Two homeless dads will spend Father’s Day with a cherished gift in Sacramento: Their kids

Just before moving into a motel in the city’s voucher program last December, Jedadiah Jincks was living in a tent off Roseville Road, sleeping with his 3-year-old son and baby daughter stacked on his chest during record downpours. Even during the day, they mostly stayed under the canvas and out of sight, because Jincks feared police would see him as endangering those he was doing everything he could to protect.

As it turned out, it was the child he didn’t have with him — the 4-year-old stepdaughter he’d “started raising before she was born” — who was in more trouble than anybody knew. In February, when he learned that the “friend” with whom his ex had left the girl had been charged with her murder, “I went downhill,” he told me. After relapsing briefly, “I had one dirty test.”

Yet for this 27-year-old former gang member with many tattoos and no experience in being parented himself, every day really is Father’s Day, because that’s what matters to him now. And if he can do what he’s already done, then I’m going to say that he and another single dad at the same second-chance motel in Oak Park can be the fathers that they want more than anything to show their kids that they are.

The opening chapters of their stories are so familiar that they are really only interesting as a measure of the distance already traveled. Jincks tells how he started out this way: “Growing up without a father, I didn’t have a direction, [or learn] right from wrong. I didn’t have either one of my parents. Grew up with my aunt and uncle, and it was a struggle because they struggled with theyselves, too. I was running around in the streets with my family members.”

Which at 8 years old was not a decision, but an inheritance. By that age, he was already having “run-ins with the police here and there.” Later, joining a gang seemed like “my only outlet.”

Thirty-one-year-old Tony Robinson II, who also has sole custody of the son and daughter who live in the motel with him, looks back and sees that he had lost his way even before an injury derailed his dream of playing college football. He married at 17, and when kids came along, “that changed me a little bit, but I was still coming back dibbling and dabbling, still mixed up in the wrong crowd, still in gang activity.”

He always worked and never went to jail, but “I did cocaine for a while. It was not cool. I was going crazy.” And as he sees it now, both he and his children were missing out on what they needed most. Before he got a voucher for the city-run motel, he was staying with a relative with a rat infestation, and in the kind of hotels where kids aren’t safe.

At this motel, vouchers for formerly homeless folks are funded by Sacramento’s Department of Community Response, which also pays the nonprofit City of Refuge to manage the place, and run programs for both kids and adults.

Jincks is in grief counseling, an anger management program and is excited about starting boxing classes soon. He is tested for drugs twice a week, and attends both AA and NA meetings virtually.

Since the death of his stepdaughter, Kierra Wesley, Child Protective Services has required a lot of him. Which they should, though he didn’t have custody of the girl, and which he appreciates more than you might think: “I’m going to keep doing everything after the case is closed. I enjoy the time I get to spend with people that are helping me.’’

Clean since the end of February, “I don’t have to sit there and waste money. I can play with my son,” 3-year-old Josiah. “I can play with my daughter,” 1-year-old Jocelyn. “We can watch movies, and I won’t be tired. I love the attention I give my kids. Every time I walk in the door, my son wants to tackle me. We can play with dinosaurs. Later today, we’re going to see the Jurassic Park movie, and he’s going to love it.”

“Choosing to be who I am today, I’m actually really proud of myself now” and am “trying to make them proud. I don’t want to be a disappointment, like how I see my dad — absent, running the streets, my kids wondering where I’m at, or one day I might not come home.”

He wants to get a job doing the kind of “hard labor” that could “put myself and my family in a house.” But his two biggest goals are that his kids grow up knowing right from wrong, and that he remains the kind of dad who instead of giving his kids presents, actually is present.

When Robinson got custody of his kids four years ago, a year after his divorce, “it changed my mentality. It changed me for the better because they’re my focus; it’s all about them.” Drug-free since 2018, he takes his 9-year-old son Tony and 6-year-old daughter Kaimani to and from school every day, when it’s in session, and watches his son pitch for the Rivercats in Oak Park Little League. “That’s the highlight of my life right now, my son playing baseball.”

He works part-time, through DoorDash and Jobble gigs he schedules around commitments to his kids. He, too, attends Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and he is trying to save enough to get a place, because a voucher for more permanent housing isn’t likely to come through any time soon.

One thing these two have in common is gratitude for what they have right now. “There is so much help here, it’s unbelievable,” says Jincks. “I never thought I’d have opportunities like this.”

Another is their sense of responsibility to both their own children and those who aren’t biologically theirs.

In his ball-playing days, Robinson never had a backup dream, but “my dream now is just to be the best dad I can be. It’s my duty to make sure my kids know they do have somebody that cares about what they do, and what they become in life. And even other kids, I feel like that’s my purpose now, to bring up the youth.”

On Father’s Day, Robinson plans to barbecue by the river with his kids, and Jincks doesn’t have any special plans beyond his usual routine. It will be just another day, really. Which is what makes what these men are doing worth honoring.

This story was originally published June 17, 2022 at 5:00 AM.