MIDDLEBURG – Victor Berrios was born in the early morning in a Los Angeles hospital shaking, addicted to heroin.

His mother had used the illicit drug throughout the pregnancy, leading to her child’s addiction at birth. Berrios said his birth and survival served as a testament to God’s grace.

He remembers his mother aching from heroin withdrawals in the early morning, curling up into herself. In Los Angeles, Berrios would walk from 11th to 18th Street to buy a dime of heroin so his mother could get up long enough to make breakfast.

She was young and had met her husband in jail. He was a janitor and she, an inmate.

Berrios grew up making many off the same mistakes as his mother and eventually found himself looking at a 12-year prison sentence for armed robbery. He was alone and yearning to change himself in a way he’d never felt before.

That’s when Berrios turned himself over to God for the last time.

Now 38, Berrios lives in Middleburg and works as a radio preacher, doling out advice to a spread out congregation, some of whom could still be in the same position he found himself constantly trying to crawl out of.

“I have preached on the radio, fed the hungry, I’m actually trying to establish a group to feed the homeless,” Berrios said. “I know I can do anything I set my mind to.”

Throughout his childhood and well into his adulthood, he remained mired in a cycle of jail, crime and drug use.

He drifted house to house, foster home to foster home and in and out of juvenile jails and diversion programs.

In 1999, while staying in San Bernardino, Calif. with a friend, he decided he wanted to uproot himself and start a new life in Chicago, away from the familiar streets and drugs of California.

“At that age, I think I felt God tugging at my heart saying hey, ‘I want to show you something different, I want to pull you out of this mess’,” Berrios said.

Berrios started working in construction with a young man named Gabriel.

“At this time I had been moving from state to state trying to get away from everything,” Berrios said. “I didn’t know nobody – I didn’t want to know nobody. I was just trying to walk the straight and narrow path. Get up, go to work, come home to see family and do the same thing over again.”

And for a time, he did. When Gabriel’s nephew Tony began working with him, however, things changed.

“He said ‘hey, you want to go to the club’ and we meet a couple girls and start drinking again,” Berrios said. “When we get home he goes ‘hey man, let me tell you something,’ I said ‘What’s up?’ He said ‘I like to get high’... ‘I’ve got some crack cocaine.’”

Gabriel found out Berrios and Tony had used the street drug and fired Berrios. His aunt, with whom he was living, kicked him out on the street with no job and no money soon after.

He stayed in a prostitution house and made friends with the manager who told him she could send him to Florida via the brothel’s owner, who owned a similar business in Broward County.

Berrios said he had always dreamed about Orlando and Disneyland, so Florida was a dream come true for him. He was 21 when he began living in a brothel in a Margate, Florida that was owned by a pimp from El Salvador.

He began working security for the brothel, but when customers started to use drugs at the business, he began to feel insecure without guns. Chino had a no guns policy, so when he discovered Berrios had brought guns into the brothel, Berrios was kicked out.

“I was across the county from a place I’d never been at, I had no food no clothes,” Berrios said.

He began to rob gas stations to make ends meet and eventually landed in the county jail for a different charge. The arresting officer, however, recognized Berrios’ tattoos from the gas station armed robberies and was able to get a full confession from Berrios while he sat in jail for a different charge.

“At the time I was ignorant, I was young, I was uneducated to the law and I had come in contact with God again and I felt if I told them the truth, I was going to be set free because they made promises to me,” Berrios said.

Berrios then faced two life sentences plus 15 years because of his confession. However, he eventually made a deal with the judge and spent the next 12 years and two months in prison followed by five years of probation.

He just finished probation in October. For the last year, Berrios has preached over the radio on WROS 1050 AM and has earned his a degree in ministry to preach his story to others.

Recently, he’s even returned to the prison not as a prisoner, but as a Toastmasters public speaking teacher. He uses the position to tell his story to the inmates.

“I want to show the world that if you have a dream, regardless of where you’ve been in the past, you can still live that American dream,” Berrios said.