She was Daddy’s girl, from the beginning to age 5 when her parents divorced. A photograph from the time shows Johnny Rivera smiling at his daughter fast asleep in a sea of stuffed animals arrayed on her bed.
He was a laborer for whom life was never easy. The divorce devastated him, but he remained a loving constant in his only child’s life, until the day she turned 18, when he thought she didn’t need him anymore and disappeared.
He was wrong, Vanessa Warren will tell you.
She would marry, have children. She would think of Johnny often, ask Aunt Simona if she had heard from him. No one ever had.
And then in 2005, a neighbor of her grandfather’s gave her aunt a stack of letters Johnny had sent to his father, not knowing the older man had died in 1998.
Johnny was in Denver.
In his letters, Johnny wrote of life on the streets, how his bipolar disorder had gotten the best of him. And he mentioned a place called Aurora.
Vanessa Warren and her husband, John, flew from their Dallas home, landed in Denver and got a hotel in Aurora. After walking the streets for a few hours, they decided they would do better by combing the mission and shelters in downtown Denver.
They printed up fliers that they hung in store windows, on street poles, everywhere.
“I hugged so many homeless people that day,” Vanessa Warren said. “I’ll never look at them the same again. They are some of the most beautiful, compassionate and caring people. They searched their minds hard for something to give me.”
For two days they searched. Nothing. She sobbed.
They were driving aimlessly when her cellphone rang. It was a Denver police officer. He said someone wanted to say hello.
“Dad, I’m here! Dad, I need you!” she shouted into the phone.
He was standing with the officer, a flier in his hand. The officer had let him use his phone.
Johnny Rivera, for the first time in 10 years, slept in a hotel bed that night.
He had followed a woman to Denver. When she left him, his world fell apart, Johnny told her. He’d spent the past decade living beneath overpasses, in shacks — anywhere warm.
Diabetes first robbed him of his foot, and then the entire leg. Walking on a prosthesis was pure hell.
After three days, Warren begged him to come home with her. Someday, he consoled her. He wasn’t ready.
“My Dad, he had been a big, strong, proud man. He didn’t want the people at home seeing him like that,” Warren said.
She kept track of Johnny. Homeless counselors arranged an apartment for him to live in. He got a phone. They would talk often.
It was fall 2008 that she last spoke to her father. She could tell he was winding down, she said. He was only 57, but the diabetes was taking its toll. He died on Dec. 12 of that year.
A package arrived at her Dallas home not long ago. Inside was an urn with Johnny Rivera’s ashes. A funeral home, which had found her name and address in his belongings, had paid for all of it.
“The people of Denver were and are so awesome and wonderful to me and my father,” Warren, 38, said.
She wanted me to say thank you.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
