Family tragedy inspires woman, son to help homeless

(December 16, 2005) - - They used to pray together, their heads bent down, eyes squeezed shut.

In unison, they would recite the Lord's Prayer. "Our father which art in heaven. ..."

When they were finished, Phillip Pruitt would kiss his son on the cheek and pull the covers snugly around him.

For five years, they hardly ever missed a night.

People used to say they were like playmates.

Big Phillip and Little Phillip. Father and son.

They would spend hours building giant castles out of Legos or constructing Thomas the Tank trains.

They went everywhere together. Phillip was a construction engineer and would take his son to work sites around Dallas and Fort Worth.

At home, they would scrunch next to each other on the couch and read books. They ate dinner together and studied the Bible.

They were, by all accounts, inseparable.

Fatherhood had changed Phillip. It made him whole.

Late in 2001, Cyndi Bunch began noticing gradual changes in her husband, Phillip.

He would mutter and swear to himself. Cyndi sometimes walked into the living room and found him in the middle of a heated conversation with himself.

Then, he claimed bad guys were following him. The phones were tapped, he warned his wife. Their family, he said, was in terrible danger.

Cyndi didn't know what to think. She worried her husband was on drugs.

She tried to keep Little Phillip from finding out. But things got worse.

First, her husband would disappear for a few hours with no explanation. His paranoia and scatterbrained behavior escalated. She found out he hadn't been showing up at his job as a construction engineer.

Then one morning, he left home. He was gone for days. No phone calls. No contact.

Little Phillip knew something was wrong.

"What do you tell a 5-year-old boy?" Cyndi asked her friends. "What can I say?"

Daddy would come home and then disappear again.

Late at night, Cyndi and Little Phillip would drive around, looking for Daddy and shouting his name out the car windows.

They rarely found him.

Occasionally, they spotted him in abandoned parking lots or at the side of the road or sitting by himself on a curb in downtown Fort Worth.

"Where have you been?" Cyndi would ask, trying to keep her voice level. But Phillip never answered.

A police officer came by one afternoon in 2002.

Cyndi wasn't home, so the officer asked a neighbor questions about Phillip and Cyndi.

Who are they? What do they do? Where do they work? How long have they lived here?

That evening, Cyndi called the officer.

"We're looking for Phillip," she recalled the officer telling her. "We can't say a whole lot, but we think he was involved in an armed robbery."

Cyndi couldn't speak. She realized now that her husband was sick.

His brother had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and she now feared the illness was taking Phillip.

The police eventually arrested Phillip. She tried explaining the situation to lawyers, she said, but most seemed uninterested in the mental illness. They told her they would focus on that later.