He arrived here in the dark four years ago, so depressed about the turn his life had taken that he wanted to die.
But not anymore. Dionicio Torres has dreams now. He wants to go to college and become a translator.
Torres, 20, is one of a handful of honor students at Banneker High School, ranked sixth in a class of 301 who graduated Saturday.
When he enrolled here Sept. 16, 2007, the suburban Atlanta school once associated with excellence had been experiencing trouble with drugs and gangs for close to a decade.
“You had to be tough to go to Banneker,” said Starzee Walker, a paraprofessional at the school who became one of Torres’s mentors. “Some people called it Eastside High from the movie ‘Lean On Me.’ It was rough.”
In some ways, though, Banneker was exactly what Torres needed. Constant joking by classmates lifted his spirits, but it was Eddie Morris who set him on the path to full recovery.
For weeks Morris had heard that Banneker’s newest student wanted to meet him, but he didn’t have time. Between counseling students and his volunteer work with Men of Destiny, a mentoring program he helped found, he had time for little else.
He was en route to a MOD meeting in the cafeteria one day when several colleagues with Torres in tow cornered him.
“What happened to you?” Morris asked Torres.
The story he shared was at once sobering and familiar. Morris knew Torres because he was Torres. Once.
The school social worker had grown up in an area of St. Louis plagued by drugs. He was 5 when a gun was held to his head. When members of his family were prosecuted on charges of selling drugs in 1992, relatives sent him to Atlanta to get away from it all. He was 22.
“I immediately related to this kid,” Morris said.
He also knew Torres’s story would resonate with the students he hoped to reach at a mock funeral MOD was planning.
“Will you tell your story?” Morris asked Torres, then 16.
He refused. He wasn’t ready. But the day before the event he changed his mind.
That day a raucous crowd of students filed into the school gymnasium for the mock funeral, a symbolic burial of the pall many felt hung over the school.
Halfway into the two-hour ceremony, Torres, wearing dark sunglasses, was led to the stage.
For years, Torres had run drugs, sometimes delivering cocaine and other times collecting payments that topped $60,000.
On March 31, 2006, he and the dealer he was selling for drove together in search for a woman. About 8 p.m., they found her and several male houseguests.
While his dealer, the woman and one of the men were in the kitchen, Torres remained in the living room.
He could hear a loud argument from the kitchen. When his dealer emerged, two men pulled their guns and ordered Torres and the dealer to get on the floor.
The men tied their hands and feet before freeing Torres to make a list of the people he knew had drugs and money. Over the next two hours, the men threatened to kill them, to bury them alive.
“What is that?” one of the men asked Torres, referring to a pendant hanging from his neck.
“This is the Virgin Mary,” Torres said.
“Don’t worry, little man,” the man said. “She’s going to save you tonight.”
In the next moment, the man put a gun to Torres’s head and pulled the trigger. The room went black.
‘It’s just not worth it’
During emergency surgery at Grady Memorial Hospital, in a last-ditch effort to dig the bullet fragments from his skull and save his life, doctors were forced to remove Torres’s eyes.
“I’m here to tell you this thing that some of y’all are doing, it’s just not worth it,” he told a rapt audience that day. “I know.”
Now, just days before he was scheduled to graduate from Banneker, Torres sat in a crowded office with a few of the men who have been his constant companions since coming here. He wore a dark T-shirt with dark Versace shades covering the place where his eyes once were, a faux diamond in each ear, the ever-present pendant bearing the Virgin Mary.
He had come once more to tell his story, the same one he shared four years ago and dozens of times since, whenever Morris asked.
Like the 300 or so other young men Morris drafted into Men of Destiny, Torres’s education became a personal mission. For every kid he meets at Banneker he offers encouragement, a listening ear and, most importantly, these three words: “I love you.”
MOD is his attempt to redeem students such as Torres from lives of poverty, violence and brokenness. In Torres’s case, Morris said, it was all three.
He migrated here from Mexico in 1990 with his mother, who had come to the United States to find work and refuge from the poverty she had known.
Torres was a good kid, a model student, but that all changed at age 12 when he dropped out of school, started selling drugs and getting drunk. His mother begged him to return to school, but he never did. When he lost his sight, he said, he could finally see the mistakes he had made.
“It used to be I didn’t care,” Torres said. “Now I think twice before I do stuff.”
GPA best among men
That shift in thinking helped propel Torres to the top of his class. But it wasn’t automatic. At first Torres was too depressed to live. He focused less on academics and more on learning to navigate the darkness into which he’d been thrust.
At Banneker he learned to laugh again. He learned to read Braille. He learned to use a cane for the blind. In between, he got the grades, compiling an impressive 3.85 grade-point average, the highest of any Banneker male, and receiving both a National Merit Award and the Fulton County school district’s I Can Award.
And so on Saturday, he was one of the kids under the red mortarboards, hiding his black spiked hair, and the gown hiding the Virgin Mary pendant he believes helped save his life.
In a way, he could not believe where he was; the first on his mother’s side of the family to graduate from high school. But then again, he could. He was living a more purposeful existence. He could see now.
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