The Lonely Guy

The prisoner told him to call home.

"That was the best phone call I've made in my life," Owen says. "If it wasn't for that black inmate, I'd been in a lot worse shape."

He credits his father, Darrell Owen, with helping him break his addiction. "He kicked me in my ass — well, not really," Owen says. "It was tough love, but it was needed."

The call inspired him to start a program to reunite homeless people with their families. So, in 2002, he put his name on another registry — not the list of sex offenders but the list of lobbyists on file at the Kansas Secretary of State's office.

Now he spends his days trying to chat up legislators and wandering around while grade school students tour the Capitol.

It's a Wednesday morning in early February, and Owen is hanging out in the Capitol rotunda. In his messenger bag, he keeps studies on homelessness and a well-worn Bible. Inside the maroon holy book is a clipping from his hometown newspaper, the Cimarron Jacksonian, about his lobbying efforts.

Owen has half an hour to kill before he will read a statement to the Senate Tax Committee, urging its members to push the Salvation Army to reunite homeless people with their families. He pulls a photo album out of his bag and flips through pages showing homeless people he has photographed throughout the years.

"What really bugs me about this picture," he says, pointing to a man in a homeless camp surrounded by discarded furniture, "he's got better furniture than I've got. No, no, I'm joking. He's got his own place now."

He points to a graffiti-covered stairwell in one picture. "I'll be so glad when they blow that damn thing up," he says of plans to rebuild the Topeka Boulevard Bridge. "This is a hotel for the homeless. I've had some pretty good meals under this thing. The homeless feed me well sometimes."

Behind him is a group of lobbyists. They whisper, point and giggle. It's clear that Owen is an outcast. He always has been. In high school, the kids picked on him. "Those Ex-Lax cookies tasted real good, though," Owen deadpans. "Terrible going out."

He's 37 now, and his hair is graying. Owen looks presentable in a suit and slightly off-center tie, but his Coke-bottle glasses sit askew on his oversized nose. Skin flakes off his clean-shaven face. Owen walks with a shuffle. He has cerebral palsy, which he says affects his hands and prevents him from driving.

A maroon name tag pinned to his suit coat reads "David Patrick Owen, Homeless Come Home Family Re-Unification."

Owen is obsessed with reuniting homeless people with their families. His method is simple: Ask every homeless person, "Where's your family?" and hand the person his cell phone to call home.

"Nobody ever asks that stupid question, and it drives me crazy because they all say, 'David, that's a brilliant idea. You must be a genius,'" Owen says. "Anybody who knows me knows that I'm an idiot. I am. I am an idiot."

He claims to have been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. "I live and I breathe homeless," he says. "I've got to drug myself at night because I know there's guys who are going to be sleeping on rocks, and I've got this nice, warm bed to sleep on. It's hard to turn myself off at night. And when I don't sleep at night, that's when I get sick. So the pharmacist said that I could take some antihistamine, you know, cold medicine, and those are a lot better than sleeping pills."

Owen receives a monthly Social Security check and lives in an apartment building a couple of blocks from the Capitol. He's a lobbyist with no budget, no influence and few — if any — supporters. This session, he's not working on any bills. Actually, he hasn't worked on much legislation since the Senate passed his nonbinding resolution 1808 during the 2004 session, asking the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services to consider the effectiveness of reuniting homeless people with their families.

The resolution hangs on a wall in Owen's apartment as a reminder of a single victory. Owen realizes that the nonbinding resolution carries little weight.

"It's basically toilet paper, because nobody ever read it," Owen says. "I mean, it took me two years to even get the damn thing passed, and when it did, I had to wait around for another year for the [Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services] to look at it to do a study on it and that was last year, and they maybe spent 15 hours studying it, making some polite comments about it, but nothing has changed. I feel like basically I wasted three years of my life in that damn statehouse."

Over the past three years, stories of Owen's antics within the Capitol have grown legendary.

Some legislative secretaries reportedly printed out his mug shot from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation Web site and posted it on bulletin boards in their offices.

Owen has disrupted committee meetings by talking to himself and thinking out loud. Last July, when Rep. Judy Showalter, a Democrat from Winfield, was battling abdominal cancer and had returned to the Legislature for a last hurrah, Owen stood in the gallery and shouted at her, "Speak up!" Showalter died weeks later.