He loved martial-arts movies.

He wanted his first car to be a Mustang.

He had just turned 16.

He was afraid of heights.

His name was Delvonte Tisdale.

At 7:15 p.m. on Nov. 15, US Airways Flight 1176 took off from Charlotte/Douglas International Airport, bound for Boston.

Delvonte was inside the left wheel well.

***

Arrange the facts a certain way, piece the jagged edges together, and you start to see a picture. But the picture doesn't speak. Nothing in it says why.

A lot of people want to know the how. How, exactly, did Delvonte Tisdale get onto airport grounds and hide inside a commercial airliner? And if a 16-year-old could do it, why not a terrorist?

These are important questions, and authorities owe us the answers. But this is more personal. The idea this morning is to talk about why.

Back in November, right after it happened, a couple of relatives said Delvonte was homesick for his mom in Baltimore. But there's no hard evidence to back that up, and nobody's talking now. Several relatives declined to comment. Others didn't return messages. Delvonte's mother, Jonette Washington, sent a message two weeks ago agreeing to answer some questions. I sent a few. She never wrote back.

Delvonte's father, Anthony Tisdale, said Washington was planning to visit Charlotte for Thanksgiving. So if Delvonte missed his mom, he was due to see her in a week.

Delvonte's body was found the night of the day he disappeared. He ended up 700 air miles from home, splayed on a lawn in a Massachusetts town, about where the Boeing 737 jet lowered its wheels before landing in Boston. His handprint was later found inside the wheel well.

Charlotte police investigated. Their report is not yet public. A three-page summary doesn't talk much about the how. It says this about the why:

"Investigators also could not determine what motivated Mr. Tisdale to travel to the airport and stow away on the airplane."

The Rev. James Woodson, the Tisdales' pastor, puts it another way:

"The longing of a 16-year-old kid... you know, all kids got secrets."

Father had an odd feeling

He had a cellphone but it hadn't been activated.

He watched Dragon Ball Z cartoons.

His last meal at home was Domino's.

He had never been on a plane before.

***

Anthony Tisdale started to worry when he saw the pillows.

Delvonte's father tells his story in a hotel lobby uptown, accompanied by his lawyer. Tisdale and Jonette Washington split up when Delvonte was 8. Chris Chestnut, the lawyer, represents them both. He specializes in wrongful-death cases. No one has filed legal papers yet.

This is the story Anthony Tisdale tells:

He last saw Delvonte about 10 the night of Nov. 14, playing video games. His brother later said they played until 1:30 in the morning. When Anthony Tisdale got up around 6:45, Delvonte was gone. That was normal. Classes at North Mecklenburg High start at 7:15.

Tisdale went downstairs and stopped. Every night he put two pillows across the bottom of the front door to keep out the cold. The pillows were still there. For some reason, his son had left through the back.

Their house in the Davis Ridge neighborhood, off Old Statesville Road, backs up to the woods. But Tisdale says his son didn't spend time back there. He doesn't know why Delvonte used the back door.

But he knew it felt odd. So that morning, Tisdale called North Meck. Delvonte was in the Air Force Junior ROTC, and Tisdale thought he might be doing drills. He couldn't reach anyone who could find out. So he drove to the school. They called Delvonte's name on the intercom. Tisdale waited until second period. Then he headed home. He drove the side streets again and again, hoping.

He called the police non-emergency number. The dispatcher said Delvonte might be somewhere with a girl. That had crossed Tisdale's mind, too. But in the year and a half since Delvonte had moved back in with his dad, he had never been on a date.

Tisdale watched for the school bus in the afternoon. Delvonte wasn't on it. At 5:48 p.m., Tisdale called police and filed a missing persons report.

He put a chair by his living room window and opened the blinds. That night he stared at the part of the road lit up by the streetlight, hoping his son would come out of the shadows.

Not a stray thought

He was 5-7 and skinny.

His ironing board wobbled, so he wrapped a piece of plywood with a quilt and a sheet and laid it on his bed.

He used that to press his ROTC uniform.

The morning he left, he took his school lunch with him.

***

"We just figured this out," says Maj. Mark Miller, one of North Meck's two ROTC teachers. "It's been longer since he passed than the time that he was with us."

Miller had Delvonte in class maybe 20 times over three months. He remembers a kid who needed academic help but was well behaved, friendly, hovering around the edges: "Every time you looked around he was standing there in your doorway."

After Delvonte died, detectives came. They looked through the computer Delvonte used at school. Miller says they found nothing unusual. Police offered $1,000 for information. No one claimed the reward.

Miller found the teen's book bag. Nothing but textbooks and class notes. Not a stray thought. Not even a doodle.

Delvonte's fellow cadets wrote letters to his family, or to Delvonte himself. Most shared the same thought, written different ways.

Even tho I didn't know him for a long time...

I didn't get to know much about him for myself...

I know that I didn't know you well enough...

Miller went to Delvonte's funeral with some of the cadets. There were disagreements among family on how to do things. Miller says his understanding is that, including stepsiblings and half siblings, Delvonte had 19 brothers and sisters.

The cadets signed a sweatshirt for Delvonte's family. Four months later, it's still in Miller's office. They don't know who to give it to.

'Something very heated'

His middle name was Seffon.

He liked strawberry cake.

He did back flips in the yard.

He helped the woman across the street take her leaves to the curb.

***

"This case just blew me away," B.J. Casey says.

Casey is a professor of developmental psychology at Cornell University. She's an expert in how the mind develops among adolescents. She and her colleagues have been talking about Delvonte.

She is careful to say that she's not familiar with all the details. She is speaking simply from her studies and her experience. This is what she says:

"Something very heated was pulling him or pushing him. This was either frantically moving toward something or frantically moving away from something."

She says teenage boys out to hurt themselves do something blunt, like picking up a gun or a knife. Boys looking for a thrill do something quick and impulsive, like New York kids who joyride on the outside of subway cars. Stowing away on a plane doesn't fit either profile.

She lists three key findings about teenage behavior.

Peers have incredible influence.

In emotional moments, they make emotional decisions.

And they don't think about the consequences.

She says Delvonte's case feels emotional, but not impulsive. She says she thinks he planned it. She says someone else probably knew. She says that person is not likely to tell.

The killing cold

He moved to Greensboro in 2009 to live with his father.

After a year, they moved to Charlotte last summer.

His ROTC unit picked up trash at the Carolina Renaissance Festival.

He didn't show up there for his last day on the job.

***

The Federal Aviation Administration keeps a list of every reported stowaway on a commercial flight. The FAA's historical records show 88 stowaway attempts worldwide.

Of those 88, 70 died.

When the landing gear folds into the wheel well, someone inside has almost no space. For a few minutes it can be blistering hot from the friction of the tires that just left the runway.

But it's the cold that kills. Flight 1176 rose to 33,000 feet, according to tracking data from FlightAware.com. At that height, by a formula experts use, the outside temperature averages 60 below zero.

Delvonte is only the second person in history to stow away on a commercial flight originating in the U.S. The other was Pvt. John Joseph Gribowski. He was an 18-year-old from Michigan who enlisted in the Marines in 1972. After three weeks, he bolted boot camp in San Diego. The camp was next to the airport.

His body was found when a plane from San Diego landed in New York. He was frozen, still strapped into the wheel well with his belt.

Delvonte probably died in the wheel well. But the Massachusetts medical examiner has not released an official cause of death.

All we know for sure is that he fell.

A chasm as big as the sky

We are left with empty spaces.

The 12 hours or more between the time Delvonte left home and the time Flight 1176 took off.

The 15 miles of road he somehow traveled from his house to the airport.

The 700 miles the airplane flew before its wheels lowered and Delvonte fell.

Those gaps, you can measure. Others, you can't.

There's a chasm as big as the sky between what we know and what we wish we knew.

Did somebody help? Did Delvonte know where he was going? Is there any clue to what was in his mind?

Why?

"That's what messes with me," Anthony Tisdale says. "There's nothing that I can spot. No change in attitude. No change in demeanor. No change at all. To have nothing to hang onto... I just don't understand."

Maybe someone does. Maybe someone who knows, somewhere down the road, will tell the whole story.

But for now it is in pieces.

His name was Delvonte Tisdale.

He was 16, and he died.