E’Stephan Garcia is an Army captain with a killer dimple and West Point credentialsthe kind of guy for whom everything seems to have come easy.
“People look at me and figure I was an Eagle Scout with a congressional nomination to West Point and a fabulous upbringing,” he says. “They have no clue that I’m a Mexican kid from the north side of Greeley who took a wrong path and nearly left all my potential behind.”
Garcia, 28, won’t mention the details of that path when he speaks at his commencement Friday, congratulating classmates for making it through the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine. Most don’t know his history, and he is incredulous “that anyone would even want to hear it.”
Things got messed up for him at age 12, when his parents divorced and he moved in with his father, who didn’t protest when he blew off school and starting drinking, dropping acid and snorting crystal meth up to four times a day.
Garcia took to dealing pot and stealing — “anything that wasn’t tied down.”
His principal threatened expulsion after Garcia had skipped school for almost three months of 10th grade. He walked out of the principal’s office, got into a fight in the hallway and was booted both from Greeley West High and the home he shared with his dad.
Then followed months of homelessness that led him once to scavenge through a friend’s parents’ pantry for a can of peaches to sustain him.
“I remember lying in bed feeling like I wanted to die,” he says.
Garcia watched, numb, as one friend got hauled to prison for shooting into a crowd and another for strangling a neighbor. Numbness turned to panic when a buddy killed a convenience- store clerk in Platteville.
He re-enrolled, this time at Ault’s Highland High, where he graduated, barely, at the very bottom of his class.
Knowing that college wasn’t an option, he enlisted in the Army, quietly enduring meth withdrawal during boot camp.
He excelled as an enlisted man and persuaded his superiors to send him to an Army prep school, where he caught up on math and English and figured out basics such as the differences between the Democratic and Republican parties.
Garcia still was catching up after snagging a spot as a commander at West Point. In his spare time, he read classics like “Catcher in the Rye” that his classmates knew from middle school. He taught them how to shine their boots in exchange for editing his papers.
Army brass leaned on Garcia to become an infantry officer, especially after he was rejected by 12 medical schools.
Then came word that CU was taking a chance on a local kid who paled on paper compared with many other applicants.
The Army paid Garcia’s way through four years of med school while he married his college sweetheart and had a baby, Alana, in January.
At North Colorado Medical Center, he ran into old schoolmates stunned to find him in a tie and doctors’ whites.
“I feel guilty, because the best thing I ever did was leave,” Garcia says.
“He’s a miracle kid,” adds Dan Bañuelos, a counselor who identified Garcia as an at-risk freshman and worked for years prodding him to class. “I knew if he just hung in there, he would take off and fly.”
Dr. Garcia and his little family head in June to El Paso, where he will spend a year interning at an Army hospital.
He has done us all proud.
“Hopefully somebody will clip this and give it to a kid who’s lost his way,” he says of this column, for which he hesitated to interview. “Hopefully somebody will read it and decide never, ever to give up.”
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
