He is not in jail.
For a while, though, that was the rumor about Byron Dennis. When I heard it, my heart sank. Not that kid, who had come so far against such ridiculous odds.
I wrote about him three years ago. He was 17, a senior at North High School, and had just won a Metropolitan Mayors and Commissioners Award for disadvantaged youth, along with a $1,500 scholarship to Community College of Denver.
Such achievement didn’t figure.
At age 3, Byron Dennis was in his mother’s home, playing with a loaded .38-caliber revolver. His grandmother snatched it away, swooped him up and fled. It was the last time he saw his mother.
His father soon came for him. He remembered they were living in a shelter when his father told him he had to step out for a minute. The man never returned.
That began an endless shuffling between his grandmother’s home, foster care and group homes and, finally, the streets. It was there a boy named Angel befriended him. He took him home.
Angel’s dad said he could stay and put him to work on weekends in his drywall business. All he asked was that Byron Dennis attend school.
When we met he told me all he wanted was to go to college. He said he understood why I wanted to put him in the paper. Kids like him weren’t supposed to make it.
Byron Dennis never even graduated from North High.
The sightings began again last week, when he was supposedly spotted on the 16th Street Mall.
The rumor was he was living with Elisa Cohen.
She is editor of the North Denver Tribune and for a year taught a journalism class at North, where Byron Dennis was a student.
“The last time I saw Byron was in January at the funeral of a north Denver kid who had been killed in a car accident,” Cohen said. “And no, he never lived with us. I offered once. We have the room.”
I remember him as a tall, thickly built, hulk of a teenager who spoke softly but intelligently once you engaged him. Cohen discovered this a few weeks into class that year.
“He would always shuffle in late, rarely pay attention,” she recalled. “I finally got in his face.”
She shouted him down.
He told her he didn’t have to hear all of that and left.
“He came back the next day,” Cohen said, “and never was a problem again. And he was a good writer, a really good writer.”
She still remembers the essay he wrote for an assignment on gratitude. He was grateful, he wrote, for the man at the shelter who let him come and go when he was 11 and 12.
“I love that kid,” Cohen said.
Maybe what happened had something to do with his grandmother, the only relative he really knew. He left me that day to take the bus to see her at a Northglenn nursing home where she had just suffered a stroke.
Or maybe it was, as he acknowledged then, the resentment that still burned and he could never reconcile over his father’s abandoning him.
I want to find him, to know why a kid from nothing and nowhere ran away from promise and success.
Elisa Cohen asked if I tried Facebook. It was the last place I would have figured Byron Dennis would ever surface.
I was right.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
