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Honestly, he may have appeared to be older, due to his extremely poor health, and was probably shaking and incoherent due to near-starvation and an overdose of drugs which had been given to him without his knowledge. There are an awful lot of people out there who have chosen, as adults, a life of drug abuse and panhandling, and they often end up with AIDS, and die on the streets, or pass out on the streets and die shortly thereafter. All these people tell improbable sob stories to strangers in an attempt to get money, which will be used mainly for drugs.

I expect people who didn't help him sized up what they saw and heard, and figured he was one of these. I'd never get home from work in the evening (NYC), if I stopped to try and get police to help everyone I see who looks they fit this description, and most likely all of them have repeatedly refused help. I walk on by; I ignore them when they walk through the subway cars telling their sob stories. In part, this boy is a victim of our "liberal" government's policies, which have prevented removing these people from the streets, and putting them in mental hospitals or prosecuting and imprisoning them for fraud and creating a public nuisance. If we did that routinely, this boy would have been picked up by authorities early in his bus trip, discovered not to be the standard, adult drug-addicted scammer, and possibly helped before it was too late.

In part, this boy is a victim of our "liberal" government's policies, which have prevented removing these people from the streets, and putting them in mental hospitals or prosecuting and imprisoning them for fraud and creating a public nuisance. If we did that routinely, this boy would have been picked up by authorities early in his bus trip, discovered not to be the standard, adult drug-addicted scammer, and possibly helped before it was too late.

Megadittoes, as they say on Rush. The same principle is at work across many sectors of our bloated unfocused welfare state. The undeserving soak up the resources and the real emergency cases are shut out.

Like you, I ignore the scams run by the professional beggars infesting parts of my own city. In this particular case, however, the kid was not doing a lot of the things typically associated with modern mendicants. He wasn't sitting on the sidewalk in the financial district, begging from the curb in front of a liquor store, et cetera. It's truly hard to understand what happened on those buses from Pennsylvania to Florida. Five foot three and 62 pounds???

I'd never get home from work in the evening(NYC), if I stopped to try and get police to help everyone I see who looks they fit this description, and most likely all of them have repeatedly refused help.

I agree. People who don't understand this have never lived in or near the rougher parts of a big city. The one thing I don't understand is why he didn't just walk up to a cop and tell them he was hungry and sick. He would have been taken to a hospital,and most likely would have been alive today.

I WAS questioning why he didn't steal food to eat if he were starving,but now that we know he was being given speed by the (most likely) school doctors,we know that he wasn't really hungry,even if he was starving.