Young Hustlers Face Danger, Death on Street

by George Stuteville

A teenage boy waits at the steps of the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Monument Circle looking for the right man to drive by. He doesn’t know it, but he has attracted the attention of a middle-aged man who has slowly cruised the Circle for the last half hour. Aiming his late model Datsun into the left lane of traffic, the man creeps just past the youth. “Need a ride?” There’s no answer from the youth, who walks to the car and gets in. He has found his man.

AFTER THE 16-year-old youth says he is hustling and gives his price, the man Sgt. Steven M. Garner of the Indianapolis Police Department vice branch arrests him for prostitution a block away on Market Street. Delvoyd Lee Baker. 14, should have met Garner last Saturday. He might be alive today. Now detectives from Hamilton County, IPD, and the Indiana State Police are attempting to pull clues from Baker’s night of hustling Oct. 2 that will lead them to the murderer who strangled the eighth grader and dumped his body in a southeastern Hamilton County ditch.

PART OF his evening was spent with a Florida man, who was in Indianapolis training to be a truck driver for a moving firm. The man, Duncan V. Patterson, 47, admitted that he gave the youth $20 for a sex act that occurred in a Southside motel. Patterson was cleared as a suspect in the child’s murder. Baker’s friends and family are angered and confused about the events surrounding his death. They describe him as a quiet kid, a churchgoer, never in trouble, active in sports.

IF ANYTHING, they insist it was peer pressure, his friendship with a 16-year-old homosexual prostitute, that led him to his death. It is the lust of a dollar not sexual preference that entices teenaged males into homosexual prostitution, according to Garner. “Most of the prostitutes are appalled at the suggestion that they might be gay,” he said. From eight years on the vice squad. Garner has found that the majority of young male prostitutes are heterosexual. In many cases, he said they have strong enough moral backgrounds that would seemingly prevent them from working the streets.

FOR THESE KIDS, it is strictly a business transaction. They can dissociate completely from the act. They feel that if they, are not the ones who are aggressively performing the sex, then somehow, they have not been involved in gay sex, and it doesn’t challenge their heterosexuality” Garner said a young male prostitute earns between 5 to $25 per sex act. He usually “hustles” only one trick a night and rarely spends more than one night a month on the downtown pickup circuit. He may quit after one or two encounters.

BASED ON ARRESTS Garner said it is usually impoverished white, teens from the Southside and South eastside who hustle. He estimated that between 15 and 20 percent’ of the 9- to 25-year-old male population in that area have accepted money for sex. “We’re not talking neighborhood molestation here.”