Never a Number

A journalist, a murderer, an improbable friendship

Fourteen

“Miami”

An old saw about a bus hitting a parolee as he exits the prison gate came to mind as the direction of Ben Brim’s parole hearing pointed to him stepping from 44 years of confinement into a world locked down by Covid.

The day of hearing marked six weeks since the university that employed me as a staff writer announced the abrupt closing of the campus until further notice. March 12, 2020, it turned out, marked the last time I would ever work in an office.

Faculty and students scattered far and wide put my turning out stories for the school and website alumni magazine on hold.

A paid, no-show job and the eerie emptiness of shuttered New York saddled me with a lot of unfilled time - until the parole hearing plunged me down a rabbit hole from which I’ve yet to emerge.

I can’t say what prompted me to reach out to Brim in the first place. But I do know the possibility of a story emerging from a one-off letter to a stranger I knew by name only was not on the radar.

As things progressed, even the implausible sequence of events that aligned me with Brim’s prosecutor and Washington & Lee student legal team seemed, at best, a half interesting anecdote to share over beers.

Then came the parole hearing that laid out the life of a soul who, from day one, never stood a chance.

The reporting began with multiple searches in combinations of mass incarceration, cognitive impairment, parole, race, poverty, criminal and social justice, educational and institutional neglect. The results provided few leads on studies, scholars and advocates with a focus on developmental disability and parole.

Reviewing my hearing notes, an arrow from “Buckingham” to an unfamiliar name returned me where the whole thing started: The inmate finder link on the Virginia Department of Corrections website:

Pernell Jefferson

1016207

Black

Male

50

Buckingham Correctional Center

Multiple Life

The Cleveland Browns came calling after Jefferson, a diminutive (5’1”) defensive back, capped an All-American senior season at Division III Guilford (N.C.) College (now University) by leading the nation in punt return yardage.

Homesick and filled with self-doubt, Jefferson walked away from the team’s training camp and his dream of an NFL career before the first preseason game.

Greensboro sportswriter Wilt Browning chronicled his downfall in Deadly Goals: The True Story of an All-American Football Hero (Down Home Press, 1997: ). A history of abusing anabolic steroids and violence toward women dating back to high school that culminated in the 1989 stalking, murder, and disposing of the charred remains of an on and off girlfriend in a dry Virginia creek bed. Authorities eventually caught up with Jefferson in Florida, earning him the prison moniker “Miami.”

Multiple life terms meant Jefferson entered the system with a slim hope of ever getting out - odds that didn’t deter him from seeking redemption through voluntary participation in a comprehensive medical study connecting performance-enhancing drugs to off-field violence and the establishment an outreach program to counsel high school athletes on the perils of steroid use.

The trust built up through the years over time landed “Miami” a prized job in the Buckingham administrative offices, a post from which he could act as a conduit between prison officials and the inmate population.

Jefferson’s rehabilitative efforts formed the crux of the case for his release the Washington & Lee “Time Served” clinic presented to the chair of a 2018 parole hearing.

The chair, unswayed, recommended that the full board deny the petition.

Jefferson the next year alerted W&L to a Buckingham friend coming up for parole a 29th time in early 2020; an illiterate resident of his unit for whom he’d been ghost-writing responses to letters from a journalist in New York.

The unfamiliar name identified, I shot an email to Jefferson; he got back to me right away

“Ben is very docile, easy-going, non-violent. He gets along with everybody. In life we make bad decisions but that does not mean we are bad to the core. He expressed to me he is still sadden(ed) for being responsible for taking a life...by nature he isn’t a violent person.”

In my reply, I conveyed cautious optimism that Brim might be released in the foreseeable future.

To which, Jefferson responded, “One of the things (Brim) always will tell anybody who would listen (is) ‘the first thing I am going to do is get me a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a liter of Dr. Pepper soda. I don’t think he has ever had the Colonel’s chicken (he must) have seen it advertised.”

The death toll was inching toward 136,000 when Jefferson and I began corresponding in early summer.

I was sheltering in place, minus dog walks, runs through Central Park, bicycling (never again will I ride up the middle of 6th Avenue from Greenwich Village to Central Park without fear of being mowed down by a bus, cab, or Uber and risking visits to Manhattan supermarkets with three-foot aisles that turned social distancing into a mere suggestion.

A (ultimately apocryphal) prediction of July and August heat slowing the rate of infections however was the only encouragement I needed to move from tedious online research to on-the-ground reporting.

Even if it meant driving 500 miles in the teeth of a pandemic to a place I once had good reason to believe I would never set foot in again.