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Faces of hope in tent city

By ALISA ULFERTS
Published January 12, 2007

	Tina May, 32, holds a flashlight up to a piece of pizza held by Nygee Shabazz on Wednesday night in the tent city after several boxes of pizza were left by an anonymous donor.
[Times photo: Lara Cerri]

ADVERTISEMENT [Times photo: Lara Cerri] Jessica Tennyson was on Social Security disability, but the checks stopped coming two months ago and officials have frozen her account to investigate. [Times photo: Lara Cerri] Casey Schnabel and Bryan Pennington kiss and make up after an argument Tuesday. They came to Florida from Ohio, but a plan to join Pennington's dad in Ocala didn't work out. They wound up in St. Petersburg and are looking for work. [Times photo: Lara Cerri] Ann Rozelle checks out a stack of donated clothing at the tent city Tuesday. Rozelle moved to Florida from Muncie, Ind. in 1987.

They came from different backgrounds, different generations and with different problems. But for two weeks, the men and women in the tent city on St. Petersburg's Fourth Avenue N have been a community, warts and all. Some have boarded buses, others are talking to potential landlords and some just linger outside the nearby soup kitchen. The deadline to leave is noon today.

*   *   *

Ann Rozelle, 47

Ann Rozelle's second husband was the first man to hit her. That was more than 20 years ago, in Indiana, before she made the drive to Florida with an old high school pal.

Rozelle's boyfriend was the last man to hit her. That was on Christmas Eve, after beer turned to whiskey turned to vodka, and she says he took off his belt and whipped her in the face with its buckle.

"I had to wait until he passed out at 5:30 in the morning to leave," said Rozelle, 47.

She came to the tent city.

In the two decades bookended by those two men, Rozelle drifted from relationship to abusive relationship. She's been arrested for drug use and solicitation.

She has talked to social workers about joining a support group or getting therapy. She thinks it'll help her spot the patterns of abuse earlier, before she falls in love.

She's begun a relationship with a fellow resident of the tent city, and they talk of getting an apartment together, using a county rent voucher. Sometimes, Rozelle leans in to whisper, he says unkind things to her. Her eyes show the hurt, yet she says she'll stay: "I have feelings for him."

Bryan Pennington and Casey Schnabel, both 28

Nighttime, when temperatures dip and tempers rise, is when hang-in-there-baby and we'll-get-through-this-together lose their power. He pleads. She cries.

She wants a bed. She wants a shower. She wants to wake up from this nightmare. Homeless? How did this happen?

The plan was to leave the cold of Ohio, join his dad in Ocala and find work. Bryan Pennington, 28, says he has an associate's degree, and Casey Schnabel, also 28, says she's certified in surgical instrument sterilization. But things didn't work out. His dad has a new family now, Pennington says, and he and Schnabel felt they were in the way.

They stayed in hotels for a while, sold the car to pay for them. They couldn't find work in Ocala, so they came to St. Pete with a guy in a van who said he was headed this way.

Pennington works food service day labor when he can. But he doesn't like to leave Schnabel alone at night, when restaurants most need the extra help. Using county rent vouchers, they hope to get an apartment soon.

"We just got stuck here, and it's hard to get by on $50 a day," Pennington said.

Jessica Tennyson, 20

Watching Jessica Tennyson sweep out her tent, it's hard to imagine she could lose anything. Slowly, meticulously, she slides the broom bristles across the lip of the dustpan. Back and forth, she strains to get every grain of sand, every sliver of grass.

But she did lose something: her Social Security disability check. Two months running the checks have failed to come, and now she says the government has put a freeze on her account until it can determine if the checks were stolen and cashed.

Without those checks, Tennyson couldn't make rent. She ended up at the tent city.

Tennyson, 20, is no stranger to moving. She says she and her siblings grew up in Florida foster care. Her siblings eventually were adopted. Tennyson was not. She has bipolar disorder, which made her "unruly." She lost count of the number of foster homes she lived in, but puts the ballpark at 100.

She says her own daughter, who turns 2 in March, is in foster care.

And the county mobile medical unit, which has tended the residents of tent city, has told her she's pregnant again. She smiles when she says this and shakes her bottle of prenatal vitamins like a baby's rattle. She may qualify for space in a women's shelter.

"I don't want to be on the streets."

Nygee Shabazz

Nygee Shabazz doesn't mind the conditions at tent city.

"When you've been locked up for 22 years, you like to sleep outside," said Shabazz, whose legal name is Stanley Otis Bass.

Plus, he's got a pretty sweet tent: a two-room Winnebago that can sleep four, maybe five. The Newark, N.J., native was staying with a brother in St. Petersburg, but he didn't like his brother's rules regarding women and drink.

Shabazz, 45, doesn't like to be confined. He says he's spent a total of two decades in New Jersey, New York and Florida jails and prisons. He doesn't give details - records show some drug charges - but says he was involved in a shooting. He lifts his shirt, lowers his waistband and hikes up his cuff to show bullet scars on his leg, arm and abdomen.

And then there are the tattoos: maybe a half dozen and they bear the bluish-gray color and thick, imprecise lines typical of jailhouse body art. Shabazz says he has one tattoo from each stint in prison.

"You know how you wear a visitor's badge when you go somewhere? These are my visitor's badges."

Tent city may leave its mark, too. It was here, among the people he says he prays over each night, where he was inspired to sign up for anger management counseling.

When the site shuts down at noon today, if he can't get a rent voucher and find an apartment, Shabazz says, he'll just pack up his tent and pitch it somewhere else. "When I'm tired of that, I can go back to my brother."

Times researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report.

[Last modified February 8, 2007, 11:22:40]