At the age of 15, Way was held at gunpoint, as he said in an April 2008 Rolling Stone interview: "I got held up with a .357 Magnum , had a gun pointed to my head and put on the floor, execution-style."

When the attacks occurred Sept. 11 on the Twin Towers, Way worked for a comics industry in New York, and from there he could see the disaster. From that moment he felt he was wasting his life and then decided to do something important with it, forming the band My Chemical Romance.