KCK- Justice From the Heart to the Judge - Letter from John Brandt

Kathleen and John Brandt with Mom, 1997

Wyandotte District Court Probation Department Victim Impact Statement

John Brandt

RE: Case # 2014-CR-000818

Defendant: Joshua Jay Brazeal

Your Honor,

I am writing this to convey some sense of the impact this tragedy has had on my life.  On our lives.  But if I am to state the impact of the untimely, unnecessary and violent death of my mother-in-law, “my mother”, then this task comes too soon.  How can I know the impact?  How do I calculate the impact on a community, on a family or on me?  How do I describe the full impact today, of something it took weeks to fully comprehend the finality of.  However, if I must speak today of the impact this crime has had on me, I would need some way to assess the impact of knowing that after being hit and ejected from her vehicle, my mother in law was left on the side of the road to die while others ran away.

I would also have to assess the impact of seeing my mother, her naked body crushed, wheeled into the emergency room while being given chest compressions. How do I quantify the impact of seeing her face, covered with gauze and blood, the brightness of her eyes, their mischievously good nature twinkle, already gone.  What impact might be imagined seeing the floor of the emergency room red with my mother’s blood?  There were shoe prints in our mothers blood.  

What impact can be imagined in seeing her daughter, my wife, stricken by that sight?  How should I appropriately assess the impact of watching my wife’s heart needlessly broken?  

How does one calculate the impact of standing in a hospital hallway with your family while they realize the last thread that maintains their mother's presence in this world must be cut?  Not only were we horrified by the devastation of the crash inflicted on her body, but we were forced to take an active role in ending the life of our mother.  How might that impact us?  

To say the thread is cut, or the plug is pulled isn’t accurate. There was nothing so merciful in the end that I witnessed.   It was a slow, excruciating unraveling of what bound my mother’s life to her body.  We stood vigil and watched as the meds that kept her heart beating, stopped working. Not all at once, my mother’s heart slowed and we waited.   Her blood pressure dropped a bit more and we watched, stealing time with her, grudging each moment that slipped away, while wishing an end to her suffering.   I held her swollen hand as my wife, leaned close, and stroked her mother's white hair, now edged in the burgundy of dried blood, coaxing her toward peace.  “It’s okay, Mom we love you, you can let go.”  What is the impact of being so torn?  How does one quantify such mental and emotional anguish?

For four hours we stayed with Mom in that room, holding her hand, talking to her, all the time, forced to take inventory of the cuts and tubes, bandages and bruising, the deep lacerations on her face that marred those muched loved contours. We stayed as they removed the intubation, as they cleaned up the blood. We stayed as family came in to the room, only to have their hearts broken, looking at their mother, their friend, their aunt’s, scuffed, swollen and broken body. Brutally killed by the carelessness of others.  These are the images I’m left with of my mother.  Not the many dinners and car trips and birthdays and Christmas and laughter but rather her broken body and the hurt and suffering of everyone I love.

What is the impact of missing the many phone conversations my wife and her mother had every day?  How many times has my wife heard silence instead of her mother’s voice? I have seen my wife, in a moment of excitement, pick up the phone to call her mother.  I know because I see the quiet, awkward way she returns the phone to cradle.  I see the disappointment as time after time, over and over she must relive the fact that her mother will no longer answer her calls.  What is the impact of holiday shopping and enduring the awkward silence and fighting back tears after saying, “Mom will love this.” To realize again, she is no more.  There is no mother to love anything anymore.

Yet If I’m to assess impact today, then here is some of what I have seen.  I’ve seen the dark, early hours of the morning when night after night, I awake to an empty bed and find my wife still up, unable to sleep.  I’ve felt her toss and turn when she does sleep only for her to awake and refuse to return to the nightmares that visit when she closes her eyes.  Visions of her mother, her best friend, being crushed by a car.  Being left to die alone on the side of the road.  Did she know she was dying?  Was she scared?  Was she in pain?  These are the questions that haunt us.  These are the thoughts that mar every memory of our mother.  

I’ve seen the impact in my wife's fear of driving alone.  Her tentativeness behind the wheel, the way she will sometimes avoid leaving the house during the day for any reason so that I will drive her on her errands in the evening.  I see her foot breaks reflexively as I drive.  I’ve seen weight fall off her as her interest in food has waned.  I’ve seen the impact of questioning the underpinnings of reality: how could something so horrible, so violent happen to someone who, inspite of any human fault, was a good and kind person.  I have felt the impact in all the corners of our lives that were once filled--filled to capacity with the love and strength and understanding and caring and kindness that was our mother.  Now these gifts exist as open wounds, reminders of what is no more, reminders of what should still be. Reminders of the emptiness that has supplanted our dearest friend.

Geraldine wasn't frail.  At 79 she was in better shape than some in their 50's and that allowed her to travel all over the city helping people.  But I doubt anyone would say they loved Geri because of what she did for them.  They loved her because of who she was.  She was service when it was needed, strength when there was weakness, knowledge for those who were willing to learn and laughter for those who were down.  She was a friend.  Not just to me, not just to the people who knew her, but to anyone who needed one.  I’m still receiving condolences as the news slowly spreads through the many communities impacted by Geraldine.  “Such a loss,” they say.  Indeed.  Such a terrible loss.  

When I moved to Kansas City, Geraldine, a veteran teacher, became not only my mother-in-law, but my mentor.  With her experience navigating the licensing requirements and experience in classroom management, I was well prepared for the rigors of being a new teacher.  She was a respected advisor and confident for me and in later years the voice of wisdom and reason as my career progressed.  We shared a love for reading and we would talk about books together as well as gift them to each other.  But through all of the many roles she played in my life, the one I held most dear was as my friend.  Someone who would listen, someone who would laugh, someone who believed the best about me.

I will mark the impact of this tragedy in every birthday that passes and every holiday card, written in her perfectly slanted, fastidious cursive strokes that will remain unsent.   I will mark the impact when she is not there to sit by the fire eating gumbo and s’mores.  I will mark the impact when there is a calendar with an empty spot on her birthday, no reservation to be made, no birthday gift to be purchased.  I will mark the impact in evenings when I return from work and her car isn’t parked in front of our house.  I will mark each day this spring when Geri won't stop by to sit on the front porch and drink tea then stay for dinner.  We will mark our hours by the absence of our mother.  We will mark the days with thoughts of what might have been.  We will mark the evenings with words unspoken and we will mark the ensuing years struggling to make sense of the senseless brutality and utter needlessness of her death.

So I return to this difficult task of assessing impact.  We who love Geraldine Strader,  have been given the severest of lifetime sentences in which to feel the impact of a car that was mercilessly, needlessly and carelessly driven through the heart of our family.

It is therefore, in my opinion, unconscionable that the District Attorney has asked for a mere forty-one months of a possible one-hundred and fifty-four month sentence.  By not charging this repeat offender with the full range of laws that were violated in the acts that directly lead to the death of my mother-in-law and by allowing the few charges brought to be plead down to a minimal sentence, the message is being sent that innocent lives do not matter and that Wyandotte County is more concerned with the welfare of recalcitrant criminals than upstanding citizens who actively contribute and dedicate their lives to make their community a better place for everyone.

Sincerely,

John Brandt

justice4strader@gmail.com