Rescuing veterans from the abyss

Rescuing veterans from the abyss
Tampa Bay Times
By Waveney Ann Moore
Times Staff Writer
September 29, 2012

Anthony Sperduto, 53, was taken under St. Vincent de Paul’s wing about two years ago at his lowest point. “They’ve saved my life. ... I couldn’t have survived on the streets,” he said. Now the onetime business executive has been hired to mentor fellow veterans.

ST. PETERSBURG — At his desk, steps from an exposed toilet with two rolls of tissue, a sink, bed, small white refrigerator and microwave, Anthony Sperduto displayed computer images of his life as it once was.

There on the screen were pictures with ex-wife, Maritza, at a banquet, business trips to Hawaii and views of a meticulously decorated, four-bedroom, 2,400-square-foot Texas house with 12-foot ceilings and a copy of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam above a fireplace.

As Sperduto, 53, tells it, his world began to collapse in the fall of 2006, starting with a blackout at work, loss of an executive position and back problems that became debilitating. Three years later, Christmas Eve, to be exact, the 6-foot-7 Navy veteran found himself broke and homeless in Florida.

A few miles from Sperduto's room at St. Vincent de Paul's Center of Hope in St. Petersburg, Heather Vazquez welcomed a visitor to her bare, three-bedroom apartment and offered to borrow a couple of chairs from her next-door neighbor.

Vazquez, 38, a military veteran who served two tours in Iraq as a hospital corpsman, has two part-time jobs. Soiled carpet and impoverished state notwithstanding, the apartment into which she moved a few days earlier is the "best home" she and her children — ages 17, 9, 5 and 2 — have had in years, she said. "We were going from hotel to hotel."

A national count recorded 67,495 homeless veterans on a single night in January 2011.

Touting its beefed-up efforts to stem the problem, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs says the figure represents a nearly 12 percent drop from the previous year.
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