The last time Jeff Kemp found his name in the newspaper, he'd been left for dead by the whole wide world. It was the summer of 1977, when he was 16 years old.
Tomorrow he goes to Baltimore County District Court for violation of probation, wishing the world would go away again.
The last 18 years have been a mess, commencing with that June night when Kemp was hit by a car on a highway in Anne Arundel County.
Vagrant memories cling to him: how he lay on the ground in agony, how the driver of the car stood over him, watching Kemp try to rise and then fall back down, and how the driver then walked back to his car and sped into the night.
Kemp lay there for several hours. He lay there while cars drove past him, and drivers swerved around him, and the hours drifted by and nobody stopped from about 1 in the morning until about 5 in the morning, when three women drove past.
They were schoolteachers -- Laura Brown, Jacqueline Simmorins and Maryanne Brown -- and it was Brown who spotted Kemp's body and yelled, "Stop, you gotta stop."
They found Kemp lying in the fetal position, conscious but just barely.
They knew he was alive because he was crying softly and mumbling, "Help me, help me, help me."
The three women tried to flag down cars. People drove past them. They stood over Kemp and said frantic prayers for him.
Finally, a guy wearing a Hess Gasoline shirt stopped, surveyed the situation from his car and drove off to call for help.
When they brought Kemp into Johns Hopkins Hospital's intensive care unit, his blood pressure was next to nonexistent. He had a broken pelvis, broken hip, broken leg, broken ribs.
His head, eye and back were scraped raw.
His parents were told he wouldn't make it. Too much damage had been done. Too much time had elapsed as Kemp lay in the road and people drove around him and went about their lives.
He was hospitalized for a year. He was given major amounts of morphine to cope with the pain, and when he finally left the hospital, his father, Bob Kemp, remembers, "he was addicted. When they were giving him all this morphine, the doctor told us if Jeff survived, we'd have to deal with the addiction.
"I guess we didn't handle it too well after he left the hospital. As he was being weaned from the morphine, he was substituting illegal drugs."
His life began to take on the familiar pattern of drug addicts: not only the inability to break his habit, not only the lying and deceiving to cover it, but the stealing to support it.
"We were just so thrilled to have him alive," his father says now. "It was like he'd come back from the dead.
"We never recognized some of the things that were happening. First, the pills, which he got with phony prescriptions. Then the heroin. He was taking money from us, and we didn't know it. We didn't want to face it. You know, not my son. He was alive, we were so happy."
But there were clear signs of trouble: Jeff dropped out of school. Too much money was missing from the house.
And then began a series of arrests and convictions, shoplifting stuff, and then bulk items that he'd swipe from the big chain food stores and sell to owners of little grocery stores.
"Ten arrests, 15 arrests," Bob Kemp says. "It's heartbreaking every time."
It's the familiar lament of a generation of parents who have watched their children obliterate their future. Maybe Jeff Kemp's was wiped out on that summer night in the road. But now, while facing theft charges in Baltimore County, and in Anne Arundel County as well, he says he's had enough -- not only of drugs, but of court leniency.
Too many times, he's gotten a judicial slap on the wrist, quick probation after promises he would straighten himself out. The judges know the pattern, the phony promises they're given. They aren't stupid.
But they also know the prisons are overcrowded with people not only dangerous to themselves, but to everyone else in their vicinity. Jeff Kemp has strictly been a hazard to himself. They tried to be kind.
Now, while awaiting trial at Baltimore County Detention Center, he doesn't want to go to prison but he also doesn't want to go back to the streets.
"A residential drug program," his father says.
"He can't make it any other way. He's been in detox programs and straightened out for a little while. But it's outpatient care. He needs long-term, in-house treatment."
On a June night nearly 18 years ago, when he lay in the road and the whole world passed him by, Jeff Kemp's life took its terrible turn. Now he wants the world to go away again.
Just put him in an isolated place where he can get help.
It is, in its way, the familiar cry of one who finds himself cornered, a willingness to do anything to avoid serious time behind bars.
But, having arrived here after the world turned its back on him, maybe he's entitled to his shot.