<p>The story of how Andrew Speaker met his future bride still draws laughs from his friends.</p><p>The young attorney met Sarah Spence Cooksey, an aspiring lawyer, at an Atlanta pub and handed her his fancy business card. When she called, she asked for "Mr. Speaker." But the man she ended up flirting with was not Andrew, but his father, Ted, who practices law with his son.</p><p>The young couple's relationship blossomed. They stayed up late debating ethics, the law and politics. He called her and her young daughter "his girls." They got married in May in Greece, honeymooned in Europe, and friends say they were eager to get married life started.</p><p>Instead, the couple described by friends as loving, energetic and athletic is now at the center of an international health scare.</p><p>Andrew Speaker is quarantined in a Denver hospital with an extremely drug-resistant form of tuberculosis. Critics are blasting him as a modern-day Typhoid Mary after he boarded two trans-Atlantic flights despite warnings from health officials.</p><p>His friends say that's not the "Drew" Speaker they know.</p><p>"I know if he had any thought whatsoever that he would put others in harm's way, he absolutely would not have gone," said David Rich, a Nashville attorney who was Speaker's law school roommate.</p><p>"If you subtract this TB thing from Drew Speaker, he's really a pillar of the community," Rich said.</p><p>Andrew Speaker seemed to idolize his father Ted, a Vietnam veteran turned lawyer who built a successful practice in a ritzy section of north Atlanta. A zealot for public service, Ted ran unsuccessfully for a Fulton County judgeship in 2004.</p><p>Andrew seemed set to follow a similar path. He enrolled in the U.S. Naval Academy with hopes of joining the elite Navy SEALs, but friends say he left after two years when he decided the military wasn't his calling.</p><p>Speaker then graduated from the University of Georgia with a finance degree, and was admitted to the university's law school. He earned friends with his cheerful personality. He earned a reputation as a tenacious litigator on the school's award-winning mock trial squad.</p><p>"He never let go. When he was trying to make a point, he was very clear and concise," said Charmel Gaulden, who was a law student with Andrew and a member of his mock trial team. "He was kind of always searching for that clear yes or no."</p><p>After school, he moved back to Atlanta, joined his father's law firm, and met his bride-to-be, a beautiful blonde with a young daughter.</p><p>"It was random chance," chuckled Greg Fansler, a sales manager who lived with Speaker until he moved out around December. "He bumped into her, gave her his business card. And she called the next day and got his dad _ she didn't know she was talking to the right lawyer."</p><p>Sarah Speaker took a more obscure path to law school.</p><p>Friends say she dropped out of high school when she became pregnant and moved to south Georgia to care for her daughter, Ariel, who is now 8. She earned her GED, enrolled in community college and later graduated from Georgia Tech in Atlanta.</p><p>She's now a third-year law student at Emory University's law school.</p><p>"She's very gracious, she's very accommodating. And she backs that up with smart," said Fansler. "Normally people TiVo things like 'Lost.' She TiVos things like '60 Minutes.'"</p><p>The young couple stayed up debating late into the night. Friends described the two as "conservative liberals" but said Andrew is more of a fiscal conservative while Sarah leans the other way.</p><p>As the relationship blossomed, Andrew Speaker began to care for her young daughter as his own, calling Sarah and her daughter "his girls."</p><p>"That's not his biological child, but if you'd look at them at Piedmont Park, you'd think it was," said Fansler, referring to the popular Atlanta park where families are often seen walking dogs, flying kites and playing games.</p><p>After he asked her to marry him, the two set a May wedding in Greece, inviting only close family and friends.</p><p>"Greece was picked sort of location-wise for where they wanted to be for their honeymoon," said Ryan Prescott, Speaker's law school classmate and one of his closest friends. "They wanted to go to Europe."</p><p>But tests showed that Speaker had an especially dangerous and extensively drug-resistant strain of TB.</p><p>While in Europe, federal health officials contacted him and told him to turn himself in immediately at a clinic there. But he caught a flight to Montreal and then drove across the U.S. border on May 24 at Champlain, N.Y.</p><p>He told ABC's "Good Morning America" he felt as if health officials had suddenly "abandoned him." At that point, he said, he believed if he didn't get to the specialized clinic in Denver, he would die.</p><p>Fansler visited Speaker on Tuesday before he was flown from Atlanta to Denver for treatment. He said he walked away shaking his head.</p><p>"He still has the same smile," Fansler said. "And his first question was 'How are you doing?' That's Drew."</p>
