Gregory Tino was 24 years old, and he had not spoken to anyone since he was a toddler. Not in the ordinary way, in any case. A nonspeaking autistic person, his language consisted mostly of mimicking snippets of television and movie scripts. He couldn’t ask for what he wanted to eat, much less hold a conversation.
Gregory’s mother Linda doted on him, however, and was patient through his youth. She and her husband cared for him through his seizures, his emotional meltdowns and his violent outbursts; once he pummeled her because there was no hot water for a shower.
She never understood these fits from her sensitive son, but his family loved him and cared for him like he was a child, even while his body grew into a man. They adapted their outings for Gregory, made his food for him, and gave him Sesame Street and Barney to watch. He spent a good deal of time on the sofa watching YouTube.
In May 2017, Linda took Gregory to a center called Inside Voice in Philadelphia, PA. She’d heard it taught kids a little-known therapy called Spelling to Communicate (S2C), a method of spelling to speak by pointing to letters.
Linda didn’t tell Gregory where she was taking him because she didn’t think he would understand. The therapist at Inside Voice treated Gregory as if he was an adult, however; she sat him down and taught him how to use his arm muscles to point to stencil cut-out letters on a hard plastic board. It was grueling work, but he pointed awkwardly to each letter she asked for and it was clear the task was becoming easier for him toward the end of the session. Then the therapist read a story about an astronaut.
“Would you ever like to go to outer space, Gregory?” she asked.
Linda was watching intently from
