LOST
BOY
his speech. They brought toys and
forms to fill out. As Maya recalls,
they came, sat on the living room
floor, stayed for an hour and left.
By the time Max turned 2, his
speech delay became more worrisome. Max attended a daycare
operated by a Spanish-speaking
woman, so his parents assumed
that was the cause. More evaluators checked him out, but none
offered a diagnosis.
Max would walk around the
house carrying random objects like
plastic knives, hammers or drumsticks. “We thought he was just a
quirky kid,” Maya recalls. And besides, a speech delay had an unexpected benefit: D.C. would provide
him with free preschool earlier.
At 2 years old, Maya and Greg
took Max to Walker-Jones Elementary School to be formally
evaluated. Six professionals
worked with Max, who started
climbing bookshelves and screaming and crying. Then a therapist
started hitting Max on the back
rhythmically. She squeezed him
from behind and picked him up,
then dropped him to the floor so
that his feet hit the ground hard.
He calmed down. “I was just
blown away that someone knew
what to do to make my child shut
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down,” Maya says, “in a good way.”
For the next few months, Maya
and Greg waited, checking the
mail for the letter from the district that would explain Max’s
speech problems. Instead, on
Oct. 28, 2010, they got an email.
Maya burst into tears. Greg did
not believe the diagnosis. Max
had severe autism and ADHD.
“It’s like being told you have
AIDS in an email,” he says.
For a few weeks, they mourned
the death of the son they thought
they would have.
What makes the episode so
tough to comprehend was that,
compared with his present state,
Max was talking then.
In video footage compiled by
Greg to argue that while with
DCPS, Max “has regressed to the
point where he can barely speak,”
Max was developing language
skills when he was younger. In a
scene shot in 2010, Max is in pajamas next to his little sister, Delilah, then an infant. From off-camera, Maya says, “Say, ‘I love you,
baby.’” After a few tries Max says,
“Ayaya beebee.” A later clip shows
him speaking more clearly, yelling,
“Mommy’s shoes!” while dancing in them. But a few years later,
he could not repeat any of those
phrases. When asked to name a
hammer, he jumped up and down
and put the hammer in his mouth.