NOTE: Over the course of three weeks, I reported from outside this pre-school in one of the most dangerous sections of the city during both morning and afternoon dismissals. The article prompted a series of changes, as is detailed in the follow-up story.

CAMDEN -- Just like the 3-year-old boys with their Spider-Man backpacks and the 4-year-old girls with their perfectly placed hair braids, the "drug boys" and prostitutes wake up early for school.

They mill around Red Circle Liquors down the block, which isn't even open yet. They drop enough blue heroin baggies to get caught on teachers' shoes, and they leave enough broken beer bottles in the makeshift employee parking lot to bring a crunch to every step.

Each day, they are among the first adults seen by Camden's most vulnerable residents -- 3- and 4-year-olds, most with special needs, who attend the Early Childhood Development Center at the old Dudley School in one of East Camden's roughest neighborhoods.

NOTE: After this article appeared, hundreds of readers offered monetary help and dozens said they would open the doors of their own homes. Social services took notice, and after four years living on the side of the highway the couple moved into a one-bedroom apartment, which is pictured below the article.

For commuters, it's a way to get to work. For truck drivers, it's a way to avoid the turnpike.

But for Richard Brooks and Diane Lessig, Interstate 295 is home.

For the past four years, the couple has lived in a torn tent pitched in the woods next to an I-295 entrance ramp. On Wednesday -- after they said they were issued a deadline by state police -- they packed up their bags of blankets and left.

CHAPTER ONE
Michael Milano went to high school with you. 

He was the shy, slightly awkward one -- the one with a stutter; the one who was pretty much ignored unless the jocks needed someone to bully.

 However, Milano was also the type to occasionally surprise you. He surprised you when he stuck up for others who were teased. He surprised you by working hard to make friends, earn respect and improve his grades.

When he tossed rose petals to the girls during a high school pageant in senior year, he surprised you. When he won the Most Improved Student award, he surprised you. When his newfound confidence helped him to stop stuttering, he surprised you.

And that's what makes what happened next -- in the boys' locker room, just weeks before high school graduation -- so tragic.  

NOTE: This profile of a boy who needed a specialized wheelchair to stand -- and survive -- elicted $7,000 in donations from readers and a $12,500 check from an anonymous donor. Below the story is a picture of the 6-year-old in his new chair.

When Dylan Brown plays Pokemon after school, he lies on the living room carpet next to his little brother, who makes sure all the plastic figurines stay within Dylan's reach.

When Dylan needs to go the bathroom, his mother straps on his brace and puts the 6-year-old in a motorized wheelchair so he can cruise down the hallway of his Browns Mills home, steering with his chin. 

But when Dylan -- who suffers from a severe form of muscular dystrophy -- is asked what he wants to do when he grows up, the blond boy with the toothy grin doesn't need anyone's help to answer.

"I'm gonna be a chef, I'm gonna go to outer space, I'm gonna be an artist, I'm gonna be in the Army, I'm gonna be a policeman, I'm gonna put out fires, I'm gonna be a zookeeper, I'm gonna be a hot-air balloon driver, I'm gonna make houses..."

NOTE:  One week after this story ran, a developer lent the Davises a five-bedroom house. A picture below the article was shot the day the Davises moved in.  

John Davis' seven brothers and sisters clamored around him in the dingy motel room as he dug into the Christmas stocking, a gift from one of his teachers at Moorestown Middle School.

He pulled out the tiny treasures -- pens and candy, mostly -- and without prompting from his parents, divided them evenly among the anxious hands and hungry faces.

"Even the little things make them smile," said their father, Albert Davis Jr., 32.

NOTE: For eight years, the local authorities ignored the mentally disabled man and his one-room shack without heat or water. But after the flood, David Frake was forced to go to town for help. That's where we met him. After our series, readers funded the reconstruction of his home, adding heat and a bathroom.

Down a muddy stretch of a tree-lined road that doesn't exist on most maps, past a horse farm and eight homes, lies a tiny cabin next to Rancocas Creek.

The right side of her body has seen the worst of it.

It usually happens when Renee Seddon, 17, walks to class on the right-hand side of the crowded high school hallways: Taunting. Laughing. Spitting. Kicking. Tripping.

And, of course, the classic shove against the lockers.

"I'm sick of being teased for not doing nothing," said Seddon, curled up on her living room couch in Westville, pulling at the sleeve of her white sweater.

NOTE: This is the first in a series of articles that ultimately led a school district to allow a child suffering from a rare skin disease return to school with his lesions exposed.

Steven Wark woke up last week on Monday morning and cried. He didn't want to go to school.

It wasn't the classwork -- he normally gets A's and B's. It wasn't the students -- he is generally popular and known as a class clown.

Steven, an 11-year-old fifth-grader who suffers from a rare skin disease that causes blisters throughout his body, didn't want to go to school because he knew he'd be wrapped in gauze.

"It hurts," he said.

NOTE: A photographer and I documented the final month in the life of Bambie Wishart, 23, as she died of cancer. Reader donations helped fulfill Wishart's final wish -- a trip to Disney World. This article appeared three weeks before she died; below it is a second story written days before her death.

A massage therapist rubbed her legs. A home health aide propped her mattress. A nurse sorted her medication.

And her mother, looking down at her, showed her a smile.

Bambie Wishart -- 23 years old, a mother of three and terminally ill with multiple forms of cancer -- had come home to die.

"I told her I was there when you were born, and I'm gonna be there when you die,'" Jackie Johnson said. "I'm a Mom." 

PARSIPPANY -- Susan Kelly's eyes were red from tears last Thursday. Her shoulders sagged, her fingers dialed churches in the yellow pages, and her voice begged for help. 

 
But someone smiled at her from above.

On the roof of the rusted Ford Taurus outside the motel room where the family has lived for six weeks sat her 9-year-old daughter, Alaina -- smiling.

"Are we still allowed to move in?" she asked her mom.

No, not yet.