Commentary
System lets disabled man down

By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer

Hazel Johnson called the newsroom in a panic.

She was frantic. She couldn't find her 20-year-old son.

He wasn't a runaway or a rebellious college kid.

He is developmentally disabled, someone who needs to be told when to eat and when to go to bed. Someone who can't take the bus home on his own. Someone who has trouble remembering his phone number.

Reginald "Hoku" Johnson Jr. earned his certificate of completion from Wai'anae High School this year, but he never learned survival skills. And maybe that's the sad thing.

Or maybe what's sadder is that when he was arrested last week after walking out of a Waikiki restaurant without paying for lunch, authorities released him to the street without trying to call his family or a case worker.

No one seemed to notice that he was disabled and had the mental capacity of someone half his age or that he needed help. Or maybe they were too busy to care.

Hazel Johnson called the newspaper because she didn't know where to turn.

She had no idea where her son had gone, and the Makaha woman was unaware of any social-service agencies that could help.

So she filed a missing person's report and looked everywhere she could think of to find him. After she discovered his brush with the law for skipping out of a restaurant, she was told he might have a court hearing. She took the bus to the courthouse, only to learn that she was too late. He had pleaded no contest to fourth-degree theft and already had been released.

For four days, he wandered the streets, and for four days, Hazel Johnson worried.

He turned up on Saturday after running into acquaintances in Waikiki. His mother considers his return home nothing short of a miracle.

The sad thing is that his mother is the only one shocked that this could happen.

"As much as it might seem to be just one case, our agency sees this as typical," said Howard Lesser, an advocate for the Hawaii Disability Rights Center, a private nonprofit organization that pushes for the rights of people with disabilities.

"It's like a web," said Leslye Sneider, development director at Helping Hands Hawaii, the woman who tried to sort out his case. "The fundamental thing is that the judicial system should never have let him go on his own. But this happens all the time."

The saddest thing of all is that a bureaucratic system that was blind to Hoku Johnson's problems will let the same thing happen again to someone else.

Staff writer Tanya Bricking can be reached at 525-8026 or at tbricking@honoluluadvertiser.com. Columnist Lee Cataluna is on vacation.