It would have been a shame beyond measure to have lost Elliott Centeno to the streets and the prison system forever, but it didn’t happen.
In a turn of events that sprang from a jailhouse epiphany and a supreme act of will, this 46-year-old son of Allentown is about to graduate Lehigh Carbon Community College with an associate’s degree, then head to Bucknell University on a full scholarship.
He’ll spend two years pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in psychology. When he’s done, he will emerge from higher education roughly eight years after entering state prison as an alcoholic, sometimes violent man broken by decades of hard living and crime.
Centeno will share his story with LCCC’s graduating class Wednesday at PPL Center in Allentown. He’s the student speaker — an honor bestowed after faculty selected his speech out of many entries — and plans to evangelize for the idea that the future needn’t be chained to the past.
On Tuesday, sitting for an interview in the Downtown Allentown Market, the Northampton man admitted to a flutter of nerves over telling such a tale in front of hundreds of peers and their families, but another worry nibbled at him.
“I just have to control my emotions so I don’t bawl my eyes out for the whole four or five minutes,” he said, reckoning the weight of his improbable destiny is likely to squeeze some tears out of him no matter what.
“It’s still like a dream,” he said. “I still can’t believe I’m going to wear a cap and gown and get a diploma.”
‘Sucked into the streets’
Centeno’s story began in 1977 in Allentown. He didn’t say much about his family, except that he is the fourth of five children, his father was murdered in 1980, and his household was utterly unsupervised.
“I got sucked into the streets,” he said, likening the pull of Allentown’s more troubled precincts to a sort of tractor beam for a boy in search of companionship and distraction. “I started out roaming the streets as a child. I wanted to be a thug.”
Centeno took his first drink when he was 8, chugging a can of beer like a pint-sized frat boy. He bounced around various city schools and ended up at Allen High School, where he attended just eight days in his freshman year.
He was sent to juvenile detention for some transgression and had a brief measure of success after that by earning a high school equivalency diploma when he was 15 or 16, but it didn’t last.
He returned, inevitably, to the family he knew.
“We call it gangs and a lot of other negative terms,” he said, “but that’s our social circle. In normal situations, it’s religion, sports, family. You’re very simply attracted to people you get along with, and it doesn’t look the same for everybody.”
Gifted with a lively intelligence but unmoored from any structure, Centeno fell deeper into a perilous life. Court documents headed “Commonwealth vs. Elliott Centeno” would make a considerable pile.
“Petty drug deals, getting high, drinking, violence, dangerous sex,” he said. “That’s definitely a waste, especially for someone with potential.”
He drank heavily every night. He went to jail. He went to jail again.
“I went to jail 15 or 20 times,” he said.
Many of those were short stints at Lehigh County Jail, but when he was 40, he said, “I went to prison for more drunken recklessness.”
This time, he got two to four years in state prison — State Correctional Institution-Waymart in Wayne County. There, a few months into his sentence, he had the life-altering idea that it might do him a world of good to quit drinking.
It doesn’t sound like a dramatic insight. Who doesn’t know that?
For an alcoholic, though, it’s a break in clouds so low and dismal that they obscure common sense and make happiness seem like something that only belongs to other people.
“There’s a phrase in recovery,” Centeno said. ” ‘When you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired, change can happen.’ And I was sick and tired.”
He decided he’d taken his last drink. He also resolved to go to college when he got out. So he began to educate himself, borrowing textbooks from the library — mainly math and science — and poring over them incessantly. Whatever he had missed in traditional schooling, he aimed to make up for in prison.
He also attended therapy, learning the innumerable ways the addict has to change. Studying, Centeno happily discovered, was a perfect replacement activity — a therapeutic term for a healthy pursuit that dislodges an unhealthy one.
“Sobriety has to involve a whole series of changes, lifestyle changes,” he said.
He was a good student in this regard, too, and before long was serving as a facilitator at the meetings.
Another chance
After 2½ years, Centeno was paroled and returned to Allentown. That was January 2020. He worked on getting financial aid with the goal of starting LCCC in August.
It didn’t go exactly as planned, of course.
“I tried to prepare for coming out of prison,” he said. “Unfortunately, a global pandemic wasn’t on my list.”
His first classes were by Zoom. When he finally started going to campus, “I tried not to stand out,” he said. “You have this thing where you know what your background is and it nags you — ‘Oh my God, what if they find out who I am?’ ”
An associate’s program is typically two years. Centeno, busy working at restaurants and at various side jobs, proceeded more slowly. His girlfriend, Amber Brzozowski, “helped me out immensely” as he juggled work and study, he said.
Centeno impressed his teachers from the start, quickly moving up to the honors program.
“He was in my class and I guess what I noticed right away about him is that he was a student who clearly wanted to get everything out of his education that he possibly could,” said Mary Engel, an associate professor of chemistry who co-facilitates the honors program.
Engel said she learned about Centeno’s life piece by piece. They are the same age, but Engel came from a vastly different background. She found herself marveling that their paths had crossed at the school, given all he had been through.
“I would think, ‘Man, how on Earth are you here?’ ” she said. “You can’t help but root for him and have an immense amount of respect for where he came from.”
Engel’s admiration for Centeno’s forthrightness in sharing his story — and the compelling way he does so — prompted her to encourage him to apply for the student speaker role.
“He has a way of telling it that is so humble and really motivating, more so than kind of preaching,” she said. “He talks about where he’s been and how far he’s come. He says ‘This is where I was, this is where I am. If I can do it, someone else can, too.’ ”
In summer 2022, Centeno attended Bucknell’s Community College Scholars Program, created to help high-achieving, lower-income students who want to pursue education beyond an associate’s degree.
He spent six weeks experiencing campus life and academics. It honed his already keen desire to learn all he could, to make up for all the lost years.
He’ll keep sharing his story along the way.
“It’s important to tell it,” he said. “I literally grew up a dirty little kid around here. My father was murdered not far from here. The odds can be stacked against you and you can still overcome.”
Morning Call reporter Daniel Patrick Sheehan can be reached at 610-820-6598 or dsheehan@mcall.com.
