When he was about 12, he moved to Children’s Village, a boarding home for at-risk children in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. He lived there for five years, eventually obtaining scholarships to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York in 2007.

“He was full of personality and charm and a certain kind of elegance,” said Taur Orange, the college’s director of Educational Opportunity Programs, which help poor students succeed. “At the same time, from Day 1, I could see he was fragile.”

To his friends, he seemed to have things together. He lived in the dorms. He was a preppy ladies’ man who hung out with the basketball team. He told friends that the easiest way to pick up women was to compliment them. He was not particular about race.

“Every time I was with him, he always had a girl,” said Tarik Payton, 25, a basketball player and one of Mr. Shaw’s closest friends. “He was never struggling in the women department.”

Mr. Shaw talked big, and lived big. He won attention for his cleverly designed bow ties, which he made from dice and Scrabble-like tiles from the game Bananagrams to spell words like “imagination” and “outstanding.” Somehow, he managed to get his creations onto the necks of celebrities like Adam Sandler — although some of his celebrity tales might have been exaggerated. (He also told a friend that the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. had paid him $10,000 for a bow tie.) His painting style, he liked to say, was “100 percent power.”

“What can we say, the man’s got swagger,” said a story about Mr. Shaw published in August 2012 by the Foster Care to Success program, a nonprofit group that helped him get financial aid for college.

Image The actor Nick Cannon with Mr. Shaw, wearing a bow tie that Mr. Shaw had designed.

At some point, he became fixated on Asian culture and Asian women. He invited Mr. Payton to drink bubble tea in 2012, saying it was very popular in China and Japan. “He was saying I want to learn Japanese, so I can talk to more Asian women,” Mr. Payton recalled.