Secret life steals a promising future

Something happened when he raised his voice.

The quiet, chubby student, so polite that he answered professors with "yes, sir" or "no, ma'am," would suddenly find the guttural roar of a Southern preacher. And when he thundered about the need for justice or the ills of poverty, his colleagues at Boston College Law School thought they were witnessing the second coming of Martin Luther King Jr., a young man whose zeal to help the down-and-out might one day propel him to the highest offices of the land.

Arthur Cornelius Harris never made it that far. Instead, his path took him to a musty room in Boston's largest homeless shelter, where he slept on a thin vinyl mattress along with hundreds of other men. At the Long Island refuge in Boston Harbor, the aspiring attorney often seemed like just another junkie, walking about aimlessly, sometimes begging others for the money to pay for his next hit.

For a year, Harris, a 27-year-old who had made it from the ghetto to a few months shy of graduating from one of the nation's top law schools, managed to live two very different lives: he was a promising young law student and a heroin addict.

But as he lurched toward a bright future, charming judges, professors, and friends while disguising a secret none of them imagined, he could not escape the darkness of his past.

Late last year, it found him.

Harris grew up in Montgomery, Ala., amid the poverty, despair, and violence that he saw as the legacy of slavery. Even as a teenager, he told people he felt "an awesome" responsibility to "make America live up to her promise of equality and justice."

His first challenge was simply surviving.

A scrawny middle child growing up without a father in one of Montgomery's most dangerous housing projects, Harris could not escape the violence. Over the years, a neighbor, who enticed Harris with gifts of shirts and shoes, sexually abused him, his friends in Alabama said.

When his mother thought he was running with the wrong kids, she beat him so badly that police held him for several days at a shelter for child abuse victims. "I would whup them with a belt, wherever -- wherever," Harris's mother, Mona Scott, said about her sons. "I wanted them to be afraid of me, to protect them."

Later, in college and law school, Harris would write about the hardships of his youth: about his anger at having met his father only once, at age 15; about repeated stops by police, whose profile he often fit; about his struggles with his sexuality, as relatives told him he would go to hell if he did not restrain his attraction to men.

"I challenge anyone to go to my middle school or high school, live in my neighborhood, and come out any better than I did," Harris wrote in an essay at the University of Alabama Birmingham. "Most yield to the grave, the prison, the drugs, or some other escape route. I was lucky."

Aiming to become his family's first college graduate, Harris won admission to the Birmingham campus. By his senior year, while working full time to support himself, he served as president of the student government, chairman of the Black Student Union, president of the Omicron Delta Kappa National Leadership Honor Society, and was a member of the university's mock trial team and the local YMCA's mentor program. "There was something special about him -- you just knew he was going places," said Niyi Coker, an African-American studies professor.

To protest budget cuts in the university system during his junior year, Harris led hundreds of students from schools around Alabama to the state capitol. When university trustees proposed severing the medical school from the campus, he organized a movement that hounded the trustees until they abandoned the idea.

And when administrators suspended black fraternities and sororities for missing an obligatory campus meeting, he held a rally that attracted hundreds of students and local media, and ultimately got the suspension lifted. Harris's boldness won the grudging respect of university administrators.

When university president W. Ann Reynolds saw Harris working at a drugstore and realized how little money he had, she decided to pay the $3,200 tuition bill for his senior year.

Because he scored poorly on the Law School Admissions Test, Harris's application was rejected at some 20 law schools, but he was admitted to a special seven-week pre-law program for minorities at Suffolk University Law School. When Reynolds heard about this, she used her frequent flier mileage to buy his ticket to Boston.

"It was the best money I ever spent," Reynolds said.

While at Suffolk, after standing on Boston's Freedom Trail for the first time in the summer of 2000, Harris wrote in an essay: "I was reborn right there on the spot by a thought that somehow I had survived I had finally made it out."

Euphoria dissipates

A few weeks later Harris talked his way into BC Law School. On a visit to Suffolk to interview prospective students, Elizabeth Rosselot, BC Law's assistant dean of admissions, met with Harris. After a half-hour interview, she promised Harris a place in the class of 2004.

"What I saw was just an incredible determination to beat the odds," Rosselot said, adding that she could not recall admitting a student so spontaneously.

Harris's euphoria at being accepted to BC law wore off quickly. The first year of law school was grueling and Boston was different than he had expected -- colder not just in its climate, but also less welcoming.

Harris told friends that the homophobia and racism he had tried to escape in Montgomery continued to haunt him in Boston. Uneasily out of the closet, poor, and living among mostly well-off white students on campus Harris grew indignant about what he called his "suburban" law school professors, who he believed taught their students how to abide by the system instead of how to improve it.

"I, too, have a dream," he wrote in a paper titled "A Burning Desire for Justice" in the fall of his second year. "I came to the law with an understanding that I was to use it as a tool, to help stop the modern-day tidy ethnic cleansing of my people."

But law school seemed not to satisfy Harris. Friends and professors said he seemed depressed, frequently confiding in them that he felt out of place and that his creativity was drying up. It did not help that he had been diagnosed with a learning disability and earned mostly Cs.

Finding distance

During his second year at BC, he decided to move into the Long Island homeless shelter, a two-hour commute from the Newton campus. He told his friends he wanted to live with the people he planned to represent after graduation law school, because "sometimes you have to get down in the hole with them, in order to pull them out."

Not everyone accepted that explanation. He told other friends that by living in the shelter instead of a school dormitory, he could save roughly $8,000 a year. Even so, friends wondered whether there was yet another explanation for the move, something Harris would not reveal.

"It was just so puzzling," said Mary Ann Chirba-Martin, a BC law professor.

If Harris was moving to the shelter to put more distance between his two lives, he succeeded: BC colleagues never knew about his drug habit.

When Harris first arrived at Long Island in December 2002, the shelter assigned him a social worker and a bed, No. 313. "He said he had no family, no friends, and no support, and he didn't know what he would do," said Valerie Pruitt, his case manager.

Harris made several friends at the shelter and found a lover, Ricky Negron. But last September, Negron, 31, died of a heroin overdose.

The loss devastated Harris.

"He would say, `I wish I was with Ricky. I wish he didn't have to die,' " said Robert Wooden, 52, a friend at the shelter.

In the months before Negron died, Harris's friends at the shelter had noticed a pattern: Harris would return from school around 7 p.m., eat in the shelter's cafeteria, and then walk the refuge's dark corridors, looking for money to buy the white powder he called "pop" -- heroin.

"He would come up to me and ask me for $10 or $20," said one friend, Leon Smith, 21.

Last fall, Harris began seeking a more direct high. Rather than sniffing the drug, he asked David Johnson, a 35-year-old veteran junkie who slept a few beds away, to teach him how to shoot up.

"He didn't really understand the road it was taking him down," Johnson said.

Lost potential

On Nov. 22, after e-mailing friends and professors about his plans to promote his latest cause -- electing Howard Dean president -- he took a bus to the shelter and met his friend, Carlos Ramirez, 23.

"Who's got pop around here?" Ramirez recalled Harris asking.

At 9:40 p.m., Ramirez found Harris on the shelter's third floor, in the television room, wearing shorts and sandals, sweating profusely.

"He was a wreck," said Ramirez, who said Harris's face was puffy, his eyes red. A white powder coated his upper lip and nostrils. "He looked like he was going to blow up." Before Harris went to bed a half-hour later, Ramirez saw him walking around slowly, hunched over, his eyes rolling and dilating.

At 5:30 the next morning, after the other men had left the shelter for the day, Harris was still in bed. He was dead.

The official cause of death will be determined in a toxicology report to be released next month, said John Cronin of the state medical examiner's office.

Harris's mother welled up with tears when she learned of her son's drug use.

"He lived a double life," she said. "I guess he knew not to tell me."

At BC, Harris had been fond of quoting the late Senator Paul Wellstone, who urged people to "never separate the life you live from the words you speak." Colleagues could not understand why Harris did not take this advice.

"It makes me think he must have been in pain, a lot of pain," said Nora Wiley, the law school's assistant dean of students. At graduation this year, she said, Harris's name will be listed as part of the class of 2004.

"Harris loved everyone," said Coker, his professor at the University of Alabama. "He fought everyone's causes, but in the final analysis, Harris forgot to love himself, and in doing that, he cheated the world of everything he could have contributed."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.