Rough area calls these angels neighbors

On the lower end of Fremont Street, where the freshly painted face of the new downtown fades and human kindness can be a stranger, angels are where you find them.

If you know where to look, of course, some are easy to spot. They appear as poor children playing a boisterous game of football after school is out behind the South Cove apartments. It’s one of the cleaner and more modern complexes in an area that borders on dilapidation. A banner draped on the front of the complex boasts, “Our Background Checks = A Safe Place to Live!!”

Such confident assurances aside, the neighborhood also has a heavy police presence and one of the highest crime rates in the valley. There’s no shortage of children living there, where apartments rent by the day, week, and month.

It’s there amid the drug dealing and prostitution that you might also meet Jackie Puchan, whom those kids call “Miss Jackie.” She’s an angel, too.

At 54, Jackie suffers from multiple sclerosis. She moves slowly, but without complaint, and on the day we talked, she was visiting with her elderly girlfriends, Heidi Kuntzman and Melinda Knoll. Heidi is blind. Melinda uses a walker. They are roommates who met while working at a plastic bucket factory at Jean.

Watch the ladies help each other navigate the streets and strangers even once, and you will find yourself blushing for not being more grateful for your own life’s blessings. Seeing angels can have that effect.

Jackie and daughter Jennifer have taken it upon themselves to minister to the kids in the troubled neighborhood. They might be called freelance aunts, or a mother-and-daughter neighborhood watch team. Jackie says she has been a youth minister, in official and unofficial capacities, for 32 years.

They grind out an existence in Glitter Gulch making balloon animals for tourists. A little air, some squeaky twists and turns, and there’s a poodle, a flower, and hopefully a tip.

They use some of their tip money to buy treats and presents for the youngsters who duck in and out of the neighborhood’s shadows and play wherever they can. Most of them attend Hollingsworth Elementary, which is easily among the most-challenged schools in Clark County.

“If they get good grades, they get prizes,” Jackie said. “But they have to stay in school.”

While looking out for those children recently, she watched another act of kindness and wanted to share it.

“Yesterday, the kids played all day,” she said. “This police officer came out down the alley, and he saw the kids playing football. The little boys were out there, and the little girls playing football. I saw the cop stop and play with them for over an hour. There must have been 30 kids out there.”

Then her story turned.

“Afterwards, I saw one of the best things I’ve ever seen in six years around here, and I’ve seen a lot,” she said. “That police officer had a flat tire, and a tow truck came out. And he told the tow truck driver, ‘No, that’s OK. You can go.’ And he gave all the kids in the neighborhood these orange gloves. They helped him carry the (emergency) cones from the back of the car. And he told them how far to set the cones. And two of the boys helped him with the tire. And one of the boys helped him jack up the car. All the kids participated.

“He sent the tow truck away. He taught all the kids to change the tire, for real.”

The officer also broke an important barrier that often separates young people in high-crime areas from authority figures and especially from members of law enforcement. If the cops are going to have success working tough streets where crime and violence are common and drug gang activity is on the rise, they need to be seen as people and not as strangers.

With street gang activity a fact of life, the police and a few neighborhood angels are often all that keep those kids from harm’s way. As Metro Capt. Andrew Walsh recently observed, “It’s just become too acceptable to have crime scene tape with kids playing on one side of it and bloodstains on the other.”

The busy cops and beleaguered residents of lower Fremont Street need each other, and they could both use a few more angels.

John L. Smith’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. He can be reached at 702-383-0295 or jsmith@reviewjournal.com. On Twitter: @jlnevadasmith