Neediest Cases

PROGRAM HELPS EX-GANG MEMBER CHANGE HER COLORS

Everything was just too much for Jessica Nivar to handle. Her teachers told
her she could do better in school, her mother wanted her to pay her own
bills, and her younger sisters were pestering her to initiate them into her
gang.

"I felt so down and so depressed," Ms. Nivar, now 23, said. "I just wanted
to go to sleep and not wake up."

Her worries gnawed at her until a day in April 1999, when she had a fight
with her mother, Violet Logrono, a real estate agent, about money. That
day, when she was at a friend's house, she started swallowing as many pills
as she could -- "a whole bottle of Motrin and a bottle of Tylenol," she
said -- and drank two pints of rum.

She passed out. Her friend's mother found her going through convulsions and
shivering as if in the cold, so she put a blanket around her and called an
ambulance.

Paramedics came and induced her to vomit. She was taken to the Jacobi
Medical Center emergency room to have her stomach pumped. She awoke the
next afternoon in a psychiatric ward, as a nurse was checking her blood
pressure.

"All I saw was mad white, the walls were white, the room was white," she said.

She spent three months in the ward, where she was treated with
antidepressants, a mood stabilizing drug and a drug to alleviate her high
blood pressure.

She was released in July 1999 and referred to a psychiatric rehabilitation
program run by FEGS, formerly the Federation Employment and Guidance
Service. FEGS is a beneficiary agency of UJA-Federation of New York, one of
the seven local charities supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.

The program helps people seeking jobs, housing, schooling and support
groups. Counselors helped Ms. Nivar return to school. She had been selling
hot dogs from a cart she would park near Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx.
Now she is taking high school equivalency courses at Lehman College, and
has enrolled at the Howie T. Harp Peer Advocacy Center on the Lower East
Side, hoping to become a counselor herself.

"Jessica is certainly outspoken and passionate," said David Kamnitzer, the
manager of the FEGS program that Ms. Nivar attends in the Woodlawn
neighborhood of the Bronx. "She's very committed to making some changes."

She has already made some changes. As a gang leader, she did things she now
regrets, such as the day she whipped another gang member's hands. The gang
was called the Netas, for Never Ever Tolerate Abuse, she said. When a
fellow Neta had broken the rules by smoking marijuana before going to a
meeting, Ms. Nivar took a leather belt and hit him with the buckle 10 times
on each hand.

"I said, 'I'm sorry, I still love you, you're still one of my brothers, but
you violated the code.' "

It was a low point during her six years in the gang, she said, which she
joined when she was 13. She hung around on the streets, taking drugs and
drinking liquor, instead of being with her mother and sisters in their
crowded apartment in a row house in the Castle Hill area of the Bronx.

Ms. Nivar said she started running with the gang, which she said has
members in chapters throughout the country, because she wanted to be
accepted by others. "It was like a second family for me," she said. "I was
looking for comfort, people who could understand me, people who were on the
same level I was."

She was the oldest child in her family, the one her siblings looked up to.
Her brother, Leo Cuello, is 21, and her two sisters, Melody and Susie
Cuello, are 16 and 14.

Shortly after she left the hospital and went to join the FEGS program, she
nearly turned around and went home. She stood outside the door for a
moment, thinking about her sisters, who had been asking her about the
Netas. Ms. Nivar decided that she ought to give the program a try.

"I didn't want them to turn down the road I was leading in," she said.
"That made me realize if I don't change now, whatever happens to them is
going to be on my conscience."