But as anyone who spends much time reporting on children in trouble in Washington will tell you, things rarely work out the way they’re supposed to. They didn’t for Terrell Hunter. On Feb. 20, four years after I met him, Hunter died in his sleep at his grandmother’s house from complications of obesity. He was 19. He weighed 436 pounds. He had been in intensive care units of local hospitals three times in the previous year.

The news of Hunter’s passing wasn’t a surprise to me, and probably isn’t to anyone who read “The Battle Over Heavy-T,” the story that came out of the many months photographer Darrow Montgomery and I spent following him. It was not an inspirational tale.

Soon after the obesity conference, I met Hunter and he told me his story. Born and raised in the District, he rarely saw his father, who had been just 15 when Hunter was born. If Hunter was ever thin, he didn’t remember. By age 10, he weighed more than 200 pounds. Classmates at Bowen Elementary School ferried his food to the second floor because he couldn’t brave the stairs. By 13, he weighed more than 340 pounds, struggling with asthma and a heart like a senior citizen.

Yes, he had recently dropped 200 pounds; the weight had come off during his second stint at an inpatient weight-loss program in rural Virginia, where he’d been sent after having been declared a ward of the city following his near-death from heart failure. Since returning home, however, Hunter had gained most of it back. Worse yet, his mother had once again lost custody of him after social-services officials concluded she was unable or unwilling to hold the line on his weight. But this time, Hunter wasn’t going to foster care. He wasn’t going back to Virginia. Instead, he decided to run.

From spring, though summer, and into fall, Hunter ducked in and out of his mother’s home, hiding from police officers and Child and Family Services Agency workers, giving them the slip whenever they caught up with him. He dropped out of Woodrow Wilson Senior High School. He stopped going outside during the day. He gained weight.

Hunter got good at fooling the government workers paid to chase him. A smart-aleck kid too fat to run fast, he nonetheless regularly put them all “in a trick box,” as he put it. I thank him for letting City Paper tag along and tell his story. I wish it could have changed something.

There are a few things I won’t forget about Heavy-T. Like how the teen asked 30-year-old women for their phone numbers, but slept with his stuffed dog. Or the time he got caught, conned a social worker into taking him to McDonalds, and then slipped out the side door with a Big Mac and an Oreo McFlurry. I mainly remember the way the kid barely half my age never showed fear, even when the adults around him had caved in to it.

One afternoon, Montgomery, Hunter, and I were hanging out at Hunter’s mother’s house in Southwest when the police started hammering on the door. Montgomery and I panicked, jumped into a pantry closet and hid, two journalists on the wrong side of an episode of Cops. I remember Hunter looking at us, stone calm, as he rounded the corner and headed upstairs to find his shoes. Back downstairs, he put on his black Nike Air Max high tops, opened the back door, and slid out, running as hard as he could. As the cops kept banging, we stood in the closet shaking with fear, wondering what to do now, and how that kid kept it together.

Terrell Hunter is survived by his mother, Leslie Abbott; his father, Terrell Hunter Sr.; his stepfather, Bruce Wooten; sisters Sieda McCray and Jamika DeVaughn; a grandmother, Deborah Brown; and a grandfather, Charles Hunter. A wake will be held on March 5 at 10 am at Community of Hope at 905 Alabama Ave. SE, with a funeral immediately following.

Photos by Darrow Montgomery

Good morning, City Desk readers, and welcome to another Freedom Friday! How about this "heat wave," enh? ENH?

Michael Phelps, Olympiad and hero to long-necked people everywhere, crashed his Escalade in Baltimore last night. To give you an impression of how bad the accident was, here's WaPo's headline: "Phelps Uninjured in Two-Vehicle Crash." There wasn't enough room in the headline to mention that the person in the other car was left uninjured as well–only "shaken up."

It's an important story because Michael Phelps is A FAMOUS SWIMMER AND IMPORTANT YOUNG MAN, and when he was fresh out of high school, he was arrested for driving under the influence. Five years is nothing in journalism years–so maybe the the solid graf that addresses Phelp's sobriety was worth including. Then again, there's this [emphasis mine]:

Police found no reason to perform any tests on him, [Officer] Guglielmi said. Officers also examined both vehicles and found no evidence of drugs or alcohol, he said.

Throwing in that bit about the drugs–something WaPo didn't bother to do in a single one of these traffic accident stories from Tuesday–now that was pure genius! After all, there was that DUI, and the picture of Phelps taking a monster hit with those Aquaman lungs.

But as good as WaPo is about keeping us abreast (swimming joke!) of Phelp's fuck-ups, the paper was strangely silent about Subway, which dropped the heavily wreathed Phelps like an ugly newborn seven months ago in the wake of the bong pictures, only to bring him back on board in recent weeks for a series of print and TV commercials, in which Phelps gushes about his love for jalapenos and banana peppers alongside a nervous and sad-looking Jared.

C'mon, Phelps gettin' his endorsement back wasn't worth even a blog post?

Do you cry easily, sweet reader? The September issue of Esquire features a heart-breaking story by John H. Richardson about Warren Hern, the only remaining late-term abortion provider in the country. For the last several decades, Hern has been the target of brick-throwing, gun-firing, vitriol-spewing, COLLEAGUE-MURDERING "Pro-lifers." Told with an elegant yet enthralling second-person voice, Richardson's story is almost enough to make a non-believer embrace Original Sin, if only as an explanation to what tempted Bill O'Reilly's mother to raise the spawn of Satan as her own. In fact, it's almost enough to inspire a guy–who, as Dogbert once said, doesn't like to get "gooky stuff" on his "paws"–to put his money where his mouth is. Too bad  I'm too damn dumb for abortion school!

Obesity is apparently off limits, but I'm pretty sure it's still OK to call smokers "addicts." Thankfully, there's a less unhealthy alternative on shelves as we sprechen! From Jacob Sullum at Reason:

A new review of 89 studies confirms that the cancer risk associated with smokeless tobacco is tiny when compared to the cancer risk associated with cigarettes....

[The authors] estimate that if all male cigarette smokers in the U.S. had used smokeless tobacco instead, the number of tobacco-related cancer deaths among them would have been 1 percent what it actually was in 2005 (about 1,100 vs. 105,000).

Holy metastasizing lung tumors, Batman, why hasn't some do-gooding (good-doing?) public health advocate endorsed Snus? Sullum can tell you:

This comparison highlights the absurdity of the main "public health" objection to promoting smokeless tobacco as a harm-reducing alternative to cigarettes. Opponents of this strategy claim to be worried that it could lead to more tobacco-related mortality in the long run if it attracts nonsmokers to smokeless tobacco. But Lee and Hamling's numbers indicate that if a significant percentage of smokers switched to oral snuff, the tobacco-related death toll would be smaller than it is now even if every nonsmoker in America started using oral snuff too. By the professed standards of public health, which seeks to minimize morbidity and mortality, this is a no-brainer. As with the opposition to electronic cigarettes, something else is going on here: a moralistic crusade to conquer sin disguised as a scientific quest to conquer disease.

If you've never read Jacob Sullum on cigarettes (and weed), you should. Especially if you're the kind of person who knows what's best for everybody but your coke-snorting daughter. (Catch that? I just said "F you!" to Vice President Joe Biden, Destroyer of Families!)

Happy Friday, y'all. Don't get scammed!