After having been released from jail earlier this year, 23 year-old student Adrian Burt found himself sleeping in a baseball dugout at Heartwell Park with a blanket and a phone as his only possessions.
He had lost everything, including his car, home and job. The people he thought would be there for him knew that he was homeless, but did not respond to him when he reached out for help.
“I can’t blame them,” Burt said. “I was drinking and using drugs like meth, which made me act out and led me to get arrested.”
Burt had been no stranger to homelessness before this point. He had been on his own since the age of 17, and his entire life he had been used to dealing with hardship.
“One day I was walking around Downtown Long Beach and I saw a resource fair. I saw the LBCC tent and was just trying to see if they were giving out anything for free. That’s when I met Jose Ibarra.”
Jose Ibarra is the director of the Phoenix Scholars program at LBCC. This program intends to help gang-impacted individuals go to college and provide them resources for academic, financial, and emotional support. After talking for a while, Ibarra suggested Burt go to college.
Burt had declined Ibarra’s invitation to college at first, but was the perfect candidate for the Phoenix scholars program. Growing up in Riverside, Burt had lived in the shadows of gangs.
His father was in the Mexican Mafia and had landed himself in prison for murder. His father then killed himself in his cell when Burt was only 3-years-old.
Growing up without a father affected Burt. He recalled a memory of when he began doing his own research online to find out more about who he was. Through social media, he found one of his father’s old friends from high school.
“The woman who was friends with my dad sent me an article about him,” Burt said. “I remember her telling me ‘read this and understand what you’re getting into if you really want to know about your dad.’ ”
While reading through the horrors of what his father and other Mexican Mafia members did in the article, Burt discovered he had half-siblings: two older brothers and a sister. He typed his siblings’ name into Facebook’s search bar, and called them once he found out who they were.
Burt’s siblings had followed their father’s footsteps in joining gangs. Burt recalled a moment when a car drove slowly past him as he conversed with his half-siblings outside their house. The hairs on the back of his neck raised as the car circled back around the block. The people in the car fired gunshots at them, then sped off.
“That day didn’t change me wanting to meet my brothers and sister,” Burt said, “but I realized that was the path they took. I don’t want to be impacted by that lifestyle, but I am and I always will be. After that day I was like, OK, I have another vision for myself. I’m not a perfect person but I don’t want to have a bad life.”
After that interaction, Burt had made it his focus to work on his academics and play football in high school, but trouble was brewing at home. His mother made herself a reputation for partying and leaving him and his younger siblings home alone while also dating abusive men.
“One day in high school, I came home from football practice and my mom was getting hit by her boyfriend. She was pregnant, so I hit him and ended up breaking his jaw,” Burt said. “I thought I was protecting her. I thought she was going to kick him out, but she ended up kicking me out instead. I was 17. That was the first time I was really homeless.”
Burt’s grades started to falter after that. He was top 30 in the state of California in 2016 for football and even had a scholarship waiting for him to play at UC Berkeley, but they required a 3.0 GPA. After Burt had gotten kicked out, his high school GPA fell just shy beneath that at a 2.8.
While other high school students were worried about what to wear for prom and whether they’d get accepted into universities, Burt was worried about finding a place to sleep at night. He slept on multiple friend’s couches until the school year was over.
“Once I graduated that school, there wasn’t a place for me to go anymore. That free food and somewhere to spend time during the day, that was gone. I fell in with the wrong people after that and got into drugs after high school,” Burt said.
At 19, Burt had started using meth and was drinking, but after a few years of being involved with a bad crowd, he wanted to try to get his life together again. He moved to Long Beach to live with grandparents to get sober and start over. But he soon began feeling the withdrawals from the drugs and partying he used to do.
“I thought everything would get better when I got to my grandparent’s house, but I was in a dark place. I was depressed. I was trying to stay clean, but I ended up getting really drunk one night and I got really aggressive. That’s when I got arrested,” Burt said.
“I was a different person when I was on drugs, and my friends and family saw that side of me. After jail I came out with a growth mindset, but I understood that I did people wrong and I needed to show them that I was doing better. I knew that was going to take time,” Burt said.
So although Burt had initially declined Ibarra’s offer to go to college and enroll in the Pheonix Scholars program, he thought about their conversation as he went back to his car to sleep for the night.
He figured maybe going to college could be a way to better himself. He felt he had nothing better to do, and it was hard trying to find a job in his situation.
A few days later, he went over to the Liberal Arts Campus to check it out and ran into Ibarra again, who then helped enroll him into school.
“Phoenix scholars guided me in the right direction and helped me stay in college,” Burt said. “If I didn’t come here, I don’t know where I’d be. I’d probably turn into one of those druggies on the street. I was close to relapsing, like going back to drugs but I didn’t.”
“I’ve seen him grow confidence in himself and own his life since I’ve met him,” Ibarra said. “He has a way of using the narrative of his life to empower himself and empower others. He overcomes all barriers, and still manages to show up for himself.”
The Phoenix Scholars program was able to connect Burt with Jovenes, one of LBCC’s housing programs. He now lives in an apartment building with four other students and studies welding technology full time.
“I made a promise to myself that I’m gonna do this,” Burt said. “I’ve achieved a lot these past couple of months. My whole mindset going into school was that I’m going to be homeless for two years and tough it out, but I can come out of this. I always have.”