‘Resilient’ Teens Some Area Kids Are Able To Hit Bottom, Then Summon The Strength To Bounce Back

Four years ago, Kristie Mills wrapped up her wild youth by getting pregnant and dropping out of school.

Meanwhile, Renae Arnold grew up in homes where her cocaine-addicted mother was tormented by abusive boyfriends. And Dennis Moeckel stole televisions and beat up rival gang members.

Now all three Spokane young people are respected by their teachers and making their families proud.

What gives some troubled teenagers the strength to turn their lives around when others can’t? How do they survive against the odds?

Researchers call their ability to bounce back “resiliency.” If it can be duplicated in other children, there may be hope for the nation’s soaring youth crime and teenage pregnancy rates.

Resilient kids are typically outgoing, intelligent and motivated. They have a caring adult in their lives - a parent, teacher, coach, church leader or neighbor.

That person understands what it’s like to be young and troubled, can be there to give advice and will cheer the child’s victories.

Mills, Arnold and Moeckel are good examples. They had caring adults outside their families who helped them.

Mills, now 20, pulls the equivalent of straight A’s at Havermale Alternative Center, studying while her daughter naps.

Arnold, 17, will graduate with honors in June and wants to teach. Moeckel, also 17, graduated last summer, works stocking shelves at Kmart and is trying to break into the Christian music business.

Mills, Arnold and Moeckel turned their lives around. They want other young people to know: They can do it, too.

She did it for her mom

As a child, Kristie Mills felt like the family’s black sheep. She had a different father than her three older siblings. Their father had married her mother; her father hadn’t.

The only future she planned as a teenager was the weekend. Popularity and fun were her only goals.

“At 14, I started drinking,” she said. “I had already smoked pot. I was lying to my mom, going places I knew I shouldn’t. It was pretty much a rebellious stage.”

She got pregnant at 16 and dropped out of Rogers High School. Her boyfriend, also a teenager, left town with another girl.

Her mother, Linda Low, was disappointed by the pregnancy. Low’s other children also quit school. But she stood by her child and let her decide between abortion and carrying the child to term.

Mills decided to have the baby. Her turnaround began as she started thinking about her child’s future.

“As soon as I quit crying, I started to pull it together so I could be ready when the baby came,” Mills said. “That meant eliminating people I shouldn’t talk to and starting over again.”

Her daughter, Brittany, was born one day after Mills turned 17. The next month, Mills enrolled in an independent study program at Havermale, a Spokane alternative high school. She met teacher Jeanne Marque, who recognized her intelligence.

“There were a lot of times Kristie wanted to throw in the towel and quit school,” Low said. “Jeanne would work with her and keep her going. I think without Jeanne she might not have made it.”

Mills stuck with the program for three years, during which she took parenting classes and worked at a restaurant and a sewing company.

Jerry Mills, her daughter’s father, returned to Spokane and they fell in love again - a more mature love this time. They married in July. He is 22 and works as a mechanic.

Kristie Mills will get her diploma in June.

“Jeanne says I can do it, so I trust her,” Mills said. “I’m doing it for my mother and my daughter. I want my mother to have one child who graduates. And I have to have that diploma so my daughter won’t throw it back at me that I never graduated.”

There’s no happy ending in pregnancy, Mills said. She loves her daughter, but wants teenagers to know how hard life became because of the baby.

“A lot of girls want a kid. It’s the biggest mistake they could make.”

She missed the senior prom, a normal graduation and going out with friends.

“My schedule goes around Brittany. When she’s sleeping I shower, clean the house and do homework. When she wakes up, it’s back to her.”

School was her refuge

Childhood to Renae Arnold meant six different schools in one year. It meant coming home from trick-or-treating to find police at her home and her mother beaten by her latest boyfriend. It meant pushing her baby brother in a stroller while searching the streets for her mom.

“As a little kid I thought this was normal,” she said.

Today, Arnold’s sunny nature, exquisite manners and self-confidence mask her past.

“It is impossible not to feel uplifted after a conversation with Renae, who truly has managed to find a silver lining in every cloud,” said Joe Everson, her Ferris High counselor.

Arnold’s parents divorced when she was 4. Her mother, Patricia Arnold, got custody of the children and took them first to Reno, Nev., following a boyfriend, then to Sacramento, Calif., to escape him. He beat her when he got drunk.

Efforts to find Arnold’s mother to discuss her daughter were unsuccessful.

Alcohol and cocaine began to rule Patricia Arnold’s life. A new man who moved in also battered her.

Renae’s older brother began to pound Renae in the same way. He pinned her down and smashed her head against the floor.

“When he got mad he reacted how he saw other men react,” Arnold said. “He was pretty much the father, and I was pretty much the mother.”

Renae Arnold believed God knew what was happening and would make her strong enough to endure.

At school, Renae Arnold put up a front. Her teachers loved her. She kept up with homework by doing it at school.

“School was the only place I was able to be a kid. That was my refuge.”

Back in Spokane, her father, Orville Arnold, had remarried. He knew nothing about how chaotic his ex-wife’s life had become until she moved back to Spokane with Renae and the other children.

He eventually won custody and slowly earned his daughter’s trust.

“I picked up the pieces one by one,” he said. A family counselor urged him not to let his new marriage break up over his first family, advice he now treasures.

“Without opening up and talking to therapists I would have lost my kids,” he said.

At Libby Middle School, a counselor gave Renae Arnold the chance to drop her Miss Perfect image and tell him what happened in California.

“I began to talk about things,” Renae Arnold said, “everything from ‘I have a crush on this guy’ to ‘This is what happened when I was 5 years old.’ I began to talk more with my dad and ask a lot of questions.”

There were other adults who helped. A teacher, Carol Wanamaker, reinforced Renae Arnold’s faith in God by talking with her after class. During high school, a friend’s mother, M.J. Busse, became her surrogate mom.

“My dad encouraged it. My stepmom encouraged it. She was sad she and I didn’t have a relationship like that, but she knew I needed a mom.”

Busse marveled at the relationship.

“She’ll spend the night or a weekend. Or she’ll come over early in the morning and have breakfast. It’s kind of like I have two kids. It really is.”

Renae Arnold thinks God has a plan for her. She wants to teach at middle school where she hopes to help kids like herself.

‘He focused on me’

Dennis Moeckel got beat up by the Ghost Town Crips when he was a high school sophomore. He was proud of his broken nose and busted ribs. The beating meant he belonged to the gang.

The initiation occurred in Window Rock, Ariz., the capital of the Navajo Nation. A new student from Los Angeles had imported his Crips ties to Moeckel’s reservation school, which already teemed with gang hopefuls.

Moeckel already led a double life. He stole televisions and stereos, sold marijuana, got into fights. Meanwhile, he did well enough in school to play sports, enjoying a reputation as an athlete.

After joining the Crips, Moeckel traveled with his new friends to Phoenix or Albuquerque “to party and fight.” Sometimes they made a 10-hour drive to Los Angeles to see friends and get more drugs.

Teachers, his parents and his counselor never knew how deeply involved he was.

“He may have looked on himself as being rebellious and to an extent he was,” said his Window Rock High School counselor Alton Thornton. “I never looked on him as being one of the bad ones of the class.”

Belonging to a gang was a matter of survival, Moeckel said. “If you weren’t, you’d get your butt kicked. You wouldn’t have no backup.”

Moeckel’s turnaround began when he dated a preacher’s daughter and followed her to church. The message of redemption resonated with him. In the summer of 1993, he joined an evangelist’s tour of Southwest Indian reservations.

Ron Hutchcraft Ministries’ Make a Difference tour cruised into reservation towns and set up a slam-dunk contest. The catch: Contestants would have to stay to hear the sermon before they got their prizes.

On the tour, Moeckel played basketball, performed rap music and publicly told how Jesus Christ changed his life. His gang status gave his story power among reservation teenagers.

Moeckel felt so completely changed he asked people on the tour to call him Sonshine, a name that to him symbolized the light of God’s son.

Hutchcraft saw talent in him.

“He focused on me for some reason,” Moeckel said.

When school resumed in the fall of 1993, Moeckel fell back in with his gang friends. His grades slipped. He skipped school to avoid gang rivals.

In the summer of 1994, Moeckel joined the evangelist’s organization again, this time on a tour of Northwest Indian reservations. During the tour, he decided he couldn’t go back to Arizona.

“I realized I couldn’t try to serve God and be affiliated with a gang,” he said. “I started praying, asking God what I needed to do and to help me find a place to stay.”

The tour stopped in Spokane where Moeckel met Jeff Doud, pastor of an Indian congregation, and his wife, JoAnn. Moeckel sang a duet with the Douds’ daughter, Nikki, during a church service.

Nikki Doud gave Moeckel her telephone number before the tour left town.

In a series of long-distance calls, Moeckel told the girl his problem. She asked her parents if he could live with them.

The Douds already were helping other teenagers trying to escape from gangs. They agreed to take Moeckel. After the tour, Moeckel went home, picked up some clothing and his guitar and flew to Spokane.

He enrolled at Jantsch High School, a Spokane School District alternative school, and graduated this year. He stocks shelves at Kmart and shares an apartment with a young man he met at church.

Moeckel, called Sonny by his friends, writes songs and wants to record Christian music. He may get the chance to go to college.

At the recent gang summit held by area churches, he met Whitworth College Professor Don Liebert and Dean of Chapel Terry McGonigal.

Liebert and McGonigal were impressed. They are raising money to allow Moeckel and another reformed gang member, Shawn Revious, to take courses with them during the January term at Whitworth.

Moeckel credited God and a host of human angels for helping him change.

“It was the people who really focused on me, who concentrated and paid attention and loved me,” he said. “The people who saw something in me.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos