Iowa City High graduate DeSean Martin wanted to ‘do his mom proud’

IOWA CITY - During mornings before school, convincing DeSean Martin to get out of bed was a regular battle between him and his mother.

Exasperated, his mother, Carrie Martin, would sometimes turn to school employees for backup. She'd often call Diana Langfield-Speer, who first met DeSean while working in the nurse's office at Grant Wood Elementary.

'He won't listen to his mother, so you tell him,” Langfield-Speer remembers hearing on the other end of the phone.

DeSean, now 18, graduated Saturday with 371 other students from City High in Iowa City, after years of trying to avoid class. Walking across the stage was supposed to be something for his mother to see, he said. But after years of ongoing health issues, Carrie Martin died in her sleep on May 3 at age 48.

'That's all she ever talked about, ever since I got to high school,” DeSean said. 'Like, ‘You're going to walk across the stage, and you're going to get that diploma - because me and you worked so hard for this. I have to get up in the morning to get you up in the morning.'

'And now that I'm at the finish line to get my diploma, she's not going to be there to see it.”

DeSean and his mother were a package deal, Langfield-Speer recalled. Without her, DeSean is, in some ways, on his own - his older brother Neiman, who has mental and physical disabilities, lives in a care facility in Des Moines, and his extended family lives in Chicago.

Since his mother's death, DeSean has been welcomed into Langfield-Speer's home. A longtime Iowa City school district employee, she also has raised nearly $10,000 on GoFundMe to help DeSean cover living expenses as he heads to college (gofundme.com/22xjpvfg).

Langfield-Speer and DeSean first met when DeSean was a fifth-grader at Grant Wood Elementary. Working in the nurse's office, she regularly saw DeSean as he tried to scheme his way out of school by faking being sick.

'(I thought) the same thing everybody thinks of DeSean,” she said of their first encounter, about seven years ago. 'He's so sweet. He's like a puppy popping out of a basket of kittens, you know? Sweet, adorable, just heartwarming - but he also had that little edge of naughtiness.”

DeSean said he tried to avoid class because he often felt overwhelmed.

'I felt like I wasn't at the right level of school work and stuff like that,” he said. 'I felt like I wasn't smart enough to be there.”

DeSean and his family had recently moved to the Iowa City area from Chicago in order to find better care services for DeSean's older brother, Neiman. At home, DeSean was often taking care of Neiman, who is quadriplegic - sitting with him, singing to him, helping him safely board the school bus. As Carrie Martin dealt with her own health problems, DeSean would sometimes miss school to take care of both his brother and his mother.

During DeSean's fifth-grade year, Langfield-Speer transitioned into an interventionist role within the district and continued working with DeSean. When Carrie Martin was hospitalized briefly that year, Langfield-Speer invited DeSean to stay at her family's home.

DeSean remembers going with Langfield-Speer to her son's baseball game that afternoon and meeting her husband, Mike Speer, for the first time. Staying the night at a school employee's house was 'pretty crazy,” he remembers thinking, but he loved her family's dynamic.

'I think that's what really made me fall in love with her family,” DeSean said. 'They actually had time to spend together.”

DeSean started looking forward to dinnertime at Langfield-Speers', when the family of five would tell each other about their days.

He took the practice back to his mom's house.

'I used to love just talking to her,” DeSean said. 'If I had a bad day, she would just give the best advice. She made me feel sane, I guess you could say.”

He'd jokingly ask his mother if she missed him while he was at school, and she'd ask him about his post-grad plans. DeSean wants to be a veterinarian, something he's dreamed of since he was little, and plans to go to Kirkwood Community College in the fall.

To get there, he knew he had to first graduate high school. But he continued to skip class - from Grant Wood Elementary to Southeast Junior High to City High. Still overwhelmed by his academics, he eventually left City High and moved to the district's alternative high school, Tate.

Earning a degree from Tate would have been easier, DeSean said, but he was adamant about graduating from City High.

'He really wanted to do his mom proud and graduate with his City High class, where he had started,” Langfield-Speer recalled. 'He started as a City High Little Hawk, and he wanted to graduate as a City High Little Hawk.”

By the beginning of DeSean's senior year, the Martins had moved to North Liberty. Now living outside City High's school boundaries, DeSean had to catch two city buses to school. After school, he'd ride a bus downtown and wait two hours for his connection back to North Liberty.

Even still, he'd often arrive at school and skip class. During his second trimester, DeSean said school administrators told him he might not graduate on time.

'That really woke me up at that time,” DeSean said. He started showing up to class in dress shirts and ties and learned to ask for help when he needed it.

By May, DeSean was on track to graduate and celebrating the end of high school like many seniors, counting down the days until summer and getting ready for prom. He and Langfield-Speer's daughter, Kaily, 14, went to prom together as friends - or, Langfield-Speer put it, 'as siblings.”

But losing his mother in the midst of those celebrations was especially painful, DeSean said. They were moments meant for her.

In the three weeks since his mother died, DeSean has attended prom, weathered a Mother's Day and graduated high school.

'She always did have bad timing with things,” he said.

Now that DeSean is a graduate, Langfield-Speer said she wants him to find his own place - just as her other sons did. But he'll always have a bedroom at her house.

'It's time to go on your own adventure,” she told him. 'That is what the next part of your life is about.”

His next steps depend on the financial aid he receives for school and the money raised on GoFundMe.

Langfield-Speer said she started that account after many people - from DeSean's former school bus driver to the maintenance worker at his old apartment building - asked her how they could help support DeSean. More than 150 people have donated money.

DeSean said the donations and comments on the GoFundMe page have been touching. His mom always told him that people cared for him, he said, but he never took her seriously.

DeSean's graduation ceremony was Saturday at the Carver-Hawkeye Arena. He said he was proud to be walking across the stage, even though it hurt knowing his mother wasn't in the audience.

But he knows she got him there.

'I'm really the person my mom raised me to be,” he said.