For Kids With a Jailed Parent, Comfort and Joy

Janae Viloria’s wish list for Christmas is short and sweet, tragic and impossible to fulfill.

She wants a Razor scooter, a radio and some CDs. And she wants her father to come home for the holidays.

“I miss him,” the 8-year-old Anaheim girl said.

But her father’s home is a state prison cell where, her mother says, he’s serving 25 years to life for a murder in a nightclub more than a decade ago. Janae has never seen him on the outside. In fact, Janae was conceived behind bars.

“She cries every day for her dad,” said her mother, Helen. “She asks a lot of questions about him. Why is he in there? Is he a bad man? When is he getting out?”

On Saturday, at a Christmas party in Anaheim for 600 children who have an incarcerated parent, Janae planned to ask Santa that question.

He was ready with an answer.

“I tell them, don’t ever let your wishes go,” said Ron Lounsbury, sweating under his rented red suit and beard. “I understand. I’ve been on that side of the fence.”

Lounsbury has spent 12 of his 33 years behind bars. Burglary, robbery and assault top the list. Along the way, he lost custody of four of his five kids and watched his hard time become their hard time.

“There’s abandonment, shame, the constant fear of somebody finding out,” said Sandi Burns, director of Friends Outside, the Orange County outreach group that sponsored the Saturday party, which was also attended by sheriff’s deputies, U.S. Marines and firefighters.

“It’s very shameful for the child,” Burns said. “They’ve taken on the silent role of a victim of their parent’s crime.”

The ballroom of the West Coast Anaheim Hotel was full of victims. Five-year-olds who’ve watched their mothers shoot heroin. Teenagers who’ve never touched their fathers. Children with a parent on death row.

“Some do understand what’s going on. Some don’t,” Burns said. “Some hurt so badly they don’t want to understand.”

Janis Espinoza tells her four children their father was in the wrong place at the wrong time, in a house full of drugs when the police raided.

Her teenagers won’t visit him at the state prison in San Luis Obispo. “They won’t go behind bars,” Espinoza said. “They think they’re going to be left there. They’re afraid.”

Her 5-year-old daughter, Destynee, loves to go. “She spends the whole day with daddy,” Espinoza said. “But he doesn’t get to go home with her. She doesn’t understand.”

Neither does 2-year-old Summer Hunkin. She was in her mother’s womb when her father assaulted her mother. He was convicted of domestic violence and sentenced to prison, said Summer’s mom, Debbie Clapper. Now, Clapper dreams of holding the family together after he’s released from the state correctional facility in Soledad next March.

“He’s never had a chance to hold her,” Clapper said. “I want him to hold her so he can get to know her. I don’t know if we’ll stay together or not, but I want to work on it because it’s important to her future.”

Clapper has run up a $1,700 phone bill keeping the two in touch. He has promised Summer that he’ll take her to Disneyland.

“She likes to hear his voice,” Clapper said, tears welling in her eyes, her holiday dinner of turkey and stuffing getting cold. “I tell her, ‘Your daddy’s in jail, but he’s going to get help and come home soon.’ I tell her, ‘Then, we’ll be a family.’ ”