A party with drinking, like one students at Ball State University attend all the time, turned tragic for Marwin Strong.
It was 1998, Strong was playing summer league basketball with future professionals. He was on the path to the NBA, that is until that night.
Someone slipped something into his drink and a month later he was in a coma on his death bed.
"The doctors basically told my mother and my father 'there is nothing else we can do for this young man,'" Strong said. "So the ironic thing is that by the grace of God man, He brought me back."
TRAGEDY
Strong grew up as a member of a low-income family in Muncie. His mother was a single parent and raised him and his seven siblings by herself.
Amidst the despair that surrounded him, Strong found his place in the community on the basketball court. As a 1995 graduate of Muncie Central High School, he was a high school teammate of Bonzi Wells, a member of the NBA's New Orleans Hornets.
Wells graduated in 1994 and went on to play basketball for Ball State, becoming the university's all-time leading scorer.
Strong received a scholarship offer from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. However, the scholarship offer would only pay for half of his tuition and his family did not have the money to pay for the rest of expenses.
Instead of going on to play college basketball after high school, Strong stayed in Muncie and began dealing drugs the summer after he graduated.
"I grew up around drug dealing and prostitution," he said. "So it wasn't nothing for me to do that. So I started in my teenage years. It was a part of life, wanted the bling-bling, wanted the nice cars, wanted all of that."
In between dealing drugs, Strong continued to play basketball and described himself as "a park legend."
"He grew and just became like really athletic late in his career," Strong's former teammate Jeff Holloway said. "If he would have kept playing, the sky would have been the limit for Marwin."
He also played four years of summer league basketball, with stars such as Wells, Chandler Thompson and Jay Edwards. Even amongst the top players, Strong won the league MVP one summer.
"I was going to the NBA," he said. "I was better than a lot of people, a whole lot of people. I was better than the Bonzis, the Chandler Thompsons, the Jay Edwards."
Then the night before he was scheduled to head off for another summer of basketball, Strong went to the party that changed his life. He was dancing and drinking when it happened. Some of his associates in drug dealing handed him a cup while and he did not think about what was actually in the drink. The men, who Strong knew, were jealous of him, he said. In the world of drug dealing, it is every man for himself.
"I grabbed it and drunk it," Strong said. "It had a bitter taste about it but you know I was already drunk so I didn't pay no attention."
The spiked drink did not take its full effect right away. It progressively got worse throughout the next month. He developed a cough and his mom and aunt took him to the hospital. His condition continued to worsen. Sores spread across his entire body, his weight dropped, his heart began to fail, his brain began leaking fluid and he went into a coma.
"I know I was going to the NBA, but if that stuff hadn't happened to me I would have been 10 years in the league right now, 10 years," Strong said. "I would have been right there with Bonzi."
MIRACLE
Laying in the hospital bed for a month, the doctors' prognosis for Strong was not good.
"They said 'there's no hope,'" Strong said. "'There's nothing else we can do for him.'"
The doctors told his family that he would not recover from his coma, and that if he ever did, he would be a vegetable. With the somber news from the doctors, his family began to prepare his funeral arrangements.
"It was a very life-changing experience because we had never dealt with anything so severe in our family," Strong's sister Silvia West said.
Despite the doctors' bleak prognosis, not everyone lost hope.
His pastor told his family that he would be all right and then walked around his bed three times. That same day, he awoke from his coma.
Strong compared his awakening from the bed to the Bible story of Jesus bringing Lazarus back from the dead.
"If people don't believe in miracles, they ought to just look at me and believe in them," Strong said.
While Strong had awaken from his coma, the hardships were far from over. He couldn't eat solid foods or breathe by himself, so he was connected to tubes and eight IVs.
"I've been through everything you can think of," he said. "I had to learn to walk again, talk again and even to think again."
Instead of listening to the Lord, Strong listened to the words of the doctors that did not have much encouragement, he said.
"It was hard, frustrating," he said. "I wanted to run out of the hospital, at a time tried to run out of the hospital."
Although he was still trying to learn to function again with the help of occupational, speech and physical therapy; Strong was focused on resuming his basketball playing career during his two years of recovery from the coma.
One day someone called his uncle asking if he knew of any point guards and he told him of Strong's story.
"He gave me a call in the hospital and he said 'Marwin,' he said. 'You still got it?'," Strong said with a laugh. "I think it's the funniest thing man. I said 'Yeah, I still got it, you know, I still got it,' but at that time I weighed around 130 pounds."
A trainer from UNLV came out to help Strong train and he worked on getting back into shape to play basketball with physical therapy every morning. The following year, he went to the University of Massachusetts, Boston in hopes of continuing his career. After sitting out a year because of missing the registration period, Strong joined the Division III team.
"It was beautiful," he said. "I loved it."
HOME
After one year of playing college basketball, Strong left Boston to return to Muncie because of a personal emergency.
When he returned home, he enrolled at Ivy Tech for a semester before transferring to Ball State. When he got to Ball State, Strong was reconnected with someone he did not expect to see in Muncie.
While he was still at UMASS, Boston, Strong was a captain on the basketball team and had dinner with the university's chancellor along with the other team captains. The chancellor, who he was reunited with at Ball State, was Jo Ann Gora.
"I don't even think she was aware of Muncie, Ind. at that time," Strong said. "I said 'you familiar with Ball State,' and she said 'yeah, I've heard of Ball State.' I come to find out man, the next year man, she was the president of Ball State. So it's amazing man."
Strong and Gora were reconnected at a party at her house. Strong was invited to the president's house by a coach of his, but he did not realize whose place he was going to when he was told of the gathering for the Indiana Pacers and Washington Wizards game.
In addition to studying at Ball State, Strong is working as the Delaware County building commissioner. He is the youngest person ever to hold the position in the county and the first black man to get the job.
He is also the founder of Fight Against Drugs and Violence in Delaware County, the president of Human Rights Commission and the co-chair for Weed and Seed program.
"I'm doing stuff that I never imagined, especially where I come from," Strong said. "A lot of people are looking to me for hope. I'm their Bible, I'm their inspiration."
With his work in Muncie, Strong has helped to turn a crime-riddled area around. He is getting a chance to give back to the community unlike his friends, who are either dead or in prison, he said.
"I'm just cleaning up what I messed up," he said.
With the work that he is doing in Muncie to help others in Muncie, Strong said, he feels like he could fly now.
"I had a mindset that when come back I was going to be a productive citizen here in Muncie, Ind," he said. "The same place I sold drugs at, the same place I did things like that at, the same place I am a nationally-certifield public housing manager."
FUTURE
Strong said he expects to get his associate's degree this summer from Ivy Tech. He then expects to graduate from Ball State with a Bachelor's degree in the Spring of 2009.
While he has dreams beyond his degree from Ball State, Strong said he is not going to leave Muncie.
"A lot of people that's from Muncie, I'm born and raised here, they get that degree and leave Muncie," he said. "I ain't doing that. What I'm going to do is get my degree and stay here. I'm going to stay here and help out this place."
After he gets his bachelor's degree, Strong said, he plans on attending law school so that he can become a criminal defense attorney and help at-risk youth and people without any hope.
He said his passion is to help kids and be a friend, father and counselor to them. He can understand where the people are coming from because he grew up in the same situation.
"I want to be better than Johnnie Cochran," Strong said. "I want to be the Johnnie Cochran of the new generation."
Strong also wants to go on a national tour to speak to kids about his life, about which he is writing a book titled "Back from the Shadows of Death."
Some of the people Strong wants to talk to are at Ball State.
"My main dream: I want to speak to a million kids at one time, and I always wanted to speak to all the Ball State kids in Emens Auditorium," he said.
Another performance Strong said he would consider at Ball State is playing for the Cardinals' basketball team.
"To be honest I kind of want to play another year," he said. "I want to play another year at least at Ball State."
Wells has asked him to play another year of summer league basketball with him, he said, but he is not sure about returning to the court because of his other commitments such as his family. He said he would have to talk it over with his wife, but if he would pursue a career in basketball, he has no doubt that he could achieve his goal of playing in the NBA.
"Do I regret that I didn't get to the NBA? Yeah, yeah I regret, I hate that it happened to me," he said.
Despite the fact that he did not reach his dream, Strong said, he has found his passion in life in helping others and he happy with where he is at.
"Sometimes I look back over my life and I be like 'wow, I went through that, dodging bullets,' and to be where I'm at now, it's a blessing all in itself," he said.
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