At 10, a life on the run

He feared a spanking and ran away, sleeping in a vacant house and a pickup truck and eating oranges. Now he's back with his grandmother.	[Times photo: Scott Keeler] Grandmother Rushie Thomas says she wants to find a role model for her grandson, Schralton "Buster" Ashley.

By SHARON TUBBS

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 26, 2000

LARGO -- Schralton "Buster" Ashley heard the footsteps. He scrunched his 4-foot-11 frame deep into the cab of the broken-down pickup.

The 10-year-old was 15 pounds lighter after a month on the run. His fingers were pricked by thorns from a nearby citrus tree, his only source of food.

Since Christmas Day, when his grandmother accused him of stealing a battery to power a new toy, Buster had run from this moment:

He was about to go home.

"I was scared stiff," Buster said.

For 30 days until he was found Monday, Buster lived alone in a vacant house and the truck in Ridgecrest, a working-class neighborhood where church steeples and crack houses stare each other down. During the day, he picked oranges for food and talked to himself for company. At night, he slept with a hammer by his side.

Experts said Buster's was the most unusual runaway case in memory.

"I've never heard of, in my 20 years of experience in this work, this situation of age and survival alone," said Jack Levine, president of the Center for Florida's Children, a statewide advocacy group in Tallahassee. "Never."

The search for Buster was discreet, yielding few headlines. The Sheriff's Office didn't alert the media to the boy's disappearance until three weeks after he was gone. Deputies said Buster had a history of running away; they never doubted he was somewhere in Ridgecrest. "Street smart," they called him.

In fact, Buster's life has been far different than those of most little boys who play basketball after school and ride their bikes along Ridgecrest's narrow streets. In a single decade, Buster has seen more turmoil than most people see in a lifetime.

The child was running from more than a 9-volt battery, or the spanking he was promised for stealing one.

Fire 'wrecked me bad'

It was the summer of 1996, and Buster and one of his brothers were trying to break down the door to his parents' Jacksonville bedroom. Smoke billowed from the room. His mother and father were screaming.

Buster, then not quite 7, got in. Smoke rose from his mother's arms, chest and forehead. She was swinging a baseball bat at his Dad. "Daddy's fists are swinging," he says today, the memory still fresh.

Buster helped get the fire extinguisher to douse the blaze and his mother's burning skin.

His father, Columbus "Ricky" Ashley, had come home sloppy drunk and raving. He had walked to Buster's mom, Regina Bradley, who was in bed, and doused her with alcohol. Ashley struck a match and threw it on her.

"That's what kind of wrecked me bad right there," he says, nearly four years later. "That's the worst thing I seen my Daddy do."

A few days after the fire, Buster's grandmother, Rushie Thomas, came to the rescue. Buster barely knew his mother's mother, having seen her only once when he was 3.

An electric cord caught the bed on fire, Ashley told Thomas, holding out his own arms to prove that he, too, had been burned. Instead of taking Bradley to a hospital, Ashley had treated the wounds with peroxide and a bleach solution, Thomas remembers.

Thomas, a determined woman who raised five of her own children alone, took her daughter aside. "The only way I'm going to help you is if you go back home with me," Thomas recalls telling her.

Bradley agreed.

She clung to the electric cord story. But Buster didn't keep the secret.

The boy told a sheriff's deputy what had happened, and authorities in Jacksonville filed charges. Ashley pleaded guilty to attempted murder and spent two years and 10 months in prison before being released in December. He could not be reached for this article.

Buster says he doesn't miss the beatings he says his father used to administer with a braided TV extension cord, or the sight of his Dad straggling home after yet another night out.

But his father used to take Buster fishing. Dad would catch a big grouper, Buster says.

Father and son haven't spoken in three years. Thomas shakes her head when she thinks of the circumstances that led Buster to snitch on his own father.

Her daughter "never told anybody the truth about it," Thomas says. "That little boy had to tell what happened."

Grandma's rules

Life at Grandma's house was a world away from what Buster knew in Jacksonville. Here, it was a bath and bedtime by 9 p.m. He couldn't stay up late watching Cartoon Network. Sundays, Buster and his little sister, Dominique, sat in a pew at Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church with Grandma.

Buster's mother didn't fit in with the new regime. Bradley couldn't keep a job, and she and Grandma didn't get along. So Bradley left, but Grandma let Buster and Dominique stay a while.

After several months of living with relatives, Buster's mother got her own place in 1997, an apartment in the public housing complex just blocks away. Buster and Dominique lived there for the next two years.

By all accounts, it was a stormy period. Buster ran away several times.

"Buster is stubborn," his mother says, flicking the ashes from her cigarette outside the coin laundry where she now works.

She said she hasn't a clue why Buster ran.

"See, he's a pro at this," Bradley says. "I don't know where he gets it from."

She took care of him the best she could, she said.

She's tired of being judged -- by her mother, her brothers, her sisters and the case workers from the Department of Children and Families, who investigated eight child abuse and neglect complaints concerning Buster and Dominique since 1995.

Her family has accused her of being a pitiful role model and a drug addict. "I don't do drugs," she says. "I drink like a fish on occasion -- Schlitz Malt Liquor is my beer."

Buster says he noticed the drinking.

"The only time we'd usually have fun is when she'd get drunk," Buster says. "Every day, we'd wait until she was drunk and we'd be having us some fun."

Buster also remembers the presence of "Auntie," a woman who lived with them on and off.

One day, his mother sat him and Dominique down to tell them about Auntie, who wasn't a relative -- she was Bradley's lover.

"She said, "Y'all mind if I be gay?' " Buster recalls.

Bradley says, "I sat them down one day and told them. I said, "Y'all might not like it, but me and Auntie like each other.' "

After being burned three years ago, Bradley says, "I don't want that masculine control over me."

Buster says he "didn't like my mom being a lesbian."

But, "that's her business," he says now.

Buster prefers to think of the good times: the big bowls of spaghetti his mother used to make for him, the TV he had in his room.

It all ended last August, when the family got evicted for non-payment of rent.

To hear Buster's grandmother tell it, Buster and Dominique were dropped off on her doorstep with only the clothes on their backs. Buster's shoes had holes in them and his sister's were too little, Thomas says.

A few months later, a judge gave Buster's grandmother custody of him and his sister. They've seen their mother only sporadically since that day in August. "She abandoned them," Buster's grandmother says.

Bradley says she was ashamed to be around her children. That's why she hardly visited.

"I had let them down," Bradley says. "I didn't have nowhere to stay."

So, for Buster, it was back to grandma's house -- and grandma's rules.

Running away

Buster opened up his presents Christmas morning. He got clothes, a Nintendo player, a mini car set, a radio with headphones and a fire-red, remote-control car that needed a battery.

His grandmother thinks he stole a battery from his cousin. Buster says the cousin loaned it to him. His grandmother, disabled with a back injury and severe arthritis, spanked him. Then she promised that his uncle would spank him later.

That, Buster said, scared him.

He bolted for the bathroom, locked himself in and jumped out the window. He ran just a few blocks away to an empty house, pushed up the back window and made it his home.

Last Friday, Buster was caught as he slept on a mattress by the house owner, Doodnauth Pokhan.

"He had a hammer beside him where he was sleeping," Pokhan said.

But when Pokhan went to call police, Buster bolted again -- to an old truck in a nearby yard. The truck owner found him curled up on the front seat Monday.

Buster trembled and cried all the way to Largo Medical Center, where he was examined and released.

Buster says he has moved on, that he's looking forward to his first day at a new school, Starkey Elementary, today. He's thinking about playing football again and hoping to see his Dad one day soon.

At Starkey, teachers are preparing to help the fourth-grader, who is three weeks behind schedule. His grandmother wants to find someone -- some upstanding man, perhaps -- who can be a good role model for the boy. And the pundits are adding Buster's name to a list of statistics.

"For many many thousands of children," Levine, of the advocacy group, says, "their well-being ... requires them to take unusual or even extraordinary action. We hve so many children who do not have storybook lives."

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