Micah Brown

When I sit down to write anything I almost always know the picture I want to paint with words. I usually start writing knowing exactly how I feel about whatever topic I’m sharing, and I have a clear idea of how to express these feelings to ensure whoever reads it will not only know how I feel but, if I get it just right, feel what I feel.

This time, for this story, I don’t have a plan. I don’t know exactly how I feel. I’m angry, I’m sad, I’m ashamed, I’m confused, I’m disappointed, and my heart HURTS. What plan I do have is to write and hope exactly how I feel becomes more and more clear, and leaves you with a picture in your heart that lasts.

On August 1, my friend Micah Brown, a Death Row inmate in Texas, hung himself in his small concrete cell about 120 feet away from me. I was told that he was hanging for multiple hours before anyone saw him – even though the guard working the floor was doing security rounds every thirty minutes, as is required. She just walked by without seeing him. That a guy who often felt unseen went unseen as he died and hung by a homemade rope for hours makes me feel like I have a rope made of sorrow wrapped tightly around my heart.

Around 1-2 pm that day, I was standing at my white cell door watching the TV that is bolted to the concrete wall ten feet away when I noticed guard after guard running quickly onto the pod and rushing over to B-Section, the section next to where I’m housed. So many guards were running quickly on and off the pod that I couldn’t keep track of their numbers. One thing I knew was that a serious situation was underway because Texas Department of Criminal Justice guards don’t EVER move fast, unless someone is in danger.

I know all 14 of the inmates housed on B-Section, and there are several men who are elderly and not in good physical shape, so my first assumption about what was going on was that someone was having a heart attack or another type of serious health-related malfunction. This is somewhat common on Death Row, where so many of the inmates are elderly and overweight. But something about how frantic the guards were moving, coupled with almost no speaking, made me think whoever it was was already deceased. There was too much silence for so much physical activity. Not even the inmates were speaking that I could hear and the guards that did speak spoke very quietly and briefly. In prison, in the face of so much guard activity, only death causes such a loud silence.

After several minutes, two young female nurses, attired in multi-colored scrubs, came onto the pod, slowly pushing a stretcher towards B-Section. After several more minutes, the two nurses again slowly walked by and pushed the stretcher off the pod. Despite their lack of haste, I was still unable to identify the pale form atop the hard plastic stretcher. Unknown to me at this time was that this would be the last time I ever saw my friend Micah.

I knew the worst had happened because when the next security round was done, it was done by a young male guard who I’d never seen before, instead of the elderly lady who had been working the pod and doing all the security rounds up to that point.

As soon as I saw that the female guard had been removed from the pod – she was removed to both give her a chance to cope with finding a dead body and spare her from any inmates saying or doing anything to her if they felt she’d failed to see him before he’d died – I knew she found a dead inmate, and it was most likely a suicide. When I had this thought, I instantly thought of Micah who lived on that section and who I knew struggled mightily with deep emotional issues. Could my friend be gone? Was that Micah atop the stretcher?

I didn’t know the young guard and there was still a lot of chaos on the pod with so many guards still coming and going, so I didn’t feel either comfortable, or that it was a good time, to ask him what had happened as he walked past my cell.

Soon after this unknown guard walked by all the responding officers began filtering off the pod back to whatever posting they’d left to come and help. And the pod went utterly silent.

Imperfectly silent.

A silence so imperfect in that it left you feeling cold inside and out. There were still no inmates talking. No loud radios. Nothing. And after such chaos, that is not normal in prison. Not even close. Normally in prison chaos like that is a spark in dried brush that starts a conflagration of bored inmates who are stuck inside cells perpetually all day every day, who are just waiting ever so impatiently for an excuse to let off some pent up emotional steam, to erupt into yelling back and forth amongst one another about what had just occurred – or into the flat out destructive chaos of screaming, banging on the cell doors, setting fires and flooding the whole pod with numerous overflowing toilets. Chaos begets chaos in prison. Usually.

Not on Texas’ Death Row. This state kills more inmates than any other by far. Here, we live with death. We live with our own death hovering over us like an unwanted ghoulish apparition to keep us daily company and remind us of an unpleasant upcoming event we’d like to forget. And worse, we watch year after year as friend after friend is walked off the Death Row Building to his long-awaited fate with Texas Justice.

Here, another Death Row inmate, another friend, dying doesn’t bring chaos. It is not an excuse to be ugly or let off steam. It brings silence. Silence as most try not to feel the pain too much – or at all. Some try to pretend not to care; while others who really do care try not to let anyone hear their sobs for another friend’s death.

The silence was cut by the footfalls of the young guard doing his next security round. This time, as he walked slowly past my cell, he asked me if I was alright. I said, “Yes, are you?”

“No, not really, but I’m trying,” was his quiet response.

With that quiet answer, I knew my fears and intuition were right and someone was dead.

“Someone killed themselves, didn’t they?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

“Was it Micah Brown?” I asked.

“Yes,” he stated calmly, sadly… softly.

This led to one of the most extraordinary conversations I’ve had with a stranger in my life – and especially with a prison guard. The guard, who I won’t name, is a baby-faced 20-year-old who had returned to work THAT DAY after having been on leave the previous two months after he’d attempted suicide. And here he was seeing the grisly results of someone who succeeded, and which caused him to relive everything he’d gone through two months prior. All while also having a job to do.

As I’m processing, or actually not yet processing my friend’s death, someone I liked very much, a human being in a grey uniform is beautifully opening up to me about his pain – human to human – not prison guard to inmate, but person to person. He stood next to my cell door quietly talking to me for a long time. I can’t tell you who was helped more by that conversation. Him, to have someone to REALLY listen – or me, to have the gift of a guard trained to not see me as a human being, but a dangerous threat at all times, see me as a fellow human being and really talk to me. Which now as I write this hits me hard – in the shadow of my dead friend, who felt unseen, I and the young guard left in his wake were feeling seen. In the face of tragedy two unlikely people comforted one another. There is something extraordinary in that.

After the guard continued on his way, I was left trying to sort out my emotions. At first, I felt a lot of anger with Micah for killing himself, but this has mostly passed and left me ashamed of the cruel thoughts my anger had evoked. Mostly, I feel incredible sadness for his mother who I know loves her son dearly, talked to him daily on the phone, and has already suffered extraordinary losses in her life.

As the days passed after Micah’s death, I found myself thinking about his mother a lot. From Micah’s crime she had lost her daughter-in-law and access to Micah’s two kids – her grandkids – and her eldest son is severely handicapped. And now Micah is gone. I wonder if she’s holding up okay and if she has support…

Why did Micah do it? Nobody really knows. He left no note, gave no warning. I wasn’t surprised, but only because I’ve spent so much of my life around people struggling with deep emotional pain and mental illness and I knew Micah well enough to know he dealt with both.

Who was Micah? To the world at large he was just a junkie that flipped out on meth and shot his ex-wife in the head while she was in her car and their two very young kids were unseen in the back seat. To me, and anyone who knew the now sober Micah, his crime doesn’t begin to sum up who he was.

In general, humble and gentle people are hard to find, but in prison they are exceedingly rare. I’m not humble, nor very gentle, but I very much desire to be. When I’m lucky enough to be around someone who is, it is a blessing, and I hope close proximity with them will help me be more like them.

As I sit here, I’m trying to think of how best to explain Micah to you. Is it by what he looked like? Six foot one, muscular, white, handsome, early 40s, bald, with many bad tattoos.

No. To me, how he looked was irrelevant to making you see him. To making you feel him.

The doorway to get you to see and feel my friend how I did is his voice. Not just that it was mildly deep and had a slight Texas twang to it. But that to my ear it told me SO much about him as soon as I heard him talking the first time.

Micah was at recreation in the dayroom in front of my cell talking to another inmate. He was out of sight, but I could clearly hear him as he spoke softly, calmly – oh so calmly, to an unremembered individual. With his very, very slow cadence and soft way of speaking I could clearly hear an “off” tone that, from experience, I knew meant that he was either on psychiatric medication, which he was, and/or also dealing with something cognitive, which he was. Micah was autistic. I could hear both in his voice, and by how softly and slowly he spoke, I had a hunch he was gentle, humble and kind. And he was. It was like his voice was a road map that laid out his secrets and heart. His voice hid no secrets. And with this voice that I felt showed me so much about him, I never once heard him raise it. I only saw him mildly angry once, which was the only time I ever heard him curse, but even then, he never raised his voice.

Are you starting to see my friend yet? The guy nobody saw for hours as he hung by a homemade rope. Are you? A big guy. Lots of bad tattoos. A big guy who was just a little off. A little bit socially awkward, but gentle and the kind to make you feel comfortable with him anyway. A big, nice guy with a gleaming bald head and a soft gentle way about himself. A big guy with a big burden, huge guilt, who despite his size couldn’t carry the load anymore. A big guy who once told me when I’d referred to him as “big guy” that he didn’t feel big. A big guy who I miss big. A big guy who despite not feeling big was big in beautiful ways; who was just too humble to see the positive impact he made. A big guy with a soft calm voice that told the story of his heart.

Rest in peace, my friend.