Bellevue safety a long way from nowhere

BELLEVUE — A door opened, and Janet Atofau finally saw her son again, walking down a hallway in a red jumpsuit. His hair was longer, his frame thinner, his face worn. He looked older, broken, tired. It had been more than a year, she realized, since she last saw him.

Jamal Atofau had already spent almost two weeks in a California juvenile-detention center, and every day, he stood on his tiptoes and peeked out the window of his cell, hoping that day would be the day someone would visit. He was not even sure if anyone knew he was there.

And now he looked at his mother in front of him, and he broke down, and then she broke down.

"That's it," she said. "Things are going to change for us."

She stayed for a week, visiting every night, before she came back to Washington, to her three other children and two jobs. And the next time she came back to California, the day he was released, she came to bring him back home.

"We're going to start a new life," she told him. "In Bellevue."

On the coffee table of their Bellevue home, there's a picture of the mother and son taken that day, when he left juvenile detention for good. It seems like ages ago, not four years.

So much has changed. Jamal Atofau, the state's hardest-hitting safety, can be the first in the Atofau family to go to college next year, and his mom cries every time he gets a new recruiting letter.

Last week, sitting in the bleachers at Bellevue High School, Atofau looked over the football field and raised his arms to the sky.

"Look where I'm at, man!" he exclaimed. "I can't complain."

When he came here four years ago, when his mother took every penny she had and pleaded her way into government-subsidized housing for low-income families in Bellevue, Atofau felt lost. How could this kid, who just spent the last year on the streets of Long Beach, Calif. — sleeping in an abandoned Jeep and living on scraps — blend in with the upper-class kids at school? He saw the luxury cars in the parking lot.

And those houses! They were five times the size of the ones he used to stay in, with five times fewer people living in them.

"I really didn't know how to handle it," he said.

Then he stepped on the Bellevue football field, and the wing-T on offense and the disguised coverages on defense were so complex. He had never played a down before, and he wondered how he would ever fit in.

"Then I started hitting people," he said.

And, oh, that felt good. With each hit, he channeled all the baggage he brought with him to Bellevue and began letting it out. The nights in hotels and shelters. The eight different elementary schools. The fights with his mother's abusive boyfriend. The lost childhood spent taking care of his three younger siblings. The run-in with a gang that forced his mom to send him to California for his own safety. The father there who put him out on the street. The desperation of the botched robbery that landed him in juvie. It all came out with each thwack of the pads.

"He would hit the crap out of a guy," Bellevue coach Butch Goncharoff said.

Before Atofau's junior season, in a dimly lit room at Bellevue's preseason camp, he told his teammates everything. With every bleak detail, more teammates wept until tears were all around the room. He heard their stories, too. And for perhaps the first time, he and the rest of the Wolverines understood one another.

"Everything changed," he said.

Midway through the season, Goncharoff said, "everything clicked" for Atofau. He stopped thinking, let his instincts take over and down the stretch, nobody could throw on him or run at him.

"He's come further in the last year and a half than just about anyone we'd ever had," Goncharoff said.

The 5-foot-10, 188-pound Atofau has become one of the state's top-10 recruits, and he's considering offers from Washington State and Oregon. He played in several camps over the summer, including one at UCLA, where he saw some boys he recognized from his year on the street. He was about 40 pounds bigger now, all cut muscle from four years in Bellevue's weight room.

"Where you from again?" one of them asked.

"Man, I'm not from here," he replied, "I'm from Bellevue."

Tom Wyrwich: 206-515-5653 or twyrwich@seattletimes.com