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HELPING HAND FROM SLAIN SOCIAL WORKER

MAX MORAN has finally discovered his life’s mission.

Moran, who felt like a nobody who was trying to scrape life’s cruel dirt off his face, became a somebody.

Moran won a scholarship at the Hunter College School of Social Work named for Amy Watkins, a 26-year-old nobody from Kansas who suddenly became a dead somebody in 1999, when petty thieves stuck a knife in her back on a Brooklyn street.

It wasn’t until the award ceremony, when Moran’s name was mentioned in the same sentence as the dead social worker, that it struck him that he and Amy shared a spirit of helping people.

“Here I am, meeting her parents, who are still going through this terrible loss – and I am the first to benefit from this scholarship,” said Moran, 24, of Staten Island. “I felt I didn’t deserve it. But I figured this is the way Amy Watkins would’ve liked it to be.

“Even in death, she is still helping people.”

The road to this change was hard for Moran, who migrated to the South Bronx from Honduras with his abusive single mother and four half-siblings in 1986. Three years later, at 13, he ran way from home to live in Staten Island with his three older half-siblings, who had also fled the abusive home.

Moran was neglected by his siblings. He earned a few bucks carrying grocery bags for shoppers outside a local supermarket so he could eat.

At 14, he was tossed on the street and into the arms of the city’s Administration for Children’s Services.

“I felt abandoned,” he said. “Now that I’m older, I saw that we were just teenagers being warehoused.”

The city didn’t bother, for example, to help him find his father, reunite him with his own family or provide life-survival skills. Social workers told him to find a job but didn’t explain how, said Moran, who still doesn’t know how to knot a necktie.

“None of these services were provided and are not being provided now,” Moran said. “That’s why many foster kids end up in jail, on welfare or homeless – because they are not taught the skills needed to survive in this society.

“What I missed the most was that there wasn’t any emotional support,” said Moran, who skipped his own high-school graduation because he didn’t have a family, anyone, to share the moment with.

He decided to become a social worker in April 1997 after leaving the foster-care system, which looks after about 40,000 kids.

“I started to notice a need for young people to be out there speaking . . . to let people know what’s really going on,” he said. “Most of the time you hear the opinions of professionals, not the clients.”

With the help of two social workers, Moran, a few months after Watkins’ murder, formed the nonprofit Voices of Youth, dedicated to providing foster kids with the type of services the city is too numb and dumb to think about.

Moran, for example, explained what a résumé was to one of his clients.

Watkins’ parents, who helped in the scholarship selection process, saw their daughter’s spirit in Moran.

“He and Amy share the same kind of moral commitment even though their backgrounds are very different,” said Watkins’ father, Lawrence. “Max does have the same very strong commitment to justice and reform that Amy had.”