With a little help, a diploma

Jerry Martinez started out just wanting to know more about the young man who was dating his daughter Sabrina.

Since then, he's been changing DeAndre Sturgeon's life.

“When I heard his story, I couldn't give up on him,” said Martinez, 45, of Bellevue.

World-Herald readers learned about DeAndre last year when he was featured in a series on Omaha's dropout problem.

After years of family neglect and truancy, including 70 days missed during seventh grade, DeAndre struggled in school. Eventually he was placed in foster care and started to make progress at Westside High School.

But he still fell short of graduating.

When Martinez met DeAndre earlier this year, the 20-year-old had been drifting for more than a year, with no high school diploma, no job and no idea how to turn things around.

In fact, DeAndre felt as though he was going backward.

But that wasn't the end of his story. And the latest chapter contains a powerful lesson about what caring individuals can do to help restore damaged lives.

“Thank God I met Sabrina and then him,” DeAndre said of Martinez.

DeAndre and Sabrina, who just turned 18 and graduated last month from Bellevue West, started dating in February. They worried about telling her parents, anticipating the obvious questions and answers.

Does he have a job? No. Did he graduate from high school? No.

“I didn't want them to think I was a bad guy,” DeAndre said.

Martinez said he initially had some qualms.

But he liked the soft-spoken, respectful youth. And as he learned more about DeAndre and his tough life, Martinez felt something more: an obligation to take him under his wing.

“It astonished me that people gave up on him in life,” he recalled. “Somebody like him needs a chance.”

So when DeAndre's mother wanted him to move out of her apartment, Martinez invited him to move in.

When Martinez discovered that DeAndre had no identification papers, he tracked down the youth's birth records in Kansas City and helped him obtain a Social Security number and state ID card.

And when he realized that DeAndre had met all of Westside's graduation requirements except for 80 hours of community service, Martinez went to work on that, too.

He found DeAndre a volunteer job at the Sarpy County Courthouse, picking up trash, washing windows and doing landscaping work. He made sure DeAndre got up every morning. He drove DeAndre to and from his four-hour shift, every day — for nearly a month.

DeAndre willingly did the work, something he had failed to do in the spring of 2009, when Westside teachers and others tried to prod him to complete his service requirement. He was lazy, he admits now.

“He's just the kind of kid that needs some support,” said Rick McKeever, a Westside teacher who was left with “an empty feeling” when DeAndre failed to graduate. “He has a hard time taking initiative.”

DeAndre turned in his community service hours last month. He wasn't going to be part of the school's commencement ceremony, but someone found a cap and gown for him to put on.

Martinez even found the money to pay $371 in Westside fines and fees dating back to 2005 so DeAndre could get his diploma. It was a financial burden, since the former insurance claims adjuster has been unemployed since his company closed in December, but he couldn't bear to let DeAndre go without his diploma.

Martinez was willing to do all that partly because DeAndre's story reminded him of his own youth. Martinez's life wasn't as hard as DeAndre's, but he said his mother sent him from their home in New Mexico to live with Nebraska relatives during high school.

“I was a lost soul,” Martinez said. “I felt like no one loved me.”

After Martinez graduated from Bellevue East in 1982, his girlfriend's family took him in for a few months, just before he joined the Navy. He later married that girlfriend, Kim Monnier. They will celebrate their 25th anniversary this month.

Now it's Martinez who is in a position to offer a place to live, as well as the structure, support and sense of family that DeAndre has lacked.

Martinez remembers reading The World-Herald article about DeAndre last May. But he didn't draw the connection to the young man he was helping until he saw a copy of the story last week.

Now DeAndre has a job. He's thinking about enlisting in the Air Force. And he has told Martinez he intends to repay the $371 in school fines.

DeAndre worried about how he would fit in with Sabrina's parents. But he impressed them right away by taking out the trash without being asked and by helping with the laundry.

In turn, DeAndre was impressed when Martinez took him to Memorial Stadium for the Huskers' spring game.

DeAndre said he has never had anyone he considered his father. He and his brothers lived with one family for several years, but even then, he typically called his foster father by his first name.

But this is what DeAndre calls Jerry Martinez:

“Pops.”

Contact the writer:

444-1114, paul.goodsell@owh.com

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