For people with loved ones on death row, the grief and shame they experience are unique and isolating
Tynecia Estrada cherished her childhood summers with her father in Atlanta. She has joyful memories of him picking her up from camp to spend a fun-filled day together at Six Flags White Water. But in August 1989, their summer tradition was abruptly interrupted when he was arrested and charged with capital murder.
“Had I been there that summer, maybe that wouldn’t have happened,” Estrada said. At the time of his arrest, she was only 10 years old.
In 1997, Timothy Holton was 17 years old and working his first job at a department store in Tullahoma, Tennessee, when his parents informed him of a family tragedy.
“[They said,] ‘Your cousin Daryl has killed his four kids,’” Holton recalled. “You hear that, but you don’t receive that. You don’t process that.”
It has been 23 years since Brenda Hooks sat in a North Carolina courtroom where her son Cerron was sentenced to death in 2001.
“When I heard the sentencing, it was like I didn’t hear it at all,” she told Prism. “It took about five years to set in.”
All three of these family members are still suffering the consequences of having loved ones who were sentenced to death. Estrada told Prism that she became depressed after her father’s arrest. She remembers crying when she received letters from him on death row because each letter was a reminder that he wasn’t there with her. He was executed in 2014.
Holton disagreed with the jury’s decision to sentence his cousin Daryl to death, but his mother told him not to go against the family and their support of the death penalty. Daryl was executed in 2007, and the family’s support for the death penalty is partly why Holton and his mother do not have a relationship today.
For years after her son Cerron was sentenced to death, Hooks self-medicated in unhealthy ways. Her son remains on death row in North Carolina, which last executed someone in 2006.
Estrada, Holton, and Hooks are among countless family members across the U.S. who are still grappling with guilt, shame, shock, and complicated grief over the actions and sentencings of their loved ones.
The U.S. has executed 1,592 people since the 1970s, and 2,241 currently await execution on death row. Each person sentenced has a constellation of family members who must navigate the unique, overlooked, and isolating challenges of their loved ones’ death sentences. Some are estranged, while some are in daily contact. Some uproot their lives to be a car ride away from where their loved one is incarcerated. Others spend thousands of dollars to visit every few years.
Though the way a family member reacts to their loved one’s death sentence can range from complete avoidance to active involvement, the thousands of impacted Americans share one thing in common: their stories are largely ignored. With limited resources to support them, these families make up the forgotten and inextricable reality of the death penalty.
“You can only imagine the loneliness”
Death row families are relegated to the shadows due to social stigma and capital punishment’s long history as a notoriously secretive institution.
“It was kind of agonizing,” Hooks said about her efforts to make sense of Cerron’s legal proceedings. “I still don’t understand a lot.”
In all 27 death penalty states, the path from charging someone with a capital crime to execution is long and complicated. A defendant must first be found guilty of the crime and then sentenced to death separately in another phase of their trial. After being sentenced to death, defendants go through multiple rounds of appeals in state and federal court.
Throughout the process, relatives of those on death row teeter within a precarious reality of both anticipation and uncertainty. They may testify in court or provide evidence during the investigation. They feel the whiplash of execution dates set, then stayed, then set again. A single election can mean the difference between the dismantling of death row or a flurry of executions.
“That emotional strain on someone is almost overbearing,” said Trent Hepting, a counselor who is trained to work with death row families.
That was Estrada’s experience growing up with her father on death row. The sadness that kept her up at night soon turned to anger, anxiety, and fear. She got into fights at school and was eventually expelled. Children with an incarcerated parent face a slew of negative mental and physical health outcomes, but there has been limited research on the uniquely damaging impact of having a parent on death row or executed.
“I was embarrassed. I was ashamed. I felt that people would judge me because of what he did,” Estrada said. “And I was also very protective of [my father].”
Stigma is a powerfully isolating force for relatives of those on death row. The eight family members who went on the record for this reporting lost friends and jobs, received hate mail, and were berated at work. When Holton returned to his department store job after his cousin’s initial arrest, one of his coworkers approached him in the break room and asked, “Was that baby killer your cousin?”
Holton confirmed Daryl was his cousin. “I hope they cook him,” his colleague replied.
“Can you imagine having someone else be excited for a family member’s death?” Hepting said. “You can only imagine the loneliness that family members experience with having society tell them you’re not allowed to grieve.”
Death row families contend with a potent manifestation of disenfranchised grief, when a person’s loss is not recognized by society. Their emotions are invalidated by that stigma and by the practical barriers within the prison system. Many death row units prohibit contact visits. In North Carolina, Hooks has not touched her son Cerron in 26 years.
“Sometimes, it’s a tearful ride home,” Hooks said about leaving the prison.
Maintaining family contact is already difficult and expensive. Family members often must battle prison officials for basic information about visitation regulations and next-of-kin procedures, information usually hidden behind an iron wall of bureaucracy. Unlike family members of crime victims, death row families have no designated contact to guide them through the courts and prisons. Many times, that role falls on the counsel representing the person sentenced to death.
Defense attorneys and investigators often strive to be a resource for family members. But a significant part of the job is gathering mitigation evidence—or information that can be used to reduce the person’s culpability and seek a lesser sentence. Family histories of mental illness, trauma, and abuse are all essential aspects of mitigation, which often means the defense team must ask relatives to share hardships they may have never spoken out loud before.
“It’s been my experience, and that of my peers, that it’s easier for family members to cut off a loved one [facing execution] as opposed to accept the pain that comes with that,” said Lyle May, who has been incarcerated on North Carolina’s death row since 1999. “They’re victimized first by the process leading up to trial, then the trial itself, and then the post-conviction stages.”
May knows this firsthand as he and his legal team prepare for his next phase of evidentiary hearings. Because his parents are aging, his team decided to depose them before the hearings. But revisiting her most difficult memories was so devastating for May’s mother that the experience triggered her alcoholism.
“I love both my parents, and I don’t want them to have to keep reliving it to a point where their mental health is impacted further,” May said.
“The guilt that you have to undergo in this one scenario is absolutely tremendous,” said Hepting, which is why many death-sentenced people ask their attorneys not to involve their families. Even so, family members often want to help their loved ones. But the dehumanizing and adversarial process takes a toll, and few support options are available to alleviate that burden.
Susannah Sheffer, director of the Access to Treatment Initiative, is trying to change that. In 2021, the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) created an initiative to train mental health practitioners across the country on working to address the specific needs of death row families. The training program came out of TAVP’s research that highlights not only a dearth of services but also how much fear of judgment impedes death row families from seeking support.
The goal is for family members, whom TAVP also helps connect with trained clinicians, to access mental health care from providers who already have a baseline understanding of their experience—whether that is the experience of a loved one currently on death row or a loved one who has already been executed.
“Someone who is a family member of someone already executed has all the experiences and feelings that the family member of someone [currently] on death row has,” Sheffer said. “And now, they have the traumatic loss. They have the aftermath.”
That traumatic loss begins with a harrowing choice family members must face as their loved one’s execution approaches—whether or not to witness their death. For many death-sentenced individuals, the decision leads to heartbreaking arguments with their families.
May told his father that if he is put to death one day, he does not want his parents to see him killed. But his mother insisted that she be there. “It’s not about me,” she told him, “it’s about me being there to support my son, whom I love.”
“More than I could take”
Whether or not relatives are present during the execution, typically, there are still special permitted visits while their loved one is on death watch, a higher-security area of the prison where condemned people are housed in the days before their death.
Kristin Stapleford visited her uncle every month for the 10 years he was on death row in North Carolina, but it was only just before his 2002 execution that she was able to hug him.
“When my mom and my uncle embraced, it was more than I could take,” she said, recalling how her uncle lifted her mother off the floor as they were overcome with emotion. “I became claustrophobic at that moment.” Stapleford begged the prison guards to let her leave the room, where a chaplain helped her calm down before she returned to her family.
Up until an execution is confirmed—usually by the media, rather than direct communication with families—there is always the possibility of a last-minute stay. Family members struggle with the dread and hope that comes with that uncertainty. In some states, nonprofit organizations like Georgia’s New Hope House try to ease some of the debilitating stress by providing families with a warm meal and a comfortable place to gather during the execution or to sleep if they have traveled. For Estrada, the support she received at Hope House helped her get through her father’s execution.
“It was like an out-of-body experience,” Estrada told Prism. “I just couldn’t believe I was actually going through this.”
The aftermath of a relative’s execution is lasting and severe. For months after her uncle’s execution, Stapleford woke up in a cold sweat at 2 a.m.—the scheduled time of her uncle’s death. “I would have flashbacks; I would have nightmares,” she said.
Holton had a similar stress response, both before and after his cousin’s execution. “It affects your entire mind and body,” he said. At one point, his boss gently asked him when the last time he showered was. Holton couldn’t remember. “It did things to me that I still, yet, am unaware of,” he said.
Holton lives with the uniquely difficult grief and trauma of being family to both Daryl and Daryl’s children and victims: Stephen, Brent, Eric, and Kayla. “When people say that execution fixes it, I can tell you, no, it doesn’t. Because I can see both sides. Walking both paths, that follows me,” Holton said.
Estrada, Stapleton, and Holton all eventually sought out therapy, with mixed results. After her father’s execution, Estrada described feeling hazy.
“It was like this black hole I was in,” she said.
She looked for a therapist with experience in parental incarceration and the death penalty but couldn’t find anyone. The first clinician she eventually saw diagnosed her with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder after she described her faltering focus and memory.
“I did not share my dad just being executed,” Estrada said. “I felt the shame [that] I couldn’t share even with the psychiatrist I went to.” Estrada was later more accurately diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, though she has never been able to find a therapist who specializes in incarceration trauma.
Stapleford eventually found a therapist who had experience working with incarcerated clients. Holton tried. He called more than 100 therapists and counselors, but none had experience with the aftermath of a death sentence and execution.
Despite the many junctures where our legal and health care systems fail death row families, many have found avenues of healing through action and advocacy. Holton now serves as a chaplain on Tennessee’s death row, where he ministers to death-sentenced people in the same halls where Daryl lived before he was killed by the state. Estrada founded a nonprofit called Girls Breaking Chains, which provides mentorship and support to girls impacted by parental incarceration. Stapleford’s family worked with her uncle’s attorneys to found the Capital Restorative Justice Project, which hosts an annual series of healing conversation circles among death row families and families of murder victims.
Those healing circles are where Hooks was able to talk about her feelings and experience of her son’s death sentence for the first time.
“Up until then, all of that was inside,” Hooks said. Years of silence contributed to health issues for Hooks, like high blood pressure and a former nicotine addiction. Now, she is cigarette-free, and joining the restorative justice circles has made her feel understood. “Every time I went, I was healed a little bit more than the last time,” she said.
Empathetic community and accessible, informed mental health support are essential resources for death row families who are so often shrouded in silence. But these resources are far from universal. “We, as family members of my uncle who was executed, we’re victims as well,” Stapleford said.
Estrada agrees.
“I tell [people] the state of Georgia murdered my dad,” she said. She hopes that states will begin to provide support for relatives of death-sentenced people, a hope that was echoed by all of the family members who spoke to Prism. Sheffer aims to train at least a few mental health practitioners in each state so that family members have someone professional to turn to no matter where they live.
Expanding access to care and creating institutional support for death row families does more than ease the devastating effects of a punishment they do not deserve. It is also the first step in reducing stigma and letting families know that, in the painful reverberations of violence and the death penalty, they have not been forgotten.
