LANSING - Robert Ray Jr. remembers waking up to someone outside banging on the door.

He was 5 then, maybe6. He heard his older sister running downstairs and went to see what was happening.

"She told me to go upstairs, but I was being a kid, so I was peeking around the corner," Ray said. "She's shaking our mom, she's not waking up, so eventually my sister opens the door and it's Child Protective Services."

Ray's mother woke up eventually. It was chaos — yelling, screaming, crying.

The siblings were placed into foster care. Ray went to live with an aunt. He didn’t see his older sister again until he looked her up on MySpace as a pre-teen.

Ray's mom and dad struggled with drugs and alcohol. He spent the next several years bouncing back and forth between them.

"Basically before then and after, it seems like those were like two different lives, because ever since then it was always something."

He attended six elementary schools – Bingham, Lewton, North, Allen Street, a school in Illinois, and, finally, Kendon.

"I was always the new kid," Ray said. "I got used to it."

Tonight, he graduates from the Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine.

He worked tirelesslyfor it.

He also crossed paths with people who were ready to lift him up, steady his course, fill the gaps.

Ray left Sexton High School in 2011 as a valedictorian. A scholarship from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid his way through his undergraduate studies at Michigan State University. People he'd met as a teenager gave him a glimpse of what becoming a doctor entailed.

He’s bound for an emergency medicine residency in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Emergency rooms are a safety net for people without insurance, he said, a place where people turn for care when they don't have other options.

"When I was in the emergency room I felt like I was in my community, because these are the type of people that best represent where I came from and the type of people I really want to help,” Ray said

A whole community helped to get him to where he is today. Now Ray has given them the latest chapter in a Lansing success story.

Landing at Kendon, finding a brother

Living arraignments were constantly in flux for Ray after the day when Child Protective Services knocked on his door. Some of the details are fuzzy. He remembers his mom got him back from foster care. When she would stumble in her battle with addiction, Ray would go live with his dad.

"Even though I lived with him, I never felt I knew anything about him or that he knew anything about me," he said.

He hasn’t spoken to his biological parents in years. He doesn't think they're bad people. They are products of traumatic environments and circumstances, he said, caught in cycles of negative behavior.

When he was about 9, his mother met a man who wanted them to move with him out of state. They sold all their things and headed to Illinois. The guy never showed up. They returned to Lansing and he started at Kendon Elementary in the middle of fourth grade.

Josh Barber-Braun was in the same classroom.

“Since I didn’t have that many friends back then and since he was the new kid, figured I should try to be friends with him,” Barber-Braun recalled.

Lori Barber, Josh's mother, met Ray at a birthday party two weeks later.

“I remember one of the first things he said to us. We asked him what he wanted to do in life, and at 10 years old, Robert said, 'I want to be a doctor,'” she said.

Growing up, Ray spent a lot of time at his grandmother Ruby Ray's house on the south side of Lansing. They'd watch shows like "ER" together. Robert would accompany her on hospital visits.

“The doctor was one of the strangers that she would listen to, that she always had respect for," he said. "To see how much my grandma respected the doctor, especially with how strong-willed she was and how resistant she was to her medication and her diet, it really sparked an interest in me.”

A second family

Ray and Barber-Braun bonded over sports.

Ray loved playing basketball so much that the two would shovel the driveway in January just to shoot around. They'd set up floodlights to keep basketball sleepovers going long after dark.

“Robert is family,” Barber said. She likes to says she has four sons: two biological, Ray and her younger son’s best friend.

Ray did his best to hide his unstable home life. Around age 13 or 14, his mother was taken to jail. The police sent him home, alone. Barber would pick him up every day for school. He'd deflect when she'd ask where his mother was.

After what seemed like a month, she demanded to come inside. Ray finally told her he was alone.

"She started to realize how different my situation was," Ray said.

A couple of years later, Ray was pulled into his best friend's parents room. They asked him if he knew where his mother was. He didn't. They told him he was going to live with them.

"I loved it at their house so much," Ray said. "So many things were different. We ate at the table together. We did stuff together, and there was so much less I had to worry about. You know when you’re going to eat. There's going to be food."

Boys and Girls Club of Lansing

Ray and his younger sister constantly complained to their grandmother about being bored as kids.

One day, partly because the children had been interrupting her soap operas, she offered an alternative. The Boys and Girls Club of Lansing was just a mile or so away from her home and she took them, promising that she’d come and pick them up whenever they wanted to leave.

They stayed until the club closed. Ray went back every day he could.

"It seemed like the possibilities were endless," he said. "It was like having a sleepover during the day."

Staff took notice of Ray almost immediately.

“We knew early on how smart he was,” said Sandra Kowalk-Thompson, director of development for the club. Some kids came to the club to get tutoring, Ray didn't. In fact, he ended up helping the kids around him with their school work.

“He was a brilliant young man," she added.

Then one day, Ray stopped coming. He’d moved again, this time to the west side of Lansing. His mom didn’t have a car. He had no one who could drop him off or pick him up consistently.

Carmen Turner, the club’s president, saw Ray months later walking on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

It had been a year or longer since Ray was last at the club. Her intuition told her Ray was special. It drove her to stop on the side of the road and call out to him.

“Robert Ray!"

He was spooked initially by a car he didn't recognize pulling over beside him, but he told Turner about his predicament.

She made him an offer. He could start working at the club as a junior staffer. She'd make sure he got a bus pass.

From then on, Ray was a fixture at the club.

“He worked in the coat room. He worked with Granny, who ran the kitchen, with snacks and meals. He helped run programs for younger kids, the reading program, sports programs, arts,” Kowalk-Thompson said. “He could jump in and help with anything.”

He would go on to win the club’s Youth of the Year award three times — in 2009, 2010 and 2011 — and take the state title in 2011 as well.

Those honors required Ray to give speeches, in which he spoke about his childhood and the hurdles he faced.

Which led him to Michigan State University and his first view of what becoming a doctor looked life.

Becoming a Spartan

In a speech Ray gave after a golf fundraiser for the Boys and Girls Club, he told the crowd gathered he was going to be a doctor.

John Sauchak, an East Lansing osteopathic doctor, marveled at the teenager's ambition.

"What impresses me the most about Robert is you take a young person in his circumstance, the odds are he'll drop out of school and have no ambition, focus or purpose."

Ray was the opposite, "one of those break-the-cycle people, very bound and determined to be successful," Sauckak said.

Sauchak approached Ray afterward, and with some staff from the College of Osteopathic Medicine, talked to him about a summer program for high schoolers: OsteoCHAMPS.

"I really didn't think anything of it at the time because people would tell me stuff all the time and it would never happen," Ray said.

This time, it did, despite missing the application deadline.

“I was really excited to stay on campus,” Ray said. It was his first time in East Lansing apart from attending basketball games. He'd grown up a University of Michigan fan.

For once, it felt OK to be a nerd.

“He came into the program bushy-haired and wide-eyed, but you could see in his eyes and through his effort he was very, very determined,” said Margaret Aguwa, a retired MSU faculty member who started the OsteoCHAMPS program.

Ray had a “presence” that led her to believe that if given the opportunity, he would go as far as he wanted in his medical career.

She picked him to give a presentation to families at the end of the program. He talked about cell phone waste in developing countries and the health consequences it would have.

“Everybody in attendance was just awed by the way he presented his own research topic,” she said.

When the week was over, nobody came to pick Ray up.

Aguwa sat with him while college staff tried to reach his mom.

“I talked with him. I made him feel he was special, that he belonged and encouraged him to put his head high," she said.

Ray came back the following year.

A basketball breakthrough

Ray was cut from his school basketball teams in seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth grades. He opted not to try out as a junior at Sexton High School but kept playing in pickup games in local parks.

His senior year was different.

Carlton Valentine was the coach of Sexton’s varsity basketball team. The team had made it to the state finals the year before and was returning future Division I athletes Bryn Forbes, Denzel Valentine and Anthony Clemmons.

“Prior to the season, we have open gym time, and there’s this kid just killing everybody,” Valentine said. “He’s got handles, a jump shot. He’s making passes and playing the right way.”

It was Ray.

The fact that he was a senior was bad news for Valentine. He worried Ray wouldn’t fit into the system, that a senior would complain about a lack of playing time. And Sexton already had a stacked team.

He pulled Ray into his office after tryouts and started to give him the bad news.

Ray insisted that a lack of playing time wasn’t going to be a problem. He wanted to contribute and to get better.

Valentine asked him what his grades were like. Ray lit up and told Valentine he had over a 4.0 GPA.

“I said, ‘You’re lying,’” Valentine recalled.

But he looked it up. Ray’s grades were as outstanding as advertised, slightly higher, in fact. He made the team, which went on to win a state title

“He was a blessing,” Valentine said. “He did more for me than I did for him.”

Ray still volunteers at basketball camps Valentine runs for the Sparrow Michigan Athletic Club. He talks to campers about more than basketball skills.

“He talks about hard work, dedication, perseverance and what it takes to be successful,” Valentine said, and he exemplifies what can happen when you set goals and commit to achieving them.

“There’s no better role model than Robert Ray Jr. He’s my hero.”

Feeling apart

On his first day at MSU, Ray overheard his roommate make a crack about poor kids not going to college.

“From day one, I felt either I don’t belong here or I’m very different,” Ray said.

Even though he’d been a high school valedictorian. Even though, like many of his classmates, he wanted to be a doctor.

Even though he arrived at college with a full ride courtesy of a Gates Millennium Scholarship, backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The $1.2 billion initiative has helped some 20,000 minority students attend college since 2000. He's one of 13 Lansing Millennium scholars, all of whom graduated from college.

The student body at MSU's Lyman Briggs College bore little resemblance to the one at Sexton High School. He was the only black student in his freshman chemistry class.

But, if he didn't have a sense that he belonged, he did have a habit of being prepared. As a kid, whenever he had spare time, he’d use it to do homework or study. One year, he asked for a lap desk so it would be easier to do his homework on the bus.

Academically, Ray was prepared. He'd taken five AP classes at Sexton as a senior. Socially, it was hard at first.

His friends were the people he met at OsteoCHAMPS and those he played intramural basketball with. He'd go on to start a successful club team at MSU with those teammates.

Over the summer, club team coach Sean Haskins had the players “running sideline to sideline 16 times, and Ray had his earbuds in with his Bane mask on listening to a lecture,” Haskins said, using the name of a mask-wearing Batman villain to describe Ray's high-altitude mask, which deprives the wearer of oxygen to create a more strenuous workout.

“He is ultimately dedicated to his studies and his body.”

Becoming Dr. Robert Ray Jr.

In medical school and during his clinical rotations, Ray found few doctors that looked like him. He can count them off-hand. And virtually no one in his life had recent experiences with pursuing a medical school degree.

“I came into medical school, and I didn’t know honestly how it worked. It was so surreal to even be in medical school. I was focused on doing what I had to do now that I was just crossing bridges when I got there.”

He felt pressure, as a minority student, to not only be equal to his peers but more prepared.

Hilary Howard met Ray at OsteoCHAMPS. They studied constantly during undergrad and spent much of their social time together among a group of friends. They lived in the same apartment complex during medical school, quizzing one another and lending a hand in subjects they struggled with.

Earlier this year, the two friends headed down to Mèrida, Mexico, as part of a program to provide osteopathic care to underserved communities. Often, they'd need to translate English to Spanish to Mayan to communicate.

When Ray was looking at residency programs, Sparrow Health System quickly rose to the top of his list.

But he was conflicted. He’d spent his life in Lansing. Continuing his medical education at Sparrow would inevitably mean treating patients he grew up with. He didn't want to find himself in an exam room with someone he knew seeking drugs.

He decided instead to pursue an emergency medicine residency at Lehigh Valley Health Network in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

He didn’t tell anyone about it out of fear of not getting it. He knew Josh Barber-Braun, his childhood friend, lived in Pennsylvania, but not exactly where.

Ray got an offer to come and do an audition rotation and learned the hospital was in the same town where Barber-Braun lived.

When Ray was accepted to the hospital’s residency program earlier this year, his old friend was elated.

"I had been waiting to find out if he was going to match or not," Barber-Braun said. "He’s always been a super loyal close friend of mine. I've relied on him and he’s been able to rely on me. I've never seen anyone work as hard as he does. It's awesome to see after this many years he’s graduating."

Last week, Ray asked Lori Barber to legally adopt him. They're his family, and if anything were to happen to him, Ray said he'd want them to be allowed into the hospital room and involved in the decision-making process.

But not just a practical decision.

"I feel like it was the best present I could give her," he said.

Before he leaves Michigan, the Lansing Boys and Girls Club is hosting a celebration of his graduation from medical school.

When he graduated from high school and earned his undergraduate degree, he was reluctant to be recognized. He knew he had further to go.

“This is one I’m excited about,” Ray said.

“It’s a fairy tale,” Turner said. “People don’t understand the community really came together to support this young man.

“It’s what we’re supposed to do.”

Contact RJ Wolcott at (517) 377-1026 or rwolcott@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @wolcottr.