Beggar tells of struggle on streets
Major Keelan, who splits his time between sleeping rough and begging for coins on Napier’s main street, once believed he’d left the darkest of times behind him.
Eleven years ago, Keelan was living in Porirua. He’d just got out of the Mongrel Mob and had adopted a baby boy from a young woman who was struggling to raise him.
He and his partner at the time planned to raise the child with their other two younger sons.
But their relationship did not last, and his youngest boy caught a virus that nearly killed him. It was then that Keelan found himself in ‘‘a real, real dark place’’.
‘‘My missus left me and my baby was going to die on me.’’
Keelan, 47, alongside two other Napier beggars – Turei Cooper and Myles Hemopo – are now facing a court charge of breaching a district council bylaw that forbids them from soliciting for money without permission.
They have pleaded not guilty and will have their cases heard in a judge-alone trial in August.
A Public Defence Service lawyer for Cooper and Keelan, Alan Cressey, said the nature of the challenge was ‘‘of utmost public interest’’ and involved fundamental human rights so should be heard by a judge.
Keelan says he hit ‘‘a real dark patch’’ when he was in Wellington, and he wasn’t sure how he would carry on.
Like other beggars who sit in doorways along Napier’s Emerson St with their cardboard signs and paper cups, Keelan has mental health issues. He is prone to long and deep bouts of depression.
His youngest son became ill when the child was only about eight months old.
‘‘The doctor explained it by saying the virus attacked his heart, his lungs, his kidneys. He was in hospital with heaps of machines around him. They were close to pulling the plug on him. That really hit me like a tonne of bricks,’’ he said.
The baby Keelan adopted is now 12 and attends a Napier school, while the boy’s two younger brothers go to a local primary school. ‘‘I adopted him and brought him up. Him and his two brothers.’’
Keelan said he had 12 children to various mothers. Several were now adults. The youngest was a daughter aged 18 months.
He returned to Napier about five years ago because most of his children lived there. He had spent more than 11 years in Wellington before heading north.
He said he received a benefit, but it was not enough and that was why he had taken to begging. Keelan estimated that he had been begging for two years.
‘‘It’s better than ripping people off and getting into trouble. The council says we can’t, but we don’t believe that. It’s a human rights issue. That’s why we’ve got a lawyer acting for us,’’ he said.
‘‘Begging has been around since the start of time and is one of the oldest arts in the world. Begging and prostitution,’’ he said.
Keelan said he was ‘‘out of that deep dark hole now’’ and was relatively happy with his life as it was.