His father eventually returned, too, but began to abuse drugs, so after suffering more abuse from his stepmother, Huerta wound up living on the streets, coaxing favors out of sympathetic friends. He got to eat only when school was in session, and looked forward to the morning so he could eat breakfast in the school cafeteria and satisfy the burning in his belly. For several years, survival was all Huerta knew. "When you're desperate, you do what you have to do to survive," he says. "I'm fortunate that there are a lot of good people in this world and that God eventually put me in touch with them." The first was Maria King, who gained legal custody of him, brought him into her home and treated him like one of her own. And when he was a senior at Crockett High School in Austin, Texas, he said his life changed forever when he met wrestling coach Bryan Ashford and English teacher Jo Ramirez. Ashford helped him to become a star wrestler and he began to think of going to college on a wrestling scholarship. When he asked Ramirez for help writing letters to colleges to drum up interest in him, he told her the story of his childhood. She never had a hint of what he had been through. She was so impressed that she adopted him during his freshman year at Augsburg College in Minneapolis.