Photo by Michael J. GallegosTribune

Tribune

In this 2006 file photo, Michael Brown was convicted of helping kill his grandparents in Rio Rancho in 1994 — one of the first teens in New Mexico to be punished as an adult. Now 29, with decades of time still to serve, he wonders what might have been. As he serves time at a prison in Grants, Brown declines to think about time in a conventional manner. "If you give up on the outside world," he says, "you lose hope."

Photo by Michael J. GallegosTribune

Tribune

In this 2006 file photo, Michael Brown heads back to his cell from his job folding and packaging plastic trash bags at a prison near Grants. He's paid 50 cents an hour, one of the best wages in prison. "This is the biggest wake-up call you can get," he says. "And it took losing the life of my dad's parents, my grandparents, to realize that."

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Shannon Brown has never spoken publicly about the night her grandparents were murdered or her only brother's role in that bloody, drunken, awful night.

She doesn't really want to now. Because she knows that what she says will hurt or anger those members of her family who cannot forget or forgive her brother.

But she thinks that if her brother, Michael Brown, has any chance at redemption — through the courts, in the public eye, in her family — she can't continue to silently stand by.

"I love my brother with all my heart," the thin 20-year-old Rio Rancho woman said. "He's everything to me, so I have to do this."

Michael was 16 when prosecutors say he told friends Jeremy Rose, 17, and Bernadette Setser, 16, to stab Ed and Marie Brown that Feb. 3, 1994, night, after Marie Brown cut short their drinking in her Rio Rancho home.

Though Michael did not inflict a single stab wound, he was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and five other charges. Because the state prosecuted him as an adult, he was sentenced to life plus 41 years in prison.

Many in her family think that's just as it should be.

But Shannon Brown doesn't.

"And if I don't, I don't see why they should," she said.

Because if anyone was scarred by the murders it was Shannon.

She discovered the bodies after school that next day. She was 5. But she remembers.

In the hallway, she saw white hair poking from under a brown blanket.

"I thought Michael had put on my grandmother's wig and was playing a trick on me," she said. "He liked to play tricks, like, scare me. I said, `Michael, get up.' "

Then she saw the blood on the walls, the blood everywhere.

Shannon, the daughter of a Rio Rancho police officer, said she worried the perpetrator was still inside and that her brother, who was living there, was also in danger.

She worried she had gotten blood on her shoes.

But not for a moment did she worry that her brother was responsible for the carnage.

"They keep saying my brother was the ringleader, but I don't think he was," she said. "He loved our grandparents. He wasn't the one who did hard-core things. He wasn't as messed up as the other two."

Shannon realizes she can be dismissed as the biased little sister. But she said she is backed up by court documents and hopes she will be in her brothers' appeal, expected to be heard at state District Court in Sandoval County this summer.

Shannon, a criminal justice major, has done much of the legwork for the appeal, including obtaining transcripts of Rose at a hearing in which he says the murders were his idea.

She said she believes her brother's 1995 trial was botched and that the state was unduly influenced by an emotional public to seek adult rather than juvenile sanctions.

"They crucified my brother because this was such a high-profile case," she said.

It had been hard to avoid the media attention and the notoriety.

"There were always reporters on the lawn, reporters following us everywhere," she said. "The story was so big."

Friends, neighbors and her father's side of the family — her grandparents' side — shunned her.

"People were looking at me like I was a freak," she said.

She underwent years of therapy that didn't help much.

"I had to learn myself to accept the fact that it happened," she said. "I couldn't let it control my life."

To this day, though, she can't sleep facing a window, afraid of what she might see. In the bathroom, she imagines knives coming through the shower head.

She is still sometimes torn by the anger of losing her grandparents, the anger of losing her brother and the anger of losing the innocence of her childhood.

Last year, she stopped communicating with Michael, a prisoner at the Western New Mexico Correctional Facility in Grants. Six months later, though, she broke the silence.

"I asked him to tell me the truth," she said. "He told me what happened, told me about his remorse for not stopping his friends. He's sorry for not being there for me. He has grown up a lot. He has matured. It gave me the feeling he deserves a second chance."

So, she is working on that second chance. Though her brother has a good public defender, she is looking for an additional attorney or an advocacy group willing to take on the argument of whether it was fair to prosecute a teenager as an adult.

"Helping him," she said, "helps me."