"Former Addict Helping Others in Haverstraw"

By RON X. GUMUCIO                                       (Original publication: September 2, 2003)
THE JOURNAL NEWS

HAVERSTRAW — Tim Tyree was 14 years old when he held a dead baby in his arms in the northern California housing complex where he grew up. Tyree would see death at least a dozen more times in the span of a decade.

"In many cases, I saw a fatality, an accident or a homicide and no one else was around but me," said Tyree, pastor at the Haverstraw Gospel Fellowship*, from his second-floor office on Main Street recently. "I was much too young to have shocking experiences like that."

But the 44-year-old pastor, who now seeks to save others, was once immune to the pain and suffering around him because of his own troubles.

Raised with his two brothers by a single mother in an impoverished neighborhood, Tyree said he spent almost every day of high school getting high on marijuana and dabbling with stronger drugs. Meanwhile, he was committing a host of burglaries and other petty crimes to support his drug habit.

It wasn't until Tyree graduated from high school in 1977 and went to work for a man his mother knew from her Baptist church that he kicked his drug addiction, cleaned up his life and discovered the Lord, he said. Now, Tyree, a father of three, wants to help others in the village with similar problems, using his life as an example.

Two years ago, Tyree opened the doors of his nontraditional, multiethnic, downtown Evangelical church as a branch of the New City Gospel Fellowship. He held his first service at the Terrace on the Hudson on Route 9W on Easter 2002.

"I feel compelled to be here," said Tyree, who served as an assistant pastor at the New City Gospel Fellowship** for six years. "In many ways, I felt like I was led here."

Tyree said that growing up as a self-described "ghetto kid" in San Francisco's Mission District, he was insecure and had no real identity or purpose in life. The family lived off welfare benefits, while Tyree's father, Ty, was in and out of prison for 25 years.

"I was a burglar and a thief," Tyree said. "I would enter businesses at night and pickpocket people on the street. I did hoodlum stuff. By being high and stoned all the time, I had not achieved anything. I had thrown away a bunch of years of my life." 

Tyree recalls as a teenager seeing a man get hit by a car, a heroin addict jumping out his fourth-story apartment and hearing gunshots that left two dead on the street.

Along the way, Tyree lost his younger brother, Trent, 28, to AIDS. His older brother, Tad, 48, has been living with the disease for 10 years.

Witnessing these and other tragedies affected Tyree's life greatly. But Tyree said he knew he had to change or succumb to a similar fate.

He went to work for Howard Bolton, a man from Tyree's family church with whom he shared a troubled past. Bolton became very influential in Tyree's life and served as a mentor and role model.

"The conversion I had was so profound inwardly," Tyree explained. "It was something very dramatic and dynamic."

Bolton said in a phone conversation from his California home last week that Tyree didn't discuss his past much. Bolton said he saw a man who wanted to change and serve the Lord. 

"It's a blessing to see somebody grow like that," Bolton said. "I'm so proud of where he's at today."

Carl Johnson, a senior pastor at the New City Gospel Fellowship, said Tyree's past made him the perfect person to preach in the village.

"One of the greatest things Tim can contribute to others is that there is hope for change," Johnson said. "He really has seen the Lord and Jesus has dramatically changed his life."

Since moving into the village, Tyree said he has built a following of 150 at his church, some of them former convicts and drug addicts. 

Reinaldo Maldonado, formerly of West Haverstraw, spent four years and eight months in prison on drug charges. While serving time, Tyree visited Maldonado in prison.

"I got saved when I was in prison," Maldonado said. "Upon my release, I started going to his church in Haverstraw."

Maldonado's wife, Lymari, and their 5-year-old daughter, Kiara, were congregants at the New City church, but they followed Tyree when he left.

While on prison furlough for a week in October, Maldonado, 30, was baptized by Tyree and attended a Christian marriage seminar at the pastor's Hudson Street home.

"He was already very involved with my family and my parents," said Maldonado, a driver for First International Health Foods in the village. "So it was understood that we would keep in touch.

"My impression of him was that he was very down-to-earth," Maldonado said. "We had a lot of similarities, and he could relate to the lifestyle I once lived." 

Maldonado shared Tyree's concern and vision for the youth of Haverstraw, and he now attends service in the village every week, belongs to the Bible study group and works with the church's community response team, which does community service projects.

Tyree has also reached out to village residents he reads about in the newspaper during their time of need.

He went to the home of Delfina Santana, whose son, Michael, 30, has been missing since Feb. 11, to pray with her for his return. Tyree's church sent a care package to village Police Officer Michael Canavan, who served in Iraq, and contributed to a medical fund for Sarah Martin, the 2-year-old girl from Stony Point who almost lost her leg in a lawn mower accident last year.

Pauline Tyree, 41, met her husband in a singles ministry in San Francisco.

"His background gives him compassion to understand and acceptance for others," Pauline Tyree said. "We're no better than anyone else here. Been there, done that."

Like their California hometown, Haverstraw has a lot of character, but struggles with the problems of poverty, drugs and crime.

"When you love something, you want to be part of it," Pauline Tyree said. "The good and the bad."

The storefront apartments in downtown Haverstraw's central business district reminded the Tyrees of a mini-Mission District.

"We feel like we fit in this community," she said.

The two discussed how life would have turned out if Tyree continued down a tumultuous path of drugs and crime.

"I wouldn't be alive, most likely," Tyree said.

 

*now, Bricktown Gospel Fellowship; **now, Gracepoint Gospel Fellowship