Letters to the judge.

It's strange how things from your past come back to haunt you after you've pretty much blocked them out of your mind.  There is one thing in particular that I think will repeat itself in my mind many times.

In July of 2009 I lived with my boyfriend, his parents, his brother, and his brother's wife. I was in the Lehigh Valley visiting my parents and I received a phone call.  The caller informed me that my boyfriend (Kevin) was in jail and that his brother was dead.

Someone killed his brother.

Absolutely frightened, I tried to get in touch with his mother. She was in a psychiatric hospital, crying and screaming, "Nicole, he's dead, I saw him in the driveway, he was blue!"

Sure enough, Brian was dead.  Kevin's dad had shot and killed him with my dad's gun.

It was such a bizarre tragedy.  I came home to police tape, a disheveled bedroom, a little neighborhood boy praying in the front yard, and a big puddle of blood on the basement floor.

I remember visiting his father in jail once a week and Kevin's mother going far off the deep end.  Once she asked me if I could help her gather some of the blood from the carpet, because she wanted to rub it onto the plants in the garden that Brian grew her.

Kevin, horrified by this, took a knife, cut out the section of the carpet that had the blood stain, and threw it away.  We went out for ice cream to get it off of his mind, at which point he realized that he got his brother's blood all over his pants.

It was the worst funeral that I ever attended in my life.  I remember entering the door to a packed catholic church and hearing loud, loud sobbing from Brian's widowed wife.  My dad's eyebrows dropped and under his breath he whispered, "oh my god."

Brian was a scary man.  He threatened to kill me, my family, and pretty much anyone who got in his way.  I remember the utter rage that would consume his body.  I was absolutely horrified of him all of the time.  The stories that I have involving Brian are stories that you would otherwise only see in a movie.

The whole incident that resulted in Brian's death began with him holding a gun and threatening to kill Kevin. Kevin's dad used another gun to try to scare Brian away from Kevin.  To this day, everyone tells me that they're thankful I wasn't home that weekend.  My dad is thoroughly convinced that I would have been killed that night.  Brian hated me more than anything.

So why am I writing about this?  To get it off of my chest.

I recently found four or five letters that we sent to the judge prior to Dave's sentencing.  Including the letter that I sent.  What a total mind fuck.  This, along with many other things in my bizarre life, will never disappear. Just add it to the list, I suppose.