Brittany Banks says she's tired of missing out on a normal adolescence. She never went to a prom, never had a first date. Ever since seven boys allegedly attacked and sexually assaulted her at a Baltimore middle school six years ago, she's been through dozens of psychiatric wards and residential facilities for troubled youths.
She had hoped to find freedom on the night of Sept. 10, when she jumped out a window of an Upper Marlboro group home where she was supposed to have been under 24-hour supervision. Instead, she found herself homeless. She used her last remaining dollars to take a cab to the New Carrollton train station and a MARC train to Baltimore, where she slept in Druid Hill Park, panhandled and went two days without food.
Yesterday, the 18-year-old was wandering the city's west side when, she said, one of her former elementary school teachers spotted her. The woman had seen an article Thursday in The Baltimore Sun about Brittany's disappearance and told the teen that her mother was frantically looking for her. Brittany then walked around the corner to the apartment of a former neighbor, who let her use the phone.
Bridget Banks was at her desk at Morgan State University, where she is an administrative assistant in a vice president's office, when the phone rang about 9 a.m. She spun around in her seat when she heard the voice of her only child and began to weep.
"Brittany," she cried, "where are you?"
A colleague gave Bridget Banks a ride to the Pennsylvania Avenue apartment complex where she had lived until 2000 with Brittany, who is classified as mildly mentally retarded. There, she found her daughter in a neighbor's home looking "like a bag lady." She hadn't showered in two weeks. She'd been wearing the same jeans, which were starting to fall down, and had only one change of shirt. She was without the medications prescribed to control her behavior.
On her left temple, a small chunk of her long hair was missing. It was, she said, the only physical harm she suffered when three girls tried to "jump" her on a street in Prince George's County two days after she ran away. The teen defended herself, recalling, "I could take little skinny girls." But she lost her cell phone in the altercation, leaving her unable to figure out how to call her mother.
