For a homeless man, rescue from the streets

All heart and determination, Yolanda Shorts marched by the pile of garbage bags, ducked through the bare branches, and looked over the tents she had read about in a news story online.

"Hey, do you know who I am?" Shorts asked, peering into one of several blue tarpaulins at Tent City, a self-governing homeless community in the woods off a Camden highway.

Squinting in the dawn sunlight, Neal Floyd peeked out from beneath the cold, damp plastic. Homeless for two years, he had not seen his family in at least six, and his eyes did not immediately register what he saw: his mother, his brother, his nephew, his stepfather, a young niece he barely knew, and two sisters - including Shorts.

Shorts had driven through the night from her home in North Carolina to Camden, where a decade ago she donated a kidney to save Floyd's life.

At the crack of dawn yesterday, she returned to try to save her big brother's life once again and to tell him this: "You don't have to be out in the cold no more."

She had come to bring him home.

Floyd stood. He smiled. He laughed.

"How'd y'all find me?" he asked, over and over.

"You got my kidney, you know I'm going to find you," Shorts said. "We love you."

"Praise the Lord," he said, grabbing a backpack. "Let's move it."

He hugged his mother. "We've always been looking for you," Jean Williams said, sweetly.

"Where's my hug?" teased another sister, Monique Floyd, who had traveled from upstate New York. "Thank you, Jesus!"

"Leave all those bad memories in that tent," said Floyd's stepfather, Kenzie Williams, who was once homeless in Camden himself.

As they walked toward the warm rental van that would take him off the cold streets, Floyd began his testimonies to God.

"I've been praying all this time. I knew he was going to do something for me. I knew he was going to bring me out of there," he said. "I never stopped believing."

"That's right, Neal," Shorts answered between sobs.

Then she reminded him about the piece of her that will always be in him: "You've got my left side. . . . You know I was going to find you."

Floyd, the oldest of six growing up in Albany, N.Y., was a quiet child who laughed a lot and was infatuated with model cars. He left home at 15, according to his family, and his first daughter was born when he was about 17.

He had a brief career as a professional boxer - boxrec.com says he was a light welterweight with a 1-2 record. He later married and had two more daughters.

At some point Floyd got hooked on alcohol and crack, Shorts said. She said she believed this contributed to his kidney failure.

Before he got sick, Floyd found God, quit drugs, and worked as a truck driver in Florida. When his kidneys failed in 1997, he moved into his mother's house in Paulsboro.

In 1999, Shorts gave blood at a hospital in North Carolina to see if she could give Floyd one of her kidneys. "We were a perfect match," she said.

Despite a few medical complications afterward, life was working out for Floyd.

He met a homeless woman named Nikki, helped her get off drugs, and moved her into his mother's house. They married, she got work as a nurse's aide, and they moved to a house across the street from his mother's.

Floyd was getting disability payments, and he took some odd jobs to make ends meet. Nikki regained custody of her three children.

"They were getting back on their feet," Shorts said. "They wanted to be a family. . . . Everything seemed to be going well."

But one day in 2006, Floyd went to pick his wife up at work. "They told him, 'Mr. Floyd, your wife is deceased,' " Shorts said.

Nikki had had a heart attack. She was 36.

"It was like overnight, everything he got was taken from him," Shorts said. "It was crazy."

Shorts spoke to her brother a few days after his wife died, and then he was gone. She assumed he had turned back to drugs.

At that point, their mother had moved to North Carolina, so "he didn't have anyone there to turn to, or anyone to say, 'Hey, Neal, come on.'"

Shorts said anyone in the family would have helped him. "But he has his pride," she said.

Since then, no one had known where he was, or even if he was alive.

On Jan. 29, The Inquirer published an article about Tent City, a homeless encampment of nearly 20 people inside the I-676 exit onto Federal Street.

Floyd, 53, was quoted.

"I still have dreams," he said. "I still want to be a father, a family man. I don't plan to stay here all my life."

He spoke of camaraderie in Tent City: "That's all we got is each other."

And hope: "I just keep looking up, keep hoping things get better for us."

It was raining that day, and Floyd professed, "It can't stay rainy every day."

Ten days later, Shorts was at her computer at Fort Bragg, N.C., where she works in a civilian job helping military families with their housing.

"My mother would always say, 'Why don't you see if you can find Neal on the Internet?' " Shorts said.

So every once in a while, she would do a search for his name.

"I don't know why that particular Sunday I punched in his name," she said. "All of a sudden, I see that article. My heart stopped. I was like, 'Oh my God, Neal.' "

The Associated Press also interviewed Floyd that day, and Shorts was particularly struck by an accompanying photograph of him lighting a fire by his tent.

"Seeing his little tarp, it was heart-wrenching," she said. "I was fixated on that picture. I wanted to keep looking at it. I wanted to get closer to his face."

That's when Shorts decided to round up the seven family members and head to Camden. By 9 p.m. Thursday she was on the road, and just after 6 a.m. yesterday she was in downtown Camden.

Shorts knew that one of the first things she wanted to ask her brother was related to a piece of Scripture he had told her about years ago: "If we fail to praise him, the very rocks will cry out."

"I can hear his voice, 'Ain't no rock going to cry out before I cry out to praise God,' " she said.

So after Floyd came out of his tent yesterday morning, Shorts asked, "You going to let the rocks cry out?"

Floyd smiled. And laughed.

"Come here," she said, pulling him toward her.

"How y'all doing?" he asked his family after hugs. "I'm OK. I'm out here on the street. I had nothing else to do. I had no way to make a living."

He said he was not on drugs again; he was just broke.

Floyd collected his belongings, said goodbye to his tent mate, and gave a bear hug to the unofficial mayor of Tent City, Lorenzo "Jamaica" Banks. Floyd told Banks to redistribute his blankets and tent.

"That's one gone, so that's good," Banks said. "It's a blessing."

For Floyd's mother, it was a blessing answered.

"Every Sunday I'd go to church and ask the Lord to bring him home," said Williams, 71. "Thank the Lord."

The thanks that brought tears to Floyd's eyes, though, were reserved for his family.

"I'm just so glad you all came and got me," he said, his voice cracking. "I just didn't want to be out there no more in the cold."

When reminded of his comment just two weeks earlier - "it can't stay rainy every day" - Floyd flipped it.

"The sun's got to shine sometime," he said. "My baby sister's come and got me."

And with that, the family left -to a diner for breakfast, to a store for new socks, and this morning, home to North Carolina.

"To a new beginning," Shorts said.