Dante Harris hid his secret well at Columbus High School. He wore music headphones like all the kids, but he didn't plug them into a music player.He couldn't afford one,so he just tucked the end of the headphone jack into his pants. He wanted to fit in.
Amber Massey knew Harris as a kid who played basketball with her nephew, but saw him as something of a mystery. He received excellent grades and captained the basketball team, but wasemotionally tight as a clam.
She didn’t know he was virtually homeless, bouncing for years between his troubled home and staying with friends.
People in Columbus know Massey as a faith-driven woman with a soft heart foryoung people facing hard times. When she discovered his secret, she took Harris under wing. She found him a place to live, helped him get a driver's license, and gave him a used cell phone. Most important, her tenacious aid helped him win a full $70,000 scholarship to the military school at the University of North Georgia. He started in 2015.
Together they make a formidable pair. But their strengths are being tested as never before, as Harris has put himself in a crisis that threatens everything they’ve worked for.
Last November, his life changed with the click of cell phone camera. Police sayHarris snapped a photo from behind a military school officialas he dropped his shorts below his buttocks to urinate in a campus men's room.
“I thought it was funny,” at the time, Harris told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
He shared it with three friends. They shared it with hundreds of others.
The official, retired Maj. Richard Neikirk, second in command at the military school, didn’t find it funny at all. He pressed criminal charges, including felony unlawful surveillance, which carries a sentence of up to six years in prison. Neikirk also delivered a scathing letter to school officials.
Harris, in turn, wrote a letter of apology to the major, saying, "I regret the stupid decision and would take it back a hundred times if I could. …I need your grace and forgiveness. I'm scared."
‘He screwed up’
Dante Harris pulled the wrong stunt at the wrong time, at the wrong place, on the wrong guy. Harris did this at a military college, where the standards of behavior are higher than most other schools.
And he did it at a time when the pervasiveness of cell phones and social mediahas raised serious issues of privacy.A military scandal erupted after a Facebook page called Marines United circulated salacious photos of female service members without their permission.
The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps on Wednesday officially said that distributing nude photos without a subject’s permission will be a crime.
Did Harris, 20 years old when the snapped the photo, simply pull a stupid, harebrained stunt, the kind that young people have done for ages?
“He screwed up, but he’s a college kid, and college kids make poor decisions,” Massey said. “Give him a second chance.”
How does Neikirk feel? He declined comment when contacted by the AJC. But in a statement to the college he registered his feelings.
“Anger, disgust, disappointment, hurt, humiliation and disrespect.”
He added Harris does not “display the character traits our students should display” and that he should not be “associated with our program or school.”
‘Among our finest’
Amber Massey remembers discovering Dante Harris’ big secret. It was after a basketball game. Harris, then a high school senior, would wait after games for someone to give him a ride home.
She volunteered, and he gave her the address. Massey dropped him off in front of a nice home and, after pulling away, saw him walk away from the house. She caught up with him and learned he didn't have a key.It was the home of a friend, the latest he was staying with.
Harris doesn’t like talking about his family life.
“My father chose to never meet me,” he wrote in his college application essay. He also talked about tension with his mother. “I live …with friends and neighbors because my mother decided to put a roof over her boyfriend’s head instead of her own son.”
The AJC could not obtain comment from his mother. When a reporter called a phone number for her provided by a family member, the woman who answered denied she was his mother.
Harris’ older sister, Kenyatta, attested to the tension between Harris and his mother.
“Mom and her boyfriend wanted Dante to quit basketball. It was petty stuff,” she said. “They made up reasons to kick him out.”
Despite Harris' turbulent home life,he excelled in the classroom."Among our finest," said Columbus High assistant principal Lance Henderson in a letter of recommendation to the college. He attested to Harris' 3.85 grade point average and his course load of advanced placement classes. Harris also ran track and was a member of the Spanish Honor Society.
Massey helped him a little, at first. She slipped him money for high school graduation fees. Then came a tux for the prom.She didn't like his personality at first. He seemed to never smile.His answers were short.
“I thought he was snotty,” she said.
Movies are made about women like Massey, such as the Sandra Bullock film “The Blind Side.” In it, a woman nurtures a hard-luck young man to success in football and life.
Massey, though not wealthy, is cut from the same cloth.
As in the movie, Massey is white and Harris is African American.
Deeply spiritual, a community volunteer from a young age, Massey, 41, has coordinated missionary trips to the Dominican Republic, taught special education and coached softball for mentally and physically challenged children.
“When I’m in, I’m all in,” she said.
She employed her tried-and-true approach to break through Harris’ silence. She spoke to him until he had to talk back, asking him question after question.
“You’re going to answer my questions or I’ll make your head explode,” she told him.
It worked.
Harris told her, “I don’t want anybody to know about my past.”
She told him, “Your past is your badge of courage.”
Determined and a little scared
Military college was Harris’ tunnel to a wider world and success. He walked onto the Dahlonega campus in January 2015, determined and a little scared.
The Corps of Cadets at the University of North Georgia is more than 140 years old and has produced national military leaders. The approximately 700 cadets in the military program stand out among the 18,000 students due to their uniforms and closely cropped hair.
Mornings, a cannon blast rings across campus at 7 o'clock, rattling windows as cadets turn to and salute the flag. Another blast comes at 5 in the evening.The cadets are held to a military standard of behaviorand are expected to comport themselves in a way that does not dishonor themselves or the corps.
Harris absorbed corps culture, earning As and Bs and making the dean’s list last year.
Neikirk is a central figure in that culture.
“He’s the guy who made the corps run on time,” said Ron Martz, a retired AJC reporter who taught at the school for six years.
“He’s very much a by-the-book kind of guy,” Martz said. “If you want something done, you go to him.”
He was tough but respected, known for his dry humor, and some cadets considered him a father figure, said Martz.
Harris’ Facebook page reveals his pride in being a cadet, including a selfie he took in his crisp blue uniform and bow tie, replete with shiny brass buttons.
But the Facebook page reveals another side of Harris, a young man with tattoos across his chest and, in one post, singing along to a sexually explicit song.
“There’s still a side of him that wants to impress the south side of town,” Massey said. “We struggle with that.”
Two arrest warrants
On Nov. 3 of last year, Neikirk finished a class and entered the rest room in the Military Leadership Center. He was wearing shorts that had no zipper or buttons, so he had to pull his shorts and underwear down around his knees to urinate, he said in his letter to the school. That exposed his backside.
Neikirk said he never saw the cadet take the photo. After Harris shared the photo with three friends, they posted to GroupMe, a mass messaging platform where hundreds saw it, Massey said.
News of the photo eventually reached the base commandant,Col. James T. Palmer. He received a call from an officer stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, who said his sister had received a copy of the photo through a mobile group application.
Shortly after Harris took the photo, he returned home to Columbus. He told Massey he had bad news. That usually meant something like he was dropping a class rather than receive a C in it.
He received a call, he told her. There were two warrants out for his arrest.
‘Heat of the moment’
The school disciplinary hearing occurred Wednesday. Harris sat at the head of a conference room table with Massey beside him. Three panel members who would decide his fate took other chairs.
Before they walked in, Harris and Massey decided to simply tell the truth, they said. They had also taken action behind the scenes. Harris wrote a letter of apology to the major, but received no reply. Harris’ attorney, Jeff Wolff, wrote a letter to the school asserting that Neikirk violated policy by exposing his buttocks in a public restroom.
Addressing the panelists, Harris spoke with remorse. He used the phrase “heat of the moment” several times.
He was told the school is considering a suspension of four semesters. Such a ruling, Harris worried, could end his plans to graduate military college and enter the Georgia Army National Guard as an officer.
He would be back to square one, back to Columbus.
Massey also spoke: “If you don’t give him a chance, he’s not going to have a chance.”
The big decision
School officials’ decision came Friday. They suspended him for two semesters, summer and fall, rather than four. They noted that he had no prior disciplinary problems and that he seemed genuinely remorseful.
Harris plans to appeal the university’s decision. Neikirk can also appeal.
Massey doesn’t know yet the effects of the suspension. She worries it will kill his scholarship and his chances to get into another school.
“Unless I’m reading it wrong, it sounds better, but it’s not better,” she said.
Harris, for his part, is putting on a brave face.
He has not yet been indicted on the criminal charges.
“My whole life I’ve learned things happen and you’ve just got to make a way,” Harris said. “Think positive and you can do anything.”
For now, he’s studying for final exams.
