Vernell Brown strides purposefully to class at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is working toward a degree in public health.
At 52, he is more than 30 years older than his classmates. It has been 34 years since his first shot at an Ivy League education was derailed by drugs and alcohol.
Since then, he flunked out of two colleges and spent time in prison. Before he came to the manicured campus and its stately brick buildings he lived in a homeless shelter.
“I was an underachiever,” he says. “There’s a void that addicts yearn to fill, an emptiness inside, until you find something that you are passionate about.”
Brown’s circuitous road to Penn winds from a boyhood of modest means, rising to a scholarship at a private school. It descends through valleys littered with beer bottles, crack cocaine vials and broken promises, then soars to the upper echelon of academia and a future ripe with possibilities.
“I had to pick myself up out of the ashes,” he says.
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Brown grew up in New Castle, the firstborn son of Dorothy and Vernell Brown Sr. His younger brother Aaron was born with cerebral palsy and has been confined to a wheelchair his entire life.
“Vernell was very smart, a lovely, helpful boy who liked to read a lot and stay to himself,” recalls his aunt, Carol Williams.
When he was 6, his parents divorced. After that, the boys did not see much of their father. Young Vernell felt abandoned.
“You know the song ‘Poppa was a Rolling Stone.’ I hear it and I think of him,” he says.
In seventh grade, he got a scholarship to Tatnall, an independent prep school in Greenville. He was a bookworm who studied hard and looked forward to going to college.
Brown doesn’t remember the precise moment he took his first drink. He was 14 and started sneaking Beefeater’s gin from his mother’s liquor cabinet. Soon he was smoking pot and drinking beer and wine with kids in the neighborhood and his classmates at Tatnall.
“It was a way of being cool, to be accepted by the in crowd,” he says. “As I got older, it was a way to numb myself.”
Brown had another secret deep inside. He was gay and struggling with his sexuality.
“Growing up I felt like that was weird,” he recalls. “I wanted to be straight for a lot of years. Drugs made me forget about being gay.”
Still, he did well in school and won a scholarship to Brown University. His first shot at an Ivy League education vanished when a teacher caught him and a classmate dividing their stash of marijuana in the boys’ restroom.
Both were expelled. Brown’s scholarship offer was retracted.
He earned his high school diploma at James H. Groves Adult High School and went to Howard University in Washington, D.C.
“I got into drugs real bad, cocaine and PCP.”
Brown dropped out of college after one semester and came home to New Castle.
He began a downward spiral that would last for nearly 30 years.
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After he flunked out of Howard, Brown took a series of temp jobs.
“It was a turbulent time,” he recalls. “I was undisciplined.”
He was arrested several times for shoplifting and forgery, crimes he committed to feed his habit. He spent time in various drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers and would clean up for a while. He enrolled at the University of Delaware.
School and jobs didn’t last long. Neither did his sobriety.
“As one judge put it to me: ‘the demons would come back,’” he says.
Ultimately, Brown was sentenced to four years in the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center in Smyrna.
Behind bars, there was less opportunity to get into trouble. He started taking college classes, “trying to make good use of that time.” He learned how to install HVAC systems.
In his 40s, he got better at keeping jobs, working for hospital billing companies. He was still getting arrested, but not as much.
By August 2012, he was out of work again due to drinking and drugs. He asked his mother if he could live with her.
She told her son that he loved him.
And then she said “no.”
“It must have been very hard for her,” he says. “But because she loved me she was not going to enable me.”
Brown was homeless. He packed his few remaining possessions in a knapsack and made the rounds, sleeping on a friend’s floor one night, at a shelter the next. Occasionally, friends and relatives would treat him to a meal.
“They preferred feeding me to giving me money because they knew I would spend the money on beer or crack cocaine,” he says.
In the crystalline light of hindsight, Brown views homelessness as his turning point, the moment that inspired him to reclaim his life.
“Even prison wasn’t the bottom,” he says. “In prison, you get fed.”
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Brown found a roof over his head at The Ministry of Caring, a nonprofit organization in Wilmington that provides a community-based network of social, health and support services for people who are homeless and working poor people.
He entered the House of Joseph, a shelter for men who have problems with substance abuse, mental health and other issues. He was required to attend daily meetings in a 12-step program.
“I had been beaten up enough,” he says. “I was sick and tired. I wanted a quality of life that was better.”
Thirty years after getting expelled from school, he enrolled in a program at Delaware Technical Community College, studying Electronic Health Records. He moved into Padre Pio, a long-term home operated by The Ministry of Caring, living with other men in recovery. It was quiet and he could study.
“Positive people and experiences were being infused into my life which I never imagined, and they impacted me beyond words,” he says. “The insatiable desire to learn anatomy, statistics, computers, and chemistry were incentives that guided me to reach beyond the adversities of my past and focus on a promising tomorrow.”
Gordon Corbitt, house manager at Padre Pio and a recovering addict himself, remembers Brown as motivated and focused.
“Vernell is the only person we ever had who went to college, let alone graduate,” he says. “I always knew he could achieve great things.”
Brown thrived at Del Tech, serving as executive vice president of Phi Theta Kappa, the honor society for two-year-colleges. He graduated summa cum laude and was chosen to introduce Mark Brainard, Del Tech’s president, at graduation.
Corbitt and others from the shelter came to support him. His mother, gravely ill with congestive heart failure, watched the ceremony via video from her hospital bed.
Two weeks later, she died.
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Brown’s mother breathed her last knowing her son had been accepted to the Liberal Professional Studies program at Penn for nontraditional students.
He was devastated by her death and requested time off before he started school so he could obtain in-depth grief counseling. Penn agreed.
“Vernell had to fight to keep it together and the whole family rallied around him,” says his aunt.
Instead of numbing himself with drugs and alcohol, he was uplifted by relatives, friends from Del Tech and supporters from his church, Bethel AME in Wilmington.
“There was so much love from them,” he says. “I was galvanized by their support.”
The next semester, Brown began his studies at Penn, moving into the dormitory with incoming freshmen.
“I am so much older the kids thought I must be professor,” he recalls.
He inherited some money from his mother, which enabled him to buy a laptop. He took a part-time job monitoring the food service in the student dining hall. He got two scholarships to help defray Penn’s $60,000-a-year tuition.
Brown is intent on making a difference in his professional life, helping people to avoid potentially devastating illnesses, such as hypertension and diabetes.
“I was surrounded by my brother’s disability and my mother’s heart problems,” he says. “Health was in my face my entire life growing up.”
He currently maintains 3.82 grade point average and has applied for a summer internship at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. He regularly attends 12-step meetings.
“It’s helpful in dealing with the stress of going from a community college to an Ivy League school,” he says. “The students here are very driven and to be able to keep up with all these young, brilliant minds is amazing.”
These days, Brown is thinking ahead. He will graduate in May 2018, with about $25,000 in student loans. He can visualize himself owning a home, a single-story house where he can care for his brother. It will have a fireplace and a garage.
Occasionally, he grows wistful thinking about what might have been.
“I look at the students at Penn and I think I should have been there when I was their age,” he says. “I see wasted years, a lot of potential. I knew in my heart that I was smarter than a lot of people with doctoral degrees.”
He is in touch with his father, who moved to Ghana, where he lives with his fourth wife. They are not close, but the lines of communication are open.
Corbitt and Brown talk on the phone and email. They met at an Eagles game last fall. He says other people in recovery have been inspired by his success.
“Penn is a long way from the shelter,” Corbitt says. “It shows what you can do when you take an opportunity.”
Brown marvels at his life, grateful for each sober day and each new door that opens.
“You cannot set limitations on yourself,” he says. “You have to harness that energy, that desire to succeed. We can never give up on our dreams
