Danielle Marie Cox came from a loving family. She
attended private school through the sixth grade, had a 3.8 grade
point average in high school, and earned a scholarship to Pacific
University in Forest Grove, Ore. But the impressionable Cox fell
prey to the drama and drugs of a homeless Portland street
“family” she met in Pioneer Square, trading the
structure of college for the free-form life of the homeless. Cox
— whose street name was “Shadowcat” — is
now serving a 25-year prison sentence for the horrific 2003 murder
of Jessica Kate Williams, a young woman with a learning disability.
The twisted road that took Cox from scholar to killer is
at the heart of Portland author Rene Denfeld’s disturbing new
report, All God’s Children.
Portland’s street families are her main focus, but she also
includes a grim assessment of a national crisis of teen
homelessness.
Street kids, writes Denfeld, are almost
always teenagers from white middle-class homes, who fall under the
sway of older (in their 20s) “mothers” and
“fathers” — criminal types who manipulate the
youthful angst of their charges while hooking them on sex, fantasy
and violence. The youngsters earn their keep by panhandling and
selling drugs. Street families can be found throughout the West,
from Seattle’s University District to Tucson’s Fourth
Avenue. They practice their own brand of paganism: “It was
like The Lord of the Rings, only with
methamphe-tamine.”
Cox’s “father”
in the Portland street gang was convicted murderer James Daniel
Nelson, aka Thantos, “whose entire adult life has been spent
in two milieus: prison and streets.” Nelson, now serving a
life sentence in an eastern Oregon prison and a member of that
prison’s white supremacist pagan gang, helped convert Cox
from a gifted student to an aspiring “death knight warrior,
whose final test was to kill.”
The arrests and
consequent breakup of the Thantos Family in 2003 did nothing to
diminish the collection of ragged teen runaways on our streets.
Currently, 1.5 million kids squat under our bridges, and in our
parks and squares. And the numbers are growing. All
God’s Children reminds us — and shames us
— that these are our kids. And we are losing them.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A family of criminals and killers.
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