LAS VEGAS – Donté Greene has lived the riches-to-rags story before, but there's no comparison between his past and present.

As the Kings' summer league action continued Saturday, the second-year small forward resumed his latest version of that tale. He is a young man with much to prove in his basketball life, regretful for turning pro after one season at Syracuse and yearning in vain for a chance to do it all over again.

Instead, his former Orange teammates made a Sweet 16 appearance without him while Greene had a terrible rookie season and the Kings endured their worst campaign ever. Greene's electric smile and well-known humor remained for most of the experience, but the pain of it all hurt him underneath.

While the 2008-09 season was painful, the tumble he took eight years ago was in a league all its own, when he and his brother heard the alarm clock ringing from their mother's bedroom and wondered why she wouldn't turn it off.

Time stood still inside their Hanover, Pa., home on Nov. 6, 2001, when 13-year-old Donté and 9-year-old D'Metrique entered their mother's room just past 6 a.m. to find 44-year-old April Greene lifeless on her bed, the victim of an enlarged heart. The shocking loss of their beloved mother also meant the loss of a life they loved.

The brothers' lives to that point had been exotic and largely carefree, the boys living with their mother in Germany and Japan because of her top-secret position with the National Security Agency. While Greene is widely considered Baltimore's own, he was born in Munich before his father, Donald, and mother divorced.

After living overseas, the three moved to the Baltimore suburbs, and the Greene boys wanted for nothing. They lived in nice homes, took frequent vacations to Hawaii and Guam and had nonstop fun playing baseball, basketball, volleyball and soccer. Greene's mother, who played semipro basketball in Europe, urged him to shoot for the NBA. He would listen and then shrug, with his preference to pursue baseball.

After their mother's death, the Greene brothers moved in with their father, grandmother and grandfather in their Woodlawn, Md., home 10 miles west of downtown Baltimore. It was cramped quarters – a two-story, three-bedroom townhouse – in a neighborhood known as Edmondson Heights.

"I felt like I went from the top, down to the bottom," Donté Greene said Wednesday in his room at the Palms Casino. "I went from that life before to only having one pair of shoes to go to church in, to play in and to go to school in. You're walking around with your shoes talking to you. You've got one pair of jeans. I've been low. The lowest of lows. Almost even homeless."

It would be some five years until money from the NSA started coming in, leaving the boys and the bills to be paid for by his father's job as a commercial truck driver and his grandfather's job as a janitor at a local mental hospital and church.

Greene, meanwhile, didn't adjust well to the loss of his mother or the lifestyle change. While his brother willingly went to counseling and was more expressive in his grief, Donté internalized his heartache.

"Donté wouldn't talk; he wouldn't say nothing," said his father, who still lives with his parents in the Woodlawn home. "He'd just go up to his room and just stay there. I'd have to go up there and look at him and say, 'Are you all right?'

"The part that hurts the most is, why did those two have to find her? It took a while for me to get it out of them how they felt about finding her like that."

Greene would later tell the Baltimore Sun that he attempted suicide twice soon after his mother's passing, although his father and grandmother say he told them that wasn't true. And while Greene always had a home and would sleep there every night, he spent most of his misguided middle school years on the streets.

"I wasn't homeless, but I took to the streets," Greene said. "When your mom dies, when that's the closest thing to you, and with me … not really being close to my father like that, I just took to the streets. I felt like my homeboys were my family."

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