Fletcher's Stairway to Success

"She was such a loving, loving person," Fletcher said. "I was in such denial. I was hurt and cried. A lot of different emotions went through me. I didn't discuss it with anybody."

Suddenly everything changed. The sparkling report cards he so proudly delivered to her in elementary school no longer mattered. A's got the same glazed stare as D's. Something started to die in Fletcher as well. Mostly, he felt rage.

At night, when she disappeared, he would, too, wandering the streets looking for the dealers, trying to catch them before they sold her drugs. He had a reputation by then, one as a boy so strong that his family called him "Bam" after the club-wielding child "Bamm-Bamm" on "The Flintstones."

"I didn't care," he said. "My mom was the most important thing to me. All I wanted was to have my mom back to where she was before her drug addiction."

Fletcher is certain she fell apart one night in January 1987, when the police came to tell them his sister, Kecia, had been found dead. She was 17. Fletcher, at 11, was unprepared for the shock of looking into a casket and seeing his sister. At times over the next several years he would look at pictures of her from back then, smiling, and wondered what she would look like if still alive. Would she be happy? What would she be doing?

Yet her death seemed to give Fletcher clarity. "Where a lot of people would look at these things as a negative, I would see them as a positive," he said. It was almost as if a map of how exactly not to live his life had been drawn for him and in the gloom of those early teenage years, he was able to recognize it for what it was.

He was never alone in getting away from Giddings Road. Benefactors kept appearing like saints from the fog. Just months after Kecia was buried, Leonard Schwartz and his wife, Charlotte Kramer, adopted a sixth-grade class as part of a still-experimental project called the I Have a Dream Foundation.

Schwartz, a wealthy suburban building materials company owner, and Kramer provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarship assistance, mentoring and life experiences through high school. It was a one-time contribution for them. Just one school. And of all the sixth grades of all the schools in Cleveland, they chose London Fletcher's sixth-grade class.

Even as Fletcher's home life crumbled, it never occurred to him to ignore the offer Schwartz and Kramer made. He met Schwartz for lunch and attended the symphony with Kramer. He told them about his mother, his sister and the brother who was in and out of jail on drug charges. When a cousin or an uncle died in a shooting, he'd tell them about that, too. Then they invited him to dinner at their sprawling stone home.

When Schwartz and Kramer look back at the past two decades, the great disappointment is that so few took advantage of the gift they had been given. Of 72 children in the class only about a dozen used the scholarships or aid grants the couple provided.

"London was always willing to try," Kramer said. "And he always had that smile. He's very smart and he realized that he had this opportunity. His sister didn't have that opportunity. And he knew he should take it."

"I don't know if he recognized it as his way out," Isaac said. "But I know he recognized it as something different, and something different provided a change of pace. It provided a relief from the chaos and the sheer reality of what home life had to offer."