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For all his later success in the kitchen, though, Marks as a boy showed exactly zero interest in fancier foods. He loved sports-basketball and baseball, in particular-but also math and chess. He had a round face, an infectious grin, and big wire-framed glasses that lent him a bookish air. “And he said, ‘Oh, they loved me.’ That was just him: ‘Oh, they loved me.’ I said, ‘I bet they did.’ ”įrom the time he was a boy growing up in Washington Heights, a working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s Far South Side, Joshi, as his family called him, had always been likable. “I remember talking to him after he went down there, and I said, ‘So how did it go?’ ” his sister Dana recalls. Marks was the last person the Chicago judges saw, but he left quite an impression. “He left my kitchen a mess, but I didn’t care,” Mitchell, his mother, says. With the family’s blessing, he dropped everything and went to work on his best dish for the audition: shrimp étouffée. Part of that passion stemmed from a fascination with reality cooking shows. He’d come home to Chicago three months earlier to attend a birthday party for his little sister, Danielle, who was turning six, and a high school friend mentioned that a casting call for the show was being held the same weekend at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in the Loop.įamily (which included another sister, Dana, two years his senior) had always come first for Marks, but in recent years his interest in cooking had become a close second. He’d been living in Mississippi, where he’d landed a job with the Army Corps of Engineers. Josh Marks was lucky to even make the audition. Gordon Ramsay, the celebrity chef most famous for Hell’s Kitchen, one of his numerous reality shows, led the three-person judges’ panel, which also included prominent chefs Graham Elliot and Joe Bastianich. The competition, which offered a $250,000 first prize along with a book deal, would take place in a Los Angeles studio that had been converted into a test kitchen.Īs with most such shows, the drama-not to mention the ratings-leaned on the intensity surrounding which contestant would be sent home each week and which would advance. It was early March 2012, and her son, Joshua, who had never taken a cooking class, had grabbed one of the coveted 36 spots on the third season of Fox’s MasterChef. He raised the gun, the metal glinting in the last light. In the gathering dusk, Marks felt the heft of the gun. The episodes were alarming and heartbreaking.Īnd now his mother drove faster. A traffic accident borne of a mind gone suddenly blank a terrifying scuffle with police that included gunfire, a flurry of baton blows, a cloud of pepper spray voices torturing him at all hours, voices that he was sure wanted to kill him weeks of hospitalization to figure out what was wrong. Until the first panic attack came.įrom that moment, like a thread being pulled from a fine garment, his mental state unspooled so rapidly that the change in him seemed as impossible as his lightning-strike ascent had seemed charmed. Restaurants wanted him, and his growing legion of fans lavished supportive comments on him. Even when he didn’t win-he was a runner-up in a season that had started with some 30,000 applicants-he seemed to come out on top. From rival competitors to hardened viewers to the cooking contest’s notoriously hotheaded, impossible-to-please host, the 26-year-old Marks had done the unimaginable: make everyone like him. Just a year earlier, Josh Marks, the 7-foot-2 gentle giant with the sweet-tempered smile and almost sappy sincerity, was the breakout star on Gordon Ramsay’s reality show MasterChef. That it had come to this, in the space of only a few months, seemed inconceivable. Her son, she had been told, was wandering the streets. But you best bring it back.Ī few miles away, cheeks wet from panicked tears, hands slapping the steering wheel, his mother weaved through rush-hour traffic, stoplights and speed limits be damned. He had eight bucks in his pocket, and there was no way he was giving up his phone, the one on which he had saved every message from his mother as the darkness had descended.

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A thousand dollars plus an iPhone had been the ask. The gun had been easy enough to find, even for someone who’d grown up abhorring the destruction that violence had visited on the city he loved. Dusk loomed a few hours away, but as the young man wandered, vacant eyed, through the back streets of his Chicago boyhood, a different kind of darkness, one that had stalked him for months, settled on him like a fog.

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