The young man, who went by his middle name, Jamal, as a child and teenager, grew up in a broken home in Greenville, South Carolina, where his mother passed him off to another family, where he bounced between houses for nearly his entire childhood and adolescence, where he tried and sold drugs as early as eighth grade, where he often stayed out all night, where he preferred the loneliness of the streets over the houses that never felt like home. And where he finally became part of a family when one of his high school coaches took him in and gave him the stability he'd lacked.