Donnell Drinks woke up one morning to banging on his door in the projects of North Philadelphia. Drinks, who was 15 and the oldest of three boys, had nodded off after taking his youngest brother to school. It wasn’t a truant officer at his door, though — no one had ever come knocking about that. The officers told him to get out, not bothering to ask if there was an adult around, which there wasn’t. Mr. Drinks’s dad had abandoned the family a decade earlier, and his mom was in the throes of crack cocaine addiction.

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Persons: Donnell Drinks, Drinks’s, He’d, Groggy, “, That’s, ” Locations: North Philadelphia