Photos: Authorities investigate child endangerment at Ewing self-storage facility

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(Gallery by Alex Zdan/The Times)

On an afternoon in mid-March, Sheena Johnson sat inside a Ewing Wendy’s deep in thought as her two boys were occupied with their electronic games.

After buying a fast-food lunch for her young sons and herself, Johnson had $60 left. But it was mid-week, and that money had to last through the weekend, covering food, bus fare and lodging.

Since leaving her ex-fiancée’s apartment in late November and being forced out of her uncle’s home in February, Johnson and her boys, 5 and 10, had been moving as transients from charity hotel to borrowed beds at friend’s houses, finding places to sleep a few days at a time. Now, the money had run out, and as the hours passed inside the Wendy’s, Johnson found herself staring at desperation.

“I really hit me so hard, that I’m down at about the tree-root’s-bottom, and what can I do to make my kids’ life better this way,” she said.

She heard Wendy’s was hiring, so she filled out a job application. They told her they would get back to her. At that point, she thought about the 5-by-10-foot storage locker she was renting in Ewing. With no other options, she took what she calls the last resort.

Sheena Johnson arraigned in Ewing Municipal Court 4/22/2013 5 Gallery: Sheena Johnson arraigned in Ewing Municipal Court 4/22/2013

“I didn’t see any clarity — our only option was to stay where our stuff is,” she said.

That night was the first she and the boys spent inside the locker. They continued to stay there sporadically through the end of March and into April, until Johnson’s arrest for criminal mischief revealed her arrangement and made international news.

Now, the two boys are in a resource home. Johnson has had no contact with them. Her parents are barred from taking them, too.

Yesterday, inside the Mercer County Correction Center where she is being held on $50,000 cash or bond on child endangerment charges, Johnson, 27, told her side of the story. The mother who spoke without her lawyer present said she was simply out of options, trying to provide for her boys without support from her family or knowledge to navigate the social welfare safety net.

Johnson says she was employed by a staffing company until mid-December, when absences caused by dealing with her 5-year-old son’s behavioral issues at school caused the business to let her go.

“Even what I was making, it puts me on the borderline of being poor,” she said.

The relationship with her ex-fiancée deteriorated into verbal and physical violence that led her to spend a week with the boys at the Womanspace shelter for domestic violence victims. The couple had a brief honeymoon of good times after their reunion, but soon broke up.

Things got worse when the only home she could find was with a relative who pushed her out of the house and locked the door with her children inside during one argument. Hamilton police had to be called to get him to open the door and allow her to leave with her possessions and her children, she said.

“On that very night is when me and the kids had our first hotel room,” she said.

The boxes she had packed in a rapid, three-hour move went into her new storage locker, and she took the check from her income tax rebate and spent it on hotel rooms. When that money went low, she applied for assistance from the county, but was told that the salary from her former job placed her $250 per week over the maximum income allowed for the program.

Johnson grew up in Morrisville, Pa., but most of her family is now in South Carolina. As things spiraled downward, she felt she had few people to turn to.

“I just didn’t think anyone would have the heart to care,” she said. “It made me feel bad, it made me feel really bad.”

The Homeless Hotline gave the family a room at the Mount’s Motel in Lawrence for three nights, because Johnson timed it to coincide with the weekend. After that, the nights in the storage locker began.

“We all hugged and we all slept on the same mattress when we were there,” she said. “We made it.”

Extra Space Self Storage on Prospect Street in Ewing is climate-controlled but not heated, so the nights were cold but not freezing. Johnson piled blankets on her boys, tried to remain comfortable on top of the 2½ feet of piled possessions at the bottom of the locker, and slept fitfully.

Every so often, they would get to spend a night at a friend's house. Other times, they would watch TV for an evening, do laundry, or take baths and showers. They would get breakfast at Burger King or ShopRite, using the bathrooms to wash up and brush their teeth, Johnson said. All the while she was trying to keep her sons going to school, taking long bus rides with her 5-year-old to drop him off at Joyce Kilmer Elementary in Trenton.

Through it all, she tried to stay strong for her boys.

“I didn’t make it seem as if it was the worst situation ever,” Johnson said.

A ROUGH CHILDHOOD

Johnson said she has very few friends. Part of it is the moving around she did as a kid, she said. The rest is a suspicious nature that can make her seem closed and aloof.

“I don’t trust too many people,” she said. “I didn’t like to tell too much of my story, because that gives people the ability to find flaws.”

She chalks it up to a childhood under drug-addicted parents where she was working by 14 and having her first child at 16.

“It was a lot of broken promises, not a lot of trust with them because of their addictions,” she said.

By the morning of April 18, the strain of a month with no place to stay was beginning to show.

“I was in a desperate situation and a lot mentally overwhelmed,” she said.

She woke up with the boys in the storage unit and headed for her ex-fiancée’s place in Trenton to ask him to drive the kids to school.

“‘Stay here,’” she said she told the boys. “‘Eat your Pop-Tarts. Momma’s going to be back.’”

It is the last time she saw her sons. She realizes that by making the decisions she made over the next hour, she abandoned them.

“I know,” she said, as her lip quivered and tears ran down her cheeks. “And I only reached out to get the transportation because I was so overwhelmed with all the stress, like I try to turn a negative into the positive.”

On Calhoun Street, she and her ex-fiancée began to argue. He had a slow leak in his tire, she said, and couldn’t fix it right away.

“He threw me $10, ‘Get along the best that you can,’” she said. “That hurt.”

As Johnson walked away, her mind was racing, her blood starting to boil.

“You threw me $10 like I was a cheap skimp,” she remembers thinking. “Why won’t you help me?”

From the pavement, she picked up a sharp metal object and buried it into her ex-fiancée’s tires, slashing them. The man’s father called police and soon several Trenton officers arrived. As they placed her under arrest for criminal mischief, Johnson said she was still thinking of her kids.

“From the police car, I was yelling, ‘Ryan, Ryan, Ryan, can you come here?’” she said.

The officers looked at the ex-fiancée, seemingly thinking the man would be crazy to go over and talk with her.

“And I was trying to tell him to go back to the storage unit and get the kids,” she said.

She couldn’t speak to him. When she got back to Trenton police headquarters, she told them about the storage locker.

NO MONEY FOR BAIL

Johnson’s attorney, public defender John Maloney, said he is trying to secure her a spot in transitional housing where Johnson can be with her kids. If that happens, he will petition the court for a bail reduction down from the $50,000.

“Which might be $50 million for all her ability to pay it,” he said yesterday.

Johnson received pre-trial intervention in 2010, so she is not eligible for it again, Maloney said.

As she waits in jail, Johnson keeps busy. She’s required to see counselors and take parenting classes, but she’s found an oasis clerking in the third-floor law library. Johnson wants to work as a law clerk.

“The library’s like my sanctuary,” she said. “I don’t argue over the TV and listen to everything the girls say about my case.”

In jail, even the good things are turned against her. She said other women who saw pictures of her children used them for even more barbs.

“All of the girls were like, ‘You have such beautiful kids, how could you do this to them?’ ” she said. “And I say, ‘You weren’t in my shoes.’”

“I’m just left here to rot, because I’m like some horrible person, but I’m not,” she said.

But there have been bright spots. Even the officer responsible for making the criminal case against her, Ewing Detective Michael Pellegrino, has tried to help her, she said.

“Me and him, we actually had a long talk,” she said.

Pellegrino rode with her to one of the court hearings last month. On the way back to the workhouse, Pellegrino talked to her about how he wants to see her succeed.

“‘I want this to be a success story, three years from now,’” she said Pellegrino told her. “I see you’re an intelligent woman, I see the stress you go through, I know how overwhelmed you are.”

“I said, ‘Thank you,’” Johnson said she replied, “ ‘Because I’m not criminally insane, I’m not insane at all. I just needed some support.’”

Tonight, before she goes to sleep inside the Mercer County Correction Center, Sheena Johnson will look at pictures of her two boys.

The children’s father, serving a 20-year sentence in Rahway State Prison, sent back the photos of the boys she had mailed at Christmas.

“He sent me pictures of everything I sent to him, of all their toys, how happy they are,” she said.

In her bunk, she thinks about the family she’s lost.

“I just sit and look at my pictures of my kids,” she said. “Hoping I’ll see them again and I’ll return. And I’m not that criminally insane monster.”

Contact Alex Zdan at azdan@njtimes.com or (609) 989-5705.

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