Woman once was lost, but has found new life
By DANIELE HAMAMDJIAN Special to The Daily Press
In March of 1988, Leslie Jean McIntosh says her husband wrapped his hands around her neck, hoping to strangle her in front of their three children. She fought back and managed to slip away.
She had never cheated on him or stolen anything for that matter. She had, she says, allowed him to do all her thinking and feeling for more than 10 years. He controlled everything. That morning, McIntosh woke up and said she finally realized she was his equal.
“We’d always beat each other up, but I was never afraid of him,” she recalled. “That night, I looked into his eyes and said, ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’”
She says he went right for her neck and tried to beat her back into submission. That’s when she called the police and found refuge with her three children in a shelter for battered women.
“I felt that if I went back to him, I would have failed at what I was setting out to do, which was to break the cycle,” explained McIntosh in a recent interview. After being evicted from her apartment a few years later, she lost her youngsters to the man she escaped.
“I was very hurt and very lost, they were my whole life,” she remembered.
McIntosh would spend the next decade addicted to cocaine and methamphetamine, with the occasional night in jail.
Today, as McIntosh attends her regular AAmeetings, she can still recall the years of drug addiction that landed her in front of a Pasadena judge in the summer of 1997.
“The judge asked me if I wanted two years in prison or nine months in rehab, so I chose the nine months, and here I am six years later,” explained McIntosh. ‘Here’is an apartment on Ocean Park. McIntosh now has a car and a stable job at Ocean Park Community Center as a food and inventory specialist. For that, she thanks Turning Point Transitional Housing.
Last Sunday, McIntosh and a dozen other Turning Point graduates joined volunteers and private donors at the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel to celebrate a program that has taken more than 2,500 individuals off the streets over the course of the past 20 years.
“The things I have today, I never thought I could have and I owe a lot of it to Turning Point,” admits McIntosh, now 45. Though she is tremendously grateful today, McIntosh remembers how scared she was the first day she walked into the 55-bed shelter located on 16th St. “It’s the fear of the unknown.”
McIntosh, however, proved more than willing to do whatever it took to get off the streets and to not use drugs.
McIntosh grew up in what she referred to as a dysfunctional family with seven children. She was a teenager when her father left her mother after 25 years of marriage.
“I was trying to find my way,” she recalled.
She married at 18, right after graduating from Duarte High School, in hopes of finally finding happiness. Instead, she became a welfare mom with three children in an abusive relationship.
“You go through the whole cycle of domestic violence, he says he’s sorry and he’ll never do it again,” she said.
McIntosh has no regrets about the past. These days, she dreams about buying a house and traveling to Italy. In the mean time, when she is not hitting down pins at the bowling alley, she spends her time with her grandchildren.
McIntosh and her children try to avoid talking about the past.
“I’m just grateful today my grandkids never have to see me loaded or drunk and all I can do is be an example for my kids by living the life that I’m living.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 19, 2004. Read the original PDF.