Born and raised in southern California, Elijah Carpenter was a man who's life was set for him on a strict and narrow path. Through his youthful years and on into college, aspirations to become a writer were strong in Elijah. It wasn't until his marriage to Marie Luciano that his perceptions of the world began to change. Dropping out of college and moving north to Seattle, Washington with Marie, Elijah would be wed by the summer of 1955.
In December of 1956, Eiljah's daughter Stephanie was born. For four years his life as a struggling author and father was one he enjoyed, up until his daughter's tragic death in a hit and run accident outside of their home in Tacoma. In the year following Stephanie's death, Eiljah sunk into a deep depression and resorted to recreational drugs and alcohol to numb the loss of his child. It was only on the threat of driving away his wife of five years that Eiljah shaped up his act and tried to move on.
In the fall of 1961 Elijah and his wife relocated to California, where Eiljah enrolled at the UC San Diego School of Medicine to pursue a degree in medicine as an attempt to focus his life on something other than the loss of his daughter. While he managed to salvage his relationship with his wife, Elijah never quite recovered the distance he put between himself and Marie.
For years after this point, Elijah's eventual graduation from UCSD and his career as a surgeon slowly grew. Moving from San Diego to Oakland in the 1980s, Elijah stepped out from the role of a physician and began to toe the waters of cosmetic surgery. In 1982, Elijah and Marie welcomed their second child — James — into the world. So many years after Stephanie's death, James was a reluctant addition to a successful family.
In the intervening years, Elijah's private practice of cosmetic surgery continued to grow as his family life became increasingly less and less his focus. James was never treated, properly, as a son should have, and memories of Stephanie would continue to haunt Elijah for years after his son's birth. He feared growing too close to his son after his daughter's tragic death, and was a distant, unloving father.
In March of 2004, Elijah's son James disappeared. Official police reports from the time presume that James simply ran away from his family, and the disappearance of James from his college campus in Los Angeles was not deemed to be suspicious. Elijah blamed himself, and once more returned to alcohol and drugs to ease his suffering. It was only on the wake-up call of 2006's devastating nuclear explosion in New York City that changed his perceptions and pulled him — for the last time — out of the bottle.
It was in the spring of 2008 where Elijah's life would forever change. While tending to a client at his clinic during a facial reconstruction surgery for a burn victim, there was a complication with the procedure, and Elijah's patient suffered a sudden increase in heart rate and blood pressure. Calling on one of his nurses to his side, Elijah attempted to rectify the situation and found himself connected for a brief moment to the consciousness of his dying patient and his nurse.
What happened next are blurred memories of fearful confusion, the eventual arrival of law enforcement officials and the death of his patient on the table. Elijah recalls an adrenaline surged argument with his terrified nurse who could not understand who she was. Elijah attempted to prevent her from leaving the clinic, but was overpowered. Elijah was terrified at what happened, and over several days began to piece together the incident.
His patient had died on the operating table from a complication with anesthesia, yet his nurse had claimed to be the patient before her disappearance. When she returned to work over a week later, she explained to Elijah what had happened, and how she was the young woman who died on the table, a perfect copy of her memories that overwrote that of Elijah's nurse.
Realizing what had happened and that he was somehow responsible, Elijah felt it was his responsibility to report what happened to local authorities and be tested and registered as an Evolved. After his testing, Elijah was quietly whisked out of his interview room and locked in a cell by himself for a week without access to a phone or being told why he was being detained.
From one holding facility to another, Elijah was moved and never explained to the reasons for his imprisonment, save for that he was "a danger to those around him." Locked away in a Homeland Security holding facility for just shy of a year, Elijah was finally transported to the Moab Federal Penitentiary in February of 2009. It was here where he first met Norman White among the crew of Moab, and finally began to understand what had happened to him and why he has not seen his family since that day he left home to register.
One of the many prisoners who escaped Moab in April of 2009, Elijah — known as Doc to his fellow inmates — fell in with Norman White following the escape and dislocation in time and space. He is terrified to return to his family after such a long absence, and feels that his life was stolen from him by the government simply for existing.
