LUCASVILLE, Ohio – Reginald Brooks Sr. was pronounced dead at 2:04 p. m.
Tuesday, his middle fingers raised in a final defiant gesture toward the mother of the three sons he murdered 27 years ago. The 66-year-old former mental health technology student offered no final words, no apology, no admission of guilt. He simply extended both hands as far as the restraints allowed and held that pose until the pentobarbital stopped his heart.
Beverly Brooks sat 10 feet away, her arms linked with her two sisters and her closest friend. All four women wore matching white T-shirts bearing photographs of Reginald Jr. , Vaughn, and Nearcos – the boys who went to sleep on a Saturday morning in March 1982 and never woke up.
She did not flinch. She did not look away. She watched her ex-husband die with his fingers pointed at her.
The execution at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville ended a legal odyssey that spanned nearly three decades. Brooks had spent 27 years on death row, maintaining his innocence through every appeal, every psychiatric evaluation, every clemency hearing. He never once admitted to killing his own children.
He never explained why he packed a suitcase with a loaded revolver, a birth certificate, and a one-way bus ticket to Las Vegas on the morning their bodies were discovered.
The case against Brooks was entirely circumstantial, but the evidence was overwhelming. No witness saw him pull the trigger. Yet the trail of his actions told a story of deliberate planning.
Nine days before the murders, he withdrew $140 in cash from his Visa card. The next day, he drove to a gun dealership in North Olmsted, a suburb far from his East Cleveland neighborhood, where no one would recognize him. He purchased a .
38 special revolver and a box of ammunition for $125. He lied on the federal registration form, failing to disclose a prior arrest for grand theft.
On March 4, 1982, Beverly served Brooks with divorce papers. He called her later that day and said something she would remember with precise clarity for the rest of her life. He told her that if he did not know better, he would be afraid of himself.
Two days later, she left for work at 7:15 a. m. Her three sons were asleep in their shared bedroom.
Brooks was awake.
He walked the dog. A neighbor saw him. The morning looked ordinary.
Then he went back inside, entered the boys’ bedroom, and shot each one in the head while they slept. Reginald Jr. , 17, was a football player at Shaw High School.
Vaughn, 15, played alongside him. Nearcos, 11, was in the sixth grade. He was shot through the covers pulled up over his head.
Brooks turned up the stereo before leaving the room to muffle the sound.
He packed his bags. He carried a small maroon carry-on and held a baggage claim ticket for a red American Tourister suitcase he had already checked. He walked to the Continental Trailways bus station in Cleveland and purchased a one-way ticket to Las Vegas.
The bus departed at 10:40 a. m. Beverly came home at 3:30 p.
m. She found her sons. She screamed.
She called the police.
Within hours, investigators traced the bus ticket to Brooks’ credit card. An all-points bulletin went out along the route. Two days later, law enforcement in Beaver City, Utah, boarded the bus.
Brooks was in his seat. He refused to speak. He claimed he had only one piece of luggage.
But officers found two baggage claim tickets in his left breast pocket. The red suitcase was later recovered from the Las Vegas bus station. Inside, they found the revolver, fully loaded with six live rounds, and a box of additional ammunition.
His fingerprints were on the gun box and on two of the cartridges. Gunpowder nitrate residue was on his coat sleeve.
At trial, Brooks refused to cooperate with his own defense. He instructed his attorneys to make no opening statement, call no witnesses, and deliver no closing argument. He refused to testify.
He refused to submit to a sodium amytal test that might have accessed blocked memories. His mental health experts diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia. One psychiatrist concluded he suffered from psychogenic amnesia – a condition in which the mind suppresses memory of a traumatic event.
But the state argued that Brooks, who had studied psychology at Cuyahoga Community College, was capable of manufacturing symptoms.
The three-judge panel found him guilty on all three counts of aggravated murder. They acknowledged his schizophrenia but determined that his free will had not been impaired to the degree required under Ohio law to constitute a mitigating factor. They wrote that Brooks, 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 was sentenced to death on November 30, 1983.
For 27 years, Brooks sat on death row, unmedicated for his schizophrenia. The illness that every court and every psychiatric expert had acknowledged was never treated. He lived inside it for nearly three decades, maintaining his innocence, offering theories that involved police involvement, relatives, and a look-alike who had been in East Cleveland on the morning of the murders.
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 Brooks 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 Brooks’ 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 10, 2011.
The legal channels that remained were exhausted in the final hours. The Sixth Circuit denied the last appeal on the morning of November 15. Brooks’ attorneys decided not to file with the Supreme Court again.
The channels were closed.
On the evening of November 14, Brooks’ attorneys drove to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility with a DVD they had made of Judge Hanna. They brought it to Brooks 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. Brooks 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 p. m. on November 15, the process began.
Brooks 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 Nearcos 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 Brooks 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 p. m.
, 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. , Vaughn, and Nearcos are buried in Cleveland. They were 17, 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.
Matty Bell, the neighbor 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.
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 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 sons’ photographs against her chest the whole time.
What do you think?