Chancellor Lee Adams can do a lot of things he was never supposed to do.
Once, Chancellor Lee couldn't walk _ and doctors said maybe he never would. Then he could barely walk, with someone holding both his hands and guiding him.
Now, the son of Cherica Adams and Rae Carruth is almost 19 years old.
Gradually, he has progressed to walking either with the aid of a walker or with gentle, one-handed help from his grandmother, Saundra Adams. His steps are slow, deliberate and sometimes flat, which has the side effect of making them noisy.
Concentrating on his physical therapy inside a room at Child & Family Development in south Charlotte, N.C., as he has done at least once every week for the past 13 years, Chancellor Lee shows just how far he has come.
Amy Sturkey, his longtime physical therapist, works with the young man she calls "Lee," as she has done since he was 5 years old.
Sturkey used to have Chancellor Lee hold onto the front bars of a treadmill. She would set the treadmill speed at 0.3 miles per hour. That's slower than the slowest setting on a standard treadmill at your local gym, which is 0.5.
Chancellor Lee eventually graduates from the treadmill. On this day, he is practicing his heel-toe walking.
Inside the physical therapy room, Chancellor Lee takes one particularly loud step.
Sturkey smiles and says: "You can hear Lee coming."
After Chancellor Lee nearly died in 1999 on the night of his traumatic birth _ when his mother Cherica Adams was shot four times in a drive-by shooting _ it's a joy for Saundra Adams to see him walk at all.
The young man suffers from irreparable brain damage and cerebral palsy because of the lack of blood and oxygen caused by that shooting.
The occasional slap of one of Chancellor Lee's footsteps sounds like music to his grandmother.
"We can take the stamping and the marching," she said. "It's a wonderful sound to me. I love to hear him coming."
Something else is coming, too.
Rae Carruth, Chancellor Lee's father, has spent nearly 19 years in prison for conspiring to have his mother killed. Carruth is scheduled for release on Monday, Oct. 22.
Saundra Adams has long said she forgives Carruth for what he did. But she has never forgotten. And as the time draws closer, she wonders if Carruth really understands the hurt he has caused her family.
Two years ago, she was adamant she and her grandson would be at the prison gates, waiting for Carruth. She has some things to say to Carruth, she told me then, when he walks out of Sampson Correctional Institution, about 190 miles east of Charlotte in Clinton.
That's still the case, but she's no longer certain that meeting will happen.
"I am still feeling forgiving," Adams said in July. "And I want still for him to meet his son. But I do want him to ... see and feel the effects of what he did. Because that's what I've been looking at every day since Nov. 16, 1999.
"And seeing the grief, seeing the hurt, the disappointment, seeing my dreams just slashed. I want him to see that too."
