In early November 2007, Neil Hope walked into Cheapies Records & Tapes for the last time.

The former star of Degrassi Jr. High was a frequent visitor to the Hamilton music store. Sometimes, he’d have his PlayStation 2 in hand, selling it for cash only to buy it back a few weeks later.

Hope had diabetes and suffered blackouts. He told his friend behind the counter, Scott Bell, that on several of these occasions he’d wake up to find his money gone.

On this last visit, he had an eye patch and wasn’t making much sense, Bell says. “That was the last time I saw him.”

A few weeks later, on Nov. 25, 2007, the boy who became globally recognizable as Wheels was discovered in a Hamilton rooming house by his landlord. He had been dead for more than a week, the victim of a heart attack at 35. Insulin vials, filled in September but not used, littered the room.

Hope was, on the surface, an upbeat and personable guy but he struggled with bouts of depression and severe diabetes made worse by alcohol. He was a private man, and his final years were a mystery to many — a rarity in a digital age. It would take just over four years for his family to learn he was buried in an unmarked plot and even longer to learn the details of his final days.

Unlike his peers, Hope didn’t leave a paper trail of home purchases, car loans or a specified next of kin. There were just two unresolved GO train infractions totalling $354, a trail of acquaintances whose couches he slept on, and a group of people who loved him but were frustrated he wasn’t taking care of himself.

“He got a taste of the limelight early. He was a little bit spoiled, and once it was gone he didn’t know how to handle it,” says Danny Hope, who bears a striking resemblance to his kid brother.

News of his death shocked Degrassi fans around the world when it was made public mid-February. His family had been searching for him for years. He was a drifter, but it wasn’t like him not to call. His sister-in-law contacted Hamilton police in 2009, but the police had no record of his death. It was only when the family asked again this January that their suspicions were confirmed.

Following the brief burst of fame as the troubled teen with the huge glasses, Hope drifted across the country from job to job — Money Mart, Pizza Pizza, agency work. Like many actors on the show, he found his Degrassi character followed him — a source of annoyance, humour and occasional joy, depending on who you ask.

On Degrassi, Wheels was a complex character. His adopted parents were killed by a drunk driver, he fended off the advances of a travelling salesman, and he routinely blamed others for his problems.

Dan Woods, who played Principal Raditch in the series, called Hope a “bright-eyed performer” who never brought personal issues to the set. He said equating Hope with Wheels is “so far from the whole picture of Neil.”

Hope’s family doesn’t want to sugar-coat his struggles. He was a good guy who loved Warren Zevon, the Toronto Maple Leafs and his nieces, but he didn’t take care of his health, drank too much and shied away from responsibility.

Degrassi Jr. High and Degrassi High were non-union shows, and that, according to Woods, meant the money stopped coming in for the actors once the series ended.

“I don’t think he wanted to face reality,” his sister-in-law Tracy Hope says. “I don’t think he ever really grew up either. He was just a big kid.”

Hope’s financial situation was rarely stable. In 2003, he was caught riding the GO Train without a ticket. And of course there was the PlayStation, “constantly coming back and forth,” said Bell.

Hope would go to Bell’s house to watch Leafs games. Bell remembers him drinking 12 beers in two hours and constantly checking his blood sugar. Bell and his wife called him Neils, a pun on his famous Degrassi character, which he made a show of hating.

One day, Bell’s wife told Hope there was a website devoted to Wheels sightings. He began to laugh when he looked it up. People were spotting him in places he’d never been, like Jackson, Miss. Unlike other Degrassi alumni, who maintain Facebook pages and an online presence, Hope was hard to track.

In Stratford, his brother and sister-in-law still have the only note Hope ever sent them. It’s undated but was sent when he was living in Windsor, around 2005. The letter is written neatly, in capital letters. According to a friend, that was how he sent text messages too.

He begins by asking about his nieces, but the letter soon becomes heavy — an update on the move to Windsor, time spent living in homeless shelters in Hamilton. He mentions his health issues — bouts of depression and the diabetes. (Hope was diagnosed in 1994 and needed four insulin injections a day.)

Tracy almost cried when she got it.

“It was a cry for help, but everybody brushed it off, because we kept hearing it over and over and over again,” Danny says.

Hope was one of five children. One brother, Brian, died of cancer when he was a teen; his father died shortly after of cirrhosis. As a teen Hope talked openly about his parents’ struggles with alcohol.

“I was the saviour because my mom was getting money from me to buy the booze. Or else she would spend all her money on booze and I would have to buy the groceries,” he said in a 1992 Degrassi Talks interview.

During those years, he’d buy his mother a television and VCR when hers were on the fritz — “which probably shouldn’t have been put on his shoulders at a young age, but that’s a whole other story,” Danny says. Hope’s mother quit drinking in 1998.

Hope’s family said he was happiest when he met Christina Boulard in 1998. The two worked at Money Mart, and he proposed to her in 2000. They went on day trips to Niagara Falls and Toronto, and he threw her a surprise party. They would visit family, and Hope’s siblings would come to visit. He seemed a different person.

When it ended amicably, Hope started drifting again.

“Everybody tried to help him out, give him a bed, a couch, but he burned a lot of bridges over the years,” Danny says.

In 2003, he showed up with a backpack at Danny and Tracy’s home in Mississauga for the weekend. He stayed for a year.

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He would take his nieces to the store to buy them surprise bags. At parties, he would sing along to Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” holding his hands up, “Wait for it, wait for it … Bah, bah, bah!” along with the famous chorus. Good times never seemed so good.

He’d work for a week or two and then he’d be unemployed for a few months. He wasn’t fired — he’d just move on after he got the paycheque or “enough money to buy a couple of cases of beer,” his brother recalls.

Voltaire Ramos, who went to the Etobicoke School for the Arts with Hope, saw him at a Money Mart on The Queensway in 2004. He looked broken.

“He was pretty upfront about dealing with alcohol issues. He’d spent a few years trying to get his life together, and he was trying to come across as being upbeat,” Ramos said. “He was trying to stay in the clear and make a turn. I was really hoping that was going to be the case.”

At the house in Mississauga, Hope had days when he would stay in his room, watch television and drink beer without eating, a disastrous mix for a severe diabetic. As the year passed, there were more and more of those days.

Tracy would call down that dinner was ready, and he’d answer that he was coming. When he didn’t come, she’d go downstairs and find him unresponsive and call an ambulance.

One time, Hope’s niece had to hold his head up while Tracy ran upstairs to get a quick hit of sugar to stabilize his insulin levels while the ambulance arrived.

Hope never spoke about the hospital trips or his drinking. He knew the family was angry. After the episode with his niece, his family told him he had to take better care of himself. They eventually had to ask him to leave, worried one of their daughters would find him after school.

After that, there would be a surprise phone call every few years.

“ ‘Hey, guess who?’ ” Danny says, imitating his brother’s deep voice.

During the last “long time, no see” call in 2005, Hope wanted to visit his nieces. He never came. A few months later, the letter arrived.

The family believes the letter was written around the time of his last public appearance, a documentary filmed in the summer of 2005.

In the documentary, Degrassi alumnus Stefan Brogren (Snake) tracked him down in Windsor. On camera, he laughs and grudgingly sings along to the Zit Remedy classic “Everybody Wants Something.” But the letter he sent a few months later reveals a man who was hurting and putting on a show for the cameras.

When he did move back to Hamilton, few knew. He stayed at a downtown Salvation Army shelter for two nights in 2006. His last address was a rooming house on Rutherford Ave., where he lived for about a year.

As it turns out, Hope’s mother lived close by. When she died in 2010 she had no idea if he was alive or dead.

In 2007, the staff at Cheapies noticed Hope was no longer showing up. Bell texted him but got no response. A few weeks later, a friend came into the store and informed them Hope had died. Word never got back to his family. They are still confused and frustrated.

“It’s sad that he got lost in the system,” Tracy says.

Hamilton police would not comment on Hope’s death because they discuss sudden-death investigations only with the immediate families. A spokesperson said police, in general, act on information they have at the time, and sometimes it is not possible to locate family members.

The location of Hope’s grave, where he is buried anonymously, is being kept private for now. His family is finalizing details for a gravestone that will read: “In loving memory of Philip Neil Hope — Wheels — September 24 1972 to November 2007.”