A Gift from Heartache

Family tragedy inspires woman, son to help homeless

(December 16, 2005) - - They used to pray together, their heads bent down, eyes squeezed shut.

In unison, they would recite the Lord's Prayer. "Our father which art in heaven. ..."

When they were finished, Phillip Pruitt would kiss his son on the cheek and pull the covers snugly around him.

For five years, they hardly ever missed a night.

People used to say they were like playmates.

Big Phillip and Little Phillip. Father and son.

They would spend hours building giant castles out of Legos or constructing Thomas the Tank trains.

They went everywhere together. Phillip was a construction engineer and would take his son to work sites around Dallas and Fort Worth.

At home, they would scrunch next to each other on the couch and read books. They ate dinner together and studied the Bible.

They were, by all accounts, inseparable.

Fatherhood had changed Phillip. It made him whole.

Late in 2001, Cyndi Bunch began noticing gradual changes in her husband, Phillip.

He would mutter and swear to himself. Cyndi sometimes walked into the living room and found him in the middle of a heated conversation with himself.

Then, he claimed bad guys were following him. The phones were tapped, he warned his wife. Their family, he said, was in terrible danger.

Cyndi didn't know what to think. She worried her husband was on drugs.

She tried to keep Little Phillip from finding out. But things got worse.

First, her husband would disappear for a few hours with no explanation. His paranoia and scatterbrained behavior escalated. She found out he hadn't been showing up at his job as a construction engineer.

Then one morning, he left home. He was gone for days. No phone calls. No contact.

Little Phillip knew something was wrong.

"What do you tell a 5-year-old boy?" Cyndi asked her friends. "What can I say?"

Daddy would come home and then disappear again.

Late at night, Cyndi and Little Phillip would drive around, looking for Daddy and shouting his name out the car windows.

They rarely found him.

Occasionally, they spotted him in abandoned parking lots or at the side of the road or sitting by himself on a curb in downtown Fort Worth.

"Where have you been?" Cyndi would ask, trying to keep her voice level. But Phillip never answered.

A police officer came by one afternoon in 2002.

Cyndi wasn't home, so the officer asked a neighbor questions about Phillip and Cyndi.

Who are they? What do they do? Where do they work? How long have they lived here?

That evening, Cyndi called the officer.

"We're looking for Phillip," she recalled the officer telling her. "We can't say a whole lot, but we think he was involved in an armed robbery."

Cyndi couldn't speak. She realized now that her husband was sick.

His brother had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and she now feared the illness was taking Phillip.

The police eventually arrested Phillip. She tried explaining the situation to lawyers, she said, but most seemed uninterested in the mental illness. They told her they would focus on that later.

Phillip, meanwhile, remained in jail.

Every day, Cyndi says, he got worse. Schizophrenia ate away his mind and body.

They began a cycle. She would bail him out of jail, and he would come home. Days later, the police would arrest him for something else.

One night at home, he walked into the living room with a knife.

Without saying a word, he cut off the state-required tracking device from his ankle.

"I'm going for a walk," he said, casually.

The next day, the police came back.

The idea came to Little Phillip one night last December. He worried about Daddy all the time. Was he safe? Was he happy? Would they ever see each other again?

And then, she recalled, he asked his mom a question that had been bothering him.

"Mommy," he said. "Are you warm?" "Yes, baby," she remembers telling him. "I'm warm."

"Is Daddy warm?" he asked. She said yes.

And then the 7-year-old boy asked about everyone else -- the people on the street, in the shelters, the people he had seen when they drove around looking for Daddy. Cyndi said she told him the truth: "No, not everyone is warm."

Little Phillip knew what they had to do. They would collect blankets. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. And give them to every homeless person they found.

So this time last year, Cyndi made fliers that told their story of mental illness. Churches and businesses donated blankets. In the end, they collected more than 200 in less than one month.

This year, they set the goal higher -- 5,000. "The homeless population keeps getting bigger and bigger," Cyndi said. "We have to do something."

Cyndi says this is no longer just about her family.

"People don't want to be on the street," she says. "Most of them have mental illness. They have no choice."

Market Street in Colleyville, where Cyndi works, has become a sort of command center, with people dropping off blankets daily.

High schools around Northeast Tarrant County are competing to collect the most blankets. And many businesses are helping out.

"It's such a good cause, and you can actually see people receiving the help," said Kelly Roach, whose Colleyville insurance business is helping with collections.

So far, they have collected about 3,600 blankets and have distributed about 1,100 of them, Cyndi said Thursday. They will keep going until they reach 5,000.

When the winter storm pushed into Fort Worth earlier his month, Cyndi handed out blankets at the Presbyterian Night Shelter. The shelter had donated its blanket supply to hurricane relief efforts and was worried about people freezing.

"This is a huge help," said John Suggs, executive director.

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Tainisha Drew and her 2-year-old daughter, Tasha, huddled under two donated blankets, trying to keep warm. "This," Drew said, "is a blessing."

Little Phillip sometimes asks about his Daddy, who is now 31 years old and lives at the infirmary at the Tarrant County Jail after spending some time in state mental hospitals. He is still sick, Cyndi says, and he looks nothing like the man she met 12 years ago.

Cyndi tries to explain to her son about mental illness and schizophrenia, but it's hard. "It's so unfair to him," Cyndi says. "He deserves to have his father here." Every night at bedtime, Cyndi tucks her son in and kisses him. "Say a prayer for Daddy," she tells him.

Little Phillip never misses a night.

By SARAH BAHARISTAR

Last updated: 12/05

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