BOYNTON BEACH, Fla. — Janie Yoshida was driving her daughter home from high school play rehearsal one cool autumn evening when she noticed a teenager walking by himself next to a busy road, according to a story from CNN.
Tre Burrows, it turned out, was also in the same play at Somerset Academy Canyons High School in Boynton Beach. Despite his initial reticence, the 17 year old agreed to get a ride home.
Janie soon learned the boy, his single mom and siblings were living in a motel and struggling with their daily needs.
From that point on, Janie gave Tre a ride every day after play rehearsal. Sometimes, she would make up an excuse to get fast food along the way, just to make sure Tre had a hot meal.
“I don’t want to cook tonight,” she’d tell him. “Let’s just go through the drive thru.”
Then one day, Tre let slip another detail about his family life.
“‘I’m gonna save this (meal),’” he told Janie, “’and split it with my sisters’” – one older and two younger, all together at the motel.
Tre’s mother, it turned out, had been working two jobs and hanging by a thread to support her four children against immeasurable odds.
Despite the financial challenges, Cindy Dawkins worked tirelessly to give her kids everything they needed. She had every meal ready, even without a kitchen. She helped with homework. Instead of asking her older ones to work part-time to support the family, she encouraged extracurricular activities such as track or school theater.
Tre eventually told Janie why he’d been nervous about telling anyone where he lived. He was afraid the Department of Children and Families would find out and take the kids away to foster homes.
Janie asked to meet the children’s mom – she was floored by her work ethic and strength.
Cindy moved from the Bahamas to the U.S. for what seemed like a promising career in the hospitality industry. But an avalanche of “bad luck on top of bad luck” fell on her, Janie said, including a layoff and a divorce.
She ended up having to waitress at two restaurants – one during the day, the other at night.
“And she did all of that with a smile on her face because she didn’t want us to know exactly how hard it was to do all that,” said Tre, now 21.
Despite working two jobs, Cindy couldn’t get an apartment on her own because of a prior eviction. So she and her children moved into the motel, which cost far more per month than an apartment.
For three years, Cindy raised her four children in a motel room while working multiple jobs. Behind the omnipresent smile she put on for her kids, though, Cindy was struggling. “She was like, ‘I don’t have a moment to myself or any privacy except when I’m in the shower. So if I’m going to break down, I’m going to cry, it’s going to be in the shower,’” Janie recalled.
“‘And I’ve got to put my face back on, walk out of the bathroom in front of the kids and make sure that they don’t see it from me because I have to make them think everything’s OK.’”
But the family’s bad luck continued that day Tre missed play rehearsal. The next day, Janie asked if he had been sick. She learned the family had been kicked out of the hotel because they couldn’t pay. But Janie told her husband they had to get the family an apartment.
Soon, with Janie’s name on the lease, the family of five moved into a two-bedroom apartment – mom in one bedroom, her four children sharing the other.
Cindy paid the rent and utilities “earlier or on time – always,” Janie said.
She got a raise at one of her restaurant jobs, Tre said, allowing her to quit her second job and spend more time with her kids. But that cherished time with her children would be short-lived.
With a new home and better pay, Cindy and her kids eagerly anticipated celebrating her 50th birthday last year.
“We were planning on going up to Orlando a few days before and then spend her birthday up there,” Tre said.
But soon after moving in last year, Cindy got sick. She spent her birthday, Aug. 1, in bed with severe Covid-19. The disease ravaged her body so quickly, “I didn’t even get to see her after she went into the hospital,” Tre said.
But just six days after her birthday, on Aug. 7, 2021 – Cindy died.
“She didn’t have any prior illnesses. … We just didn’t think anything like that would happen because we were healthy,” Tre said.
“We were seeing the news (about) all the people passing away from Covid, but you never really understand exactly how bad it is until you experience it firsthand. We weren’t thinking this would completely uproot our lives.”
Tre said his mother did not get vaccinated, in part due to rumors about side effects.
“We didn’t want to do this and then (have it) potentially cause us to get sick,” Tre said. “We know better than that now. But I guess that was the reasoning behind her not getting” vaccinated.
Tre and his siblings joined a growing group of children – orphans of Covid. More than 212,000 U.S. children have lost one or both parents to Covid-19, according to estimates from Imperial College London. And the numbers keeps rising.
Tre was the first to hear from the doctor his mother had passed. He rushed to the hospital and told his older sister, Jenny Burrows, now 25, to get there immediately.
When Jenny arrived, “We cried for hours,” Tre recalled.
They woke up heir siblings Zoe Clarke, then 15, and Sierra Clarke, then 12, and the most horrific nightmare had just turned into reality.
Feeling despondent, overwhelmed and having to plan a funeral, Tre told Janie the news.
“I just lost it. I couldn’t believe it,” Janie said. “It was devastating.”
She realized the siblings quickly needed help – and not just financially. The kids needed to know how to parent on the fly. Without a living legal guardian, the children’s greatest fear was getting separated. So, Janie helped Jenny get to work on becoming the younger girls’ legal guardian. It was just one of the many legal complications that followed their mother’s death.
“Another thing that’s helping us tremendously is we were able to get the girls set up with Social Security benefits from my mom,” Tre said, which will help support Sierra and Zoe until they turn 18.
Janie and her husband also paid the remaining six months on the apartment’s lease. And she started a GoFundMe account, with an initial goal of helping pay for Cindy’s funeral expenses.
Then just as Janie had stepped in as a stranger to help so did hundreds or strangers touched by the family’s story.
The crowdfunding effort grew so popular, it raised enough for a down payment on a house so the children wouldn’t have to worry about getting evicted. Any extra funds likely will go toward Sierra’s and Zoe’s college education in the coming years.
To read the full story, click here.
Pictured: From left, Tre Burrows, Cindy Dawkins and Jenny Burrows.
