The Mysterious Death of Brandon Embry, Part One
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This is Murder, She Told, true crime stories from Maine, New England, and small town USA. I'm Kristen Zevey. You can connect with me at MurderSheTold.com or on Instagram at MurderSheToldPodcast. Sarah was simultaneously shocked and proud of her 18-year-old son when he burst in with some news. He had enlisted. He was going to be in the Navy.

Sarah was in the Navy herself, and though Brandon had talked about getting some information from a military recruiting office, she never expected that he would come home with the papers signed. After all, it had been his younger brother, Scott, not Brandon, who had been the one to march around the house calling Cadence like a pint-sized drill sergeant. Brandon was no stranger to the military. He'd grown up with his mom and stepdad both in the military, moving frequently.

You know, there was always something new. There was always something to explore. You know, we lived in Italy, so that was definitely a different culture. They got to see a lot, you know, go different places. You know, we traveled. We went to Germany. I was stationed in Colorado. So we did a lot of outdoors stuff in Colorado. We were always hiking, just always outdoors. We did a lot together as a family in that way.

The boys were in football, just starting like at the Parks and Rec. Brennan played football all the way up to high school.

His brother played football too. It was just always something different living in a new place. There was always something we hadn't seen before or someplace to go. Though Sarah was surprised by Brandon's quick decision to enlist, his physicality made him a good candidate. He played football from middle school through high school and was into powerlifting. He was a big guy and would be well prepared for the physical demands of the Navy.

Not only was Brandon strong, but very bright. He got mostly A's, read voraciously, and loved learning. He always excelled in math, science, and history, and even had competed in smelling bees as a young student.

His family had a nickname for him, Webster. He loved learning and he never stopped. He just continued always learning. And it would be hard to find a subject that he didn't have something to contribute on. Like a lot of times it would even surprise me in conversations, the things that he knew.

Brandon was different from his brother, Scott, and many of his peers. He had no trouble entertaining himself and was a self-described introvert. Sarah recalled as a boy when some neighborhood kids came by to ask him to play. He said, I'm reading a book, but I'll think about it.

He loved reading and had a penchant for epic fantasy sagas. I can imagine him finding his way through the 12,000 pages in the 14-book Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan that was very popular in the 90s and 2000s.

He was kind. He was generous. If you ever needed anything, if you needed to talk to him, if you needed help with something, you just could depend on him. He was always the person, like if I had something I wanted to talk about, I was like, I'll comprehend it. And I think a lot of people felt like that.

After he entered the Navy, he traveled around the eastern U.S. to enter basic training and then several specialized training programs to prepare him for his role in the Navy as a nuclear submarine machinist mate.

This is one of the most difficult roles to fill in the Navy and has the highest enlistment bonus of any position in the Navy. In 2022, it's listed on their website at $38,000. It requires smarts and fitness. He had to have scored very high on the standardized test given to all new recruits. The test is aptly named a battery and covers math, reading,

science, electronics, spatial visualization, and mechanics. Your raw score doesn't matter, only how you do compared to other test takers. Your results are given to you in percentile, and for Brandon to have been eligible, he would have scored in approximately the 85th percentile across several disciplines. After his training, Brandon was stationed out of Hawaii and spent a great deal of time aboard nuclear submarines at sea.

Even though he was in paradise, on a remarkable little island marked by year-round perfect weather, mountains, rainforest, beaches, and scuba diving, his mom remembered most of all his complaint.

You know, he was kind of an Eeyore because I was like, who goes to Hawaii and complains? You know, I love Hawaii. You know, he would complain about so many things, you know, and I would just be like,

You know, let me trade places with you. I feel like, you know, when people go to Hawaii, everything's just so, you know, for the most part, just really chill. But he would complain about how people acted or the driving or getting around or just...

anything. And I think like, you're in Hawaii, you can't let the traffic bother you or, you know, just things like that. But, you know, I think he did get out. I'm sure that, you know, there were things that he went and did, and I just didn't hear a lot about it. You know, he may have even dated then, but I just don't know everything that he was up to at that point.

"Brandon was a big guy. He was six feet tall and muscular. I can only imagine his discomfort being cooped up in a tiny sardine can under the ocean.

It surprised me to hear that he'd chosen a job for himself that lacked the creature comforts of home. His mom recalled that he never really enjoyed camping or outdoor trips because of the many small annoyances that came with them. He did complain about the food. I remember him talking about, you know, when they're underway, like, they would run out of food. So, like, they would use ketchup for the sauce for spaghetti. So he was not happy about how the...

You know, before they would get to a port to restock, he didn't have a lot good to say about the food. But he loved, you know, he always loved Japanese culture and he got to go to

the ports and I think he really, he loved that part of it, you know, that he was in Japan and I think he said he tried shark and, you know, just all those different kinds of things. And he would always, you know, he didn't get to call a lot at that time, but he would call and he would be like, you know, what do you want? Do you want a souvenir or something like that? So it was just very thoughtful. I do remember though, when I,

We stopped in, you know, to see him and spent time at Pearl Harbor, but then we were going on to the Big Island for the remainder of vacation. And I remember when it was, you know, time to say goodbye. It really did seem hard for him. Like, he didn't say anything, but I could just, I could sense it, that he hated seeing us leave. He was based in Pearl Harbor, and after a five- to six-year career in the Navy, he was out unexpectedly early.

It was cut short by a back injury and PTSD. He was honorably discharged, packed up, and headed back home to Washington State as a civilian, retiring with a rank of Petty Officer, Second Class. He was about 23 years old, and he had his whole life ahead of him. When he returned to Monroe, Washington in 2009, he moved in with his parents and got a job in the area. Monroe is a suburb north of Seattle.

His mom remembered him working at a soup factory for a while, but big changes were ahead. His mom, his younger adopted sister Rachel, and his stepdad Reg were going to be leaving Washington for good in just two short years, and his brother and his wife just a year after that.

In the meantime, he got his own apartment in Everett, Washington, where he would stay for many years. He was receiving disability payments from the Navy, which helped to ease the burden of living on his own in Seattle.

It was his first time to truly be on his own. Though he was away from his family at 18, he was still under the strict supervision and support of a new family, his military family. Without that structure in his life, he was left with a void to discover his own interests and his own identity. Growing up, you know, I kind of immersed them in a few different things. Nothing really seemed to be of interest. But when

When we cleaned out Brandon's apartment, we found a black-faced guitar in his closet. So we were kind of surprised at that because I didn't know that he had taken that up. He found musical inspiration in heavy metal thrasher bands like Five Finger Death Punch, Disturbed, and Slipknot.

He got into Viking culture. Mythological and tribal tattoos covered his arms, chest, and back. He grew out his coarse, reddish-brown beard and even braided it into three long plates that were over a foot long. He became a fan of insane clown posse and counted himself among their devoted fan group, the Juggalos.

To me, Brandon was just so unique in a lot of ways. You know, even as an adult, I just didn't see him caught up in a lot of things that other adults were. Like, he wasn't afraid to be himself. One time, it was after he got out of the Navy. Like I said, he's full of surprises, but he dyed his hair blue, like bright aqua blue. And we were like, wow, that's different, you know? Because he was an adult, and it was really before...

people started doing this. Like, that's more of a thing that people are doing now. And he did it back then. And so we thought that was kind of interesting. And you just never knew. Like, you never knew what to expect with him as far as little things like that. He was always into video gaming, even as a kid. And with some disposable money in his 20s, he picked up several consoles and a powerful computer to run all sorts of games.

After a few years of work, he decided he wanted to return to school. He took advantage of the GI Bill promise to pay for his schooling and enrolled in a local community college called Green River, south of Seattle. He moved into some off-campus housing and even got a living stipend from the Navy for the time that he was enrolled as a full-time student.

He studied bioengineering and chemical pre-engineering, and in two years, earned his associate's degree from Green River before moving on to the University of Washington, where he planned to finish a four-year engineering degree.

Brandon was a late bloomer when it came to dating. He hadn't dated anyone in high school, and when he was in the Navy, he was predominantly surrounded by men. So it wasn't until he was 23 and returned to Washington that he had much of a chance to even begin dating. Even so, his mom doesn't remember him having a long-term relationship until he was in his late 20s.

He wasn't shy, but I do think he was naive. You know, like I remember going to the mall. This was after he got out of the Navy and we went to the mall together. They have those little kiosks and this girl was flirting so much with him and he was completely unaware. And I thought that was really funny. I was like, oh, Brandon, you should have asked her out. You know, she was really...

flirting a lot with you. And he was like, she was? I was like, oh yeah. You know, and he just, he was kind of unaware of things like that. And I think that's because, you know, he was just more introverted and not as on like a social scene kind of person. When he began schooling at the University of Washington at 29, he was in his second long-term relationship of his life and he and his girlfriend moved in together.

Other than his girlfriend, Brandon was on his own in Seattle. His parents and siblings had all left the city, and difficulties in Brandon's life were mounting. His relationship was putting a tremendous financial strain on him, which was compounded by the fact that Seattle is a very expensive city. He was working part-time along with being a full-time student, and he had a very challenging course load on chemical engineering.

The larger apartment that he had leased with his girlfriend was suddenly his sole financial burden in the wake of their failing relationship. Plus, the most important thing in his life, his family, was on the other side of the country.

It just seemed to be a lot on him. You know, as his mom, I could tell he was stressed. And to me, I just thought it just wasn't worth it for him to be so stressed financially. He was coming out of a bad breakup and a bad relationship before that. I think I just left him broken hearted.

and the financial aspects on top of that. And I thought his income would go so much further here as far as cost of living. And there's a lot of schools here and that it would just be nice to help him and to have him close by. So we thought it would be a good idea for him to move here. I think maybe he thought, you know, being close to family and a fresh start would be the best thing.

With only one semester to go, Brandon made the difficult decision to leave the University of Washington and move to North Carolina to be closer to his family. Brandon put everything he owned into a box truck, towed his Camaro, and in July of 2018, made the long drive from Seattle, Washington to Greensboro, North Carolina. When he got to Greensboro, he put his stuff in a storage unit and moved in with his parents, Sarah and Reg.

They hadn't lived with Brandon for over a decade. He moved out when he was just 18, and here he was, 13 years later, at 31, back home with them.

His younger sister, Rachel, finally drinking age, remembered going to Lucky's Burger and Tap with him. It was a bar, restaurant, and music venue, the kind of place where you can get a burger piled practically a foot tall with fixins, grab a beer, and listen to live music five nights a week. Living with his folks didn't last that long. He met a girl at Lucky's in his brief time in Asheboro and started dating.

Things moved fast and after a little tension with his mom, Brandon decided to get an apartment with his new beau at Park Place Apartments on Church Street, just south of the town center of Asheboro. Sarah didn't get a good vibe about the area, and if you were to walk around the apartment community, you'd find that it backed right up to some train tracks and industrial buildings, making it feel a little rough around the edges and deserted, especially at night.

The apartment buildings were long, skinny, red brick rectangles, two stories tall, that formed sprawling U-shapes around central parking lots. His unit was on the ground floor in one of those six-to-eight-unit buildings. He signed a year lease, got his stuff out of storage, and staged it in his two-bedroom apartment.

He never really got completely unpacked. His living room and spare bedroom became areas to store things. His relationship ran its course quickly, and it fizzled out in just a few months, around February of 2019.

Brandon's stepdad, Reg, remembered during this time how disappointed Brandon was that his relationships had failed. He liked living with a partner and told him that he hated being alone. Perhaps compounding that pressure was the fact that his younger brother was married and had three children. In the meantime, he was having success finding work. He had a number of welding certifications and most of his work involved metalwork.

His employers were in North Carolina and beyond. He found himself traveling to Texas and to Detroit. It was much easier to afford the rent in Asheboro than it was in Seattle. In the brief time he was in North Carolina, he had about four different jobs. He was still trying to find the right fit. He had lost a couple of those jobs. One, because he threatened to call OSHA because of safety concerns.

I asked Sarah about Brandon's health, and she told me about a few issues that he was contending with. He had discovered that his testosterone levels were low, so he was administering hormone shots to himself regularly.

Each shot contained a small amount of HCG, or human chorionic gonadotropin, which is used to stimulate the body's production of testosterone. It required that he use a supply of disposable hypodermic needles, so he always had liquid vials and needles with him.

He had some lingering back issues from an injury working for the Navy, and he had a shoulder surgery from an injury that he'd sustained working at the soup factory in Washington. Before he left Washington, he also had a major powerlifting injury. He had broken his left, dominant arm. Sarah said that he'd made a full recovery from it, though.

He also suffered from sleep apnea, and Sarah remembered being surprised when he showed up to North Carolina with a CPAP machine. CPAP stands for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure, and it's essentially a mask you wear to sleep with a tube attached that goes to a machine to help you breathe at night.

It was February of 2019 and he was at work at an employer in Greensboro. Brandon hadn't been feeling well but he was still going to work. His employer noticed his state at work and could tell that something was off. He asked Brandon to leave and get a drug test.

He agreed and left, but decided to stop and get some food, and pulled over at McDonald's. But his state was beginning to deteriorate. He started to lose control. He was throwing up outside of his truck. He had terrible abdominal pain. He was screaming and had an unsteady gait.

Someone at the McDonald's called 911 and EMS responded quickly. From the records, it appears that the dispatcher told the EMS units that they suspected drug overdose or poisoning. The first responders asked him some questions and found his behavior and his answers bizarre. Though he could appropriately answer some of them, he couldn't explain how he had gotten to McDonald's. They took him to the hospital.

He insisted that he be able to use the bathroom, but once he got to the door, he wasn't sure how to operate the handle. Once he was admitted to the ER, he immediately fell unconscious. His mental state was erratic, delirious, and combative, so they sedated him and put him on a ventilator. He had acute respiratory distress, and they had trouble stabilizing him.

He was in a medically induced coma and was held in the ICU for several days. His kidneys were failing, so they put him on dialysis. He was given a blood test, but nothing came up.

After an intense five-day stay at the hospital, he was discharged. He had no recollection of the entire stay. The only thing that he told his mom is that he felt like he'd been profiled as a drug user from the very beginning, which is definitely true. It doesn't, however, explain what this mysterious near-death episode was all about. His employer, too, wanted to make sure that Brandon wasn't using drugs.

and asked him to produce a clean drug test before returning to work. It had a one-week lead time from the hospital, and he didn't feel like waiting, so he just got another job. His mom said that he was getting calls from recruiters pretty regularly looking for his skill set and experience. And not two months later, on the morning of April 24th, 2019, he had another major health scare.

He was at work, and that morning, around 7.30 a.m., he suddenly felt very hot and passed out, falling to the ground and hitting his head. Fainting from a standing position as a 6-foot-tall, 300-pound man can be dangerous, and he was lucky to have not been badly injured. He quickly woke up and resumed work, and about an hour later, the same thing happened again. Fortunately, he was sitting in a chair the second time.

EMS was called and they took him to the main Asheboro hospital and dropped him off at the ER around 9 a.m. Brandon was conscious and lucid and explained that he had diffuse abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, and, unsurprisingly, a headache. He wasn't sure what to make of it and told the doctor perhaps it had something to do with the outdated meat he'd eaten the night before. They ran his blood work and found no sign of any illegal drugs.

He seemed to have recovered and he, again, was left with few answers. Little choice but to move on. These incidents didn't make a lot of sense to Brandon. He was a strong and healthy guy. He would log his food and his workouts. He cooked for himself and often would take health supplements. He was very active and on his feet for work. He worked out a lot. He was even pursuing certification in personal training.

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It was August of 2019, and Brandon had found a job based out of Charlotte, North Carolina, an hour and a half away from Asheboro. He was making the long commute. He was happy with the job, and he was looking to move closer to work. It had been about a year since he'd gotten his own two-bedroom apartment, and he let management know that he didn't want to renew, but rather go month to month.

He was starting to get his place packed and ready for yet another move. His mom and family were helping him to get organized, but there wasn't too much work to be done. He hadn't really unpacked from his initial move-in. Sarah remembered helping him and him complaining of being very tired. In late August, he went on a work trip to Detroit from Tuesday the 27th to Thursday the 5th of September.

The very next day after he returned, Friday the 6th, he was brought into the office in Charlotte and he was fired. The reason? They told Brandon that it was because of the condition of his hotel room. They put him up at a hotel and he stayed in the same room the entire trip.

Fairly early on, the hotel staff began taking photos of the room. It's not clear if the photos were requested by his company, or if the hotel took the initiative to document its condition.

The things that they shot seemed to be centered around messiness and his medications. The images invoke a strange feeling of invading someone's privacy. They had close-ups of his pill bottles showing the medication he was on. In addition to the HCG and disposable syringes I mentioned earlier, he also had some prescriptions for different hormone medications. There are images of a bag of onions, a brand new unused slow cooker.

There were some empty Chinese food-to-go containers and dirty clothes on the floor, but perhaps the most concerning were the small spots of blood on his white bedsheets.

That same day, after he drove back from Charlotte, he went to his mom's house to dog sit. He explained what happened, but he was in good spirits about it. He said that he'd even spoken to a recruiter that day about where his next job might land him. In fact, he was more stressed out about getting the AC working at his mom's than he was about getting fired.

He felt overheated, and the T-stat had been automatically disabled when the family left town. Sarah was on a trip to Kentucky to pick up his sister, Rachel, and Brandon was happy to hold down the fort. What Sarah didn't know was that when she left the house that day, it would basically be the last time she'd see her son alive. On Saturday, Sarah was on the way back home from Kentucky. She spoke with him briefly to tell him happy birthday. He was turning 33.

Sarah and Rachel got home around 8 or 9, but Brandon had already left. He had plans to meet up with a girl, but had texted his dad saying that she'd cancelled on him. This was the last time that Sarah heard Brandon's voice. Over the next couple of days, Brandon and his mom talked over text, but they never spoke on the phone.

On Tuesday night, September 10th, Sarah called Brandon in the evening at 8 and 10 p.m., but he didn't pick up or call back promptly, which was out of character for him. She kept waiting for his call on Wednesday, but that call never came. She called him again that afternoon at 3.32 p.m., and it went to voicemail. By Wednesday night, Sarah decided that she was going to go over to his apartment and check on him the next day.

On Thursday, September 12th, Sarah called Brandon's phone eight times between 11:53 a.m. and 2:16 to no avail. She, along with Rachel, made the short trek over to his apartment and at 2:45 p.m. knocked on his front door. There was no response. She tried to open the front door, but it was locked.

As she pulled into the parking lot, she saw his truck was still there. Something was wrong. She called 911. As she was waiting for first responders, she contacted the apartment management company to get keys to the front door. She made her way around the back and discovered some damage to the back window. The outside pane of the insulated glass window was broken.

and the screen was bent and damaged. When they arrived, Sarah was told to wait outside. They would enter the apartment and check on him. What they discovered was devastating. It was just so hard to describe. I mean, at first they thought he was dead. We screamed. My daughter screamed, and then I screamed. It must have been like a blood pressure drop or something, because you just, like...

Like I was standing there, but I didn't feel like I was there, but he was still alive. And they called me off to the side and they brought Brandon out and I didn't really see him because they had put a sheet all the way up to his neck and they had, you know, like the oxygen collar on him. So I couldn't really see much of him.

They had discovered Brandon in his bedroom, laying on the floor, barely breathing, unconscious, nude, and badly hurt, with scratches, cuts, and bruises over his entire body.

They put him on a gurney, covered his body, and brought him out. By 4:00 PM, they took Brandon to the main hospital in Asheboro to try to help him. Asheboro Police Department detectives arrived soon after and asked Sarah and Rachel some questions about Brandon in the waiting room. He was transferred to nearby Moses Cone Hospital in Greensboro for a higher level of care, but Brandon's health continued to decline.

And then we finally go back and see Brandon and they're telling us that like, it doesn't look good and they don't think he's going to make it. Like they tried to put it like delicately. They were saying like, you know, the prognosis isn't good. But then I think like kind of in my mind, I was like, well, I've seen Brandon intubated like this before, not too long ago. And he made it, you know, but I didn't really put the two together.

instances together in that time because I think it's like your head and your heart telling you two different things. Like my heart's telling me he's going to pull through this, but then my head is like listening to what the doctor is saying that he's not. They were confronted by a terrible situation. Doctors said that there was no hope and that it was time to decide whether or not to continue life support functions.

They decided that without hope, it was time to let him go. And on Friday, September 13th, 2019, Brandon died at 8.57 p.m. While the family and the hospital medical team were all fighting to save Brandon's life, detectives were trying to figure out what had happened to this young man. I have 276 images taken by the Asheboro Police crime scene techs, and boy, are they strange.

His apartment is a disaster area. From the moment you open his red-painted front door, you're greeted with a mountain of stuff. His front door opens into the living room, and to your right, as you walk in, you see piles of moving boxes, about four feet tall, mostly half-open with clothes thrown on top of them. Buried underneath them is a dark brown leather sofa.

One of the boxes is badly mangled, ripped and torn. There's a neat pile of flattened boxes and other moving supplies, suggesting the upcoming move. The flooring was a 12x12 vinyl-ceramic tile, and the narrow walkway through the hall was littered with empty plastic wrappers, broken zip ties, little rocks and dirt, used tape, pens and pencils.

To get to the other side of the room, you had to walk over a small suitcase that lied with its top unzipped and open that was filled with crumpled clothes. It still had tags on it from a recent trip. Perhaps Brandon's visit to Detroit. On a far table in the living room sat some liquor bottles: Knob Creek, Svedka, Old Forester, and Bacardi. And next to them sat a big tub of protein powder.

Beyond the living room was the kitchen, and there was so much stuff littering the floor you couldn't even walk into it. Dozens of Tupperware lids and even a blender were strewn on the floor. Every inch of counter space was filled with dirty dishes, pots and pans, small appliances, and food. The washer and dryer were in the kitchen on the left, and the dryer door was open with dirty clothes laying on the ground in front of it.

All the blinds to the windows were shut. There was one main corridor from the living room that provided access to the spare bathroom, the spare bedroom, and Brandon's bedroom. Though the corridor's floor was free from debris, you could see dirty clothes spilling out of Brandon's bedroom at its end. The spare bedroom to the left was packed with moving boxes, and the floor was filled with dirty clothes, its closet stuffed to the brim.

But it wasn't until you got to his bedroom that you started to understand the gravity of the disarray.

His bedroom door had been removed from its hinges and staged in the hallway bathroom, perhaps by EMS. The sliding doors on his bedroom closet had been removed and were lying on the floor, stained with blood. The same VCT flooring in the living room ran all the way back through the corridor and into his bedroom. When you looked down from the entryway, you found a roughly 10 by 10 inch stain of blood on the floor.

His bed was relatively free of debris, but all the floor space was completely covered with a bizarre mix of crumpled moving boxes, clothes, household trash like pizza boxes and crushed soda cans, his shower rod and curtain, and valuable electronics. To the right was one of his bedroom closets, and it contained one of the strangest things of the whole unit.

There was a large closet organizer system, still brand new, in its original cardboard box sitting in the corner of the closet, and its packaging was torn open and bloodstained, the brown cardboard shell ripped open and dangling down. This is where Brandon had been found by EMS, unconscious and laying on the floor.

His bed was stripped of sheets and blankets, and his mattress was riddled with dozens of large bloodstains. On the far side of his bed, which was snugged up against the white bedroom walls, was an empty pizza box stuffed between the mattress and the wall. Above the box were a number of fresh-looking red bloodstains. His naked bed had a handful of unopened cans of Red's Wicked Apple Ale and a package of chewing tobacco.

Brandon was a regular user. As you got closer to the door of the bathroom, you could tell that there had been a water leak. Papers on the floor were soaked, but there was no standing water. His nightstand, adjacent to the bed, was toppled over and lying on its face, exposing the fiberboard back panel, its bottom edge visibly damaged by water.

The bathroom was destroyed. The seat and seat cover were ripped off the toilet bowl. The porcelain cover to the tank was broken in half. The toilet itself was coming up slightly from the ground, and the slow water leak that spilled out into the bedroom originated from it. The lever for the tank was broken and dangling, and the water in the tank was gone. The bowl of the toilet was stuffed full of toilet paper and looked to be backed up.

All of the towel holders and toilet paper holders had been ripped out of the wall. The bathtub faucet was left on and running. The sink was filled with toiletries, and the mirror-faced medicine cabinet above it was broken into shards. As the police sifted through the mountain of stuff, they discovered his wallet with about $100 in it.

They found a mangled metal clipboard that looked like it had been an object of aggression. They found his CPAP machine buried under a mountain of stuff. They found a pillow that had tons of blood stains on it and a number of sex toys and restraints. Console gaming systems and laptops were mixed in with a pile of stuff. The last thing of particular note is that the T-stat was set to 60 degrees, perhaps an indication of Brandon's feeling of overheating.

Police later got a search warrant to return and search Brandon's truck. When they opened the back door, chicken nuggets started to spill out from trash and debris on the floorboard. The front passenger door was filled with empty containers of energy drinks. The mess was everywhere.

It's hard to make sense of the condition of Brandon's apartment. Sarah acknowledged that he was messy, but this doesn't look like mess. It looks like someone ransacked the place. Trash and valuable personal possessions were indiscriminately mixed up and thrown into huge piles. It's so bizarre. Sadly, we don't have Brandon's own account of what happened. He was found unconscious by EMS and never recovered.

But when had he lost consciousness? When was his last bit of communication? There are so many unanswered questions. His mom, after starting to come to terms with the loss of her son, began a tireless search to try to answer some of these questions. And for the past two years, Sarah has answered many and unearthed even more. Next week on Murder, She Told...

The nurse told me that he really looked like someone who had been hit by a vehicle. He was just bruised everywhere. From what I knew, Brandon was in his apartment alone. Like, I just could not put any of this together. Nothing made any sense. Join me as we dig into the circumstances leading up to Brandon's mysterious death, what the autopsy says, the investigation that followed, and who might have been with Brandon the night he died.

I want to thank you so much for listening. I'm so grateful that you chose to tune in and I couldn't be here without you. Thank you. If you want to support and contribute to the show, there's a link in the show notes with options. Leaving a nice review or telling a friend is a great way to support too. You can connect with me on Facebook or Instagram at MurderSheToldPodcast.

Special thanks to Sarah Lee for her generous amounts of time in sharing her memories with me. A detailed list of sources can be found on the blog at MurderSheTold.com linked in the show notes.

Thank you to Byron Willis for his research and writing support. If you would like to make a suggestion for a future episode or a correction, feel free to reach out to me at hello at MurderSheTold.com. My only hope is that I've honored your stories and keeping the names of your family and friends alive. I'm Kristen Sevey, and this is Murder She Told. Thank you for listening.