The Unforgivable Charlie Brooks

Dick Reavis invites me to hop in his canary yellow ’74 Volkswagen Beetle. We’re taking his dog, a handsome mutt named Haki, to the dog park, and Reavis thinks it would make for a better atmosphere to chat — barks be damned.

I got shotgun, which means Haki has to ride in the back, but it also means my seat is pulled all the way forward. If you’ve ever been in an old VW Bug, you’re aware that these fascinating, rear-engined vehicles have a thin piece of vinyl-clad metal that faintly resembles a dashboard. My knees are, for all intents and purposes, butting up to the windshield. After a two-minute search for the buckle to my seatbelt, we’re finally dog park-bound.

With my tape recorder rolling, I first ask Reavis how long he’s had the car. “Forty-five years,” he says in a rasp that I suspect is the result of an infatuation with Pall Malls. I quickly do the math in my head — a simple arithmetic problem, thank God — and realize he had the car for five years before the state’s execution of Charles Brooks Jr. I make the not-so-far-fetched assumption this is the car that, while on staff at Texas Monthly, he had driven to and from Huntsville’s Walls Unit to interview Brooks, “at least three but no more than six times.” This is the car he drove home after he had coaxed Brooks, a convicted murderer who had been sitting on death row for four years, into finally admitting that he was the one responsible for the killing of David Gregory, a 26-year-old mechanic with a wife and a son.

We’re on a friendly Highland Park road in Reavis’ home base of Dallas, hopping from neighborhood to neighborhood at a decent clip — Reavis isn’t one to pump the brakes for speed bumps. And through the cacophony of his car’s rattles and high-pitched acceleration, Reavis chats about his days as a civil rights activist in Marengo County, Alabama. This was around the time when the Voting Rights Act was signed into law. Reavis had marched with and met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on a few occasions. But, as Reavis humbly puts it, “If King were alive today, he wouldn’t know me from the next person.”

When we arrive at the park, Reavis grabs a chair and comfortably perches his foot on a wooden deck clearly made for canines. It’s chilly out, and Reavis’ small frame is well covered by a large black coat, gloves, and a well-used Bernie Sanders cap. He’s now 76 and a case of emphysema makes his sentences a little shorter than they once were, but he remains affable, nonetheless. He routinely squints his eyes and cocks his head back when he speaks, as if searching through his large file cabinet of a brain to conjure the memories of his phenomenal stories — of which there are surely thousands. As we ruminate over the state of journalism — from one reporter to another — I’m wondering when I should bring up Brooks.

Reavis was one of the few reporters who spoke to Charles Brooks Jr. when he was on death row, and he was someone who, if you’re aware of the information Reavis was able to obtain, had gained a certain level of trust with the death row inmate. He interviewed him the day before he died. He was in the Death Room at the Walls Unit when the state injected Brooks with a lethal dose of chemicals — the first time such an execution had ever taken place. He heard Brooks’ last words, and he saw his eyes close for the final time. Eventually, Reavis, catching himself mid-sentence, says, “We’re supposed to be talking about Charlie.”

“Oh, right, but I’m honestly just enjoying chatting with you,” I respond.

“I felt sorry for him in the end,” he says. “They came around a couple days before his execution and asked what he wanted for his last meal, and he said fish. But, as it turns out, the commissary at the prison didn’t have any fish on the day Charlie was to be executed. And, so, they had to substitute something, and I thought that was cruel. For $5 they could’ve gone to the supermarket and bought some fish. It didn’t make sense. I went out and had fish that day, I guess, in remembrance of him.”

I remind him that, in his story for Texas Monthly, Brooks had requested shrimp and oysters, not fish.

“Well, I can’t remember, but I know I had fish that night.”

The last meal, and Brooks eventually settling on steak, was something that bothered Reavis. He would bring it up a few more times during our conversation — always perplexed as to why Brooks couldn’t have gotten the meal he wanted.

Throughout the course of our chat, I realize that feelings toward and about a killer can shift rapidly — a feeling of sympathy subsides once one is reminded of the horrors the convicted murderer committed. “Charlie killed an honest worker,” Reavis says bluntly just a few minutes after his story about Brooks’ last meal. And with those words, I’m suddenly awakened to the realization that Brooks extended Gregory no such privileges when he shot him in the face. Why should I feel so badly for Brooks? Why should I feel sorry for a man who took another person’s life? And yet, I still do. And, clearly, so does Reavis.

Reavis’ story about the execution of Charlie Brooks, “Charlie Brooks’ Last Words,” would hit newsstands in February of 1983, two months after Brooks’ execution. If you’ve never read the article, you should. Like, maybe even now. Within the text of Reavis’ 7,500-word article was the revelation that Brooks, in a round-about admittance that Reavis got on tape, had indeed killed Gregory. A confession he had never before given in front of a court or to the media.

Brooks was arrested with another man, an accomplice, a friend named Woodie Loudres. They were both in the motel room off Rosedale Avenue where a bound, gagged, and defenseless Gregory was killed. But someone had to have done it. Someone had to have been the one to pull the trigger. According to Reavis, when the prosecutors got the two of them together and asked who did it, they pointed at each other.

Despite never recovering a murder weapon and not knowing who committed the final deed, both Brooks and Loudres were found guilty in separate murder trials and sentenced to death. As the pair entered the long process of filing writs and appeals, Loudres would strike pay dirt when an appeals court overturned his conviction, and he subsequently plea-bargained for a 40-year sentence. Loudres would serve only 11 years, making parole in 1989. Upon doing a little digging, I found out Loudres died in Fort Worth in April of this year. An unvarnished video of friends and family members eulogizing Loudres can be found on the Greater True Light Baptist Church Facebook page.

Brooks didn’t have the same luck. But he also had the misfortune of being seen with a gun. He had earlier in the day threatened Emma Speers, the wife of the owner of the New Lincoln Motel, by pointing the gun in her face and telling her, “If you say anything, I’ll blow you and your daughter’s brains out.” But Brooks remained mum on whether he pulled the trigger that killed Gregory.

“Who shot the dude, you or Woodie Loudres?” Reavis asked Brooks in one of his interviews. And Brooks would respond with a canned answer, “I regret my participation in the events of that day.” But when Reavis pressed, Brooks finally said, “I don’t want to say too much. Let’s just say that, uh, you know, the gun could have gone off.” Reavis found a court transcript that said the gun with which Brooks threatened Speers was a long-barreled revolver. As Reavis posits in his article, revolvers don’t go off on their own accord. “If you know anything about revolvers, you know that’s impossible,” Reavis tells me. “You can take [a revolver] and bang it on this table, and it won’t go off. It just couldn’t have gone off.”

When he confronted Brooks with the new information, Brooks finally gave insight into what actually happened. “Yeah. I’m not talking about accidentally discharge as in, let’s say, like an automatic. In order for a revolver to discharge, you have to either cock the hammer or either pull the trigger,” he told Reavis. “What I’m saying is that, OK, like, if you’ve got the hammer cocked, okay, it can be an accident when you twitch that finger. That don’t, that trigger can be pulled deliberately or by accident.”

 Whether by accident or the effects of a lingering heroine high, it didn’t matter. Charles Brooks had made a stunning admission to the Texas Monthly journalist: He pointed a gun at Gregory, cocked back the hammer, and it was his finger that sent the bullet toward Gregory’s face.

As Reavis reasoned in his article, “They had picked the right outlaw.”

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Charlie was to shake his head back and forth, from side to side as if to say, “No,” if he felt any pain. This was the plan — straightforward and seemingly easy to decipher.

This was the deal Brooks cut with Reavis in the days leading up to his execution. You see, this was the first time this had been done. This was the first time ever, anywhere, that someone would be put to death by lethal injection. The notorious electric chair, Old Sparky, a foredooming seat that 361 condemned inmates had previously taken, was no longer the centerpiece of the Death Room. In its place was a gurney with large wheels and a thin mattress. A combination of eight straps were affixed to the white-sheeted bed, ensuring any convicted killer would only have the use of his or her neck. This sterile cot is where Brooks would lie down and receive three separate drugs — sodium thiopental, Pavulon, and potassium chloride — intravenously that would put him to sleep, paralyze his muscles, and stop his heart, respectively. “It’s the same way they put down dogs,” Reavis tells me. While some vets use potassium chloride for euthanasia, most use a barbiturate called Pentobarbital (the drug Texas, today, uses for executions), but the idea is the same: to humanely stop a heartbeat. And this wasn’t a new way to die. The idea of using intravenous drugs to intentionally end a life has been around since 1870, but this was the first time that it would be forced upon someone in a public setting. So, there was a natural sense of curiosity. Would he simply fall asleep? Or would he feel pain? Brooks, being the first, clearly felt a need to communicate, in some way, his experience. And the shaking of the head made sense. Not only was the motion of his neck one of the few things Brooks would be able to control, but he was also very particular about what his last words should be, and he didn’t want any verbal cues to disrupt his phrasing.

Not only was Charlie Brooks in line to be the first man executed via lethal injection, but he was also about to become the first man executed in Texas since 1964, when judicial challenges resulted in a national moratorium on executions in the U.S.

In a 1972 case heard by the Supreme Court, Furman v. George, the justices, in a narrow 5-4 decision, abolished the death penalty. Their ruling concluded that such sentencing was in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Three justices argued there was an arbitrariness when it came to how states imposed the death penalty and found a racial bias against Black defendants — especially in the cases of Black defendants committing crimes against White victims (as was the case with Brooks). Essentially, some murderers spend the rest of their lives in prison, and some get executed. And the court didn’t see any consistency in a state’s rationale regarding who should and should not be executed. It appeared that not all killers were created equal — which is unconstitutional.

Four years later, after state legislatures passed laws to comply with the Furman ruling — making their sentences less arbitrary — the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of Troy Leon Gregg in Georgia, opening the flood gates on the potential executions of 1,050 death row inmates. As the Supreme Court stated in its decision, “The most marked indication of society’s endorsement of the death penalty for murder is the legislative response to Furman.”             

Now that the Supreme Court effectively lifted the moratorium, a new method of execution would soon sweep the nation. Following the Gregg ruling, a Dallas reporter named Tony Garrett filed a suit seeking permission to film executions. Garrett’s initial victory in federal court led to Texas legislatures approving a more palatable, primetime-worthy method. Something less unsightly and unsettling than a man being jolted by 2,000 volts of electricity in an upright wooden chair. This led to lethal injection becoming the new form of execution in Texas — quickly following Oklahoma’s footsteps, which became the first state to adopt the method three months prior. Yet, Garrett’s suit was overturned when the case reached the Fifth Circuit. Thus, why you will never see a video on YouTube of a state’s execution of a man or woman. Regardless, lethal injection remained the method of choice and is to this day the primary method of execution in 28 of 29 states that authorize the death penalty.

But moral and humanitarian debates over lethal injection persist, and the procedure has come under intense scrutiny over the past several years. Botched executions, new scientific evidence, a lack of trained medical staff on hand, and difficulty receiving a supply of the drugs have led to a widespread reexamination of the practice, which has culminated in several lawsuits claiming that lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. The majority of these suits circle around the drugs midazolam and potassium chloride. Prisoners claim midazolam causes fluid to build up in the lungs, creating the feeling of suffocation, and potassium chloride induces a pain “similar to being burned alive.”

Six states currently use the above drugs in their execution protocols — Texas, which now uses a single drug in its protocol, pentobarbital, is not one of them. But the Lone Star State hasn’t gotten off scot-free. In recent years, Texas has accumulated its fair share of challenges to its use of lethal injection, including a 2018 suit that went to the Supreme Court — where the challenge was denied. In spite of the opposition, Texas isn’t slowing down its cadence. The state has become renowned for the amount of death row inmates it executes — a rather morbid reputation that’s either positive or negative depending on to whom you speak. And there’s been a notable uptick in executions since the state switched its method to lethal injection, with Texas doubling its execution rate since the change in method.

Reavis and I make the trek back to his house, and we continue our conversation in his home office. He takes out a red pack of Pall Mall cigarettes and asks if I mind if he smokes. I tell him it’s no problem.

He goes through five cigarettes during the remainder of our conversation. Though he’s clearly someone who’s been doing it, smoking, for a while — perhaps even an expert, if you will — he relights each cigarette no less than four times, frequently allowing the ember to die. Whether it’s Dick getting too caught up in talking or a way to manage his nicotine intake, I can’t tell, but the conversation seems to naturally pick up when he’s got a cigarette between his index and middle fingers.

We talk about Brooks intermittently and get on the subject of lethal injection and his pledge to Brooks to watch for his sign.

“I do believe that dying by lethal injection is probably more humane than dying by electric chair or hanging,” Reavis says when I ask him about lethal injection. “If I were to face execution, I’d rather it be by firing squad.” Which, by the way, was the method chosen by Gary Gilmore, a Utah resident whose life, crimes, and execution became the subject of Normal Mailer’s “Executioner’s Song,” and who became the first person, post-moratorium, to be executed.

I remind Reavis of a study he referenced in his story on Brooks that I found interesting. In 1953, the British Medical Society studied a proposal for the use of lethal injection. Its conclusion argued that, not only is it unsuitable on Hippocratic grounds, but also, in a bit of Old West logic, men die best on their feet.

“Human nature is so constituted,” the report said, “as to make it easier for a condemned man to show courage and composure in his last moments if the final act required of him is a positive one, such as walking to the scaffold, than if it is mere passivity, like awaiting the prick of a needle.” 

“It is kind of pitiful, isn’t it?” Reavis says in response to my query.

And I’m supposing that this was the consensus among those who watched as Brooks, strapped to a gurney, patiently awaited the last bit of pain he would, hopefully and theoretically, ever feel: a prick. But whether he felt more than that, we’ll never know. Reavis kept his end of the bargain; he watched for Brooks’ signal. Two minutes after the injection began, right as he would begin to feel the effects of the drug, Charlie slowly moved his head from shoulder to shoulder. He made only one revolution of a “no” signal, and his head stopped midway through its second turn to the left. Was he in pain? Reavis remains, to this day, uncertain.

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The day Charlie died, he went by a different name — Shareef Ahmad Abdul-Rahim. This translates roughly to “Noble Praiseworthy Servant of Allah the Merciful.” Like many Black prisoners, Brooks — as we’ll continue to call him through the remainder of this story — had given himself fully and sincerely to the teachings of the Nation of Islam, a sect of the religion that had engaged in prisoner outreach since 1942. He tried Christianity but, “it didn’t do for [him] what [he] wanted.” You see, as Shareef, Brooks saw the errors of his ways. He was no longer the drug-abusing thief with two estranged children and a long history of wrongdoings and run-ins with the law — and steady stints in and out of prison sprinkled in. He was now a noble servant of Allah. But such a conversion, such a pledge to improve as a human being, would not expunge his murder of David Gregory.

But Brooks was hopeful, even during the last few days of his life, that he would die an old man — that he would continue his work as an Islamic convert well into his golden years. That tune changed just hours before he was to be put to death. Brooks was now fully aware that, in this life, he would receive no clemency. But perhaps he could, at the very least, receive mercy from Allah in the hereafter.

Interestingly, to read Brooks’ biography, one doesn’t get the impression of a man who was dealt a bad hand. The namesake of his father, a cutter at the old Swift & Co Meatpacking Plant here in Fort Worth, Brooks grew up in a religious and solidly middle-class family. He went to I.M. Terrell High School, where he played football and was considered one of the popular kids. He married his high school sweetheart. And, when his father, Charlie Sr., died at the age of 55 — just before his 14th birthday — Brooks inherited his new Chevy and a pension made in his name.

Dick Reavis tells me that Brooks was handsome, soft-spoken, and intelligent. “You wouldn’t know him from anybody else,” he says. “What was key to the crime was he was a heroin addict when it happened. Well, in prison, of course, he wasn’t doing heroin. And I’m sure he was a different man from what I would’ve known on the street.”

Somewhere along the way, Brooks got hooked on drugs. According to Reavis’ story, Charlie rebuffed the idea that he was a heroin addict. Instead, it appears, he was an indiscriminatory junkie — someone who did everything under the sun, whatever was available in the moment. A high is a high, no matter the source.

He became estranged from his wife and two sons when he started slipping in and out of prison. His first stint came in 1962 on a burglary charge in Baton Rouge. From there, it was a slippery slope. As Reavis puts it, “Charlie did not grow up in our prisons. He grew in them.”

Despite the intense media coverage Charlie received around the time of his execution, there’s nothing fascinating, dramatic, or story-worthy about the day Brooks killed David Gregory. This is likely the reason Brooks’ story seldom gets repeated. Forty-six years after he committed the crime and 40 years after he was executed, Brooks’ name garners a confused reaction if brought up in casual conversation. This in the face of his status as the first man to die by lethal injection. No true crime documentary has ever been made, no book has ever been written, and no status of infamy has ever been achieved. And, in all likelihood, they never will.

High on heroin and buzzed on booze, Brooks and Loudres were hanging out at a liquor store on Rosedale Street on the morning of Dec. 14, 1976, when a known prostitute, thief, heroin addict, and alleged roommate of Loudres, Marlene Smith, picked the pair up in a car she was borrowing in exchange for sexual services. The three then drove to the New Lincoln Motel, a “hot-sheet inn for prostitutes and shooting gallery for addicts,” where Smith and Loudres lived in Room 15. There, the three took heroin and subsequently drove to the home of Brooks’ mom, where they drank. The plan after that brief stay was to go shoplifting in Fort Worth’s southside, but as they were driving onto East Lancaster, their car broke down. After pushing it into a service station and unable to get it started, Brooks walked to a nearby used car lot to “get a car to test drive.” That particular lot required someone to go with him, and David Gregory, a paint and body repairman, was “told to accompany [Brooks] around the block.” Somewhere on the way back to the New Lincoln Motel, Brooks and Loudres bound and gagged Gregory and threw him in the trunk of the car. According to the police report, “[Brooks] released [Gregory] from the trunk of the car and took him at gunpoint into Room 17 of the motel. Shots were heard soon after.”

I ask Reavis what Brooks was like the day before he died.

“He was … not calm.”

“Scared?”

“Scared or worried; he was dreading it. His demeanor had changed.”

Outside the walls of the Huntsville prison, things were frenzied and chaotic. Brooks’ lawyers — desperately seeking an 11th hour stay — were working ‘round the clock. Demonstrators, gathered where they could be seen from a small window inside the Death Room, chanted incessantly — mostly looking for justice to be served. Media, jumpy as ever, were primed to get scoops and break news. But inside the Walls Unit — so named for its red brick façade — things were decidedly calmer. Brooks, quiet and scared, played chess with a guard, ate his last meal, and later wrote letters, prayed, and mused over his life. He was to be executed in just a few hours, at midnight.

His ex-wife and two children showed up around 11 p.m., looking to witness the execution and hoping to get one last glimpse of their estranged father. He didn’t want them there. He didn’t want them to see him like this. According to Reavis, “the poor kids didn’t know what was going on. It was a sad thing. That might’ve been in my story.” It was.

Brooks had gotten a new girl while he was in prison — a Fort Worth nurse named Vannessa Sapp. The two shared letters before the pair became an item. They went through the normal evolution of a relationship — courting, dating, exclusivity, followed by engagement. The judge on Charlie’s case, David Belew, offered to marry the two, but the couple never technically took the plunge.

Sapp would be in the room when Charlie died, along with Dick Reavis; Larry Amin Sharrieff, Brooks’ spiritual advisor; and about 20 other witnesses. It was just before midnight when Charlie walked into the room with a catheter already in his right arm, and he calmly lay down on the gurney.

Reavis was shocked by how resigned Charlie seemed, as though he was expecting him to show resistance — some kind of instinct for self-preservation to kick in. But he didn’t show any. He calmly allowed the guards to strap him in the gurney and said his last words, a prepared statement in both Arabic and English.

“Ashhadu an lā ilāh illā Allāh,           

Ashhadu an lā ilāh illā Allāh.           

Ashhadu anna Muhammadan Rasūl Allāh,           

Ashhadu anna Muhammadan Rasūl Allāh.

I bear witness that there is no God but Allah.           

I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.

Inna li-Allāh,           

wa-inna ilāyhi raji^cūn           

Verily unto Allah do we belong,           

Verily unto Him do we return.”

The drugs were then administered, and he mouthed “I love you,” to Sapp. While fading, and likely fighting to stay awake, he let out an audible “Ahllll …” He then closed his eyes and lay motionless.

Reavis later found out, through Brooks’ spiritual advisor, Larry Amin Sharrieff, what Charlie was trying to say when he let out the noise before his consciousness waned. He was saying “Allah u Akbar,” meaning “Allah the Most Great.” Charlie had wanted to say these three words after he completed his monologue. He wanted these to be his final words. This, Charlie had hoped, would gain him admittance to paradise.

After seven minutes, a physician pronounced Brooks dead.

The following day, a headline for United Press International read, “Condemned Man Dies Peacefully.”

Norma Morrison, the mother of David Gregory, didn’t stay up for the execution. The following day, she said “It would be very unfeeling for me to sit up and gleefully wait for the execution of a man. I have feelings also for the people that he’s leaving behind in his own family.”

She went on, “I would like the message to be strong and clear that if you kill someone, you pay. He executed my son. I feel if you can execute someone, you should graciously accept your own execution.”

Days later, Charlie’s body was brought back to Fort Worth where he had two funerals — the first for his Islam faith at a mosque on the southside and the second at a Baptist church off Ramey Avenue in Stop Six. At the second funeral, Charlie’s estranged son, Derrek, spoke to the congregation.

Eight years ago, Derrek gave an interview with the Texas After Violence Project, where he remembered what he said at his father’s funeral.

“I didn’t know my dad a lot, so I didn’t know whether to call him dad, daddy, papa, Charlie Jr,” Derrek told those gathered to pay their respects. “I wasn’t sure what to call him because I didn’t really know him like a son should know a father. But, if he had lived, I would’ve been able to find that answer out. But they killed him, so I never got to find out [what to call him].”

They don’t make journalists like Dick Reavis anymore. Heck, I’m not even sure they make people like Reavis anymore. He’s an unabashed Marxist, or “if people call me a communist or anarchist, I don’t complain,” who got his start in journalism working for the left-wing press.

He was someone who fought for, and routinely wrote about, those who were marginalized — those who didn’t get a fair shake in life thanks to circumstances beyond their control. While he majored in philosophy, he’s got an honorary degree from journalism’s school of hard knocks. He’s an old-school and highly ethical reporter whose unpolished nature is what makes his writing and his advocacy so alluring. The way I see it: We need people like Reavis. Someone’s gotta be the radical. Someone’s gotta fight systems and status quos. And Reavis is plum pleased to do just that.

But, in a slight curveball, when it came to Brooks and how he feels about the state executing him, Dick Reavis is on the fence.

“Everybody who read the story thought I wrote it to oppose the death penalty. But truth is, to this day, I don’t know what to make of the death penalty.”

Reavis plays coy concerning whether he felt Brooks deserved to die. He has a very pragmatic approach to the subject of capital punishment — citing studies that prove, in some cases, rehabilitation’s faults and impracticalities — Reavis thinks, for some people, it’s better that the state executes them.

“I think there are individual circumstances in which I would be in favor of [the death penalty],” Reavis says. “With Brooks, he had killed an honest worker, so I thought ‘so what if they execute him?’ It wasn’t they ought not to or they ought to execute him. It was so what? That was my attitude.”

I don’t know whether it’s normal to have mixed feelings about capital punishment. I don’t know if people are in the same boat that Dick and I both find ourselves. It isn’t something I bring up when having dinner with friends, so I don’t have a good pulse on what people really think. But Brooks, to me, is a fascinating case study. Sure, he likely pulled the trigger — Dick Reavis got him to admit that much. But did he deserve to die? Was he a cold-blooded killer whose psyche could never play nice with others? Or was he strung out on dope the day he killed Gregory, influenced by drugs to carry out this heinous misdeed?

Perhaps asking whether someone deserves to die isn’t the right question. Capital punishment and the way it’s carried out is bigger than one man. But when it comes to Brooks, I have to know.

So, I ask Reavis straight up, “Was Charlie Brooks a cold-blooded killer?”

Reavis cocks his head back and squints, and I prepare myself for an answer to the question that’s been burning inside of me since I randomly came across the story of Charlie Brooks months ago. In hindsight, Reavis’ response is more appropriate and enlightened than I initially thought.

“I don’t know the answer to that.”

Yeah, it’s not so cut and dry.