Daniel Edozie's reason to smile

Eric Prisbell | USA TODAY Sports

LOS ANGELES — Daniel Edozie made a slow walk into the cafeteria, eyeing a familiar seat facing a wall of more than 300 small opaque windows.

The Iowa State senior exhaled a deep breath. He rubbed his head. He moved closer to the foggy windows and looked out from the Skid Row homeless shelter onto a San Pedro Street cluttered with cardboard boxes and tents. Women pushed shopping carts, children in tow.

"I'd spend hours here just looking through these windows," Edozie says, shaking his head. "Nothing was clear in my life. And nothing was clear in the world I saw through these windows. Where was my life headed?"

Ten years ago, this was Edozie's world.

He was the 12-year-old boy with a lost stare. He was the boy who wouldn't smile.

Each morning, he had three wishes: A bed. Food. Love.

"That is all I needed," he says.

By that age he had already embarked on a two-year odyssey that took him and his mom from London to Boston to Las Vegas to Los Angeles. He had slept on concrete, in tents, on benches and in more shelters than he could recall. He had become too familiar with that gnawing sensation in his gut that reminded him he had nothing to eat.

Most 12-year-olds are busy playing video games or sports. Edozie's most prized possession was his "big old trash bag" full of clothes that he'd fling over his shoulder as he roamed the streets.

He doesn't remember finishing the sixth grade. He remembers learning the art of panhandling.

"Survival tactics," he says.

He feared the danger on the streets around nearby San Julian Park. He feared being deported, along with his mom, because of expired visas. He feared what would happen if he remained in such a transient circumstance.

How he went from that state of hopelessness and confusion to where he is now — a 22-year-old poised to earn his college degree in the spring — is a story that Edozie still has a difficult time comprehending. Ten years after he found a way out, he revisited the same streets, inhaled the same stench that he never forgot and saw children who face the same uphill climb he confronted.

Skid Row buzzes with activity. A siren blares. A child holding a Dorito chip cries. Women curse each other. A slender man asks for a dollar. Edozie steps in human waste.

Dressed in an Iowa State T-shirt and basketball sneakers, Edozie looks like an outsider. But he once called this home.

"All I wanted was a chance," he says with his forehead leaning on the windows. "How did I make it out of here? Thinking about all this stuff, damn, I don't know how anyone could really survive this."

Edozie sits in the passenger seat of a car winding through the streets of Compton, past home after home with bars on their windows. The one with no bars is the one Edozie calls home.

Inside the well-kept home on West 133rd Street is a 60-year-old woman named Faye Brim, a foster mom whom Edozie calls the angel who helped save him.

"I consider him my son," Brim says. "I'm so proud because he didn't have to take the road he has taken. I know it is God who protected him all that time before he brought him to me."

Edozie talks about his past while sitting on a couch surrounded by family pictures and athletic trophies. His account was confirmed to USA TODAY Sports by Brim, coaches who played integral roles in his development and an attorney whose efforts nine years ago helped him fight a deportation order.

"He was given a lot of avenues to quit and never did," said Mike Marquis, who coached Edozie for two seasons at Tyler (Texas) Junior College.

Edozie starts the saga in Greenwich, England, where he was born to a mother of Nigerian roots, Georgina Edozie, and grew up poor and often on the move.

In 2000, Daniel Edozie and his mom visited the United States and stayed with a great uncle in New York, then with a great aunt in Texas. Edozie did not attend school. He soon traveled to Nigeria to stay with his grandparents for eight months.

He and his mom returned to the U.S. on May 5, 2004, flying to Boston in search of opportunity and stability.

They found none.

Their first two weeks there served as a harbinger for what awaited the next two years: A struggle to find opportunity, permanent shelter and food.

"It was hell," Edozie says. "It was tragic."

They lugged around five large pieces of luggage. Wherever they traveled by foot, the routine was the same: Drag two bags a few hundred yards, then backtrack for the rest. Over and over again.

And then it got worse.

They took a bus to what Edozie saw as a big city of lights in the desert. But when they got to Las Vegas, the only constant was movement from one homeless shelter to another.

When he could, he brushed his teeth. When he could, usually every few days, he found a shower. On a few occasions, he slept on concrete.

"You just feel like nothing," Edozie says of the sleeping conditions on the streets. "You feel like absolutely nothing. You feel like an animal in the wild."

Once Edozie and his mom moved to Los Angeles, their quality of life continued to spiral downward.

For a few nights, he and his mom slept in a tent outside a church. Then on the move again.

Edozie and his mom arrived at the Union Rescue Mission in the heart of Skid Row on June 7, 2004, according to the shelter's records.

Sometimes he went to school, sometimes he didn't. Edozie was attending Hollenbeck Middle School in Los Angeles in March 2005, according to the shelter's records. He always panhandled. You woke up, you panhandled.

"I just knew I had to live," he says. "I had to do something to live."

In July 2005, Edozie says he was walking alone by a detox center run by Volunteers of America when two people from the center stopped to ask him his age and the whereabouts of his mom. Edozie was taken into police custody and turned over to the Department of Children and Family Services.

"That," Edozie says, "was the day everything changed."​

Faye Brim picked up the phone in the summer of 2005 and didn't like what she heard.

It was Wings of Refuge, a foster care agency, wanting to talk to her about a 12-year-old boy who needed placement. Brim had been taking in foster children for more than a decade but had never brought in a child so old, or so big. Edozie was 6-feet-2 at the time.

When she walked into the agency to see Edozie, she saw a lost soul. He rolled his eyes at her.

"My heart just went out to him," she says. "He didn't have much life. His mood was very low. It was just sad."

He took his trash bag of clothes and got into Brim's car. He started crying. Every time he had been given a chance, it was always taken away. He didn't want it to happen again.

Brim took him to Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles in Los Angeles, where he gobbled up their wings order. He had been deprived of so often, he didn't have any concept of how much to eat.

Edozie acknowledges he faced challenges in adjusting to a traditional home, and says he did not truly feel part of the family until 2006. That's when Brim's sister died, a death that Brim says made her lose her love for life.

What kept her going was the thought of what might happen to Edozie if she weren't around anymore. He gave her a purpose.

But Edozie was still struggling. He didn't know how to behave in school. He was suspended after telling the vice principal, "Screw you."

His fall report card for the seventh grade at Willowbrook Middle School included a 1.83 GPA and a teacher comment about neglecting both school and homework.

But by spring 2006, 13-year-old Edozie confronted a more serious issue: a removal order by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer in El Paso dating to the previous year when Edozie and his mother were pulled off a bus bound from Los Angeles to Florida and found to have expired visas. Edozie faced a scheduled deportation from the United States back to England on July 19, 2006.

In an effort to shield him from immigration officers, Brim kept Edozie out of school for a week.

Iowa State's Daniel Edozie: From homeless to NCAA success USA TODAY Sports' Eric Prisbell talks with Iowa State forward Daniel Edozie and his foster mom Faye Brim to find out what Edozie's life was as a foster child from a young age.

"We were more or less hiding him," Brim says. "He had been through enough."

An attorney involved in Edozie's juvenile legal matters reached out to Kristen Jackson, a senior staff attorney in the Immigrants' Rights Project of the non-profit Public Counsel. Her expertise was juvenile cases.

She knew Edozie's case — his transient life, his relationship with his mother, his status in foster care — was unusual. And deportation was imminent. So she dropped or postponed every other case she had. On June 28, 2006, she conducted an extensive interview with Edozie, who told her in-depth about his experiences with his mom living on the streets and in shelters.

Jackson said she also got a good feeling about Edozie's living situation with Brim.

In an 11-page letter to a U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services official on July 18, 2006, Jackson wrote: "Even if both Daniel and his mother were to remain in the United States, they would not be reunified. And deporting Daniel together with his mother would not serve his best interests, but instead would work a de facto reunification and provide an end-run around the very court assigned to protect children like Daniel from abuse, abandonment and neglect."​

Almost a decade later, Jackson recalls him as polite, open to talking about his situation, and scared of being sent to England or Nigeria.

The issue: Edozie and his mom entered the United States on the visa waiver program. Though that enabled them to come here without applying for a traditional visa, the downside was that they could be deported without even seeing an immigration judge if they were found to stay too long.

Jackson was intent to prove Edozie, at 11, was not competent to waive those rights when he entered the program. She sought special immigrant juvenile status for Edozie, which she says would be virtually unprecedented relief granted to a child who had entered the States on the visa waiver program. She thought she had a 50% chance to stop Edozie's deportation.

"Daniel had a really strong case," she says. "Legally it was really complicated. Because I have a lot of expertise in this, I thought if anyone could pull it off, I would be the person … The Immigration Service was very intent on removing him. When you have a train that is moving like that, it is really hard to put the brakes on."

Her plan worked. In Sept. 2006, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services granted Edozie a special immigrant juvenile visa. He received his green card and was a lawful permanent resident.

Had Jackson not been summoned to help, she says there is little doubt Edozie would have been "on that plane and none of us would have heard from him since then."

Once he knew he was staying in this country, and in Brim's home, Edozie flourished.

Their home in Compton soon became filled with athletic trophies and academic accomplishments. His report cards became filled with A's and B's and teacher comments about "exceptional work," "determination" in completing assignments and how Edozie was a pleasure to have in class.

"At the end of the tunnel there is light," Brim says. "Where there is darkness, eventually it gets light."

Edozie says he does not resent his mom, who he says lives in London. Attempts to reach Georgina Edozie were unsuccessful.

"I have nothing against her," he says. "I still love her. There are questions I have for her that I want to ask. I want to ask those questions face to face rather than being over the phone. Over the phone, you don't see the emotions behind the voice.

"Do you think you could have been a better parent? Some things make you or break you. I just look at it that it made me. You learn many lessons and it got me here today. If my mom were a better parent would I be the person I am today?"

Edozie says some of his Iowa State teammates ask him why he doesn't want to hang out with them more. He tells them he just acts a certain way because of what he has endured.

At one time he wondered whether he would be alive at 22. Playing major college basketball was a pipe dream. In middle school, he said, he was a "baby" in the sport and started out crawling. Then he broke his tibia bone in eighth grade and didn't play as a high school freshman.

But he had size, good character and had qualified academically to play college basketball. By his senior year of high school, one of his summer-league coaches called Marquis, the Tyler Junior College coach who has sent more than 100 players to Division I college basketball.

On tape, Marquis saw a 6-8 forward who could run the floor well. He needed work on his post moves. When he arrived, he was no better than a 40% free-throw shooter.

But then, progress. Impressive footwork. A blocked shot and a tipped dunk in one sequence. Marquis hadn't seen a lot of players of Edozie's height in junior college who would hedge on ball screens and then take a charge on the next play.

"And he's impossible not to like," Marquis says. "He has an infectious personality. He is very smart."

Marquis, who has Iowa roots, called longtime friend Jeff Rutter, then Iowa State's director of basketball operations. With the Cyclones in search of a big man, once Rutter heard Marquis rubber-stamp Edozie, he was sold and recommended him to the rest of the staff.

When Edozie visited Iowa State, he was "incredibly genuine, very respectful and humble," Rutter says. "He convinced us he would play any role needed. No doubt his journey and positive attitude shaped him into the person he is today."

Marquis told Iowa State coach Fred Hoiberg about Edozie's background.

"It just kind of blows you away," Hoiberg says. "And for him to be the type of kid that he is, it's amazing. He's a well-rounded person. I don't know if you can say that about a lot of kids who really raised themselves."

Though Edozie says it was hard to adjust to Division I basketball last season, Hoiberg says the forward proved "invaluable" in filling the void created by the injury to Georges Niang, the versatile standout who broke a foot in Iowa State's first of three NCAA tournament games. Edozie played 16 minutes in the next game, a victory against North Carolina.

Hoiberg says Edozie, though raw from a basketball standpoint during his first season in Ames, fit well socially in a college environment. He says Edozie is among the most popular players on the team and sees no evidence that his background hinders him. "We were fortunate to get him," Hoiberg says.

Edozie recently watched The Blind Side, a movie which chronicles a similar journey experienced by former Baltimore Ravens player Michael Oher, and sent a text message to Brim saying, "Thank you for everything you have done for me. Thank you for everything you protected me from."

Brim says, "That is my biggest reward. Saving that soul. Helping to save that soul."

Edozie becomes emotional only when talking about Brim opening her doors and her heart to him. And when he cries, he laughs continuously, as if embarrassed.

Tears run down his left cheek and land on his hand.

"All I needed was just one chance," he says. "That's all I needed. I took advantage of that chance. Look at where it has gotten me. It has gotten me here today. I'm not going to lie — it was hard. It was a hard, hard battle that I don't think anybody could have survived through."

And the boy who wouldn't smile looks up and wipes the tears from his eyes.

"I have a lot to smile about now."