Chase Davenport loved all the things a typical boy loves — spaghetti and meatballs, pets, dancing, comic books, and especially rock ’n’ roll.

He was bright, curious and interested in myriad things. He was smart, too. In second grade, he won first prize for his science fair project about tornadoes. “You keep at it,” the judge told him, “and you’ll be a great scientist one day.”

But that glimpse into the future would come true only in his mother’s dreams, because Chase Davenport is autistic and schizophrenic, conditions thought to be “non-existent, unknown, impossible” in a single individual. He is, one doctor proclaimed, “a population of one.”

On Thursday, April 22, at 4 p.m. at The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines, Davenport, who is the executive director of the James M. Johnson Center for Undergraduate Excellence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will share her critically-acclaimed memoir, “The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes,” the story of her two-decade-long struggle with North Carolina’s mental health system to save her son from “crossing the Rubicon” into psychosis.

“I didn’t set out to write about mental illness,” Davenport says. “I set out to write about my son, whom I love very much, and what happened to him and our struggles to find him appropriate care. And when I wrote about my daughter, Haley, the love story only got bigger.”

“We are truly honored to have Dr. Davenport with us during Autism Awareness Month,” says Bonnie Johnson, manager of The Country Bookshop. “Each and every one of us who has ever looked at someone with a disability or mental illness as being ‘a little bit less human,’ as Dr. Davenport admitted about herself, must hear her incredible story of hope, courage and unconditional love.”

Soon after Chase, Davenport’s first child, was born, everyone agreed that something might be wrong with him, but no one knew what that “something” might be.

“No one was saying he was developmentally disabled,” Davenport recalls. “He was such an odd mix of things that it was hard to say what was going on.”

He wasn’t hitting his developmental benchmarks, but he wasn’t losing skills.

“That’s the thing we really worry about,” his pediatrician told Davenport. “When we see a child disintegrate, that’s when we know we’ve got something very serious going on.”

Over the next few years, Chase was diagnosed as having “very interesting features” of severe ADHD, Tourette’s Syndrome, pervasive developmental disorder and atypical autistic syndromes, all overlapping and compounded by seizures. While all those conditions “could not exist” in the same person, in Chase’s case doctors believed they did, although certainty never came.

When her son was four, Davenport made a list of things that made his life difficult, “as if these were things that could be quantified and fixed,” she said. By the time he was in second grade, she had convinced herself that while he might have a bumpy childhood, once he was through it, “everything was going to be fine.”

Then she saw something in him she had never seen before. “A strangeness and a dislocation, as if he had slipped from our world,” she says. “For the first time I was afraid.” She had seen similar behavior before — in her husband, Zip. Before they divorced, their marriage counselor had told her, “It’s like he’s not there; it’s like there’s no one home. I’m afraid he has a serious psychiatric illness and he needs treatment.” She eventually came to understand that the same thing that took Chase’s father would take her son.

Davenport decided to leave everything behind and move Chase and his younger sister, Haley, to North Carolina, where she found care for him through the state’s Community Alternatives Program, designed to keep the developmentally disabled and medically fragile out of institutions.

As Chase grew sicker, Davenport blamed herself in “ways too uncountable to name,” she said. “Somehow I made a million wrong choices. I rehearsed these failings in my head and always came out on the short end of the stick.”

In late 2002, 15-year-old Chase, a 6’3” 205-pound teenager, became psychotic, no longer able to recognize his mother, his sister or even himself. It was finally determined that he had the rarest of all mental-health catastrophes — true childhood schizophrenia and probably had all his life.

He spent months in UNC Memorial Hospital’s acute-care stabilization unit, where he held the record for the longest stay. When Davenport’s insurance company ruled it would no longer cover that high-level care, Chase was shuttled to John Umstead psychiatric hospital in Butner, even though housing people with developmental disabilities in state psychiatric hospitals was against the law.

Because he had been severely psychotic for many months, Chase’s prognosis was very, very poor.

“It’s extremely unlikely that he will get better,” a social worker told his mother. “He’s not coming home. You need to find a long-term-care facility that can take him.”

“I have a pretty good idea of what’s available in this state,” a doctor confided, “and I have no idea what you’re going to do. I think you might need a miracle. I’m sorry to put it that way, but it might be that this is what it’s going to take.”

After months of contacting everyone from the Governor’s Advocacy Council for Persons with Disabilities, to the Carolina Legal Assistance for Exceptional Children, and the Department of Health and Human Services, Davenport found her miracle in “the most powerful man in the state” (who asked to remain unnamed in her book). After hearing her story, he said, “We’ll get your boy back. We’re going to turn his light back on.” He called the governor, and within days, Chase was moved into the Behaviorally Advanced Residential Treatment (BART) Program at Murdoch Developmental Center for young men with incapacitating autism who require intense behavioral interventions.

Today, Chase, now 22, lives at Murdoch where he takes classes and works as a messenger, delivering items around the campus. He goes home for a weekend every month.

“Our life is as peaceful as we’ve ever known it,” Davenport says. “Chase visits regularly, and Haley is nearly ready to go to college. We like to talk about the old days, but we’re looking forward to the days to come, too. It’s very sweet to be together.”

For information, call The Country Bookshop at (910) 692-3211.