Friday, Dec. 15, 2006 | 7:16 a.m.
John Winn was living in an abandoned gravel lot last July, when a $40 drug deal went wrong. He was hit over the head with a brick, stabbed in the arm and left for dead.
At least the drug dealers didn't slit his throat. They wanted to, but Winn begged. He told them he had two kids, teenagers in Henderson, who already thought of their homeless father as a dead man. Dead to them, at least.
The dealer eased his knife off Winn's neck and let him collapse in the dirt. Winn had been homeless for three years. He was addicted to meth and injecting it. The makeshift shelter he shared with another addict was practically walking distance from his children's home. They never knew it.
Winn was 6 foot 2 and 165 pounds with gaping sores. This is how Metro Officer Brooke Newton found him.
"If I wasn't as hurt as I was the day she found me," Winn said, "I probably would have jumped the wall and ran."
Newton makes a point of asking most homeless people she meets whether they'd like her to take them to a shelter, but she only asks three times. "If they still say no, I know they haven't hit rock bottom," she says.
Newton parked her black-and-white outside Winn's gravel lot hideout on July 5. Winn's crew, all addicts, scattered when they heard Newton suggest a shelter.
Winn stayed. After half an hour of convincing, he let himself be handcuffed. Five months later, still living at the Las Vegas Rescue Mission shelter, he can't exactly say why he went.
"Officer Brooke caught me at a time when I was down and out. I had nothing left in my pocket. No money. No nothing," he said. "And that was the best time she could have found me."
Winn, 38, started using drugs as a teenager. By the time he was 25, he was divorced and addicted to meth. In 2003 he started injecting the drug. From that point forward, everything changed. Winn gave his ex-wife custody of their kids. He stopped paying bills. He was awake for days at a time. He was soon homeless and grew to accept it. He became a "booster," stealing whatever his dealer wanted in exchange for drugs.
In the space of two years, he was arrested 14 times.
"You're not yourself on meth," he said. "You're outside yourself. You're 10 foot tall and bulletproof, running around. I should be dead right now."
Winn spent seven months behind bars last year after stealing electronics from a department store for his dealer. When he was released last December, he got high and called home. His ex-wife picked up, and in the background, Winn heard his daughter shout, "I don't have a dad." He stopped calling. In the six years that Newton has worked for Metro, she has convinced about a dozen homeless men and women to let her escort them to a shelter. Winn was kicked out of three halfway houses and a handful of other treatment programs before he landed at the rescue mission, where he spent his first two weeks of detox asleep almost the entire time.
He slept, but only on his back - the jut of his ribs made it too painful to lie on his side.
"I had bones coming through me," Winn said. "My cheeks were all sucked in, my eyes were sockets in my head."
Newton heard nothing from Winn until early this month, when he called her to arrange a meeting. Winn graduated the shelter's drug treatment program, and wanted to tell Newton face to face. He feels she saved his life, after all.
Waiting outside of the rescue mission's chapel, Winn walked right past the police officer without recognizing her. And Newton didn't recognize him either - Winn is 70 pounds heavier. "I walked right past him," she said, beaming.
Winn's kids had the same reaction last weekend, when they saw their father for the first time in three years.
"They teased me about being fat," Winn said. Of course, he isn't. He was big enough, however, to hoist his teenage daughter onto his shoulders and smile for a picture, which he did. His kids have called him every night since. His son has invited him over for Christmas.
"We were like a family again," Winn said, holding the snapshot outside his mission dormitory Wednesday, smiling at full thrill. "It was like nothing ever happened."
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