A Cleveland man who shot and killed his three sons while they slept will be put to death. The execution is set for Reginald Brooks. News Channel 5’s Dan Haggerty is live at the Lucasville Correctional Center in Southern Ohio this morning, where the execution is set to take place. Dan, what can you tell us about Reginald Brooks this morning? >> The gurney is already in position when they bring him in.

Reginald Brooks Sr. is 66 years old. He has spent 27 years on death row. And on this Tuesday afternoon in November 2011, that number has finally run out. The execution chamber at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville is quiet. The witnesses are behind the glass. 10 ft away, Beverly Brooks sits with her two sisters and her closest friend.

All four of them are wearing matching white t-shirts. On the front of each shirt are photographs of three boys, Reginald Jr. Vaughn, Nearcos, their sons, her sons, the boys who went to sleep on a Saturday morning in March 1982 and never woke up. Prison staff ask Reginald if he has a final statement. He says nothing.

 Instead, as the pentobarbital begins moving through the IV line, he raises both hands as far as the restraints will allow and extends both middle fingers. He holds them there. Beverly does not move. She sits with her arms linked through her sisters’ arms and she watches. His fingers are still raised when he loses consciousness.

They are still raised when the declaration comes at 2:04 in the afternoon. Reginald Adams Brooks Sr. is pronounced dead with both middle fingers pointed at the mother of the children he murdered. He never admitted to killing those boys, not once in 27 years. To understand how a man arrives at that gurney, you have to go back to a two-family house in East Cleveland, to a woman who worked every day to keep a family alive, and to three young men who played football and spent summer afternoons on a neighbor’s porch,

and went to sleep one Saturday morning while their father was still in the house. This is where it began. Cleveland in the mid-1940s was a city that believed in itself. It sat on the southern shore of Lake Erie, and its economy ran on steel and manufacturing, and the particular energy of a place where people came to work and stayed.

The factories along the Cuyahoga River employed tens of thousands. The neighborhoods that spread outward from the industrial core were filled with working families who owned modest homes on familiar streets, and who measured their lives in decades rather than seasons. People did not pass through Cleveland.

 They planted themselves in it. They raised their children on the same blocks where they had grown up, and watched each other’s families take shape across years of shared proximity. Reginald Adams Brooks was born into that city on March 20th, 1945. He was the younger of two sons. His brother Tyrone was two years older, born in 1943 into the same household, the same public school system, the same working-class world that shaped everything around them.

Tyrone moved through that world with a particular kind of distinction. He graduated from John Hay High School with honors in business administration, a distinction shared by only seven other young men in the school that year. He enlisted in the United States Army. In 1966, he was deployed to South Vietnam and served in active combat.

He came home in 1968 with an honorable discharge and several distinguished medals. He was 25 years old and had survived something that consumed many men his age. He went directly to work at General Motors, joining the Fisher Body Cadillac division. He was, by every measure available to the people around him, a man who had gone out into the world and come back with something to show for it.

Reginald did not enlist. He stayed in Cleveland. And in the early 1970s, he enrolled at Cuyahoga Community College, an institution built for working-class Clevelanders who wanted access to higher education without the cost or distance of a four-year university. He chose a field that reflected a genuine intellectual interest.

 He studied mental health technology. He took courses in psychology. He read widely. He accumulated books, clinical texts, the vocabulary and frameworks of a discipline that examined how human minds functioned and malfunctioned. People who knew him in those years described someone who engaged with the world. He had opinions.

 He could hold a conversation. He was present in the way that a person who reads and thinks is present. He was not remarkable in the sense of being conspicuous. He was an ordinary young man in a working city, attending college, moving through his days without drama, building towards something. The psychology books sat on his shelves.

He understood the clinical frameworks for diagnosing and treating the kinds of conditions that would one day consume him entirely. He had studied those frameworks. He had read those books. None of it would save him from what was coming. He met Beverly Stevens in his mid-20s. She was steady and capable and grounded in the same working-class world he occupied.

They understood each other the way people from the same place and the same generation understand each other, sharing assumptions about what a life was supposed to look like, what it meant to work and raise a family, and stay in the city where you were from. They married. They settled in East Cleveland, a small self-contained municipality that sat immediately east of Cleveland proper, a place of modest homes and long-tenured families, where the same people had lived on the same blocks for decades.

They moved into the lower floor of a two-family house. Upstairs lived a neighbor named Vicky Hayes. Beverly’s sisters, Monica Stevens and Mary Fluker, formed the inner circle of her life. Her close friend Joyce Powell moved through that same world. These were the people Beverly called and counted on.

 They were the people who would stand beside her 30 years later in that execution chamber, arms linked, photographs of three boys printed on their chests. Beverly and Reginald had three sons. Reginald Jr. was the oldest. He was 17 years old in 1982. He played football for Shaw High School alongside his brother Vaughn, who was 15.

 They were students and athletes, and the neighborhood knew them in the easy way that neighborhoods know young men who have found their footing. Matty Bell lived next door to the Brooks house. She was older and occupied the particular role that certain neighbors occupy in residential communities. The constant presence. The one whose house is always open.

She had watched all three boys grow up from her porch. She described them in simple terms. Hard working and kind. She said they came to her porch during summer months and talked with her the way young people talk when they feel genuinely welcome somewhere. Nyarkoh’s was the youngest. 11 years old and in the sixth grade.

 He shared the bedroom with his brothers sleeping in a separate bed while Reginald Jr. and Vaughn occupied the bunk beds. He was the one who absorbed everything around him quietly. The way the youngest member of a family absorbs the world without yet having the vocabulary to name all of it. Patrick Brandon had known the family for about eight years by 1982.

He described Reginald Sr. in those early years the way several people described him. Warm. Funny. Someone people enjoyed being around. Someone who joked on the block. Who was part of the neighborhood social fabric. Who showed up. He was a functioning father and husband in a functioning household on a residential street in East Cleveland.

Beverly worked. Reginald worked. The boys were in school. Matty Bell watched them grow up on her porch. Patrick Brandon joked with the father across the street. Then in 1976 Reginald Brooks stopped going to work. He came home one day and did not go back. Beverly asked for an explanation. What he told her did not fit inside any framework she had for understanding the world.

 He said the people he worked with were trying to poison him. He said they were putting something in his food and his drink. He said he could not stay in a workplace where that was happening to him. He did not return. He did not find another job. He stayed in the house. And from that day forward, everything passed into Beverly’s hands.

 The rent, the groceries, the utilities, the shoes for the boys, every bill that arrived and needed to be paid. She was the only earner in a household of five, and she went to work the next morning as she always had. The paranoia did not stay at the level of the workplace he had left behind. It followed him home and found a new target.

Within months, he began accusing Beverly of poisoning his food. He watched what she placed in front of him with the same guarded vigilance he had once directed at his co-workers. He examined meals before eating them. He questioned what had gone into what she prepared. The woman who was working every day to keep the household alive was, in the framework of his deteriorating mind, a threat to his physical safety.

Beverly sat across the table from a man who had decided she was trying to harm him, and she continued to cook and work and raise their sons. By 1979 and 1980, his behavior had moved into territory that Beverly had no framework for managing. He stopped leaving the house with any regularity. He severed contact with friends.

He reduced his interactions with family. The man Patrick Brandon had described as warm and easy to be around was no longer visible to the neighborhood. He had removed himself entirely. Inside the house, the objects began to change. He tore the telephone from the wall. Not in anger during an argument. He removed it deliberately as a statement about something that existed only inside his mind.

 He destroyed his record albums, a collection built across years of ordinary adult life, and left them gone. He took a ceramic cat that hung on the wall as decoration and scratched out both of its eyes. He worked at it with enough deliberateness that Beverly remembered it precisely and described it years later.

 He took a child’s doll and cut a hole in its chest. Then he hung the doll by its neck from the chandelier where it was visible to everyone in the room beneath it. He told Beverly he believed in voodoo. He said that magic spells could be placed on people, that certain people directed spiritual harm at others through these practices.

 He said this was happening to him. Not as speculation, not as a fear he was working through, as settled fact. He accused Beverly of having an incestuous relationship with their oldest son and returned to the accusation the way a person returns to something they have decided is true. He was jealous of Reginald Jr.

‘s athletic trophies and refused to allow them to be displayed anywhere in the house. The achievements of his own son were something he could not tolerate being made visible. Beverly tried to get him help. She spoke to family members. She looked into what options existed for moving a resistant person towards psychiatric care in East Cleveland in the late 1970s.

Those options were almost nonexistent for a working woman without institutional support or legal resources. She could not force him into treatment. She pushed where she could. It produced nothing. Reginald lived in the house unmedicated and untreated. The psychology books still on his shelves, the clinical texts still there.

 The vocabulary of diagnosis still sitting in the same room as the man who needed it most and could not see himself in any of it. The boys moved through this household with Beverly as their reference point. Reginald Jr. was old enough to understand that something was deeply wrong with his father. Vaughn understood it, too.

They had physically restrained him more than once. They had heard the accusations against their mother. They had seen the doll hanging from the chandelier. Beverly made sure they still went to school. She made sure they ate and had what they needed. She was the wall between what Reginald was becoming and what her sons needed to become.

 And she held that position every single day. By the fall of 1981, Beverly had absorbed 5 years of this. She contacted an attorney. She began the process of filing for divorce. Reginald Jr. had taken a job at a local car wash. He went out on his own initiative, worked for his own compensation, and spent his earnings on a watch.

 It was a small purchase by most measures, but its meaning was specific. He had gone out into the world, earned something, and brought it home as his own. In the fall of 1981, the watch disappeared from the house. Beverly traced it. Reginald Sr. had taken it and pawned it for cash. His own son’s earned property, exchanged for money without a word. Reginald Jr.

 went back to school and football and the neighborhood without the watch he had bought with his own labor. On January 31st, 1982, Reginald Sr. approached Vaughn about his schoolwork. Vaughn did not respond in a way that satisfied his father. Reginald struck him. Beverly came into the room and moved to intervene.

 Reginald pushed her out of the way. Reginald Jr. came into the room and assessed the situation the way a watchful eldest son in this household had learned to assess situations quickly and with an understanding of what was required. The two older brothers physically subdued their father together. They held him until the moment passed and he agreed to stop.

When they let him go Reginald Sr. turned and looked directly at his oldest son. The boy who had just put his hands on him to stop him from hurting people. He looked at him and said “You’re dead.” Beverly heard it. The boys heard it. It was not heat-of-the-moment language. It was a direct declaration spoken to a 17-year-old by his own father immediately after that boy had physically restrained him from committing further harm.

 Beverly held the statement alongside everything else she was already holding. She did not call the police that night. She was already moving toward divorce and the events of January 31st added weight and urgency to a decision she had already made. The boys went to school the next morning. On February 24th, 1982 Reginald Brooks left the house and went to his bank.

He requested a cash advance of $140 on his Visa card. The transaction was approved. He took the cash and came home without explaining to Beverly what he intended to use it for. The following morning he left again. He did not go to a shop near home. He did not go anywhere in East Cleveland or the the neighborhoods where someone might recognize his face.

 He drove to North Olmsted, a suburb on the west side of the Cleveland metropolitan area, separated from East Cleveland by the full width of the city. The distance was deliberate. He was going somewhere nobody knew him. He went to a firearms dealership and selected a .38 special RG model 40 revolver and a box of ammunition.

 The total came to $125. He paid in cash. The cash he had advanced from his Visa card the day before, leaving him with $15 remaining from the advance. Federal law required him to fill out a registration form. The form asked whether the buyer had any prior arrests that would disqualify him from purchasing a firearm.

 Reginald had a prior arrest for grand theft. He did not disclose it. He wrote what he needed to write and signed his name. The dealer processed the sale and handed the revolver and the ammunition across the counter. Reginald Brooks walked out of North Olmsted with a loaded capable revolver and drove back to East Cleveland.

 The gun came into the house without Beverly’s knowledge. On March 4th, a Wednesday, Beverly served Reginald with the divorce papers. He did not react with immediate physical aggression. He took the papers. Later, he called Beverly on the phone and told her he was going to burn them. He also said something else in that same call, something she held on to with particular precision afterward.

He told her that if he did not know better, he would be afraid of himself. Beverly noted the statement and kept moving. The divorce was filed. She was not going to reverse it. That same week, Beverly’s employer told her she was needed at work on the coming Saturday, March 6th. She came home and told Reginald directly she would be leaving in the morning.

He received that information and said nothing. Reginald moved through the house in the days that followed. He had the gun. He had the ammunition. He had Beverly’s Saturday schedule confirmed from her own mouth. He had Beverly’s red American Tourister suitcase, which he opened and packed with the things a person kept when they were building a new life somewhere else.

He packed his high school diploma, his birth certificate, the documents that established identity in a new place that allowed a man to present himself in a city where nobody knew him to start over without the history that East Cleveland carried. He put the .38 special and the additional ammunition inside a black box and placed the box among the personal items in the red suitcase.

He closed the bag and set the combination lock. He held two baggage claim tickets. One went into his wallet between two photographs. The other went into the breast pocket of his jacket. On the evening of March 5th, Beverly came home. The boys were in the house. Reginald was in the house. The household moved through the evening the way evenings in that household moved.

 The surface of ordinary domestic life still holding its shape. Beverly went to sleep early. She had to be at work in the morning. On the morning of Saturday, March 6th, 1982, Beverly rose early and prepared for work. The three boys were asleep in their shared bedroom. Reginald was awake. Beverly left the house between 7:15 and 7:30 in the morning.

She walked out the front door and went to work. Reginald was alone in the house with his sons. He walked the dog. The neighbor saw him. The morning looked like a morning. He came back inside. He went into his son’s bedroom with the .38 special. He shot Reginald Jr. once in the head.

 He shot Vaughn once in the head. He shot Niarchos once in the head through the covers that were pulled up over the youngest boy. All three shots were delivered while the brothers were asleep. None of them had the chance to respond. None of them knew what happened. He turned the stereo up before he left the room. The music moved through the floorboards and into Vicky Hayes’s apartment upstairs where she sat with the memory of a popping sound she could not identify and an explanation she would not find until the afternoon.

 Reginald gathered his bags, the small maroon carry-on he would carry openly, and the baggage claim ticket for the red suitcase already waiting. He walked to the Continental Trailways bus station in Cleveland and purchased a one-way ticket to Las Vegas, Nevada. A ticket agent behind the counter observed him and processed the transaction.

The bus departed Cleveland at approximately 10:40 in the morning and headed west. Vonda Jackson called at some point after 9:00. She called four times. The last three went unanswered. The phone rang inside an empty apartment while the stereo played and three boys lay in their beds and the bus carrying their father crossed into Ohio’s western counties and kept going.

At 3:30 in the afternoon, Beverly came home and walked into the worst thing. She screamed. She left the house. She called the police. Three officers responded and confirmed what she had found. Three deceased males each with a single gunshot wound to the head. No forced entry. No sign of struggle. Nothing in the house disturbed beyond the bedroom where the boys had been sleeping.

Beverly told the officers everything she knew. Within hours, East Cleveland police had traced the bus ticket to a credit card in Reginald Brooks Sr.’s name. The bus had left that morning headed west and all-points bulletin went out along the route. On March 8th, 1982, 2 days after the murders, law enforcement in Beaver City, Utah intercepted the Continental Trailways bus.

 Officers boarded it and found Reginald in his seat. They read him his Miranda rights. He said he understood them and refused to speak. When officers asked about his luggage, he told them he had one piece, the small maroon bag. They processed him and one officer noticed two baggage claim tickets in Reginald’s left breast pocket. He was claiming one bag.

 He had tickets for two. On March 19th, a bus driver reported finding a red suitcase in the Las Vegas station originating from Cleveland. Officers checked Reginald’s inventoried belongings and found the second claim ticket between two photographs in his wallet. On March 20th, the red American Tourister suitcase with a combination lock was delivered to officers in Beaver City.

Beverly had already told investigators her own red suitcase was missing from the house after the murders. She gave them the combination. She gave her permission for them to open it. A warrant was also obtained. Reginald was present when the officers opened the suitcase. When asked for permission, he told them it was not his suitcase.

Inside the black box were a .38 special RG Model 40 revolver, fully loaded with six live rounds, and a box of additional ammunition. Latent fingerprints on the gun box and on two of the cartridges matched Ronald Brooks Sr.’s fingerprints. Gunpowder nitrate residue was present on the right sleeve of his coat.

The gun was traced to the North Olmsted dealer, who identified him as the customer. Ballistics confirmed that two of the three slugs recovered from the scene had been fired from that weapon. The third had sustained too much damage for an absolute match, but was consistent with the others. The physical case was complete.

 The murder weapon was in his possession. His prints were on it. His residue was on his clothing. He had lied about his luggage. He had lied about the suitcase. He had purchased the weapon 9 days before the murders with a cash advance. He had fled the state on the morning the bodies were discovered. He was returned to Ohio in custody.

On March 10th, 1982, a Cuyahoga County Grand Jury returned an indictment. Three counts of aggravated murder with death penalty specifications, one count for each of his sons. He pleaded not guilty. The trial opened on September 19th, 1983, before a three-judge panel in Cuyahoga County. Reginald had waived his right to a jury.

The panel consisted of Judge Daniel O’Corrigan, Judge Harry A. Hanna, and Judge Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who had recently become the first black woman to serve on the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas. The state’s case was entirely circumstantial. No witness had seen Reginald shoot his sons, but the evidence traced every step of his preparation and his flight with documentary and forensic precision.

The ticket agent who sold him the bus ticket, the gun dealer from North Olmsted who identified him in court, ballistics, fingerprints, the gunpowder residue, James Shuel who had seen him walking the dog that morning, Vicky Hayes who heard the popping sound and then the stereo, Vonda Jackson who had called four times and received one answer, Beverly who described the years of deterioration, the paranoia, the accusations, the financial abandonment, the physical aggression, and what she found when she came home that Saturday afternoon.

Reginald sat through the trial and said nothing. He had given his defense team explicit instructions. No opening statement. No witnesses. No cross-examination of certain prosecution witnesses. No closing argument. He refused to testify. He refused to submit to a sodium amytal test his own psychiatrist had suggested might access material that was genuinely blocked by psychological distress.

He gave his attorneys nothing to work with and actively blocked their ability to find alternatives. His defense team had engaged psychiatric and psychological experts. Dr. Aaron Billowits examined him and concluded he suffered from schizophrenia, residual type, but found him competent to stand trial. Dr.

 Dwayne Stanley Alof administered a full battery of psychological tests and found more stark results. A thought disorder. Very impaired reality testing. Poor emotional control. Paranoid schizophrenia. Dr. Kurt Berchinger concluded Reginald suffered from psychogenic amnesia, a condition in which the mind suppresses memory of a traumatic event too overwhelming to consciously process.

“Because of the amnesia,” Berchinger said, “he could form no opinion about Reginald’s mental state at the time of the killings. He had nothing to offer on the question of mitigation.” The prosecution’s response was precise. It pointed to the cash advance, the deliberate drive to North Olmsted, the false statement on the firearms registration form, the knowledge of Beverly’s Saturday schedule, the stereo turned up to muffle the sound of gunshots, the suitcase packed with identity documents, the one-way ticket, the two baggage

claim tickets separated so the gun could travel in the hold while he walked into the Las Vegas terminal looking like a man with nothing to hide. Every step required planning. Every step required a man who knew what he was doing and was managing the logistics of what came next. The prosecution also noted something else.

Reginald had studied psychology at Cuyahoga Community College. The psychology books had been recovered from the house after the murders. A man with formal knowledge of psychological diagnosis was capable of producing the symptoms of a condition he understood. “His amnesia,” the state argued, “was manufactured.

” On September 23rd, 1983, the three-judge panel returned its verdict. Guilty on all three counts of aggravated murder. Unanimous. The panel noted that while the evidence was entirely circumstantial, its totality was overwhelming and left no room for any reasonable hypothesis other than guilt. The sentencing hearing convened on November 29th and 30th, 1983.

The panel weighed the aggravating circumstances against the mitigating factors. The defense presented its mental health case. The state presented its planning case. On November 30th, the panel delivered its determination. The judges acknowledged that Reginald suffered from schizophrenia. They acknowledged the deterioration of the family, the unemployment, the genuine stress of the divorce.

They acknowledged all of it and found that his free will had not been impaired to the degree required under Ohio law to constitute a mitigating factor. They wrote that Reginald, in a single course of conduct, with prior calculation and design, chose to take a gun to the heads of his three sons and execute them through a twisted sense of jealousy, hatred, or despair. He had the ability to refrain.

He did not refrain. Reginald Adamsbrook Sr. was sentenced to death on all three counts, to run concurrently. He was 39 years old. He spent the next 27 years on death row, maintaining his innocence, offering the same theories to anyone who asked. Police involvement, relatives, a look-alike who had been in East Cleveland on the morning of March 6th while he was already on his way to the bus station.

He was not medicated for his schizophrenia during his time on death row. He was not placed in psychiatric treatment. He arrived mentally ill and he remained mentally ill, unmedicated, for the entirety of his incarceration. The illness that every court and every psychiatric expert had acknowledged he carried was never treated.

He lived inside it for nearly three decades. The appeals ran their course through the Ohio Court of Appeals, the Ohio Supreme Court, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, and the Sixth Circuit. Every court reviewed the record and reached the same conclusion. The conviction stood. The sentence stood.

In the fall of 2011, a clemency hearing was held before the Ohio Adult Parole Authority. One of the most significant moments came from Judge Harry Hanna, one of the three men who had sentenced Reginald to death in 1983. He appeared before the parole board in person and submitted a sworn statement saying he would not have voted for the death penalty if he had been shown certain police reports and witness statements that were in the prosecutor’s file but never provided to the defense.

Under Ohio law, the death sentence required a unanimous panel. His vote had been one of three. The board heard him. It still issued a unanimous recommendation to deny clemency. It acknowledged Reginald’s mental illness. It noted that he had shown no remorse, had offered theories it described as nonsensical, and had never once admitted to the killings.

Governor John Kasich denied clemency on November 10th, 2011. The legal channels that remained were exhausted in the final hours. The Sixth Circuit denied the last appeal on the morning of November 15th. Reginald’s attorneys decided not to file with the Supreme Court again. The channels were closed. On the evening of November 14th, 2011, Reginald’s attorneys drove to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility with a DVD they had made of Judge Hanna.

They brought it to Reginald in his cell. They showed it to him. He watched one of the three men who had sentenced him to death say, 28 years later, that he had been wrong. Reginald went to sleep that night at approximately 11:00. His last meal was lasagna, chili cheese fries, garlic bread, Moose Tracks ice cream, chocolate cake, caramel candy, beef jerky, cashews, almonds, and root beer.

He slept until 5:30 in the morning. He made no phone calls. He wrote no letters. At approximately 1:30 in the afternoon on November 15th, 2011, the process began. Reginald was brought to the execution chamber and strapped to the gurney. He wore a white T-shirt and blue pants. Beverly was behind the glass with her sisters Monica and Maria, and her close friend Joyce Powell.

 All four wore matching white T-shirts with photographs of Reginald Jr., Vaughn, and Nyarkos printed on the front. They sat with their arms linked, holding one another. The three boys between them on fabric. Present in the only way they could still be present. Prison staff asked Reginald if he wished to make a final statement.

 He said nothing. He raised both hands as far as the restraints would allow, and extended both middle fingers. He kept them raised. The pentobarbital moved through the IV line. He lost consciousness. His fingers remained raised. At 2:04 in the afternoon, Reginald Adams Brooks, Sr., was pronounced dead. His fingers were still up.

Beverly did not respond. She did not move. She sat with her sisters and the photographs of her sons, and she watched. Beverly’s sister Monica spoke for the family afterward. She said their nephews were gone and would never be replaced. She said something needed to be done about how long a person could live on death row before being put to death, and that the process had taken too long.

She said it had ended a terrible chapter in their lives. She did not use the word closure. She said, “We’ve been dealing with this every day since 1982. This is another chapter in our lives.” Beverly Brooks has never used the word closure, either. She rebuilt her life. She met someone in 1982, and they began dating in 1983.

They were together for 34 years before he passed away. She said she still struggles to accept the way Reginald killed their sons. She keeps her present life private. Reginald Jr. and Von and Nyarko’s are buried in Cleveland. They were 17 and 15 and 11 years old. They went to sleep on a Saturday morning in March, and they did not wake up.

 They did not grow older. They did not get to find out what their lives would become. Maddie Bell next door had watched them grow up on her porch and described them in the same terms every time anyone asked, hard working and kind. Here is the question this case never fully answers. Reginald Brooks was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who had been symptomatic for six years before those boys were killed.

 He was never medicated, never treated, never hospitalized, despite a household that showed every sign of a man in serious psychiatric collapse. Every expert who examined him agreed the illness was real. The judges who sentenced him agreed the illness was real. The state agreed the illness was real. And yet the planning, the cash advance, the deliberate drive across the city, the gun purchase in a suburb where nobody knew his face, the stereo turned up to cover the sound, the suitcase packed with a birth certificate and a loaded revolver, the

one-way ticket to Las Vegas, all of it suggests something more organized than a mind that had completely lost its grip on reality. So, here is what you have to decide. Was Reginald Brooks a mentally ill man who had been failed by every system around him and who finally broke in the worst possible way? Or was he a man who understood exactly what he was doing, who used the language of mental illness as a shield, and who left three boys dead in their beds because he chose to? Beverly has already made her decision.

She [bell] believes he killed those boys to punish her for the divorce. She went to that execution chamber and she sat behind the glass and she watched him die and she held her son’s photographs against her chest the whole time. What do you think? Okay.