People Most Proximate: Our Stories

We cannot create justice without getting close to places where injustices prevail. We have to get proximate.”

Bryan Stevenson

People directly affected by murder and the death penalty are the key voices that will help end the death penalty in North Carolina. It’s because of that belief that we are committed to sharing their experiences through their own voices and creativity. This page includes the stories of those who have lost loved ones to murder, those who have family members on death row, those who work directly with people facing execution, and the men and women who live on North Carolina’s death row today. We are continuing to expand this vital collection. Please get in touch if you know a story we should tell or a voice we can amplify.

Carol Dreiling

Carol Dreiling was visiting her parents for Thanksgiving when two strangers broke into their house, murdered her parents while she watched, and shot her and took her hostage. She believes the death penalty does nothing to heal the trauma of crime and only perpetuates violence.

Alfred Rivera

No one ever evaluated or helped me; no one ever explained anything. The state fails to ensure that exonerees like me are situated in a manner that would allow them to reacclimate and flourish in society despite their lives having been shattered by the ordeal. So, two years after I got off death row, when I was 29, I was caught with drugs and sent to federal prison for over 19 years.

Jean Parks

The feelings I imagined were so similar to what my family experienced after Betsy was killed: grief, rage, helplessness. I was horrified to think that our state, “We the People,” is using a form of punishment that creates new grieving families unnecessarily.

Paul Brown

Having no contact with our families for such a long time — for some of us, it’s been more than twenty years since we’ve had any meaningful human contact — the instinct to care still comes naturally. It is really good to see, and to know. Some of us are barely hospitable with each other, yet we’re all attentive and accommodating to the birds.

Andre Smith

I’m not trying to seek revenge. I am content. And so therefore I am able to experience some happiness as a result of that.

Pat McKoy

More and more people, including many family members of murder victims, hope we will stop using it, and make that fabric of our society stronger by doing so. My family and I are among them.

Lynda Simmons

So much money, time and resources are put into the death penalty that could be better used to serve victims in their healing. It’s in our personal healing where crime prevention begins and solutions are found.

Gretchen Engel

I wished so much then and still wish now that I’d been able to convey Quentin’s humanity to the judges who ruled in his case and the governor who decided against commutation. Perhaps they, and the jurors who sentenced Quentin to death, thought they were rooting out evil, teaching a lesson, meting out justice. What I saw was another killing that perpetuated a cycle of violence and trauma that continues to play out in many lives, including mine.

Brenda Hooks

It’s been nearly twenty years since Brenda has truly seen her son. While she, Kayla, and their family friend Gale visit often, the prison’s visitation rooms separate the visitors from the loved ones with wire, bars, and a thick, scuffed glass that reflects glare from overhead lights. In order to see through the glass to her son, seated less than two feet away, Brenda must position her body to block the light, lining up her reflection with Cerron’s face, looking through her own face to see glimpses of his.

Tawana Choate

It’s heartbreaking. He missed out on a lot of family things. Sometimes we don’t want to do nothing because he wasn’t here. It was times that we had family functions and I said, This is Quintel’s seat. Nobody sit there. When I go to church, I take his picture and I say This seat is taken. He’s sitting right here by me.

Megan Smith

In December 2022, I stood in front of the North Carolina Governor’s Mansion and asked Roy Cooper to remove all 135 people from our state’s death row and commute their death sentences to prison terms. But please don’t think I underestimate the pain that murder causes. In 2001, my father and stepmother, Terry and Lucy Smith, were brutally murdered by two teenagers in Pennsylvania.