Wright showed up 14 months ago. He had moved to a Flynn House facility in Elizabeth and went to City Hall in search of help — a job, financial assistance, anything. He ended up at the desk of social worker Stan Neron.

Neron was two years behind Wright at Elizabeth High School and listened as Wright told him his story.

"I said to myself, 'This can't be true,"' Neron says. "Lu wasn't crazy. He just needed the love to grow and to be in the right environment."

Every other week, Morning Star plays host to a dozen or so homeless people as part of an outreach effort by area churches. They say a prayer, eat dinner, watch movies, play cards, and then sleep on cots in the church basement.

Therman Evans, a former physician turned head pastor, likes to say his church meets people where they are.

On Super Bowl Sunday 2006, Neron brought Wright to Morning Star.

"We were the first people who saw him and said, 'Hey, look, there's Luther, he's a man who wants to improve his life,"' Evans says.

Luther Wright never left the church that night. But just like that, he was homeless again. Wright hadn't cleared the night with the management at Flynn House, and he got kicked out.

This time though, he had friends who wanted to help him. Neron got him a room for a week at the Motor Lodge on Morris Avenue, then helped him land a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Elizabeth.

Wright was 34 years old when he moved in. As Neron handed him the keys, Wright says it was the first time he'd held keys to his own house.

He had also found a home at Morning Star.

Donaldson let him help the youth ministry. Wright asked to sing and play the guitar in the band. The band director, Terry Fuller, told him to hear the music and put his own feeling into it.

He joined the homeless ministry and began working on Sunday nights instead of being a guest.

"I want them to see me as something besides a basketball player," he says.

· · · · ·

"I know in my heart I'm a good person who made several bad mistakes, and maybe I should have died. That person I was died, but this new person wants to live." — Luther Wright

· · · · ·

A new direction

Angie Felton is a shy, hospital secretary who doesn't care about basketball.

She sits and has a cup of coffee with Wright at a Jersey City diner and warns him of the dangers of going public with his story. Fame and publicity never helped him, she says. Whatever progress he has made the past year, he has made it humbly, without fanfare.