A boy stares blankly at the camera.

He’s just 13, he’s terrified and he’s alone. In the past six years he has witnessed domestic violence and alcohol abuse, been sexually assaulted and lived between children’s homes, institutions and the streets after his family fell apart.

He doesn’t know it yet, but this police mugshot will be one of more than 30 he will appear in over the next two decades.The face belongs to Peter Lyndon-James, the now 49-year-old founder of the Shalom House rehabilitation centre in the Swan Valley who, since turning his life around in 2003, has dedicated it to helping men almost destroyed by addiction like he was.

Mr Lyndon-James uncovered this mug shot, and more than 20 others, only last month through a Freedom of Information request.

The shots document a boy’s transformation into a hardened, drug-addicted criminal.

They have brought back horrific memories of a childhood lost from the age of seven when Mr Lyndon-James’ dad, whom he idolised, left their home and his mother spiralled into an alcohol addiction, going in and out rehab.For years Mr Lyndon-James never spent more than three months in the one place.

He rocketed from living with his mother and her various boyfriends — one of whom was abusive — to foster homes and children’s homes such as Wanslea and Parkerville, from which he often ran away.

It was while living in a caravan park with his mother that he was sexually assaulted by a friend’s uncle, which left him with lifelong trauma.

During one stint on the streets he slept in a Good Samaritan bin until the police picked him up and returned him to Parkerville, where his father — whom he hadn’t seen in two years — was waiting.

A childhood lost

Because he kept running away, they gave the nine-year-old the option of living with his dad or going to Longmore detention centre in Bentley.

“I had this voice in my head, ‘he doesn’t love me any more.’ I loved and missed my dad but I thought ‘stuff him’,” he recalls.

“If it wasn’t for my dad abandoning us, we wouldn’t have been separated as a family. I wouldn’t have been sexually abused. I wouldn’t have been sleeping under bridges.”

He was taken to Longmore and given pyjama bottoms, a towel, toothpaste, toothbrush and six comic books and taken to a cell.

“I’ve never been so scared in my life. I’d never hurt anyone, all I’d wanted was mum and dad. I had hurt, pain, resentment, bitterness and confusion,” he said.

Yet, here he found a family of sorts. “I finally had a place to call home. Because the kids in there all had stories like mine. They became family.”

His real family handed him over to the State when he was 13, with his parents both appearing in court to say they could not care for their son.

Life of crime

After his release from Longmore he moved into a hostel but ran away not long after, embracing a life of crime and drugs — “cannabis, LSD, ecstasy, but mostly amphetamine” — and alcohol.

This pattern continued until 2001. “I would be locked up for three months, out for a month, back in for six months.”

He met his future wife Amanda in 1990 and they had two sons, while Mr Lyndon-James proceeded to “screw up her life for 13 years”.

His criminal activity reached its peak in 2000 when he was selling $40,000 of meth every day as well as firearms and explosives.

Peter Lyndon-James in 1991 aged 21.Picture: Supplied

Peter Lyndon-James in 1999 aged 29.Picture: Supplied

“I went really big, really quick,” he said. “I used to go home and feed my wife drugs and disappear for days on end. I was sleeping with prostitutes and doing a whole heap of stupid stuff.”

He says one morning he woke up to police in his house, and guns pointed at him and his wife as she lay on the floor clutching their young son. “I hated myself. I hated who I was and what I stood for, I hated everything I had become but I didn’t know how to change,” he said.

Finding God

Change finally came in 2001 ahead of Mr Lyndon-James’ final stint in prison for firearms offences. He had started attending church, discovered a faith in God, and committed to walking away from more than two decades of crime and addiction.

The young family moved to a caravan park in Gingin where Mr Lyndon-James embarked on a three-month cold-turkey detox before he was sent to jail for 12 months.

On his release he studied theology at a local bible college and started telling his story to inmates at Acacia Prison, where he then spent five years volunteering as prison chaplain.

It was a remarkable turnaround for a man seemingly destined to spend his entire life in the grip of addiction. Throughout it all, Amanda remained by his side as she is now as the pair work to save the lives of dozens of men caught in the same trap.

Mr Lyndon-James started Shalom House in 2012, determined to offer those men a path other than prison and despair.

The Swan Valley centre espouses a “tough love” approach, with rules such as no swearing or smoking. Residents have regular urine tests.

Men progress across five stages, which can take three years, and aims to have them clean, debt-free, reunited with their families and in full-time work.

The couple live off the proceeds from the sale of their lawnmowing business, sales from a book Mr Lyndon-James published two years ago and seminars around the country in which he guides parents, educators and health professionals on his tough love approach. Shalom operates on the $300 a week each resident is charged and public donations.

Transforming lives

Mr Lyndon-Jones spent two years as a councillor at the City of Swan. He remains locked in a legal battle with the council over Shalom House’s zoning, and plans to run in the next State election.

As the State grapples with the meth crisis he wants its leaders to spend time at Shalom to see the transformation of the men.

“A lot of people make comments about Shalom but they’ve never taken the time out to come and have a look,” he said.

“Men need to be kept busy. In jail they are talking about past crimes and planning future crimes. Here we are equipping and empowering them.”

He sees himself in each of the men who come to his door and gets the most satisfaction in watching them reconnect with their families.

“I broke down bawling when I received those (mug shot) photos a few weeks back. Especially that young one,” he said. “My childhood was stolen from me, but I’m looking at that boy in the face of every man I come across and I want to make sure they don’t end up in prison.”

Read tomorrow’s The West Australian for a look at the men inside Shalom House.https://thewest.com.au/news/social/shalom-house-founder-peter-lyndon-james-tells-his-story-of-redemption-ng-b881216857z