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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wrahn" data-source="post: 2942109" data-attributes="member: 9191">The inner city is a tough place to grow up, it takes a person of great character to rise above such humble beginnings and make something out of their lives.  Michael Sudoran is not a person of such character.  His mother, from what little he remembers of her, was a junkie and a whore.  His father could have been one of a hundred people.  In a way, as weak as she was, she tried to do the best she could by Michael, but ultimately she was doomed to failure, her drug habits making Michael more of her caretaker than she was of him.When he was seven, he came into his mother being “attacked” by her pimp.  He took the gun out of the man’s discarded pants and shot him in the back four times.  It was the last time he saw his mother.  Though not charged with a crime, he was taken by social services and placed in a foster home.  His mother did not contest the ruling.  Four months later she was dead of a drug overdose.A boy, alone without a family needed a sense of belonging, he found that in the street gangs he began to run with.  It did not take long for him to join one and it only took a little longer for him to be arrested on drug charges.He drew a harsh sentence with a killing in his past and a drug charge.  He was sentence to Darshland’s Youth Correctional Facility until he was 18.  Normally juvy hall was something to laugh at, but with the increasing underage crime activity, the city had begun an effort to clean up the streets and began locking up the worst offenders in their own version of junior prison.  This also put all the rival gangs in one place with inadequate supervision.  It was a recipe for disaster.It would have been, but for Father Joel.  A priest of great charisma and compassion, he was able to keep the prison as something of a neutral ground by convincing the hard cases that further violence in the prison would be pointless.   He also took some of the young and impressionable kids and showed them a better way to lead their lives.Michael was one of those kids.  He received his High School Diploma and Father Joel had even talked to a friend of his and secured him a scholarship at a small college in James Cove.  But finally, the priests efforts found a child he could not convince that a peaceful way was better and three weeks before Michael was to be released, the only positive role model in his life was stabbed in the stomach and killed.He was left with questions, why the guilty go unpunished and those that stand up to evil are brought down.  He looked for purpose in Father Joel’s death, of his mother’s.  He went to James’s Cove looking for hope that the world is not endless entropy that breaks down everything good and decent.</blockquote>

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