Miami Herald (MH) - WED September 4, 1991
Dexter Filkins; Herald Staff Writer

A month ago, she stood before a judge on prostitution charges -- nearly 8 months pregnant, addicted to crack cocaine and carrying the AIDS virus.

Appalled by the tragedy before her, County Judge Kathleen Kearney ordered Taylor held on an extraordinary $100,000 bond.

It was Taylor's lowest moment. But maybe the one that saved her life.

"It was the best thing that ever happened to me," she said. "I feel like I've been given a second chance at life."

Today, Taylor is enrolled in a special program for drug-addicted pregnant inmates at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. She is fighting her addiction and dreaming of a new life -- for her and her baby.

"I would have been dead," Taylor said in a clinic lounge over the weekend. "All I want to do now is keep clean, and keep my baby."

The odds are against her, a fact she realizes. She is three public health problems rolled in one. She carries the baggage of a horrific life on the streets.

Taylor insists something happened to her in the month she spent in the Broward jail, that she may yet be able to recapture the Catholic schoolgirl she once was.

Standing before a judge last week, Taylor wore a yellow maternity dress, a trim new haircut and the glow of a woman waiting for her baby to be born. She was a different person from the crazed street woman police dragged in just after midnight on July 24.

Two Fort Lauderdale officers said they spotted Taylor flaunting her body to passers-by in the 1200 block of North Andrews Avenue. They followed her after she climbed into a silver Ford van, and arrested her when they claimed she and the driver engaged in sex.

It was the seventh time they had picked Taylor up on prostitution charges since she was diagnosed as HIV-positive in May, and the 14th time this year. Prosecutors charged her with prostitution, public indecency and knowingly spreading the AIDS virus.

That morning, she stood before Judge Kearney in a wrinkled long-sleeve shirt that barely covered her pregnant body. Her hair, an unruly tangle, hung in front of her angry eyes.

"She was wild, crazy," said Sandra Friedman, a social worker. "You couldn't talk to her. She didn't care about her baby. And she didn't care about herself."

"All I wanted to do was get high," Taylor said. "I wanted my baby, but when I found out I was HIV-positive, I just lost it."

Taylor's self-destruction seems neither inevitable nor unlikely.

She grew up an overweight child in a middle-class Davie home and attended St. Bernadette's Catholic School. Her parents divorced when she was 8, and she started smoking marijuana that same year. She snorted coke at age 13.

"It was my weight," she said. "I started doing drugs to be accepted."

As a child, she said she was sexually abused by a man outside the family.

Taylor began working the streets at 18, when her mother expelled her from the house following an arrest on a grand theft charge. Without many alternatives, Taylor said her career choice was not a difficult one.

"I didn't even think about it," she said. "I was standing on a street corner, a guy told me he would pay $50, so I just did it. What the hell."

Prostitution financed far more than her survival. It paid for Taylor's frenetic crack habit. With a 30-second high going for $10, the addiction often cost $700 a day.

"When I was young," Taylor said, "it was so easy. I could make $1,500 a day from hooking, no problem. Old guys would offer you $500 just to spend a day with them."

Taylor is hardly old now, but she bears on her eyes and hands the cruel marks of her trade.

She smoked her crack with a propane torch, usually in the cheap hotels where she lived.

As a hooker walking Fort Lauderdale's seedier byways, she suffered routine beatings and muggings at the hands of customers or other addicts after her money.

"If I wasn't knocked or raped just about every day," she said, "I was very lucky."

In a Christmastime stay at the jail two years ago, a fellow inmate offered her a gift: a tattoo on her hand of her prison nickname. She accepted, and with needle, thread and ink, her friend scrawled the word "TRUCK" just above her right wrist.

Lately, the easy dollars of her early years grew scarce. As the price of her body dropped, the number of times she sold it grew.

"Don't ask me how many tricks I had to do to make my money," she said. "At $20 to $30 a turn, you can figure it out."

Taylor insists she was no health hazard. She says she made her johns wear condoms, which she carried around in her shoe.

She said she contracted HIV from her boyfriend, whom she declined to identify. He is also the father of her baby, she claims.

"I always, always protected myself," she said. "But if some guy was going to break my jaw, or rape me or something, well then they deserve whatever they get."

One of the costs of her trade was constant trips to the Broward County Jail. She racked up 37 arrests in five years, most of them for prostitution.

Taylor discovered she was pregnant last Christmas.

When she left jail in February, Taylor checked into a county drug treatment center. She moved back in with her mother and stayed straight for three months -- until she discovered she carried the AIDS virus.

Taylor was at the county's public health clinic on State Road 84 seeing a doctor about her pregnancy when she peeked into his file.

HIV-positive, it said. The doctors hadn't yet told her.

"I wanted to shoot myself," Taylor said. "After that, I didn't care, I wanted to go back to the streets. I was dying anyway."

So it was back to the streets -- and prostitution and drugs -- she went. In the desperate days before her last arrest, she was unable to attract enough to support her habit. She said she took to robbing clients.

Incarcerated since July 24 on the promise that jailers would provide decent medical care, Taylor and her lawyer revealed to an incredulous courtroom audience last week that she languished for 34 days without even seeing a doctor.

With myriad public health problems in one body, she had overwhelmed her keepers.

On Friday, Broward County Judge Susan Lebow ordered Taylor taken from her jail cell and sent across the county line to Jackson.

Today, more than a month since her last crack hit, Taylor said she has finally turned her life around. She said she treasures the baby inside her, and wants to fight her addiction and ward off death as long as she can.

Sitting in jail, Taylor said she finally came to grips with what she had become. And with her responsibility as a mother.

"I was always crying for help," she said. "I realize now that I got a second chance."

One confidant through her ordeal has been Howard Finkelstein, her public defender, who is a recovering cocaine addict.

"Danielle realized that drugs were simply an escape, that they were masking her real problems," Finkelstein said. "She needed to reach inside herself and love herself. I think she has done that.

"She wants to leave a legacy for her baby," he said.

The doctors said her baby, despite the travails, appears healthy. It's too early to know whether she has passed on her drug addiction or virus to the baby.

Her doctors at Jackson's maternal addiction unit said they'll try to instill in her self-esteem, a sense of responsibility and a will to stay above the abyss.

Taylor knows that she is not a good bet. She said she will give it her best -- if only for the baby who will survive her.

"I'm scared now, scared to death," she said. "I've always been my own worst enemy."

CAPTION: PHOTO Danielle Marie Taylor (b)
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