Page 30 - Pepper Smith News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Renee, now 19, got on with life, moved in with her boyfriend. soon pepper showed up at their apartment, homeless and nowhere else to turn to. and everywhere pepper went from then on, shirley's poison gift followed because of that woman and what she did, pepper was officially, at least, a nonperson. so it took a little while for determination to come back. she was in her mid-20s, a single mother by then. if only she could find her birth certificate. that could lead her to her parents. anyway, she needed documents to live. she needed a passport. so she contacted state offices. their departments ...

Usually i cry. it was really -- i would -- it just brings me to a sad place. >> you'd be sitting across the desk from somebody crying. >> oh, absolutely. >> and they wouldn't do anything for you? >> no. they could say i can't do anything for you probably. >> you need this document. this is what you need to provide. i have no way to get this document because i don't know my parent's name. i don't know my real name. pepper. and once again, pepper felt, perhaps understandably, like giving up. but by then she was living with her daughter in south lake tahoe working as a waitress and, what do you k...

Story about pepper smith and her lifelong journey to find her family, her identity, it was a friday night in march 2011. and the following monday morning -- >> my office received a call, and then i received an e-mail. >> attorney gloria allred found herself looking at a remarkable message. allred had been helping the two sisters deal with their new identity issues, and there it was. the ping of a message on her blackberry. when i looked at the e-mail, i just couldn't even believe it. i looked at it about three times. am i really seeing this? >> it was a woman claiming to be the biological moth...

We did everything together. >> renee was feeling abandoned. >> i was telling her, don't go. stay here. i need you. you're my sister. so she went. she did her thing. and i was upset and sad. >> by 1986 and on her own now, pepper had all but given up hope that she'd ever find her real parents. now she began to encounter a more immediate problem. the inevitable trouble that comes with having no real name, no birth certificate, no i.d. though she was enrolled in school under the name rhonda smith at shirley's urging, she had no way to prove this was her legal name, and without some cooperation fro...

In los angeles county and took a job at the motel's cleaning woman in exchange for a free room. and if it wasn't much, at least it gave them some measure of stability. and they signed up at a local school, junior high for pepper, high school for renee. much to shirley's disapproval. >> shirley would tell us, girls don't go to school. they get married. why do you want to go to school? i didn't like being late to school. i didn't like being absent all the time. >> so they got themselves up every morning and went to school and kept going. and then, pepper was 12. eight of those years with shirley...