That two-year period began when his parents kicked him out of their house in Waldorf, Md., after he told them he’s gay. He responded by coming to D.C., where he temporarily moved in with a student friend and persuaded his mother to enroll him in D.C.’s Ballou STAY High School.

A short time later, his friend and her family moved to another city, leaving him without a place to live. Without telling his teachers and schoolmates at Ballou, he moved into an abandoned apartment building in the city’s Congress Heights neighborhood near the school.
“I never really told anybody because I didn’t want anybody to have pity on me,” he told the Blade in an interview last November.