Escaping the streets: SteveO Michel's path to righteousness

There's a man in Fort Collins who doesn't look like he belongs.

A young man, 23, who walks with a strut and squints when he talks. His skin isn't smooth. His nostrils flare. His dreadlocks are thick. He doesn't wear the face of a gentle man. And his job, defensive end at CSU, screams aggression.

But he smiles while holding the door at church. He asks how your week went and how your kids are. He shares what his daughter back in Florida said to him on FaceTime and how big she's getting. He misses her. And now that man who looked like an outsider has become someone you aspire to be.

"Yeah, I know what people usually think of me," SteveO Michel said, his voice filled with cheerful forgiveness of those who judge him. "I mean, come on, I do look different."

Michel's burden is the fear of disappointment. Where he's from, success stories didn't exist so he wrote his own.

To every relative back home, he's dad. At age 12 his mom turned to him to make decisions. If food stamps weren't enough to feed the family, he'd go without. If there was a hole in the bathroom floor, he'd patch it. When his clothes were rags, he'd buy new ones with the money he got from selling marijuana on the streets of Orlando.

Michel couldn't read until he was a sophomore in high school, but he was savvy. If selling weed meant extra income to provide for himself so his family's welfare check only had to be split between eight people instead of nine, that's what he needed to do. It wasn't an honest living and he's not proud of it, but as a young teen living in the inner city, he wasn't old enough to take a legitimate job.

Seven years ago, Michel was illiterate. He wasn't supposed to become a college graduate. He wasn't supposed to stay out of jail. But he did and is inspiring an urban neighborhood to do the same.

Michel was raised in the shadow of an Orlando prison.

When he walked out his front door to leave for school, there it was. When he came home — the nights he did come home — there it stood. A constant reminder of where kids from his neighborhood ended up. Michel often struggled in school, but he always understood statistics. He was poor and black. The expectation of many who dared venture to his side of town was that he'd do time across Lake Catherine in the Orange County Jail.

It's the kind of neighborhood strangers are scared to drive through. The sound of gunshots are as common as sparrows chirping in the morning. It's bad.

"I wouldn't wish living there on my worst enemy," said Borris Jackson, a former football coach at Jones High School and mentor to Michel.

Kindly stated, the place is a dump. Quite literally. Mountains of trash cascade from the yards of the 49-building condominium complex built in the 1970s as a picturesque lakeside community. The garbage man doesn't come because no one pays their bills. Or their rent. The tenants drove out the property owners by the mid-2000s, and many are squatters. It's not much to look at, but it's home, and Michel's unit has an unintentional skylight from the sun streaming through rotting holes in the bathroom wall. The shower lacks a working head. To bathe his 6-foot-1 body, a size he reached at a young age, he'd fill a cup of water in the sink and pour it over his body.

Eight kids were raised in that Tymber Skan home by their mother, Elucia Michel, who immigrated to the United States from Haiti as a teenager. Without a father around, Michel was man of the house. He was the third child, but the oldest boy, and in the mornings he was the one rolling his siblings out of bed for school.

If the family needed anything, he'd provide. He was only a teenager but always a protector, and that role wouldn't change when he left for college at Colorado State University.

The first cost-of-attendance stipend Michel receives from CSU this month will be express mailed to Orlando.

His mother and now nine others living in the Tymber Skan house he grew up in could be homeless tomorrow. Owners of the condemned community who stayed away for the better part of a decade have returned and issued eviction notices. It's not a matter of if Michel's family will be out on the streets, but when. His mother, who makes the best living she can cleaning houses, has applied for more stable employment to no avail. Rental applications come back rejected. There's no clear solution in sight, and when buildings in the complex began to be demolished toward the end of July, Michel used what little money he had and returned to Florida. The thought of his family going through this alone was unbearable.

Once in Orlando, he tried calling in favors to get his mother a job. No luck. He checked the help wanted ads, consulted charities. Nothing. He did everything imaginable to get his family on its feet with the exception of one drastic move: quit football and move home.

He tried. CSU was already five days into the start of preseason camp and he was 1,600 miles away, driving around town in search of "Now Hiring" signs taped to windows. He went so far as to call Rams defensive coordinator Tyson Summers, who spent the previous three years living in Orlando while coaching at Central Florida, to warn him that his starting end might not come back.

When Michel's mother heard her son was seriously contemplating leaving CSU, she sent him packing.

"When my mom told me to leave, I was frustrated and told her I'm not going back. I'm getting calls from my siblings saying they're hungry and don't have anything to eat. I can't do anything about that if I'm in Colorado," Michel said. "I already have my college degree (graduated in May), and my family comes before anything. I didn't understand why she wanted me to leave."

But Elucia wanted a better life for her son, one where he didn't have to worry about where the next meal came from. She needed him to set an example for the household.

"I have a family at Colorado State that needs me and I can't call it quits. And you know what? She was right."

Michel will never forget sitting in his high school locker room as a freshman and being made fun of by his teammates.

His mother had no formal education. His father committed suicide when he was 4 years old. His life had no direction. When considering the future one day after football practice, he asked what happens after high school.

Puzzled by the question, his teammates laughed at his naivety.

"I had never heard of college before. I had no idea what it was," Michel said.

College wasn't a popular topic of conversation around Jones High School. College was a place for rich kids. Not people like Michel. No, he was from Tymber Skan, had a 1.8 GPA and went to Jones, the institution known around Orange County as the "'hood school."

For him, high school was supposed to be the peak. There was nothing to look forward to after graduation, if he graduated at all. At least that's what he was thinking as a freshman, spending the entire football season academically ineligible. All he was allowed to do was practice.

Football was his escape. He hung out with the wrong crowd and knew it. He had no desire to rejoin his friends peddling drugs around Orlando, but occasionally fell into that trap. He wanted more out of life, but had no idea how to get it.

The answer was being suspended from school.

Michel wasn't like the friends he hung out with. He was a teenager, sure, and got rowdy, as teenagers do, but he was always respectful of authority. So when Kathryn Kuehn, his freshman math teacher, heard that he'd been exiled to alternative bell schedule — an in-school suspension that students serve after hours — on his 16th birthday, just a week before summer vacation, she was in shock.

"I don't know how to explain it. Something about a teacher's instinct. I knew SteveO was different. I didn't know why, but I knew he was not the type of student that should be in ABS," Kuehn said. "I asked the teacher if I could talk to him and just asked him what was going on. I believed in him. I knew he was better than this, and he took what I said to heart. And I will say that what probably pushed him over the edge was knowing he could be eligible to play football if his grades came up."

She doesn't remember what Michel did to end up in ABS, and neither does he. Nor does either remember the magical words that changed his life. All Michel recalls was the power he felt knowing someone saw he was more than a poor black kid from Tymber Skan. No one had ever believed in him before.

Michel couldn't read well, but he wasn't dumb. All he needed was extra attention. His mother couldn't read or write English and had seven other children to attend to. What he needed was a mentor, and Kuehn delivered.

Grades were never again a problem. Within a semester, his GPA increased to 2.7 and he graduated at a 3.3. Most importantly, he was able to play football. If anything was going to pull him out of poverty, this was it.

He was by no means a blue-chip prospect at linebacker, but was good enough. The attention he received from colleges was limited and primarily came from smaller schools throughout the South. Florida Atlantic, Jacksonville and Savannah State offered early; Georgia Tech showed interest. But when he injured his ankle as a junior, everyone rescinded their scholarships — everyone except former CSU coach Steve Fairchild. He had faith, and it paid off.

Florida Atlantic was where Michel wanted to be. In Boca Raton, a three-hour drive from home, if his family needed him, he could be there. Six states worth of interstate highways separated Florida from Colorado. "Why would I go there?" he thought.

Then he saw it and knew. He had to leave his family.

"The first time I ever left Florida was my unofficial visit to CSU during my junior year. There's a reason God sent me to Colorado State. He showed me that there was more out there than just Tymber Skan in Orlando, Florida," Michel said. "The first time my mom ever came out here was when I graduated in May, and she couldn't believe how nice it was. I've never been around so much Caucasian in my life.

"That's the thing when you come from poverty. Everyone who's in it with you makes you think that's all there is in life, when in reality, that's not the case. You have to understand that. And if you are willing to help yourself, there are people out there who will help you get to where you want to be."

Kuehn doesn't work at Jones High School anymore.

Her former colleagues say she moved on because SteveO left. She swears it's not true.

She was out of town and couldn't attend Michel's graduation. Instead she watched the stream online, sobbing as he clutched his diploma. She thought back to the countless hours spent with him after school. Some days he was receptive, others he failed to see the point. She never quit on him. He never gave up on himself.

"I'm not being dramatic. Watching him walk across that stage changed my life," she said.

Michel wasn't supposed to succeed, yet he did. And now working at an alternative school that takes in a new batch of students each week who were suspended from wherever they were last, Kuehn points to the wall where Michel's jersey hangs next to photos from his graduations and says every Friday, "If SteveO can do it, you can do it."

Michel's goal was never to be an Orlando legend. All he wanted was a better life. He didn't want to be a hypocrite and someday tell his 2-year-old daughter Peyton that she needs go to college when he didn't have anything to show for it.

If he finishes his senior season at CSU strong enough to lead him to an NFL career, great. What really matters is he has a bachelor's degree in social work, a piece of paper no one else in his family has earned. Not yet.

His older sister, Linda Clerisier, said she enrolled in an Orlando community college because of what her brother was able to do. And his younger brother? He's trying to use school and football to get out of Tymber Skan. The way Michel did.

"People around here always ask me why I'm always working hard and not going out and having more fun. It's simple. My worst fear in life is letting my family down. I have people who look up to me," Michel said. "I'm supposed to be in jail or dead. Look at me now."

For insight and analysis on athletics around Northern Colorado and the Mountain West, follow sports columnist Matt L. Stephens at twitter.com/mattstephens and facebook.com/stephensreporting.