Never a Number
A journalist, a murderer, an improbable friendship
TWO
May, 2021
... My first face-to-face meeting with Brim occurred in the driveway of a suburban Richmond halfway house. He was six months removed from prison, having spent better than two-thirds of his life - forty-five years - in confinement.
The memory of Judge Hooker’s tirade certainly contributed to a lingering memory of an otherwise unremarkable trial I covered for a small Virginia daily at the onset of a reporting career stretching across six decades.
More persistent was a passing thought that tugged at me for years, then decades, after I observed a handcuffed Brim leave the dock - had a guy around my age really gone away forever?
My curiosity in 2014 or thereabouts drew me to a link on the Virginia Department of Corrections website. On the outside chance it might include parole information, I punched a name from the past into the inmate locator search bar and discovered:
Ben Brim
60/Black/Male
Inmate ID #1057564
Buckingham Correctional Center
Life Sentence
It made no sense.
A Justice Department survey puts the average time served by an individual convicted of a single count of non-premeditated murder in a state court at fifteen years.
Brim was closing in on three times the average.
Had he killed a guard?
Maimed a fellow inmate?
Or, per Judge Hooker, had the Commonwealth of Virginia in fact thrown away the key?
A cursory search of court records and local newspaper archives disclosed nothing about consequent felonies; the odds of unsealing correctional system files with a Freedom of Information request appeared slim at best.
Time passed.
I accepted a buyout from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, walked out of a newsroom a final time, and moved to New York.
Brim’s status never changed.
Finally, something (what, exactly, I still can’t explain) prompted me to reach out to a resident of a Virginia correctional facility who most certainly didn’t know I existed.
I never envisioned the letter reshaping the trajectory of one life.
Let alone two....