DREAMS OF NORMAL LIFE SHATTERED BY WOMAN'S DEADLY ADDICTION

Her name was Olivia.

The waif of a girl found dead beneath the Main Street overpass last week
was named Olivia Dawn Roberts. She was 26. And she was a crack addict.

Her death, like her life, could have gone unnoticed. But attempts to learn
who she was and why she died expose a side of life in Houma that few know
or even think exists.

Olivia, whom friends speculate was on the downside of a days-long drug
binge, walked underneath the bridge Jan. 4, sat down and went to sleep. She
never woke up.

A passerby, who told police he spotted Olivia sitting in a concrete cavern
under the bridge as he walked near Leona Street, found her partially
clothed body that afternoon.

He called out to her and, when she didn't answer, climbed under the bridge
to discover that a hard life made even more difficult by bad decisions had
come to a tragic end.

Surrounded by crumpled beer cans and crushed cigarette butts, lulled by the
rumble of cars driving overhead toward the "normal" life she had dreamed of
- - Roberts froze to death as temperatures dipped into the mid-20s.

Days passed before police released her name, a delay caused not because
they did not know who she was but because they had trouble finding the
family she had walked out on years before.

'AN ABUSIVE HOUSEHOLD'

Olivia's parents, Harold and Francine, married following a surprise
pregnancy that resulted in a daughter named Tina. Harold Roberts was 18,
his bride 15.

Their marriage was almost certain to fail, based on their ages and the
circumstances that led to their union, but it lasted long enough to produce
Olivia - born four years after her older sister and a little more than a
year before her parents split.

Harold moved away and had little contact with his daughters after the
divorce, family members said. Francine moved away from Miami, too, settling
in a rural area outside Ocala, Fla., with Olivia and her second husband.
Tina stayed behind with her "mema."

"I practically raised Tina until she was 15," said Estellene Roberts,
Olivia's paternal grandmother, who remains in Miami. "But her mother took
Olivia away from us."

It was hard, the 70-year-old grandmother of 11 said, not knowing where the
little girl was or if she was OK.

"She did not have a good life at home," Estellene Roberts said. Francine's
new husband "was drinking, and he was abusive. Her too - the mother did the
same thing."

It was a rocky marriage, said Jessica Brothers, the oldest of three
children born of that union. She recalled a loving childhood sometimes
punctuated with drunken fights between her mother and the man who raised
Olivia from the time she was 2.

"It was an abusive household," she said quietly. "They would beat each
other. They would get drunk."

ON THE RUN

Brothers, 22, insists that while her parents' bitter fights sometimes left
her mother bruised and battered, neither she nor her siblings were abused.

As the years passed, good times mingled with bad, and the family grew.
There were three of them now. Olivia, born of Francine's first marriage.
Jessica and Matthew, born of the second.

Olivia was 15 when the children were taken from their parents and sent to
separate foster homes.

"That's what started it," Brothers said. "Olivia ran away repeatedly."

Beginning a years-long spiral, Olivia dropped out of school. Pregnant and
unmarried, knowing she was not ready to be a mother or able to provide for
a child, she put her baby boy up for adoption the day he was born.

"It was the most unselfish thing a person could do," Brothers said. "He's 9
now, and he's being brought up in a way-better lifestyle than she could
provide for him."

'LOST IN THE SYSTEM'

Olivia gave birth to her son the same year her brother Austin was born.
Austin, too, was put up for adoption, but in a far different way.

Brothers said she learned about it as she drove a stretch of Florida
interstate and saw her baby brother's picture on a billboard. The state,
wanting to place Austin in a permanent home, advertised his availability
for adoption. Brothers was stunned.

She's still not sure what became of him.

"He was lost in the system," she said. "Hopefully he's with a family that
can take care of him. Maybe he's on a baseball team."

The broken family tried to stay in touch, and the sisters, especially,
clung to each other. Tina was living in south Louisiana by then, drawn by a
man she was involved with, and both Olivia and Brothers moved in with her.

Brothers, then around 14, said her stay was shortened after Florida
authorities insisted she return to their jurisdiction because of her age.

But 17-year-old Olivia stayed, somehow making her way to Houma.

'NIGHT ZOMBIES'

No one is sure when Olivia first showed up on Houma's streets. The people
with whom she shared her lifestyle said Olivia had been one of them for a
long time.

"She was one of the night zombies," said a woman named Michelle, whose
friendship with Olivia grew from their shared drug addiction. "She was one
of the lost souls of Park Street."

Though Olivia was never arrested in Terrebonne Parish for prostitution, her
friends said she routinely exchanged sex for drugs - or money to buy them -
and served time elsewhere for the crime.

In Houma, she was convicted of several crimes, court records show. She got
six months in jail for stealing a car in 1995 but was released early after
the sentence was suspended.

A drug charge three years later ended the same way. Overcrowding kept her
out of jail a month later following an arrest for theft and possession of
crack cocaine.

Time after time, Olivia landed behind bars only to be released. Her legal
problems continued until her death.

Friends said when she hit the streets, she went looking for the drugs that
made her life bearable and would do anything to get the high she so
desperately craved.

'CRACK HAD THE BEST OF HER'

"Crack had the best of her," said Debra Favre, a self-admitted former crack
addict who befriended Olivia about three years ago. "She couldn't shake the
demons."

The jail sentences grew from days to months, and, when she did gain her
freedom, she was tethered by the conditions of her parole.

Long used to living life her way, Olivia could not follow the rules spelled
out by her probation officer any more than she could the laws that landed
her in trouble to begin with. Her parole was rescinded, and she was sent to
prison.

She wanted out, she told Favre in letters filled with promises to change
and frantic appeals for help. Tell my parole officer you will help me,
Olivia begged the woman she called "Aunt Debbie" and her only friend. Help
me get into a program. Help me get off drugs.

A deal was struck, and Olivia, who seemed determined to make good on her
promise, was released to seek treatment.

"She wouldn't go," Favre said. "I said, 'Baby, there's all kinds of
programs I can get you in. I'll hold your hand, I'll help you.' But crack
had the best of her."

'WE TRIED EVERYTHING'

Estellene Roberts said that she, too, tried to reach the granddaughter who
called - sometimes once a year, sometimes more often - to say she was in
trouble again.

"We tried everything to get her to come home," she said. "We bought her bus
tickets, train tickets. . I would say 'Why don't you straighten up and come
home?' "

She never did.

Last Monday, Estellene Roberts and her 80-year-old husband received a phone
call from a policeman who said Olivia was dead.

She will likely be buried in South Carolina, where the family's roots lie,
but there won't be a lot of family left to see her off. Neither authorities
nor family members have been able to locate Tina Roberts; some fear she may
have followed the same path her little sister took.

"To be honest, I thought I would get this call about her before I did
Olivia," Brothers, her half-sister, said.

Francine won't attend the still-unplanned services for the daughter she
affectionately calls "Liv." Years of alcohol abuse have taken their toll
and, in the next few days or weeks, family members said, liver cirrhosis
will end her life.

Brothers said her mother's death will mean an end to a painful disease made
bearable only by morphine and a reunion in heaven with the daughter that
was so much like the troubled woman who bore her.

"Olivia was so loved," Brothers said. "She was my mother's ya-ya, her Liv.
. When mom got beat up by my dad, Olivia was there to help her."

But Olivia - a child who comforted her battered mother, a woman friends
said would do anything for someone in need, a mother who gave her child
over to a better life - would not accept help for herself.

'LOST SOULS'

While her Florida relatives struggle to deal with Olivia's death, the
prostitutes and addicts who made up her adopted family are also left to
cope with the absence of one of their own.

They have no misconceptions about who she was - a "motor mouth" with a
fighting streak who irritated people as often as she amused them. Several
businesses scattered throughout the five-mile radius she called home had
banned her from their premises.

Michelle, the woman who assigned herself the job of Olivia's protector when
they worked the streets, took the news of her friend's death especially hard.

"When you are out on the streets, you know you are doing wrong," she said.
"But there's a lot of lost souls out here looking for love in a glass pipe
or a bottle of booze."

That need made them weak, she said, not less human.

Michelle, between heaving sobs, said she wants people to know that Olivia,
and others like her, are people too.

In the days since she was found, some have referred to Olivia as the "girl
under the bridge." The words "crack addict" reveal everything some people
want to know about who Olivia was and where she came from.

But the Rev. Steve Folmar, pastor of First Baptist Church of Houma, said a
decent society must care about all of its members.

"You have to see worth and value in every human being," he said. "Her life
experiences shaped her just as yours made you who you are."

'WALK IN WATER'

Olivia did not like what she had become and wanted to change. Not that she
was all bad. She had a beautiful singing voice, her friends said, a
mischievous sense of humor and a flair for drawing.

Though Olivia listed various addresses as her home, and had a few
belongings stored here and there, she did not have a place to live.
Sometimes she stayed with friends; other times she stayed out all night.

Neither Michelle nor Favre had seen their friend for weeks, but they
believe they know what she was thinking when she slipped beneath the
concrete thoroughfare that cold winter night.

They think Olivia went to the bridge to die.

She appeared to be sleeping when she was found sitting with her back
against the bridge and her legs stretched out in front of her.

It seemed almost normal, though she had taken off her sweatshirt,
apparently in a misguided attempt to fend off the cold north wind. Her
fingers were still curled underneath the yellow fleece when police arrived.
Officers found a crack pipe nearby, but it will be next week at the
earliest before toxicology reports determine whether it was hers.

Even if she spent her final minutes with the cocaine she struggled to leave
behind but fought hard to get, it was the cold that killed her.

"It's a struggle out here," Michelle said. "She was ready to go, and she
went to the water to die."

Olivia chose that path, rather than one to recovery, because it was the
only way out she could find, her friend said.

"You know," Michelle said quietly, "I don't want to walk in water where I
can't see the bottom."

Her message is clear: The drug world was all Olivia had left. Cocaine was
her sustenance, fellow addicts her family. If she ceased being the person
she had been her entire adult life, who would she be?

OLIVIA'S LEGACY

Michelle, newly clean after seven years on the streets, said she plans to
win the fight against the monster that claimed her friend.

"That could have been me," she said as her eyes filled with tears and she
cried out against the useless, senseless death. "I don't want to be the
next one found in a bayou or in a burnt-down house."

Michelle vowed that she would become the woman Olivia wanted to be.

"She's in a far better place than here," she said. "And if I'm the one
person whose life she saves, I'll be thankful."

------------------- Related - Same Edition ------------------

LETTERS FROM JAIL: 'WILL I EVER BE SOMEBODY?'

Olivia Roberts spent much of her adult life in and out of jail.

She longed for a normal life, she wrote in letters to a Houma woman who had
turned away from crack cocaine and offered to help Roberts do the same.

The hand-written letters, decorated with her original drawings, offer a
glimpse into the heart of a young woman who said she wanted to change but
never did.

In the end, she always went back to the drugs that sent her life spiraling
out of control and the lifestyle that ultimately helped end it.

These excerpts were taken from mostly undated letters written by Roberts
over the past two years, all of them while she was behind bars.

n n n

Thank you so very, very much. I was so, so happy when I heard you found a
place that would accept me. I cried a lot and prayed that I would get to
go. . I'm so happy to have you in my life. Nobody would have cared for me
like you're doing. I'm gonna pay you back by making you proud, myself too.
I can't wait to get some help.

n n n

I want to be a sober woman who can be there for you sometimes too. I'm so
looking forward to this rehab for guidance and direction, willpower and help!

n n n

I'm sorry I haven't been the good person I can be. I wanna be a good woman
and friend. I pray one day I can make you proud. Doing time don't help.

n n n

I just pray I can overcome these drugs like you did. I've never lived a
normal life.

n n n

I can't believe I'm in jail, but I keep praying everything works out. . I'm
just very happy I'm clean and strong. I have no desire for drugs. It has a
lot to do with you and everything to do with God. Thank you Jesus for
keeping me safe and strong. Thank you Debbie for being a beautiful example.
You did it and I'm going to do it too.

n n n

(The following excerpt refers to Roberts' Bible, which contained family
pictures, addresses and phone numbers. According to the letter, jailers
misplaced the book after a friend brought it to Roberts at the jail.)

I want to contact my family so bad and I feel lost a lot. I cry a lot and
the only picture of my Moma (was in there). . That's the only thing that
upsets me right now. I just cry, cry, cry. . I want those pictures and my
Bible. I don't have much left but a few pictures of my family.

n n n

I was hoping when I get out in October I could go to a halfway house or a
Christian shelter or rehab program. I have six months to somehow work out a
plan that will help me stay sober when I'm released. I'm ready for a change
Deb. I'm so tired of the same old junk. I know I can do better. ... I'm so
depressed with my life Deb. Will I ever be somebody?