I wanted to explore what happens to the kids who emancipate out of the foster care system at 18 years of age. In 2000, as a staff photojournalist at the Los Angeles Times, along with Phil Willon, a staff writer, we tracked Jesse, Janea and Monique during their first year of freedom, when they faced homelessness, depression, violence, mental illness, drugs and poverty. When the choices they made began to define them as adults.

No one would adopt them as children. Now, at 18, the state launches them out of foster homes into the streets, flophouses and jails. They are the foster-care leftovers--kids who were too old and too troubled to be adopted. Passed from relatives to foster families or institutionalized group homes, they have ridden the system to the very end--an 18th birthday or high school graduation.

They include kids like Janea, who started her six years in foster care after she tried to bludgeon her aunt with a claw hammer. Jesse, sheltered in group homes since sixth grade, when his father put a diaper on him and paraded him around his school as punishment for not doing homework. And Monique Luna, the castaway child of a heroin-addicted mother. She became a mother herself at 15.

Los Angeles Times Staff Photography: Gail Fisher

Los Angeles Times Staff Writer: Phil Willon