The 4-year-old boy pedaled full speed on his bike, its training wheels rocking against the sidewalk grooves. Each time Sean zipped past his grandparents’ brown twin in Malvern, he glanced up at his mom as she watched from the porch.

A young man named Mark, who lived across the street, would come out with a stopwatch to time him. Sean was thrilled, each time wanting to break his record.

Linda was only 17 when she had him. She met his father at Great Valley High School, but he didn’t stick around. After high school, she lived with her parents and paid them $25 a month in rent. She worked as a legal secretary during the day and went to school at night to become a paralegal.

When Mark asked Linda out for a drink, she politely declined, dismissing him as too geeky to date.

About two years later, Linda and her son settled into a small condo in West Chester.

Sean was happiest when sweaty from any kind of sport, so Linda signed him up at the Great Valley Wrestling Association. It turned out Mark from the old neighborhood would be Sean’s coach. He didn’t look geeky to her anymore, and they started dating. She thought she’d never marry because no man could love her son the way she did. She was wrong. In 1989, when Sean was 7, Linda married Mark Schellenger, who raised Sean as his own. Two years later, their son Justin was born.

Courtesy of the Schellenger family Sean made state finals in wrestling three years in a row. His father, Mark Schellenger, was his wrestling coach.

The family lived in a four-bedroom Colonial with a manicured lawn set back from the road in Malvern, in Chester County, 25 miles west of Philadelphia. Ambitious and determined, Linda would become an executive in human resources and later was named president of a Merck subsidiary. Mark Schellenger, a high school teacher and coach, later became principal at Radnor High School.

One of Sean’s closest childhood friends was Melvin Cook, whom he met while in third grade at Sugartown Elementary School. They played Pop Warner football and Little League together, and after Saturday games, Sean often invited Cook for a sleepover.

The two used to sneak out of Sean’s house at night armed with the family’s TV remote. The two boys ran around, peering into windows of finished basements until they found some unsuspecting Schmo in a recliner watching TV. With a click, they changed the channel, looked for the confused reaction, and erupted in hand-smothered laughter. Then hit the next house.

Cook grew up poor and lived with his grandmother in Malvern because his dad got addicted to crack cocaine. But Sean and his family never made him feel like a charity case. “I never felt judged,” Cook said.

Sean had to be the best at everything. He was captain of the football and wrestling teams. Mark Schellenger spent hours training Sean, who made state finals in wrestling three years in a row. He favored in-close combat moves to quick, one-shot leg sweeps. The “cement mixer” was his signature power move. He’d wrap his arms under his opponents, roll and flip them hard to the mat.

At the same time, he excelled as a football quarterback. His junior year, he transferred from Great Valley High School to Coatesville High School, which had a better team and where his dad, Mark, was head wrestling coach. Sean convinced his Great Valley teammate Eugene “June” Cooper Jr. to transfer with him because together, they would win.

Courtesy of the Schellenger family Sean with his younger brother, Justin, in 1999.

Both Cooper and Melvin Cook, who are black, said the fact that people have painted Sean as a racist is preposterous.

“That’s crazy. That’s like laughable to everybody who knows him,” Cooper said. “Being black, I can’t sit here and say that racist things don’t happen — I’ve been on this planet for 38 years. But I know Sean from the ground up. I know him.”

Cooper told a story from high school when he invited Sean to a party at a friend’s house in West Chester and Sean was the only white kid there. “Everyone started giving us the ice grill,” Cooper said.

Cooper asked if he wanted to leave. “For what?” Sean said.

Two girls asked Sean his name. Before he could answer, a teenage boy spat, “His name is ‘white boy.’” Cooper got angry, but Sean placed a hand on his shoulder and said, “Don’t worry about it.”

Later that evening, when a few teens started rapping to the 1994 hit “The World is Yours” by Nas and couldn’t remember all the lyrics, Sean jumped in — and nailed every word. The teen who had called him “white boy” was impressed. “He’s black,” Cooper recalled him saying.

His senior year, Sean, at 6-foot-2 and 205 pounds, was offered a full ride to play fullback for the University of Delaware. Brown University courted him for both wrestling and football.

Sean would have none of it. He wanted to play Division 1. In 1999, he took one of the coveted 10 walk-on spots for Penn State University’s Nittany Lions.

On the first day of kindergarten, Michael White didn’t want his mom to leave. “Will you be right back to get me?” he asked.

Juanita White, now 55, recalled a child always under foot, trailing her around the house.

In those early boyhood days, Michael often sat, peering through eyeglasses, on the front steps of their two-story, red brick rowhouse with a book propped open in his lap.

The home abutted a bodega on 22nd Street in Point Breeze, less than a mile from the house that Sean Schellenger would build for himself on a vacant lot on Ellsworth Street and is now worth roughly $600,000.

Corey McDonough Michael, who graduated from the Academy at Palumbo in 2015, participated in poetry slams with Philly Youth Poetry Movement.

One of Michael’s older brothers has autism, and the other learning disabilities. His mother mainly focused on them, while Michael’s dad, William White, worked for the School District of Philadelphia. He maintained discipline and safety in hallways and cafeterias as a low-paid “nonteaching assistant.”

On Sundays, for a time, Michael and his family took a church van to services in West Philadelphia, a seemingly pleasant, devout family.

But from inside the house, neighbors could hear Michael’s dad screaming at his children. “You. Don’t. Listen,” he boomed, sometimes invoking the Bible during rants.

When Michael was 5, an older half-sister, Ashleigh, came to live with them after social workers had removed her from her mom’s home and a judge agreed to place her with her biological dad, William White.

Even though she had her own bedroom, White insisted his daughter sleep downstairs on the living room floor next to him on the couch.

He raped her almost every night. It started when she was 11 and Michael was 5. If she resisted, White whipped her with an electrical cord.

He warned her that if she told social workers or police, he’d kill her and her brothers. Her father continued to rape her until she told police when she was 17. William White has been in prison ever since.

Ashleigh refuses to call him “Dad.” “There’s nothing else to call him but a monster,” she said.

Michael, who was 13 when his father went to prison, has told close friends he still blames himself for being unable to protect her.

Years later, on Instagram, Michael posted a photo of a brick wall with the words scrawled in black: THE CREATIVE ADULT IS THE CHILD WHO SURVIVED.

Instagram Michael, who was 13 when his father went to prison for raping Michael's sister, shared his pain with an affirmation on Instagram.

Next to the image, he wrote, “My inner child survived, however he still needs to heal. He still needs me to go back and replace all the broken things. Including him, so one day, my offspring won’t have to inherit that pain. One day they will feel 100% of the love he didn’t get to feel.”

Michael got into the Academy at Palumbo, a selective magnet high school. Michael’s high school friends recalled a “goofy jokester,” who could do spot-on impersonations of President Obama, Will Smith and Steve Harvey.

Michael idolized hip hop artists like Kendrick Lamar, Meek Mill, Biggie Smalls, and Tupac Shakur who used music to make social statements on poverty, oppression and racism. He started writing his own poetry and rap songs.

His English teacher saw something in him and recruited him for the Philly Youth Poetry Movement and its student poetry slams.

With “long arms” and “good reach,” Michael, at 6 foot and 165 pounds, played both defense and offense on Palumbo’s football team. “Definitely had some talent,” his coach, Scott Pitzner, remembers.

But in August before his senior year, while biking to practice, he was struck by a hit-and-run driver. Michael was hospitalized with a concussion, head trauma and asphalt burns, and unable to play the entire season.

About that time, Juanita White and the kids got evicted and moved into a rundown rowhouse in the city’s Kingsessing neighborhood. Sometimes the electricity got turned off. There was seldom enough food. So he cut grass, helped people move and did other odds jobs for money so he and his brothers could eat.

Many nights, Michael came home just to sleep and left early the next morning. Sometimes he slept on a park bench or under a tree, and started to carry a knife for protection.

After dark with friends, he was always jumpy. “Calm down,” his friend Shirmina Smith kept telling him. “It’s OK.”

He told her he couldn’t help it. He had to make sure no one was coming up on them.

Smith, a friend since high school and teammate on the competitive poetry team, said his hardships didn’t make him bitter. He is passionate, she said, and wants to use his rap to change the world.

“Despite what he’s been through, he’s always looking toward the future,” she said. “He wants to be better than his past. He’s big on lessons. A lot of what he goes through, he uses it to make him a better person.”

One day in early September 2001, Sean faced his angry and disappointed mother in a courtroom in State College. Linda Schellenger had driven three hours to the hearing to learn why her 20-year-old son was charged with burglary, criminal trespass, resisting arrest, theft by unlawful taking, criminal mischief, unlawful possession of alcohol, and possession of a controlled substance without a prescription.

Nothing made Sean more miserable than knowing he’d let down his mom. They spoke or texted nearly every day, and he shared details about his dates and trips with friends to the shore.

“Just remember, youth is a disease that can be cured.” – the late Joe Paterno

But he could not bring himself to call her after he had gotten drunk and crashed her Mustang. That night he and a friend hatched a wild, impulsive plan to get cash for repairs: burglarizing a drug dealer’s house. Still drunk, Sean broke into the wrong house. The family was home and called 911.

When police arrested him in the basement, he had a bottle of whiskey and a small plastic bag of Xanax pills.

At the court hearing, the judge scanned police reports that said Sean had worn bright orange shorts during the burglary. “You better pick another occupation,” he said, “because you’re not very good at it.”

Centre Daily Times Sean, Penn State’s No. 3 quarterback, took a few snaps during a blowout in 2000.

The previous season, Sean had impressed head coach Joe Paterno enough to hold onto the No. 3 spot as quarterback and even took a few snaps running out the clock in a blowout victory.

But now he had destroyed his dream to become Penn State’s starting quarterback.

Sean served 82 days at a county jail. In lockup, he became instantly popular, something that struck his friend Melvin Cook as go-figure funny. They spoke on the phone while Sean was in jail, laughing about how Sean ran the show “as far as jail politics go.” Inmates came to Sean for advice. “He was like the go-to guy, like if you wanted to do something, you had to go through Sean first,” Cook said.

Sean liked to cook for fellow inmates, putting together “the spread” — boiling up Ramen noodles and throwing in potato chips, hot dogs, or whatever he could get his hands on.

Sean had to reapply to Penn State and, according to Sean’s parents, Paterno agreed to help, putting in a good word. Sean made the most of the second chance, graduating from Penn State’s Smeal College of Business with honors.

A few years later, Mark, Sean’s dad, ran into Paterno at a sports dinner where he lamented his son’s short run on the Nittany Lions. Paterno grasped Mark by the lapel and offered hope: “Just remember, youth is a disease that can be cured.”

At the age of 27, Sean got arrested again after a night of heavy drinking, this time at a Florida restaurant and bar. Bouncers repeatedly warned him to calm down. At about 2 a.m., he stripped off an outer shirt, leaving only an undershirt, violating the dress code. Asked to leave, he refused and brawled with two bouncers, punching one, biting the other.

Authorities charged Sean with battery, disorderly conduct, and trespass. It’s unclear whether authorities knew of his previous felony, but Sean, using a private attorney, was given the chance for a “deferred prosecution,” met the terms, and avoided a conviction.

One bouncer said he still bears a C-shaped scar on his arm where Sean bit him.

In 2016, Michael got accepted into the college of his choice. He enrolled as an engineering major and was due on campus to start the fall semester in little more than a month. But he had no way to pay for it.

Asking for help was asking for disappointment. Something Michael had learned early in life. Yet he wanted this — badly. So he opened up GoFundMe.com and created a page, “Help Michael Get to Morgan State.”

“ … I’ve been surviving, and doing that on my own, proudly, for about 7 years now,” Michael wrote in the July 10, 2016 post. “I am not one to lay down when a challenge approaches me. I realize I need help and I’m asking for it. I just want to better my life and I fully believe a college education will do that for me.”

Michael set a modest fund-raising goal: $1,600, but raised more than $4,000.

GoFundMe Michael’s GoFundMe campaign enabled him to attend Morgan State University in Maryland.

Marc Lamont Hill, a social justice activist, Temple University professor, and best-selling author, donated $2,000. He knew Michael well through poetry circles. “If someone would have asked me, ‘How would you describe Mike White?’ the first word that would have come out of my mouth is ‘gentle,’ both in spirit and in practice …. Kids like him have the possibility to do anything — all they need is an opportunity.”

A month later, Michael moved into a freshman dormitory at Morgan State University, a historically black university in Baltimore.

“I've been surviving, and doing that on my own, proudly, for about 7 years now.” – Michael White

Michael clicked instantly with 19-year-old fellow freshman Jonathan “Johnny” Tobash, a brainy industrial engineering major. Like Michael, Tobash graduated from a selective magnet high school, Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. Tobash admired Michael’s ability to turn words into rapid-fire raps about poverty and violence.

In his song “Mean It,” Michael raps about getting off the trolley where neighborhood toughs confronted him looking for a fight. “ … start somethin’, we finish somethin’, don’t start, there won’t be none.”

Like Michael, Tobash was a city boy, growing up on Baltimore’s gritty east side, where much of HBO’s The Wire was filmed, and carried a pocket knife for protection.

During winter break, Michael took the stage during a poetry slam youth night on Penn’s campus to take on newly elected president President Trump. He adopted Obama’s persona.

“Thanks to this outdated Electoral College bulls —, a racist, xenophobic, weak, thin-lipped, walking, breathing Cheetos, will be our next president,” Michael said in Obama’s slow, rhythmic speech pattern. “But this is a time when we must love more than we ever have before, because he will make America hate again. He will divide this country by race.”

YouTube

That spring, Michael, who switched his major to sociology, finished the year at Morgan State, but onetime donations from friends and strangers were gone. He had to drop out. He worked a series of restaurant jobs, including at Marathon Grill, at 16th and Sansom Streets, popular with the business lunch crowd.

He began to write rap lyrics that reflected his unrelenting want to be something more: “Southside, Miami Beach, that’s where I’m tryin’ to be. Shades on, Maserati with the leather seats. I got big dreams. Hard work, dedication — that’s the recipe.”

When his friends were down, he tried to pull them up. “Love yourself like you’d love the person of your dreams. You’re beautiful, smart, funny, fun to be around,” he wrote in July 2017 to high school friend Aaliyah Harris when she was depressed. She called him “her number one motivator.”

But he would stumble himself. One night months later, at a poetry slam on Penn’s campus, he and friends got caught cutting the lock to a $1,000 mountain bike owned by campus police. Authorities charged Michael, then 20, with theft, receiving stolen property, possession of an instrument of crime, conspiracy and possession of marijuana. The case is pending.

The following month, on Dec. 18, 2017, Michael learned from Morgan State friends that Johnny Tobash had been murdered. On that night, Tobash stumbled into a robbery outside a Baltimore corner store and was gunned down.

“I’m tired of death. I’m tired of mourning,” Michael later wrote on Instagram. “I’m tired of looking on @nogunzone page and seeing a n — I just made eye contact with yesterday, or seeing a n — who I went to school with, or ran a couple of games of basketball with, shot dead, with info on their memorial services and candlelight vigil.”

If people don’t come together and “put the guns down,” their communities will continue to unravel. “We making it easier for them to gentrify the neighborhoods.”

“I NEED YOU TO HEAR ME,” Michael wrote. “STOP KILLING EACH OTHER.”