S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. by Castaneda Ruben

Author:Castaneda, Ruben [Castaneda, Ruben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-06-30T21:00:00+00:00

I called Lou the following day. I’d worked into the article a brief reference to the two kids he’d taken into his home. One of them was Kenny McFarland, a basketball star at Gonzaga College High School.

“Tell me about these kids you brought into your home,” I said.

A week later, I sat next to Lou in the bleachers of the Gonzaga gym, watching Kenny play. The kid had game. He was six foot six, wiry, and strong, with quickness, speed, and skills. He dropped twenty-six points on the opposing team, delivering the final two with a thunderous two-handed dunk.

“He’s going to get a Division I scholarship,” Lou said.

The captain had met Kenny while working as a volunteer basketball coach at Gonzaga. Kenny lived in a tough section of Northeast. A lot of his contemporaries had ended up in the drug game. Kenny wasn’t a bad kid, but he was impressionable, the captain said. His home life was chaotic. He was drifting in school. He was on the verge of tumbling into the drug world.

Lou talked to Kenny’s mom and aunt, who gave their blessing to his taking the teenager temporarily under his wing. Then he simply brought Kenny home; he didn’t ask Loraine, he just did it. Loraine wasn’t thrilled about suddenly having a teenager, a stranger, in the house, but she didn’t object.

Lou described how he’d taught Kenny to study with three-by-five flash cards. He told me how they worked out together with free weights.

I interviewed Kenny and Loraine and wrote up the story.

This one did hit the front page.

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