HOUSTON - By all accounts, he's the best kind of kid, the kind with plenty of reasons not to be.
"Those things that you experience, that you live through, that you witness, I think they shape the character you become," Victor Cardenas says.
Cardenas is a film student at Houston's Furr High school who picked up a camera last year and crafted a haunting story.
The tale he told was his own.
"We never had money, we never had food. My mother didn't care that she had four kids," Cardenas tells his own camera in the film he dubbed "Being Victor".
"It was knives, guns and it was people ending up in the hospital. It was my own family ending up in the hospital. She kicked out my brothers, she kicked out me and it was on our own. I was 14 years-old," he says during a tightly framed monologue within the film.
"Being Victor" it seems, meant, being homeless.
For far too many nights, he bedded down, as best he could, on a park bench in Denver Harbor.
A throw away kid, ashamed and alone.
"I guess I didn't want to say anything, to anybody," he explains.
This is where many stories end badly, but not this one, not by a long shot.
