Football star faces his mother’s killer

I had to play many years of college and professional football to reach the point where I went to counseling just to seek help so I could be sane and happy. Because I was hiding so much inside, I knew I needed help to get to the point where I wasn’t depressed, wasn’t sad all the time, so that I could laugh more, smile more. This visit was part of that journey. I was doing this for my soul, for my life. It was time for me to move forward. In God’s eyes, you have to forgive. I won’t ever forget it, but I have to forgive to get that burden off of me.

In the end, Brumfield and Broadway are going to get what’s due in their lives, so I can’t hold that hatred inside. I’ve tried to tell Derrick the same thing. It’s crazy because we discussed on the drive from New Orleans that you can’t hold onto something for so long, because it eats you up. It stops you from growing as a person — in my case and in my brother’s, as men. We are still alive. We are still doing well. We are starting families. We are moving on and starting our own traditions. We’re not holding onto the things that woulda, shoulda, coulda been. That’s done and over with. This is your path and you have to live that life.

My heart started to race as we closed in on Angola. Usually, when I play football, my heart doesn’t race until I get ready to pull up to the stadium. That’s just from my love and excitement for the game. This was going to be a lot different because it was not about football. It was about life. Now I would have to face another fear in my life that I didn’t know anything about or understand. I didn’t know if I was going to talk straight or be nervous the whole time. I could tell I was nervous because my voice was cracking; it was just one of those things where I would have to try to stay calm.

We were en route to one of the most desolate spots in all of Louisiana.

Highway 66 ends at a prison that’s known as the most notorious in the South, a prison from which 91 percent of all inmates never leave. They either die on Death Row or because their sentences are longer than their lives. I was surprised when Richard Vannoy, the prison’s deputy warden for security, met us at the gates and asked me to get in his truck with him. As I got out of the car, our driver, Chad, looked at me and said, “Man to man, I respect what you are doing.” That really hit me. This was going to happen.

Vannoy joined the prison staff at age eighteen and has worked at Angola for thirty- three years. He explained how inmates on Death Row such as Brumfield and Broadway are locked in single- man cells. They are allowed out an hour each day to shower and an hour alone in the yard five times a week on a rotation basis that’s kept a secret even from them for safety reasons. Inmates are moved in full restraints: leg irons and waist chains. The only time their hands are unbuckled from their waist chains is when they are alone in their exercise pen. They are never in the proximity of anyone when they are not fully restrained.

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The 18,000-acre penitentiary is surrounded on three sides by the Mississippi River. Vannoy also told me that the prison is still run as a working farm — inmates grow and harvest their own vegetables and raise cattle. Vannoy drove me through what seemed like miles of dirt roads to get back to an area that was guarded with rolls and rolls of razor wire. The building’s official name is Camp F. It was as dank and dark a place as you would ever see.

This was Death Row.

Brumfield’s lawyers, the husband-and-wife team of Nick Trenticosta and Susan Herrero, were very quizzical about my visit. They’ve represented Death Row inmates for many years and really never had a request quite like mine, to sit down with one of their clients. I tried to explain to them that sometimes you just have to do it, that this was just a matter of opportunity for me to do something that I never before really thought I should even try.

The rules surrounding my visit had changed, however. I had hoped to meet with both Brumfield and Broadway. Brumfield agreed to the meeting, but Broadway did not after he initially said he would. Paul, meanwhile, had been released months earlier from another institution and had returned to Baton Rouge after serving 13 1/2 years of his 25-year prison sentence.

As I walked into the prison staff’s multipurpose break room, Room 116, Brumfield was already seated at a round brown table. He wore a white shirt, jeans, and Reebok tennis shoes. His hands were shackled to his waist. He was bald, with glasses; a scar was visible over his upper lip, and I noticed he had gold-capped teeth.

I have to admit that I was shocked when I first saw Brumfield. It didn’t seem like this was real. It didn’t seem like I recognized him at all. I didn’t imagine him looking like he did. I thought he was going to be a smaller man, but he was a big guy, broad and wide-shouldered. At thirty- four years old, Brumfield was just two years older than I was. Still, I didn’t think I would see a guy with a bald head and glasses. It had been so many years since I had seen him at his sentencing in a Baton Rouge courtroom in July 1995. I remembered him with hair and looking much different.

After a few moments of awkward silence, Brumfield spoke first. He explained how he had changed as a person, that he shouldn’t have done some of the things that he did in the past and that he had grown into a better human being. He apologized for what happened to my family.

And then he said it.

“I didn’t kill your mother. They got the wrong guy.”

I had been previously warned by Warden Burl Cain to expect that response, and I certainly understood that with an appeal pending, this was the way Brumfield would handle himself. Brumfield has claimed he is mentally retarded, and his appeals have argued that the U.S. Constitution prohibits the execution of mentally retarded people. But judges have ruled that Brumfield’s IQ shows that he’s not retarded. I listened to Brumfield explain how, because of the life he had lived, he would have probably been dead by now if he hadn’t been arrested for this crime that he now claims he didn’t do ... but to which he confessed.

Brumfield also told me that he had “messed over” people on the street like himself, but he had never “messed over” a family like mine, that he had never “messed over” hard-working people. Brumfield also pointed out that he had seven children, including a daughter who was in the courtroom when Brumfield was tried and convicted twelve years earlier, and was now in college. I asked him what his daughter thought of him being in prison, and he responded, “She’s not proud.” Brumfield also showed me the scars on his arms and recalled his shootouts on the streets with others like himself. He told me I needed to understand that when my mom was murdered, the police were looking for somebody. They had to have somebody. “I was that somebody,” he said.

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