A Boy Trapped by Love and Circumstance

May 26, 2005 -- -- Rose Green has had 13 children, but many have been lost to her -- each of them left her when they were young. Rose herself had been abandoned as a young child and grew up in an orphanage until she ran away when she was about 8 years old.

So when her son Norman and his wife abandoned their 2-week-old child and left Green to take care of him, she vowed not to make the same mistake again.

Green kept young RayVaughn at her home in Newark, N.J., forbidding him to play outside. By the time he was 8 years old, RayVaughn knew little more about the world than his grandmother and her apartment.

He went to school, but it was still a very stark existence. At home, RayVaughn's only connection to the outside world was his imagination.

There were also no memories of RayVaughn's mother -- no photographs, no phone calls.

The only thing for RayVaughn was his grandmother's reminder that his mother abandoned him. "She said, 'You can have him, I don't want him,' " Green said.

RayVaughn called Green "mommy," and while she loved the boy, she had a hard time showing it. Green doesn't hug or kiss him, no matter how much he begged.

"Ain't used to nobody hugging me," she said. "He gets on my nerves."

RayVaughn's father, Norman, was once in the army. Now, Rose Green says his life is "just rambling around out there in the street, like all the rest of the bums."

Green knows it hurts RayVaughn not to have a relationship with his dad. "He [is] always saying he wished his father was over here, like the other children," she said.

RayVaughn's yearning persists even though he says his father once hurt him and then left him to smoke crack.

"He picked me up and slammed me on the ground again," the boy said. "The reason he had a bad temper is because sometimes he gets confused."

"Primetime Live" went looking for RayVaughn's father and found him living on the streets of New York. His excuse? "I got lost in the sauce for a bit," he said, and promised to visit his son.