It’s late afternoon, but the conditions are unforgiving.
The heat index is north of 100 degrees.
Stepping into the humidity steals the breath from Scott Littleton’s chest.
He is undeterred.
He keeps a steady pace as his feet meet the ground, one after the other, again and again— his knees absorbing the recoil from the unyielding pavement.
Scott has welcomed discomfort for many of the last few years.
He saw the pain as a continuation of his sentence for a misspent youth and early adulthood — for the hurt he caused family members; for having a life when so many of his loved ones had lost theirs.
He says the “punishment” was part of his “penance.”
And as Scott unwraps his story — a tale of a young man from a good family who turned to drugs and, years after his life “spiraled out of control,” wound up in a Texas prison — he admits that he had plenty to atone for.
But it is a course he is ready to run.
This time, to victory.
•
Growing up in a well-known, affluent family in Grantham, Scott had all the advantages he needed to succeed.
And for a while, he capitalized on them.
He was a standout soccer player and graduated from Southern Wayne High School with honors.
He was well thought of by adults and his peers.
He was accepted to North Carolina State University.
On paper, he had a bright future ahead of him.
But what most people didn’t know was that he “never had self-worth or self-esteem” — that he had been adopted into that well-known, affluent family in Grantham and being given up had scarred him.
“My parents, they loved us. They raised us with the right morals and ethics. I just never felt like I belonged,” Scott said. “What was so wrong with me that my biological mother didn’t want me? If the woman who gives birth to you doesn’t want you, there must be something.”
Internally, he had been searching for an answer to that question since he was a little boy.
Not knowing tormented him — so much so that unbeknownst to those closest to him, he began self-medicating with alcohol and marijuana at just 13 years old.
And when he moved to Raleigh to attend N.C. State, not being “known” exacerbated his feelings of emptiness.
“So, I just met the wrong people. We would party, and I started to realize that at the parties, the drug dealers were the cool people,” Scott said. “That’s who everybody wanted to know. I know it sounds kind of strange, but I figured becoming one would give me some of that acceptance I was looking for.”
It started with cocaine — dealing and using.
“We were going down to Texas. We started out getting quarter-kilos of coke,” Scott said. “But it just spiraled and after a while, it turned into two kilos every week and a little bit of heroin.”
His roommates didn’t like the company he kept and kicked him out.
He dropped out of school.
And even though he was making a significant amount of money and he was constantly “needed” by a cadre of people, his addiction began taking its toll.
“Inside of the drug addiction, I became very anxious and depressed,” he said. “I knew I wasn’t right.”
So, he picked up the phone and called the mother who had raised him.
“She had always been there for everything, so when I got really bad off, I called her up to Raleigh to tell her,” Scott said. “We sat down, and I told her I had a drug problem. I can remember her crying.”
But he didn’t want to tell her what drug he had been abusing.
He was ashamed.
“For me, a heroin addict was somebody in New York, laying in a gutter, wearing a trench coat — like trash,” he said. “Yet, here I was, her son, a heroin addict.”
Not long after, he entered rehab.
•
It’s April Fool’s Day — three days after Scott had checked himself into Holly Hill Hospital.
“I decided really quickly that this wasn’t for me,” he said. “I signed myself out after 72 hours.”
He went back to his house and called his drug dealer.
The man arrived with heroin, cocaine, and marijuana.
“We are all partying,” Scott said. “At that point, I was in so deep with my addiction, there was no recovering.”
Later that day, he was in the shower when police kicked down his front door.
At first, because he was so high at the time, he thought it was a prank. But when, with gun drawn, one of them yanked him out of the shower and threw him into the next room, the gravity of the situation began to take hold.
He would be charged with possession of drugs with intent to sell and maintaining a dwelling for the purpose of selling drugs.
“But because heroin was just a part of my life, I didn’t realize the seriousness of possession of heroin,” Scott said. “So, (my attorney) is telling me how serious this is, and I’m thinking I’m going to prison.”
So, one might think that when he was fortunate enough to get probation instead of hard time, he would consider the bullet dodged and change his life.
“It had no sobering effect on me whatsoever,” Scott said. “I went right back to using.”
And even though he would leave Raleigh and move back to Wayne County, his dealing days weren’t left in the rear view either.
“Back at that time, Creech Street was where we did a lot of our drug dealing,” he said. “I would go to Raleigh and get the stuff and bring it back.”
He got away with it for years before movingback to the state capital.
By then, it was the early 2000s, and he decided to try using methadone to get clean.
“I was on the program, but methadone didn’t help me,” Scott said. “I was taking it and still using. I was just living a (terrible) existence.”
But he found one silver lining the day his longtime girlfriend gave birth to their child.
His son, Aaron, coming into the world could have been another aha moment — an opportunity to get clean for something bigger than himself.
Instead, a common law robbery charge — his second felony — landed Scott in the North Carolina prison system.
When he began what would be a 16-month sentence, the detox, he thought, would kill him.
“That was as miserable as you could ever imagine. The withdrawals from the methadone and the heroin and the benzos … it was atrocious,” he said. “You just want to come out of your skin. There’s no other way to describe it. You want to die. Period.”
And he realized that what he feared the most about being incarcerated wasn’t the potential for violence or being away from his family.
It was knowing that he would not have access to the drugs he had been using all these years to cope with his pain — and the knowledge that his birth mother had given him away.
“In the prison system, once you’ve detoxed, now you’re dealing with your mind,” Scott said. “What you’ve done to cope with all those things that have hurt you are gone. Some days, I’d crawl into the shower and just cry. Once I was clean in prison, I was hit with, ‘I don’t know how to live a proper life.’”
Visits from his girlfriend and their son helped.
And so, too, did exercise.
But then he found out that the mother who raised him was dying of lung cancer.
And six months before his release, his world shattered.
Scott will never forget Dec. 19, 2005.
He remembers the chocolate stains left on his prison uniform that day by then-2-year-old Aaron during a visitation.
“He was sitting on my lap, and I remember, he had eaten a Mr. Goodbar and he got chocolate on my pants,” he said.
He can still see that little boy blowing him kisses as he walked away.
“And saying, ‘I love you,’” Scott said, his voice breaking.
He can hear the warden approaching his cell a few hours later and telling him to call home.
And he recalls how his father “was all to pieces” — how after handing the phone to his wife, she told Scott that there had been a bad wreck, a crash that had claimed the lives of his girlfriend, her mother, and Aaron.
“They got in a wreck on the way home. I remember just feeling so empty and sad,” Scott said. “It’s so strange. It was like an out-of-body experience. Being incarcerated, I never really got to grieve. I never really got to heal.”
But the experience of losing his son had motivated him to be a better man when he was released from prison that June.
“I really want to do good,” Scott said. “I want to be good.”
He got a job and got back on methadone to resist the urge to start using again.
“But then, one of the guys at work is a drug addict,” he said. “So, there I am. Right back in it.”
It’s 2009 and Scott is arrested for attempted burglary and possession of burglary tools.
He’s living in Texas — and this is his second felony charge since moving there.
Since leaving North Carolina, he has fallen deeper into his addiction.
At one point, he’s homeless — living out of abandoned houses.
He claims the latest charges were a misunderstanding, but he decides he doesn’t want to fight them.
He might be facing 25 years for being a “habitual felon,” but instead of proving his innocence, he asked his lawyer to get him a plea deal.
“In my mind, I’m like, ‘Of all the (things) I’ve done in my life — the overdoses, the drug dealing — this is my penance. This is what I have to pay,’” Scott said. “I was not a good human being. I was not a productive member of society. So, I thought, I’ll sign a plea.”
He had no idea just how different the Texas prison system was from what he experienced in North Carolina.
“North Carolina’s prison system is almost like Boy Scout camp. It’s not hard,” he said. “There’s a little bit of fighting, but for the most part, you go in and you’re just there.”
In Texas, he would have to end up choosing which gang to align with for protection.
And because he “looks white” but has Hispanic blood, he had to fight twice as hard when rival inmates challenged him.
One of those fights landed him in segregation for three months.
He would sit there, in a tiny cell, doing pushups and walking back and forth — touching the walls each time he reached one — “just to keep from going crazy.”
“I didn’t want to lose my mind,” Scott said.
But when he added reading a Bible — the one object he was given — to his daily routine, his life changed forever.
“I was feeling things I had never felt before. I started telling myself, the one thing I’m going to be is better than I’ve ever been when I come home. I will be a productive member of society. I will be something,” Scott said. “I felt a presence. It wasn’t touching that wall every day that kept me sane. It was something else.”
He has been clean and sober ever since.
It’s early evening, but the conditions remain unforgiving.
The temperatures have cooled, but the heat index is still pushing 100 degrees.
There has been no pop-up thunderstorm to break the humidity.
But Scott remains undeterred — keeping the same pace as his feet meet the unyielding pavement, one after another, again and again.
He no longer sees the discomfort as a way to prove to God he is becoming a better man.
The pain, he says, is now his testimony.
“Before I really understood grace and mercy, I thought I had to pay a penance. My running and my gym time and my exercise, that was the punishment — the price I had to pay for the things I had done, the life I had lived,” Scott said. “But now I know that my sins are paid for. I don’t owe God anything other than to try to spread good news about who He is.”
And for him, his ministry is every race and competition he has completed since he walked out of that Texas prison a changed man.
Every 5K.
Every half-marathon and marathon.
“I had to do something. I needed something else to fill the voids I had. So, I exercised every day. That’s how it started,” Scott said. “It became, it became 100%, I don’t do drugs anymore because I don’t have to. The things that drugs provided me, exercise gave me — those feel-good feelings, for my body and my mind. God has given me these opportunities. For so long, I never had any self-worth — any sense of belonging or accomplishment. But the sports community, the endurance community, they understand. My story is one of many.”
He had planned to continue his next week in Penticton, British Colombia — to show people how he went from rock bottom to the Iron Man finish line.
And while his passport did not arrive in time to travel out of the country, he did not allow a setback to send him back into a spiral.
He decided that he will wait for the next Iron Man to make climbing that athletic mountaintop a reality.
But he will take to the streets of Wayne County on foot and on bike — and cut through the water inside the YMCA — this weekend, to prove to himself and his community that God is still speaking through him.
“I really believe that … as much loss as I’ve been through, if I was where I was and I’m where I am now, that can be for anybody. I want people to be able to see that and go, ‘Where I am today is not where I have to be,’” Scott said. “This is more than me. This is about the community coming together and understanding why I punish myself — why I train and chose this lifestyle. You have to keep going. Life doesn’t have to be a one goal and you’re done. Hopefully, what I’ve had to go through moves someone. Because once you’ve accepted that it’s all for Him, that there’s something bigger, there’s always a, ‘What’s next?’”
