READING, Pa. — Lonnie Walker IV was in sixth grade the first time he saw a man shot in the head.

He was hanging out with friends in a park not far from his house when a fight broke out among another group nearby. At the sound of a gunshot, Walker’s instincts took over.

“You just start running,” he recalled. “You have to. You don’t want to be seen as a witness or something. Your mind just starts going through all these scenarios.”

It says something about the chaos engulfing Walker’s childhood that he was forced to put that lesson into action more than once.

Walker — the 19-year-old guard the Spurs selected 18th in the NBA draft last June — was raised in Reading, Pennsylvania, a hardscrabble town of 87,000 located 60 miles northwest of Philadelphia.

Walker saw violence. He saw drugs. He saw crime and gang activity. Often, on the way to school each morning.

Walker didn’t see himself as different or disadvantaged.

“A lot of people I knew grew up that way,” he said. “It wasn’t just me.”

Walker became a once-in-a-generation basketball sensation at Reading High, where in 2017 he led the Red Knights program to the first state championship its history and earned recognition as a McDonald’s All-American. He was a one-year wonder at the University of Miami last season before the Spurs made him an NBA first-round pick.

Along the way, as he navigated pitfalls that snagged so many of his peers and predecessors, Walker has sought to reclaim what it means to be “just a kid from Reading.”

Survival of the fittest

In many ways, the Spurs’ new rookie guard comes off as a typical teenager.

Walker likes Oreos and “SpongeBob SquarePants.” He is more than a year away from being able to legally share a glass of wine with his new coach, Gregg Popovich. He spends much of his downtime in San Antonio riding the roller coasters at Six Flags Fiesta Texas.

“I need to get a season pass, as much as I’m going,” said Walker, still three months shy of his 20th birthday.

People in Reading speak of Walker with a zeal that extends beyond basketball and belies his callow age. To them, Walker is nothing short of Moses with a jump shot, a veritable apostle who showed an entire city a path out of darkness.

“In all your religions, you have some type of prophet,” said Dr. Khalid Mumin, the 46-year-old superintendent of the Reading School District. “He’s our prophet. He’s the one that was tapped with that special talent of influence.”

Walker wasn’t the first person to put Reading on the map. That would be Parker Brothers, who included the Reading Railroad as a space on the original Monopoly game board in 1935. Nestled in the hills of central Pennsylvania — midway between Philadelphia and the state capital of Harrisburg and bisected by the Schuykill River — Reading was once a manufacturing and transportation hub.

Its population peaked at 111,000 in 1930 before the town entered into a decades-long decline that still has not ended.

Year after year, residents left Reading’s ubiquitous row houses, which sit shoulder-to-shoulder along city streets, for the safety of the suburbs and beyond. Employers left, too. In 1971, the Reading Railroad went bankrupt.

By the time Walker was born Dec. 14, 1998 — at Reading Hospital, son of Tamica Wall and Lonnie Walker III — his hometown had become a forgotten and forlorn place.

According to the 2012 census, Reading ranked as the poorest city in America per capita. The violent crime rate is 76 percent higher than the national average. Ninety-three percent of students in the Reading School District — the fourth-largest in Pennsylvania — are classified as economically disadvantaged.

“We were on the Monopoly board,” said Rick Perez, 36, the basketball coach at Reading High and a local resident for most of his life. “Then we just disappeared.”

For Walker, being “just a kid from Reading” meant a life marked by poverty, hunger and instability.

As a middle schooler, it wasn’t difficult for Walker to pick out clothes each morning. He had one pair of pants, and could choose between either the blue shirt or the red one. At school, Walker would often scan the floor of the cafeteria for loose change. A couple of stray quarters constituted quite a score — it meant he could buy a snack for the way home.

Walker lived mostly with his dad, but bounced around depending on the family’s circumstances at the time. When his dad had a job and had to work, he would stay with his mom or grandparents.

Dinner often consisted of a hamburger and a bag of Doritos, split two ways with his mother.

“It was always negativity,” Walker said. “You tell people you’re from Reading, and they’d think you were probably the worst person in the world.”

Walker said he witnessed at least three shootings before he entered high school. He was still in elementary school the day his older brother burst into the house at 2 a.m., bleeding from a gunshot wound to the stomach.

“There were a lot of people who just didn’t know what to do,” Walker said. “They didn’t have a high school diploma. There were no jobs. So they’d go back to what they’d seen their entire life, and that’s gangs and drugs. As much as we want to make them seem like the bad guy, when you’re in that situation, you get very desperate. You do what you have to do to survive.”

A star is born

Perhaps no adult in Reading outside Walker’s immediate family has known him longer than J.T. Randall.

An assistant basketball coach at Reading High, Randall played at nearby Albright College in the late 1990s. The star player on Albright’s crosstown rival, Alvernia College, was a slick-shooting forward named Lonnie Walker III.

The two were competing in an adult summer league one day in 1998 when Walker III mentioned he was having a son.

Lonnie Walker IV soon became a fixture at his father’s rec league games.

“I remember always seeing him with a basketball,” Randall said. “He always had one, sitting there watching Dad play.”

Perez, who took over as Reading High’s head coach in 2012, remembers the first time he saw the youngest Walker on a basketball court.

Walker was in the sixth grade then, recognizable for his blond mohawk. Perez was in the high school gym, called the Geigel Complex, to watch a youth summer league game. His first impressions of Walker are of a flaxen-haired blur.

“The grace on this kid was unreal,” Perez said. “It was like, ‘Is he even playing basketball?’”

At the end of eighth grade, Perez allowed Walker to practice with the high school varsity.

Even then, the coach did not have a firm grasp of what he was seeing. Perez thought Walker’s dominance meant his older players were slacking.

“He’s in eighth grade, and he’s killing everybody,” Perez said. “I lost it on my team one day in practice. I said, ‘This kid’s 13 years old, and he’s killing every single one of you!’”

As Walker entered the 10th grade — now sporting the beginnings of the pineapple-esque hairdo that would become his signature — it became apparent basketball might be his ticket to a future beyond the grim constraints of the Reading city limit sign. Walker’s father, with support from his mother and grandparents, made sure he would not succumb to the traps that had snared so many of Reading’s youth over the years.

In high school, Walker’s days were as regimented as an infantryman’s. After school let out each afternoon, Walker’s father — who worked as a cook and took other odd jobs around Reading — demanded his son read for an hour, then write for an hour.

After that, Walker would hit nearby basketball courts to work out with his dad. Only when all that was accomplished was Walker allowed to enjoy some free time — at least until the streetlights came on at 7 p.m.

His father was determined that he wasn’t going to be like his two older brothers, who were both in and out of gangs.

That meant Walker wouldn’t bother going out at all. This is how his well-chronicled affinity for “Animal Planet” documentaries was born.

“Everybody at school was always talking about music and basketball and football and girls,” Walker said. “I liked tigers. I wanted to talk about elephants.”

To Walker’s father, known colloquially as “Big Lonnie,” basketball became a means to keep his son safe.

Big Lonnie had overcome a troubled childhood of his own to become a local star in Reading. In 2010, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame at Alvernia College.

“Basketball got his dad out of some tough places in life,” Randall said. “At its base, basketball was a tool to stay out of trouble, stay focused and then get out of the city and make something of yourself.”

Heart of the city

Over its first 118 years of existence, Reading High had won more games than any high school basketball program in Pennsylvania history, but had never earned a state championship.

The 1973 squad, anchored by future NBA player, coach and executive Stu Jackson, lost a heartbreaking state final by a single point. Donyell Marshall, a 15-year NBA veteran and Reading High's all-time leading scorer before Walker came along, only got the Red Knights as far as the state quarterfinals during his tenure from 1988 to 1991.

Walker's rise meant a wish renewed in Reading.

“Our basketball program is the heart of the city,” Perez said. “It’s always been that way. That’s the one place people are going to go to get the hope.”

As a junior, Walker carried the Red Knights to the state semifinals, coming two victories short of a title and setting up outsized expectations for his senior year.

As the Red Knights started their run to the 2017 state championship, their leader became a matinee idol in Berks County. Kids and adults stopped Walker for photos and autographs. Varsity games at Reading High grew to be such a hot ticket that fans began showing up early to claim their seats during the sub-varsity games.

“Our JV was playing to sellout crowds,” Perez said.

Monica Lacey, the school counselor, became the de facto screener of Walker’s fan mail.

“He was getting stuff from China and all over,” Lacey said. “But he just wanted to go to class and be normal. He had this calmness, this inner peace all the time.”

When Miami coach Jim Larranaga came to town on a recruiting visit, he was struck by a community that treated its teenage basketball star as if he were some long-lost Beatle.

Larranaga was equally dumbfounded by Walker’s unruffled reaction to all the attention.

“This guy’s a celebrity in his hometown,” Larranaga said. “He’s not affected by it. He has time for everybody.”

On March 26, 2017, 10,000 people packed the Giant Center in Hershey to watch Walker and the Red Knights take down Pineland-Richland and claim a state crown long overdue.

After the final horn, fans caravaned the hour back to Reading in a horn-honking victory parade. The team buses received a police escort.

“It was like the Eagles winning the Super Bowl,” Mumin said. “I’ve never seen a basketball player carry a city like this kid did.”

Basketball as bait

If the state championship game is where the Reading portion of Walker’s story had ended, it still would have made for a feel-good tale.

If only for a moment, he lifted the spirits of a sagging town.

For many teenage basketball stars, that would have been enough. Walker, it turns out, had something larger in mind.

“He’s like a social justice leader in basketball shorts,” Mumin said. “Basketball was just the bait.”

For so long, kids in Reading had lived under what Randall, the assistant basketball coach, calls “a cloud of negativity.” For many of them, Reading itself became a built-in excuse for hopelessness.

“I feel like Reading is filled with dreams,” Walker said, “but they get sucked out so quickly.”

As the Red Knight bandwagon began filling up on its way to the 2017 state title, Walker came to a conclusion it often takes other athletes-turned-activists well into adulthood to reach.

He had a platform. He had the hot microphone, both metaphorically and sometimes literally.

Walker soon found himself a frequent guest in Reading’s elementary and middle schools, preaching to spellbound schoolkids: Yes, basketball is the thing that would one day get him out of Reading, he told them. So go find your thing, dedicate yourself to that, and you can do it too.

Walker made sure to walk the walk. He kept up with his classwork, securing a scholarship to Miami.

“I can’t be telling kids to work hard in school and then make a bunch of Cs,” he said. “You can’t be a hypocrite.”

When life as Reading’s most famous resident grew hectic, Walker often sought solace in the classroom.

“Everyone is talking NBA and he’s like, ‘I’m just hoping my scholarship is going to last,’” Lacey said. “I’m sure it was his goal to continue with basketball, but if it didn’t happen he wasn’t going to be a kid that was devastated. He wanted to make sure whatever college he chose had a good science program.”

The return of hope

When Mumin arrived in Reading as superintendent in 2014, many of his peers wondered if he had lost his mind. At the time, the district was underperforming to such a degree the state had threatened to take over operations.

The first task for Mumin and his staff was to break what he viewed as a defeatist mentality. The district boasted a $232 million budget — “more money than the city government,” Mumin noted.

In his mind, there was no excuse for not doing better.

For months stretching into years, Mumin wondered if his proselytizing was doing any good.

“Then this thing called Lonnie Walker blossomed,” Mumin said. “It was almost like the stars were aligned.”

Mumin does not deny that what he calls “the Lonnie Walker effect” has made his job easier as Reading’s superintendent.

“I can get into any room in the county with a Lonnie Walker story,” he said. “And probably leave with a promise of support for our kids.”

By the time of the 2018 NBA draft, the legend of Walker as the Pied Piper of Reading had traveled as far San Antonio. Walker’s altruism was not the reason the Spurs spent their highest original draft pick in 21 years to land him. But it didn’t hurt.

“This is a kid who came up in a different background, and made a commitment not only to himself but to the city of Reading,” Spurs general manager R.C. Buford said. “He has become a real positive role model for young kinds in a community that has had difficult circumstances, and he prides himself on that.”

Mark Sewell teaches sociology and African American history at Reading High. He is a 30-something white man with a ponytail who spent his summer volunteering at an elephant farm in Thailand.

He does not consider himself a sports fan. Yet Sewell calls Walker “one of my favorite students ever.”

One of Sewell’s main objectives was to coax students to search beyond the version of American history found in state-issued textbooks.

That “think for yourself” approach appealed to Walker, who would often skip study hall to sit in on other periods Sewell taught.

“If you go outside the textbooks, you realize history isn’t always exactly what we’re taught,” Sewell said. “Lonnie was very much in line with that. He wants the truth out there, and if the truth is uncomfortable, so be it.”

Earlier this summer, when the newly drafted Walker fired off a controversial — and since deleted — Fourth of July tweet vowing not to celebrate the holiday as an African American, Sewell recognized the sentiment.

“It was something I tried to instill in him,” Sewell said. “You have to challenge everything and don’t accept everything as gospel fact.”

Sewell expects big things from Walker that have nothing to do with basketball.

“I could wake up tomorrow and hear he decided to go open a soup kitchen, and it wouldn’t surprise me,” Sewell said. “That’s who Lonnie is. He’s definitely an individual.”

Walker, too, has noticed a shift in attitudes back home. One of his proudest moments came when he returned to Reading in July to donate 300 pairs of Adidas shoes to local grade-schoolers.

Afterward, one of the mothers approached Walker and told him her son had decided to become an astronaut.

Dreams, at last, have returned to Reading.

“A lot of people in Reading might say that, but they never believe it,” Walker said. “Now kids are starting to believe in what they think they can do. That’s how it should be.”

A blessing and a curse

At the April 2017 ceremony toasting the first state basketball championship in Reading history, Walker took the microphone and recounted his story for the uninitiated few in a packed Geigel Gym who had not heard it.

There had been nights he didn’t know where he and his family would sleep, he said. There were nights he went to bed hungry. He talked about his dad, who had him on the basketball court every morning before school and every evening after it. He spoke of fearing bullets as he negotiated his way to school every day.

Looking back, Walker calls growing up in Reading “both a blessing and a curse.”

“I wouldn’t trade it for living anywhere else,” he said. “It’s what’s made me, me.”

A few months after the state championship, as Walker prepared to leave Reading for college at Miami, he wrote a heartfelt farewell letter to his hometown. The text of the “Letter from Lonnie” has been reprinted on posters that hang in every elementary school in Reading.

“Are you going to spend your time wasting your potential?” Walker wrote. “Or are you going to work hard every day to achieve your dreams? The choice is yours. Be true to yourself because anything is possible.

“Look at me. I’m just a kid from Reading.”

Jeff McDonald is a staff writer in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | Jmcdonald@express-news.net | Twitter: @JMcDonald_SAEN