Terrance Harris / AOL Fanhouse

ODESSA, Texas — A few things are constants in this bustling West Texas town of roughly 100,000: the raucous anticipation of Friday night football, rattlesnakes and a place waiting to open its arms to the next hard-luck story to venture its way.

Guerdwich Montimere — or Jerry Joseph, as those who encountered him here came to know him — may have taken advantage of the latter. He’s the 22-year-old Haitian-born naturalized citizen who last month posed as a 16-year-old basketball player at Odessa Permian, the high school that was the subject of the hit book and movie “Friday Night Lights.”

Certainly, Montimere wouldn’t be the first person to use falsified documents and offer a heart-wrenching story in order to worm his way into somewhere he shouldn’t be. What perhaps makes his story so unusual is how he captured the town’s soul and brought out the best in people here.

What’s even more remarkable is that even as more details of his deception come pouring out, and even as Montimere sits behind bars on a second-degree felony sexual assault charge because of an improper relationship he is alleged to have had with a 15-year-old girl last summer, he still has his supporters, even in a town littered with rattlesnake warning signs.

“He’s a good guy,” said basketball teammate Tevan Loud, who stands to have his senior season forfeited because of Montimere’s deception. “He just had a dream, I feel like, and really just wanted to achieve that dream and got caught.”

There are others who support Montimere, despite the sexual assault charge that sits on top of the false identification charges that saw him arrested three times in the span of four days.

“I’m just not sure that he did anything wrong,” said retired Permian teacher Pat Rogers, who admits she never laid eyes on Montimere much less knew him. “What they should do is let that kid out and let him go on back home. That’s what they need to do, just let him go because don’t nobody know really what happened.”

Increasingly, however, the evidence points to Montimere as a pathological liar, a troubled man who conned everyone he met during his year and a half in Odessa. His con might have snared Permian principal Roy Garcia and Panthers basketball coach Danny Wright, whom Montimere lived with for much of the last 12 months until his story began to unravel.

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