"My best example of what not to do was the streets"

"What's wrong with you, homie?"

A sullen boy stares at the floor of an empty classroom.

"Look at me," Keith Wheeler says. "I deserve eye contact right now. What's your No. 1 reason for coming to school?"

Muffled voice: "To learn."

"Were you learning when you were disrupting out in the hallway?"

"No."

"I suggest, when you get here in the morning, put your brain on. Do you feel me? Cut the crap."

He sends the boy on his way.

But another boy is still here — grown up, free of the temptation and despair that once hemmed him in. Brash, youthful and urban stylish, Wheeler now tells students: You are one decision away — from expulsion, from jail, from a perfect grade average.

His tattoos tell the story of a troubled kid from Seattle's Rainier Valley who would go on to be a sixth-grade teacher at Aki Kurose Middle School and now, at 26, dean of students and athletic director at Franklin High. There are his parents' initials and birth years on one arm; on the other, letters representing him and his three brothers and framing a cross inscribed with the words "Only God can judge us."

A street hustler's air lingers on him like a cologne; he's never lost touch with the world he once knew, but he's on a mission now, writing a memoir he hopes can inspire young readers, pursuing a principal's credential even as he assumes his new duties.

He's in a rush. For the kids who even now are being ensnared, kids who come in with T-shirts memorializing recently killed relatives, kids who say, "Mr. Wheeler, my cousin said he used to go to school with you. Dawg, you was bad."

His passion is showing kids that education is a way out of the maze. His classroom is typical of Aki Kurose's 600 kids — mostly Asian and black, native-born and immigrant, largely impoverished. As a teacher, he humors them by acting out book passages in exaggerated fashion, pointing out that while characters might be fictional, their experiences are universal.

"If you see somebody standing at Rainier and Henderson, and they have a gun, are you going to walk toward them?" he says, mirroring a scene from one novel.

"No!" they answer.

"Let's apply this," he says. "It's a book, but it's real life."

Another day, it's the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Locked in the labyrinth, the beast devours youths until Theseus slays it and finds his way out. The kids have questions. Why, they wonder? Why do the youths go looking for the Minotaur in the maze? Why don't they just stay where they are?

Because when trouble is the world you live in, it's all you know.

"I followed the devil's voice"

Wheeler's ride is a black Chrysler 300, a near-luxury sedan hyped in hip-hop videos, as spotless and smooth as he is in his cream-colored, factory-fresh sweater and crisp jeans.

He's cruising his old neighborhood, where his parents, Candies and Debra, raised him and his three brothers, Railen, Rodney and Kyle. Its streets hardened as L.A. gangs migrated north in the early 1990s, and as the boys grew, so did the crime and violence. Drug deals went down 24/7, hookers turned tricks in driveways.

Families and schools buckled under the pressure. Bullets sprayed the house after Railen riled a local gang; one grazed Kyle's eyebrow. Keith and his protective older brothers earned notoriety on the drug-ridden streets, even as they feared their stone-cold father's physical and verbal beatings. Says Candies: "I didn't do nothin' no other parent wouldn't do."

Debra Wheeler recently received a list making the rounds on the Internet that could be called "31 ways you know you're from Seattle's South End." Number 28: "Everyone knows the Wheeler boys — Keith, Kyle, Raleen [sic] or Rodney."

Keith Wheeler was sharp, a gifted basketball player. But barely into middle school, he saw things no kid should ever see, a world of brutality that punctured his resolve, leading him toward the temptations of fancy cars, guns and stacks of drug money rising from the kitchen table. The flash, the cash: Keith was mesmerized.

The Chrysler rolls up to Othello Park; Wheeler remembers a Crip once found dead in the bushes. Here's a guy closing in now, bedraggled and jittery — a longtime local character who, right on cue, asks for money. Wheeler hands over some change as the guy wanders around the car, admiring the glistening chrome. "You are flossin', man. For real."

Wheeler heads toward busy Rainier Avenue. There's the funeral home he knows like a convenience store, the house where he scored 150 rocks of cocaine. He purposely returns, he says, to offer hope. To not be the guy who makes it and doesn't come back.

"I remember every one of these guys," he says. That man leaning on a metal drum across the street — "they would just beat him up and rob him. Until he adjusted to the culture. It was be slick, or be slicked. This was the 'hood."

Wheeler's school discipline file was thick. He was on a path of destruction, his mother's voice on one shoulder and everything he'd seen on the other. "And as the arrest records show," he says, "I followed the devil's voice."

I am a leader

For the past two years, Wheeler taught at Aki Kurose (formerly South Shore), alongside some of the teachers who recall his mixed-up days. Following, he says, is the problem, so one of the first things he did was write a leadership pledge for his students to recite.

I am a leader. I will never follow.

He is part team captain, part troop leader — his manner encouraging but serious, his delivery fast-clipped as he takes attendance, shiny black shoes that slice to a point. Even the pledge, which the kids stand and recite in unison, resembles a military maneuver.

I am in control of my future, now and forever.

"He's tough," says Kulani Yacub, 11. "You learn more if they're tough."

"He wants us to do good," says Lavonte Jackson, 11. "He's strict, so it makes us a better and stronger person."

Education is the key which unlocks my future.

But even in the refuge of school, the young Keith heard words that plummeted him further, and he responded with growing disruption. In eighth grade, he was expelled for offering crack to a South Shore staffer. When a kid was shot to death outside a dance at Rainier Beach High, Wheeler was questioned by police as rumors flew that he'd also been shot. As he headed outside afterward, he says, he heard a counselor around a corner say, "Damn. I heard they almost got Wheeler."

The pain evident even now, Wheeler says: "That was the most hurtful comment I've ever heard."

I shall not use excuses. Excuses are tools of incompetence, which mean monuments of nothingness, and those that use them seldom use anything else.

After that, burdened by reputation and misery, he couldn't dodge the beast. He drew forgery charges when he tried to use a credit card he found at the mall. Then, he clocked a kid with a bottle — it wasn't that the kid hadn't given Wheeler the dollar he owed, it was that he didn't give the respect.

That was it. Everyone involved, including him, thought it best he move on.

I am a leader. I will NEVER FOLLOW! This is my pledge to life.

Rebuilt from the flesh

He transferred to Tukwila's Foster High, where assistant principal Joyce Kandi saw potential — not a bad reputation, and definitely not saggy pants — on this scrawny upstart.

How do you want others to perceive you? she'd press. If you're going to make a change, you're going to have to change on the outside as well as the inside.

But those clothes aren't me.

That may be true — but you're not sitting on the other side of the table in an interview making that decision.

She urged Wheeler to run for student office and put him on hiring teams for school job candidates. As a senior, he'd win all-state basketball honors.

"Good teachers care about the entire kid," Wheeler says. "[Other educators] were used to this one type of kid. 'Why should we waste the energy?' But at Foster, it was like, 'We're gonna strip you naked of everything you have. We're going to rebuild from the flesh.' "

Finally, he saw a world beyond the walls, but the forgery case still hung over his head. Called before the judge, he turned and looked at his mom, who'd always been there for him. A shrug, a nod. What could she do? It was out of her hands. With a finger, she signaled him to turn back around.

"I knew for the first time that this time she couldn't help me," Wheeler says. "And if I didn't change — well, the answer was right there in front of me. You're on your own. Keith was on his own."

Persuaded by his grades at Foster and letters of support, the judge sentenced him to work crew rather than a long detention. Wheeler, eager to change, excelled and went on to college even as troubles continued at home. His father was assaulted; his brothers considered retaliation. They told Keith: Stay out of it. And this time, as hard as it was, he did.

At times, he wondered whether it was all worth it. If his family couldn't enjoy his successes with him, what was it good for? Then, at his college graduation, he saw tears misting from the stone wall that was his father. "That's when I realized there's reason to change," he says.

Candies Wheeler, a cook at a local drug- and alcohol-treatment center, is happy to see his son accomplishing things he himself wasn't able to.

"I wish I'd changed my life years ago," he says. "But it's good to see my child successful. He said, 'Dad, I'm gonna get there someday.' He's headed there now."

Keith Wheeler still wonders: Why was he spared? After all he'd seen and been through, even as his brothers all ended up in jail, why did he make it out of that maze? The answer he keeps coming back to is: He has a job to do.

"My best teacher of what not to do was the streets," Wheeler says. "I saw every example of what could happen if you didn't act the right way. ... That's why I'm so passionate with kids. I can already forecast where they're going to go."

How does a kid find his way out of the maze? By rising above it.

Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com