Linton overcomes trials to become coveted recruit

WALNUT – He could have been the one shot and killed.

That’s what Armani Linton thought as he saw his friend lying in a pool of blood, dead from a single gunshot wound to the neck.

It was Aug. 5, 2009, and it happened right down the street from where he lived in Rockford, Illinois.

Just minutes before, Linton’s 16-year-old friend Christopher “Spyder” Fryer-Chandler had come by his apartment in the Fairgrounds Valley housing complex.

Spyder wanted Linton to walk with him to his girlfriend’s house.

Linton declined. He had a bad feeling.

He heard gunshots minutes later.

“I came out of the house, and as I’m walking down the street, somebody was like ‘Spyder just got shot,’ ” said Linton, who was 13 at the time. “I’m like, ‘That can’t be true. He was just at my house. He’s not that far away from me.’ ”

It was a sobering moment for Linton: That could have been me.

At that moment, Linton knew he had to leave, or he might be the next to have his body outlined in chalk on the pavement. He eventually left Rockford and landed in Mississippi — not without hardships during the journey — but it was a decision that set him on a path that will result in him signing a Division I football scholarship with Ole Miss today.

“I’m glad I got out,” Linton said. “I’ve seen different things as far as the kids I grew up with, my friends. Probably out of 10 of them, five are dead now. … I’ve heard people say they didn’t think I’d be alive at 18. It changed a lot.”

Linton was 13, living alone in a housing project.

It wasn’t always this way. Linton lived with his mother, Chandra, brothers Anthony and Aaron, and sister, Antoinette before things got bad.

Chandra Linton remembers the Saturdays when all four of her children would climb into her bed just to fall back asleep next to each other.

“It was our little piece of heaven,” she said.

That didn’t last.

Money was tight, and most days were a struggle. Chandra Linton had days where she wouldn’t eat so her four children didn’t go to bed hungry.

“No one really tried to get us to come stay with them,” Antoinette Linton, who was 18 at the time, said. “At the time, my mom’s parents didn’t know what was going on. ... I honestly don’t think they knew the stuff we went through in Rockford. We didn’t tell people what was going on. We talked to each other.”

There was a point where things got so bad financially that Chandra’s then-boyfriend was supporting her children. But it was complicated.

“We were so protective over our mom. We didn’t accept him,” Armani Linton said. “One thing led to another and she knew it wasn’t going to work with him being there. She was trying to provide for us through him.”

The four kids started to see less of their mother by the time summer rolled around. Chandra Linton went to live with her boyfriend. Anthony and Aaron moved in with their father’s grandmother.

That left Antoinette and Armani in Rockford.

“Me and Armani had the type of relationship where we always got into it,” Antoinette Linton said. “I didn’t like to stay in the house, so I was always gone.”

Armani Linton was left on his own. With his mother and brothers gone and sister around only on occasion, Linton had to fend for himself.

“I was staying there for a good bit and after a while they didn’t come back,” he said. “I thought, ‘I guess I’m just going to have to take this on by myself.’ ”

There were 21 homicides recorded in Rockford in 2009, according to data compiled by the Rockford Police Department. It’s a city of 150,000 just under two hours west of Chicago. A lot of Chicago’s troubles find their way there.

Linton looked for every excuse not to have to be in the apartment. He often showered, ate and hung out at a neighbor’s. Most days that summer, the 13-year-old would wake up at 8.a.m. and not return until 2 or 3 the next morning.

He said child protective services never knew of his situation.

“Who was going to call?” he said.

The freedom was fun, for a little bit. But walking around in fear was a daily concern.

Linton said he witnessed numerous shootings — standing at a distance, he watched a man gun down a person running up a hill. Another time he watched a man use his son as a shield to protect himself from getting shot.

“Every morning, I’d get up and go to my friend’s house, and whatever we could do to get by, we did it,” he said. “As kids, you’re doing things you’re terrified to do. You see in movies where people get killed for that stuff or go to jail. As a (13-year-old) kid, you’re terrified of jail.

“After a while you’re just like, ‘I got to get paid.’ ”

Linton was the person others went to for information. He wasn’t the one selling drugs, but he would bring business to those who did. In turn, they would pay and protect him.

He realized it was a dangerous path.

“Just violence and drugs — that’s what I grew up around,” Linton said. “You wake up every day, and you wonder if you’re going to live, walking around in fear half the time. I didn’t want to live like that anymore because at the end of the day, was I really living happily?”

Fryer-Chandler’s death was the last he could take.

He called his godmother in Mississippi. The next day, she was knocking on his front door.

Erica Hampton couldn’t believe what she saw.

“The (apartment) was … awful,” Hampton said, “I couldn’t believe they had left him like that. It was nasty. He had no clean clothes, no food. The house was filled with flies.”

Enough was enough. She took Linton with her.

Linton rarely bothered with school in Rockford. He only went when his favorite sport was involved.

“School was football, I thought. And if football wasn’t going, then school was the streets,” Linton said.

It wasn’t like that in Mississippi.

In slow-paced Walnut, Linton had his guard up.

He moved in with his godmother and her three children. He later enrolled at Walnut Attendance Center, a K-12 school, and had to repeat seventh grade due to how poorly he performed at West Middle School in Rockford.

“When he first got down here, he just wouldn’t do his work. You could see the anger in him,” Walnut football coach John Meeks said. “Trust issues? Oh, yes. I don’t know if I can put that into words. You kind of got the feeling that he thought a lot of folks were out to get him.”

Meeks was not one of those people.

In 2009 when Linton arrived in Walnut, Meeks was the junior varsity football coach and saw potential in the 13-year-old.

“He was really skinny, but he was still like 5-foot-11, 150-pounds,” Meeks said. “I don’t have many kids that look like him in the seventh grade or any grade. I was like, ‘Well, look what we have here.’”

But Linton had a ways to go. He was academically ineligible for athletics when he arrived at Walnut. He became eligible the second semester of seventh grade.

When Linton joined the team as an eighth-grader, Meeks’ plan was to let him touch the ball as much as he could.

“(On the) first carry of his first junior high football game, we gave it to him and he went 70 yards for a touchdown,” Meeks said. “It happened a lot.”

Meeks, a former Ole Miss practice squad player, brought Linton to his first college football game, the Egg Bowl in 2010. In that game, Mississippi State beat the Rebels 31-23 in Oxford.

“That’s when college football became part of me,” Linton said. “They don’t get paid to do this. This is what they want to do. This is going to be their life. That’s when I made up my mind that I was going to play college football.”

Walnut Attendance Center is tucked away behind a Dollar General and ‘Burgers & Stuff’ on U.S. 72 in Tippah County. College coaches figured out how to find it recently.

During his junior year, Linton never recorded fewer than 159 all-purpose yards in five wins for the Wildcats. Mississippi State was the first to take notice. Linton committed to the Bulldogs on Feb. 8, 2014.

His stock kept rising. Less than a month later, Ole Miss offered. Linton was torn.

“He didn’t want to flip,” Meeks said. “He didn’t want to be one of those kids.”

He weighed the decision for months. He didn’t want to come off as ungrateful.

During a June 6 visit to Oxford for Ole Miss’ elite camp, he made his decision. Linton was now a Rebel.

“In my mind I was like, ‘Why didn’t I do this a long time ago?’ I feel like I stick in; it fits for me,” he said.

Linton’s mother moved to New Albany before the start of his senior season.

She has another child, Ayiden. Armani is the adoring big brother.

There’s no resentment for the years of absence.

“I never looked at my mom like, ‘Why did you do that to me?’ She’s the one who had to sit there in labor with me. She went through all of this pain,” he said. “Everything she did was to better us. It might not look like it, but it was.”

As a senior, Linton had 1,532 rushing yards and 20 touchdowns. He scored twice on kickoff returns and tallied 49.5 tackles with two interceptions.

Chandra Linton was her son’s biggest fan, linking arms with Armani as they walked across the field during his senior night ceremony.

“I was an emotional wreck. I’m a big crybaby,” Chandra Linton said. “I’d never seen (a senior night before), and what touched me was seeing some of these kids who were playing their last game. Some of them aren’t going to go to college. Some of them are going to go (work in) the furniture factory next. It was touching to know that this isn’t it for (Armani).”

In fact, it’s only the beginning.

“If it wasn’t for (Illinois), I wouldn’t be me,” he said. “If I grew up here, my situation could have possibly been different. Could’ve been better, could’ve been worse … I’m sticking with what got me here. I don’t want to think about what didn’t get me here. Illinois made me. This is me now. It’s molded around me.”

Contact Courtney Cronin at (601) 961-7091 or ccronin@jackson.gannett.com. Follow @CourtneyRCronin on Twitter.