Bob Garrison was determined to rescue his son from the streets. The path was more difficult than he had imagined.
The trip had been a long shot. Bob Garrison reminded himself of that as he stood on a pier a thousand miles from home. Behind him lay the tile-roofed beach town of San Clemente, California, his last stop. Before him stretched the Pacific Ocean, immense and unbound.
Gulls cried. Surf broke. It was Monday, his last day. Garrison could afford only so much time off. And yet what if he was close?
He had spent the last two days following up on leads, scouring parks, passing out flyers. “MISSING,” they said, in block letters over photos of a 45-year-old man from Seattle, 6 feet, 6 inches tall with a beard to his chest, an ice-axe tattoo and a silver cross necklace.
Homeless, the flyers could have said, too, one of more than 180,000 homeless people in California. So many that if they all were to come inside, they would fill San Clemente several times over. But on this June day, Garrison, an engineer from rural Ellensburg, Washington, was not thinking about California’s humanitarian crisis.
He was just a 70-year-old man on a pier gazing out at an ocean, trying – too late, he feared – to rescue his son.
An early bond
“It wasn’t always like this,” Garrison said of his third child and namesake. Born in Southern California and raised in Seattle, his son, Robert Garrison, graduated from high school, had a career, supported a family.
Father and son once had been close. From the time Robert was small, Garrison said, they would camp under the stars, talking about time and space and the cosmos. Skilled outdoorsmen, they bonded over their adventures. When Robert was 19, he and his father suffered a terrifying fall while climbing on the icy south slopes of the Olympic Mountains. The family marvelled as Robert, nursed by his mother, Garrison’s ex-wife, recovered from serious injuries.
Burly and strong, Robert took a job building and repairing custom bicycles, graduated from community college and became a skilled carpenter, expanding on a gift for woodworking that he had developed in high school.
He was shy and socially awkward, his parents said. At 25, he started a relationship with a girl whom he had met through a phone dating service. After she gave birth to a son, they married, a union that lasted less than a year, according to King County Superior Court records. Primary custody went to Robert. His mother, Marlowe DeCecco, raised the child as Robert struggled to establish himself.
He eventually found a new relationship and worked in commercial construction. By 34, his parents said, he rented a home and was settling into adulthood. Then, in 2013, came the blinding headaches. Doctors discovered a brain aneurysm and rushed him into surgery. The procedure seemed successful, Garrison said.
But Robert had changed. He had never shown signs of serious mental illness before, but now he was withdrawn and sometimes paranoid, like “a switch would get thrown,” his father said. At a family dinner at a restaurant one night, “he thought people no one else could hear were saying things about him”.
Then about three years ago, “he had an episode where he thought he had died and a blinding light came down and entered his body,” the father said. Afterward, Robert became obsessed with religion and stopped going to work.
In the backyard of the duplex that he shared with his girlfriend, the family said, he began building bonfires, reading the Bible into the flames. He had been touched by the love of God, he would tell people, and had been born again.
Sleeping in the rain
By the summer of 2022, the family said, Robert was on the street, preaching and shuttling between a cemetery on Vashon Island, where he would “do battle with demons,” and a shelter at a West Seattle American Legion hall.
His mother, DeCecco, would see him on her way to the supermarket, muttering Bible verses or wrapped in a sleeping bag in the rain on a park bench. Occasionally, she said, he would come home to sleep but rarely stayed long.
Finally, in late December 2023, she suggested that he apply for disability so he could receive mental health care and housing. He stormed off, and the parents gave him space, afraid of alienating him entirely.
In the absence of answers, they wondered if Robert’s problems were their fault. DeCecco blamed the injuries he suffered in that fall from the mountain. Garrison blamed himself for letting that accident happen. Even now, the father can recite in detail how time slowed as he strained to arrest their plummet, “the individual ice granules showering up in an arc” from the pick of his ice axe. “The event has shaped us for the remainder of our lives, even unto the present,” he said.
Periodically, Robert would ask them to send small amounts of money electronically for food and emergency shelter. Then in late March, Garrison said, his son stopped answering his texts, and his calls started going straight to voicemail.
Worried, and then panicked, Garrison began calling hospitals and the coroner’s office. He obtained a replacement SIM card for the cellphone that he had given Robert in case of emergencies, giving him the ability to search the phone history. Scanning the calls, he found the pastor of a church where Robert had been sleeping.
The pastor, Craig Mathison of Eastridge Church, told Garrison that the congregation loved Robert. But Robert had told them that he could not bear the violence and drug use in the local shelters and that he had been born in California, had relatives there and wanted to go back.
In an interview with The New York Times, the pastor said that he had spoken to Robert about getting off the street and had even taken him to a tiny-home village run by the county. “I would tell him that it would be my joy to help him make that transition,” he said. “But as you are probably aware, people have to say yes to these things.”
With donations from a few church members, the pastor said, Robert amassed enough money for what they thought would be a short trip. In January or February, he took Robert to an Amtrak station, where he bought a ticket to Los Angeles.
‘I was afraid someone would kill him’
Finding Robert would be “worse than looking for a needle in a haystack,” Garrison realised. It was May now, several months since Robert had gone to California. More than 75,000 people were homeless last year just in Los Angeles County. Garrison pulled US$5000 ($8.000) from his savings and hired a private investigator.
“They told me that most of the time, when people find out the cost of their retainer, that’s the end of the discussion,” Garrison remembered. “But I’m not the father of the year. If I was, I would have taken my son in immediately, as soon as I knew he was having problems. And I did not.”
The Los Angeles investigator, Heidi Goldberg, said that in recent years, almost all of her searches had involved homeless people, usually because of mental health issues or drug addiction. “It doesn’t always end on a high note,” she said.
“I was afraid someone would kill him,” said Robert’s mother, DeCecco, who still lives in Seattle. “Robert’s a teddy bear, but he’s big. What if someone pulled a gun on him? He knew everybody here. What if he ran into the wrong person? I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat.”
The family filed a missing persons report, and Goldberg combed through investigative databases. They created their flyer and distributed it to authorities.
A park ranger north of Los Angeles, in Ventura County, called to say that she had seen a man who looked like Robert a week and a half earlier at a state beach, building an illegal bonfire. She had moved him along, and then ran into him again. He told her he wanted to go home but could not call family because his phone had been stolen. Then he disappeared before she could help.
A man on a bench
Two more weeks passed with no leads. Then, on June 6, Garrison received a call from a sheriff’s office more than 200km south of Ventura, in Orange County. A man fitting his son’s description had been caught camping illegally near San Clemente, and the missing persons report had appeared when deputies ran a check.
Garrison called his ex-wife, booked a hotel and flew to Southern California. For backup, he took their now 18-year-old grandson, William, whose custody Robert had once worked so hard to win.
From Saturday through Monday, they searched golf courses, train stations, canyons and beaches. City workers in San Clemente helped them print more flyers and showed them where local homeless people congregated. A homeless man on the beach said he recognised Robert’s picture but did not know where he had gone.
Garrison, who works full time and oversees care for his 94-year-old mother, had to fly back Tuesday. He and his grandson drove to the pier to wait until dark to see if Robert would return to sleep underneath with a cluster of other homeless people.
Killing time, they wandered down the wooden deck, past the tourist joints, the fishermen, the life preservers. An aircraft carrier floated in the distance.
Garrison lifted his eyes, and when he glanced back, he noticed a ragged figure on a bench, gazing south, a big Navy sea bag nearby.
The height. The long beard. The open Bible.
“I paused,” Garrison recalled on a recent afternoon, his voice thickening at the sheer odds of that moment. “And I said to my grandson, ‘Is that him?’”
Mexican food and a ticket home
He had come to the pier to rest while he dried out the pages of his Bible. They had become wet when an energy drink stowed in his new pack spilled. William moved in for a closer look, recognised him, called back to his grandfather.
“I walked over there, and he had that bag on the bench, and I put it on the ground and sat down next to him,” Garrison said, holding back tears. “Put my arm around him. Pulled him tight. And I said, ‘We’ve been looking for you.’”
They called Robert’s mother, went for Mexican food, collapsed into sleep in Garrison’s motel room. Robert agreed to return with his father to Ellensburg, Washington.
Worried that airport security might trigger his son’s paranoia, Garrison bought him a train ticket and asked a community outreach worker in San Clemente, Troy Shenker, to help Goldberg, the private investigator, watch over Robert until the departure. Vulnerable as he was, Robert was also a grown man; Garrison wanted to be respectful and let him travel back on his own.
At Union Station in Los Angeles a week or so later, Goldberg said, Robert was “a gentle giant,” polite and courtly. She offered to buy him lunch, and he asked only for a package of souvenir California stickers. Garrison was so grateful that he wrote a letter of thanks to the mayor of San Clemente.
In Ellensburg, however, it became clear that the celebration had been premature.
Unable to sleep, Robert paced until dawn through his father’s condo complex, alarming the neighbours. Resistant to medical advice, he skipped the doctor’s appointments that Garrison made for him. After Garrison got him a hotel room, hoping to ease the tension, the manager called to say that Robert was in the parking lot clad only in shoes and a bath towel.
Garrison came to retrieve him and found a half-empty case of beer in his son’s room, a sign that substance abuse might be exacerbating Robert’s problems.
“Self-medicating with alcohol was something I hadn’t thought of until he was with me,” he said.
‘I am on a confidential mission’
Garrison gave his son a week to see a doctor and offered to go with him, but Robert refused and asked to be taken back to Seattle. “It was one of the most disheartening drives I’ve ever made,” Garrison said of the 172km trip.
Four days after his father dropped him off, Robert spoke with a reporter in a motel breakfast room near the Seattle airport, his tall frame folded into a chair, his feet clad in new sneakers. Dark sunglasses covered his eyes, and a fresh hiking pack sat nearby, neatly filled with his belongings. Plastic bands imprinted with Bible verses covered his wrists.
“My father thinks I need treatment, but there’s nothing wrong with my mental health; he just doesn’t believe me,” he said. “He thinks this is all cults and charismatics.”
He said he was changing his name to “Apollyon DeCecco” and shared his life story, largely echoing his parents. The climbing accident. The aneurysm. Then the story diverged, and he described the moment in 2021 when “the light touched me and healed me and changed me” during what he believes was a cardiac arrest.
“I was being trained by the spirits, the Word,” he said. “I was gaining the knowledge rapidly. Fast. Cutting through the various Scriptures. I couldn’t stop.”
The ticket to Los Angeles had cost US$253 ($403), he said. God had “telepathically” sent him. When he stepped into the California night, “it felt like home – just the warmth, the palm trees”. At a convenience store, he bought food and wine and slept outside, sitting up.
The next day, he said, he hitched a ride to Hollywood with a gardener. He walked for miles and slept in Griffith Park, hugging the ground so the rangers would not find him. In Santa Monica, he said, his backpack and phone were stolen near a homeless encampment by gangs that he believed had stalked him. But he was undeterred: he preached on beaches near Santa Barbara, on Hollywood Boulevard among tourists, on hills near Camp Pendleton to military helicopters.
“I am on a confidential mission,” he said in a deep baritone, his voice urgent. “A mission that was set down amongst my heart from Jesu Christ, to spread the gospel amongst the people in Southern California.”
When his father found him on the pier, he said, his heart sank: his assignment was “compromised” because his location was now known.
He had not been afraid or alone, he said, citing Scripture, “for every hair on your head is accounted for by the Lord”.
Is love enough?
Days later, Shenker, the outreach worker, called to tell Garrison that Robert was back in San Clemente.
In texts to his father, the son said variously that he was working for the military and a supermarket. In texts to a reporter, he said he was “being headhunted by the FBI” and moving between West Los Angeles, San Clemente and John Wayne Airport in Orange County.
Only months before, Garrison had wondered, ebulliently, whether homelessness could be solved simply with enough love.
Now that seemed naive, and he had no answers about what, if anything, to do next.
“I gave it my best,” the father wrote in an email. “Sometimes your best just isn’t good enough.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Shawn Hubler
Photographs by: Philip Cheung and Grant Hindsley
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES