It was early March 2012, and her son, Joshua, who had never taken a cooking class, had grabbed one of the coveted 36 spots on the third season of Fox’s MasterChef. He raised the gun, the metal glinting in the last light.

In the gathering dusk, Marks felt the heft of the gun. The episodes were alarming and heartbreaking.Īnd now his mother drove faster. A traffic accident borne of a mind gone suddenly blank a terrifying scuffle with police that included gunfire, a flurry of baton blows, a cloud of pepper spray voices torturing him at all hours, voices that he was sure wanted to kill him weeks of hospitalization to figure out what was wrong. Until the first panic attack came.įrom that moment, like a thread being pulled from a fine garment, his mental state unspooled so rapidly that the change in him seemed as impossible as his lightning-strike ascent had seemed charmed. Restaurants wanted him, and his growing legion of fans lavished supportive comments on him. Even when he didn’t win-he was a runner-up in a season that had started with some 30,000 applicants-he seemed to come out on top. From rival competitors to hardened viewers to the cooking contest’s notoriously hotheaded, impossible-to-please host, the 26-year-old Marks had done the unimaginable: make everyone like him. Just a year earlier, Josh Marks, the 7-foot-2 gentle giant with the sweet-tempered smile and almost sappy sincerity, was the breakout star on Gordon Ramsay’s reality show MasterChef. That it had come to this, in the space of only a few months, seemed inconceivable. Her son, she had been told, was wandering the streets.

But you best bring it back.Ī few miles away, cheeks wet from panicked tears, hands slapping the steering wheel, his mother weaved through rush-hour traffic, stoplights and speed limits be damned. He had eight bucks in his pocket, and there was no way he was giving up his phone, the one on which he had saved every message from his mother as the darkness had descended. A thousand dollars plus an iPhone had been the ask. The gun had been easy enough to find, even for someone who’d grown up abhorring the destruction that violence had visited on the city he loved. Dusk loomed a few hours away, but as the young man wandered, vacant eyed, through the back streets of his Chicago boyhood, a different kind of darkness, one that had stalked him for months, settled on him like a fog.

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