GRANTS — Michael Brown was 13 when he started getting drunk at night, his short, unremarkable life disintegrating one six-pack at a time.

He supposes his parents never realized how bad it had become, though they had not hidden their growing exasperation over how their thoughtful and artistic boy was faltering for reasons no one, including him, could understand.

So the lectures began, the sternest falling like sledgehammers from his father, a Rio Rancho police officer.

"He was always telling me what I was doing wrong, that I was pointed in the wrong direction," Brown said. "But I thought I knew everything. You couldn't tell me anything."

When he was caught stripping cars in his early teens, for what he said was the "thrill of it," the juvenile justice system couldn't tell him anything, either.

"My probation was really, really lenient," he said. "If I would have been locked up it might have woken me up."

He is 29 now, locked away in prison for his role in the butchering deaths of his grandparents on a cold night in 1994.

Brown was one of the first teens in New Mexico to be punished as an adult at a time when much of the country was clamoring for tougher justice for kids who killed.

He would get no second chance, no real shot at rehabilitation.

His sentence will keep him in prison until he is past retirement age.

He got his wake-up call, the one his father always warned him about. But it came too late. And, for him, it's lasted, will last, too long.

Darkness descends

Brown's teenage years unfurled, in part, just beyond his family's radar, as he flitted from one divorced parent's household to the other's, depending on whose rules he felt like breaking.

"No one knew where I was all the time," he said.

If all else failed, there was always the Rio Rancho home of his grandparents, Ed and Marie Brown, who couldn't or wouldn't see the darkness descending on their beloved grandson.

"Whatever I wanted, if I wanted anything, it was pretty much given to me," he said.

His family just wanted him back.

When he started skipping school, family members took turns driving him there and sat outside waiting to make sure he wouldn't run. But he knew they couldn't stay there all day. He'd hang out in a class or two, then skip out when he figured his folks were gone.

In his freshman year at Cibola High, he skipped out for good.

That gave him more time to drink.

That's what he was doing, what he would have continued to do, on the winter's night of Feb. 3, 1994, if his grandmother hadn't made such a scene.

Marie Brown, 80, had put up with a lot from her grandson, 16 then, but she would not have him drinking beer with his buddies under her roof.

She put down her crossword puzzle and confronted Michael and his 16-year-old girlfriend of two weeks, Bernadette Setser, and Jeremy Rose, a 17-year-old friend the elder Browns had come to like.

She told Michael's friends to go.

They left. But they didn't go anywhere.

"It's February. It's cold, they're standing outside, and Jeremy didn't have a car there," Michael Brown said. "I argued with them, but then I told them, `OK, sneak in through my window. Just be quiet.' "

Brown said the next sound he remembers is his grandfather screaming, the 80-year-old man's hands torn and bloody from trying to shield himself from the 58 stab wounds that eventually killed him.

Brown, peering out from his bedroom door, said he saw his grandmother struggling with Setser, a knife glinting in her hand.

He heard his grandmother cry "Why?"

It took only five jabs to kill her.

Michael Brown closed his bedroom door and covered his face with his hands.

"I panicked," he said. "I was 16 and I was drunk out of my mind."

It was the last drink he ever took.

Six-year-old Shannon Brown, Michael's sister, was the first to come across the horror in her grandparent's house when she arrived from school the next day.

The teens had been gone for hours by then. They had driven Marie Brown's car to the Rio Grande, where they tossed the knives into the muddy water. They took naps at Setser's house, cut up and burned the Browns' credit cards.

Later, they ordered pizza.

They were at a friend's house when Rio Rancho police found them. Each was arrested on two counts of first-degree homicide and other charges.

Nightly newscasts featured a picture of the elderly couple juxtaposed with Brown's dour mug shot and, occasionally, two smaller photos of Rose and Setser.

"They really wanted to get me above the others," he said. "I'm sure people wanted my head on a platter."

Prosecutors announced they would seek adult sanctions against all three.

"I was one of the first kids to be tried as an adult," Brown said. "There was never a thought about, well, these are kids and they screwed up. Granted, somebody, or somebodies, lost their lives, but you shouldn't just take a kid and throw them in prison and say that's that."

Brown doesn't recall a single discussion on whether any of them should be tried as juveniles, whether any of them was salvageable, even though their previous records were free of charges involving violence.

He recalls no psychological evaluation, and no record could be found to indicate that one took place, to determine amenability - whether Brown could be rehabilitated and returned back safely into society.

Separate trials for all three were moved to Las Cruces because of the intense media coverage in Albuquerque.

On Jan. 6, 1995, Rose agreed to testify against his friends in exchange for a more lenient sentence that his attorney contended was to be 29 years. With half off for good behavior, Rose expected to be free in his 30s.

Brown and Setser refused to deal. The choice would cost them.

Setser, her insanity defense shrugged off by the jury, was convicted Jan. 17, 1995, of all charges. At her sentencing in April 1995, Setser, mascara and tears spidering down her cheeks, begged state District Judge Louis McDonald for mercy.

"If you send me to prison for the rest of my life, I'll just get worse," she sobbed. "I need help."

McDonald gave her a life sentence plus 42 years.

It took a jury less than four hours to convict Brown a week later.

Prosecutor Patrick McNertney had argued that Brown was guilty even if his hands never touched a knife because he planned the killings, showed the others where to find the knives in the kitchen and failed to stop the slaughter.

"This wasn't just a stabbing," McNertney said. "It was a betrayal."

Brown's attorney, Armando Torres, had countered that Brown was the one betrayed by his friends, who killed then pinned the crime on him.

Brown, taking the stand against his attorney's wishes, had told jurors he never imagined that his friends would kill.

And when they did, he was too scared to stop them.

Out in the courtroom, he had heard his father crying.

Thrown to the lions

Michael Brown does not think of time in increments longer than a day. He does not calculate how old he will be when, if, he leaves prison life behind.

He does not think of "if."

"If you give up on the outside world, you lose hope," he said.

After 13 years in prison, hope is one of the few things Brown has.

In April 1995, McDonald sentenced him to life plus 42 years, the same sentence as Setser's. Under state law he must serve at least 30 years for the life sentence, then at least half of the remaining years under the good-time laws that were in effect then.

He was 17. He will be nearly 70 before he has a chance to see the outside world again.

He arrived like any other prisoner, no matter that he was still a minor. He was tossed into general population and forced to fend off the predators, the gangsters, the lifers who smelled naivet‚ on his breath.

At the time, he says, he was the only 17-year-old at the Southern New Mexico Correctional Facility near Las Cruces.

It was his first incarceration.

"They threw me to the lions," he said. "I was pretty scared. I didn't know what to expect. Being the kid in a prison full of men, there are those who are going to think, `Now here's a victim.' "

Today, state Department of Corrections officials say no inmate in adult prison is under age 18.

Inmates knew his case from watching TV. Even among thieves, murdering grandparents was unforgivable.

But Brown was lucky.

"Some guys will pull you under their wing," he said. "Thankfully, I had some people who looked out for me."

Brown said in the beginning he was moved from prison to prison, most in New Mexico, one in Texas. Once he was relocated for threatening somebody - a charge he said was misinterpreted.

These days, he is ensconced at the Western New Mexico Correctional Facility near Grants, one of the smaller state-run prisons with a capacity of 428.

"It's pretty mellow here," he said. "I can't complain."

Here, a lifer with long black hair nurtures a small garden bright with petunias and marigolds while another inmate straightens the white rocks along a border - a little beauty behind the razor wire.

Sunlight sprays across the stark and perfectly swept floor of the common area of Brown's pod. "The Price is Right" is on the TV.

Brown is elsewhere, working in the Prison Industries building where he and six other medium-risk inmates pull plastic trash bags that spit out from a large processor. They fold each bag tenderly, corners even, and pack them into small cardboard boxes for distribution to other state-run facilities.

At 50 cents an hour, it's one of the best-paying jobs in prison.

The main wall in his cell is plastered with pictures of bands, women, relatives and his drawings of goat heads and pentagrams that resemble satanic symbols.

Brown calls them icons of his "Mesopotamian religion," then later admits that the religion he has clung to in prison has overtones of paganism and Satanism, though no bloodletting, animal sacrifice or evil.

"My religion is a practice of little bits and pieces," he said.

On the outside, he was raised a Roman Catholic.

A few miles away, Bernadette Setser is serving her sentence at the New Mexico Women's Correctional Facility. Last month, her lawyer subpoenaed Brown to testify in her latest appeal effort.

Brown planned to refuse, plead the Fifth. He will not help her.

The hearing was postponed.

Jeremy Rose, Brown's other co-defendant, is scheduled for parole in April 2025 from an Arizona prison. It was not the deal Rose expected. At sentencing, McDonald refused to give Rose anything less than a life sentence, not the 29 years his attorney said he was promised. Good time, then, did not apply.

At a hearing in which Rose appealed his sentence, Brown said his parents heard something, a concession, that has formed the basis of an appeal Brown expects to file soon.

It's something to look forward to, at least.

In the meantime, Brown said he tries to stay busy. He has nearly completed his GED, taken college classes, learned how to weld, how to fix a car, create art.

"I taught myself to play music," he said. "I learned how to do a lot of different stuff. I've studied religion and art. I read everything."

In one prison, he was in a band. At Grants, though, there is no music room.

He wears glasses, $65 DC skate shoes, unscuffed, with his forest green inmate scrubs. He keeps his hair cut short. His arms are covered in prison tattoos, ghoulish images of skulls and tombstones. On the left side of his neck is a stylized bass clef, a nod to his musical aspirations; on the right, the Chinese symbol for good luck.

Or so he supposes.

"It hasn't really helped yet," he said.

He is articulate and polite and safe, a man you might imagine coaching Little League or playing the church organ were it not for the tattoos and pentagrams and prison-pale skin.

What he misses most is knowing he will never have kids.

"The family thing is definitely a big one for me," he said. "I really started thinking about it - I'm never going to have a family of my own unless I win an appeal."

He cannot ever have conjugal visits because his crime involves the murder of a family member.

Still, he was married once. Joann was the friend of a friend on the outside. The marriage lasted four years. The divorce was finalized October 2004.

"After awhile, she just couldn't handle me being transferred from facility to facility," he said.

He has a girlfriend now, another woman introduced to him by a friend on the outside. Her letters, visits, her being someone in his life helps stave off the loneliness.

"You can maintain a decent relationship in here," he said, "as long as you can put up with certain things."

Waking up

If he could get out, get his life back, do it over, he would stay away from the booze.

"The alcohol made me feel like a star," he said. "I felt I could do anything I wanted. And I was a stupid drunk. I did a lot of stupid things."

If someone - the judicial system, his family, anyone - had identified his problem with alcohol, his penchant for destruction, and forced him into treatment, he might have gone on to the military life he had once dreamed of.

If he had been prosecuted as a juvenile, if he had been rehabilitated then set free at age 21, he said he would have never broken another rule, not even a traffic violation.

If.

He thinks of the nagging his parents - and his grandparents - gave him years ago that then he found so easy to dismiss.

"Now that I look back I can see they were really trying to help by being on my case," he said.

He remembers the lectures of his father, Dennis Brown, about how he needed a wake-up call.

"This is the biggest wake-up call you can get," he said. "And it took losing the life of my dad's parents, my grandparents, to realize that."

Dennis Brown has become his son's most devoted visitor. He wants, needs, to hear about that night. So Michael Brown tells him.

"It's a tough thing to talk about, but I do," he said. "Even still to this day, I don't understand a lot about what happened. I don't understand the situation, the chaos and extreme violence of what happened."

He knows there are those, maybe many, who believe that he never deserved a second chance, that he lost that chance with the first stab wound.

"A lot of people say, `Why didn't you stop them?' But it's easy to stand outside the box and say that," he said. "But when you are 16, drunk and scared . . . I didn't know what the hell to do.

"If I had been older, wiser, things would have been different," he said. "I live with that every day."

Adolescence gone, manhood begun, he can neither stop nor speed up time enough to ignore how many things he's missed, how many things he misses, how many every days he has left inside.