courtrooms. The tumult there seems to suit Slatten, a small tomboyish figure, with wide cheekbones, long blond hair and the walk of a construction worker.

Higgins, former head of the district attorney's sex crimes and juvenile divisions, didn't start out to save her.

"I was just trying to get her a job," he said, but then Slatten showed up for the first day of work looking like a "trusty from the county jail," a tiny macho spark plug in a man's work shirt and bulky jeans. She was clearly bright and a know-it-all even when she didn't know it all.

Despite day-to-day devotion to big and small issues, Higgins couldn't trump the pull of the past. At the end of the summer, Slatten announced she was quitting the district attorney's office, leaving her Covenant House subsidized apartment and returning to Indiana to live with her adoptive father, Christopher Slatten. This was the man who with his wife had adopted her from the Georgian orphanage and who later was arrested and charged with neglect for allegedly locking Milena in a feces-strewn basement, and with battery for allegedly stripping her down and touching her "in an insolent manner."

Slatten was acquitted of the charges, but that didn't make Higgins feel any better about her going back to live with him.

Higgins tried to talk her out of going. But Milena persisted. "I can't make a decision based on other people's opinions. I'll never be able to think for myself," she said.

Milena still speaks with a slight Georgian accent, although she no longer remembers her native language. She doesn't know some of the most essential facts about herself - such as her parents or even her age. She was arbitrarily granted the birthday of June 1, 1986, by the authorities at the orphanage.

She recalls little about her early life except for her first mother trying to coax her out the third-story window. "She told me, `You want to jump or do you want me to help you out?' " Milena said. Neighbors rescued her, which is how she ended up in the orphanage. She said that while there, she was beaten with a rod and molested by one of the female workers, which cemented her distrust of women.

A video was taken of her and other orphans, and at the official age of 10 she was put on a train to Moscow and told she was going to meet a new mommy and daddy.

Her first prospective mother paid $30,000 in orphanage fees but then refused to take her after Milena kicked her in the shin. Then came Chris and Beth Slatten. They picked her up at a Moscow train station and brought her back to live with them and their three daughters in Hawaii, where Slatten was stationed with the Army.

In January 1999, after the family had moved to Indiana, Beth Slatten packed her five biological children into a car and drove home to West Virginia, leaving behind her husband, Milena and four foster children. A few days later, Chris Slatten tried to kill himself. The police investigated. Two weeks later, Child Protective Services removed Milena. Chris Slatten lost the foster kids as well.

According to court files, the basement of the house was saturated with animal waste. A social worker took a photograph of Milena's bed with a dead rat on top.

Milena spent the next five years tossed from foster home to foster home, with a stint in a psychiatric hospital and eventually in a facility for troubled kids. For almost three years, she waited for Slatten to go to trial.

Milena testified that Christopher Slatten had spanked her, then stripped her. But when asked whether he had been looking at her body, she said, "I don't know."

Slatten pleaded not guilty. He did not testify in the trial and was acquitted.

Slatten sought to regain custody. Milena, then 17, agreed. She said it was preferable to the lockdown facility where she had been living. Five months after her 18th birthday, Slatten moved to Virginia. Milena did not want to go, so he took her to a motel and left her with $200. That's when she bought a bus ticket for California, carrying only a backpack and a poster of Evanescence singer Amy Lee. After living on the streets of Los Angeles for a week, she landed at Covenant House and eventually met Higgins.

Last summer, Milena came to spend a weekend with Higgins and his family at a rented beach house, but the day Higgins returned from vacation, Milena announced that she was going back to Slatten.

At first, Milena insisted that she was returning to Indiana only because her adoptive father had promised her money if she helped him renovate a Victorian home he owned.

The night before she was to leave, she finally admitted why she was going. "I basically feel that he (Slatten) owes me something," she said. "An apology. Which I'm probably never going to get ... but ... it's worth a try."

But after an unpleasant week of arguing with Slatten, Milena has called Higgins. He has paid for her return flight to Los Angeles, as well as her motel. The next afternoon, Higgins and his wife pick up Milena at the airport. They're relieved to see her, although Milena appears somewhat embarrassed.

They're not taking her home - where four grown Higgins children still reside - but back to the Covenant House shelter.

Forced to live again in the group home, Milena seethes about its rules. And she's angry. Mostly, inexplicably, at Higgins. He got her her job back, accepted her back unconditionally. Yet she punishes him as if he chastised her. At one point she refuses to speak to him for several days.

Higgins tries to be sanguine about the whole episode, but her surly behavior worries him. His wife has been asking him of late what he'll do if he can't ultimately help Milena, or if she ends up back on the streets. "Part of leadership," he says, "is the will to take things on against long odds. ... I'll cry a lot, but ultimately I can look myself in the mirror and say I gave it everything I had."

Caption:

Los Angeles Times: Milena Slatten, shown walking along Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, was offered a job by Thomas Higgins, a career prosecutor, who has been spending 50 to 60 hours a month for the past 11 months essentially trying to rescue Slatten.

Copyright (c) 2007 The Journal Gazette