Murders and monsters

I don’t believe in monsters.

I’m in a courtroom for the first day of a two-week murder trial in the deaths of Brynn Bills, a small-town 17-year-old strangled and buried in an Alpena-area back yard, and Abby Hill, a woman executed because she knew too much.

When police named a suspect in the killings, social media rang with anger, demanding a swift and terrible vengeance upon the “monster.”

We couldn’t fathom such a deed in our peaceful, pretty city. Someone capable of squeezing a girl’s neck until she died or holding a gun to a woman’s head and pulling the trigger had to be someone almost inhuman, with a mind incapable of only evil.

Not like us.

Not one of us.

A monster.

I don’t know if the man accused of the killings, Brad Srebnik, actually did them. I have a theory, based on the research I’ve conducted, but I don’t know for sure. But let’s say he did. 

That does not make him a monster.

The truth is much scarier than that.

Brad is from Alpena. He attended Alpena schools. Hung around with Alpena kids. Got caught with a group of troublemaking preteens at Rotary Island Mill Park when he was 14. Gave someone the middle finger at Walmart when he was 18 and ended up in the middle of a midnight, middle-of-the-street brawl.

Got too drunk sometimes. Tried to break into a safe at the Culligan Water store when he was 20. Stole music equipment from a church with some friends. Sold a little weed.

Got chance after chance to straighten up, then went to prison when he ran out of chances. Came back to Alpena with new, crime-connected connections. Hooked up with some old school buddies and broke into a string of hunting camps, stealing and selling the guns they found. Did more prison time. Met more of the most dangerous people in Michigan.

Just a kid from Alpena, who ended up in a biker gang clubhouse and, if police are right, in an Alpena kitchen with two people he would eventually kill.

I’ve sat in Alpena courtrooms and watched the same story, over and over. Minus the murders, of course. But the rest is the same. Kids from Alpena, drawn into bad places and bad situations, becoming Alpena adults stuck in a loop not social workers nor police nor prison can break.

There are probably hundreds of people in Alpena, right now, walking the path Brad walked. Coping with the same life-changing, horrific trauma he endured as a teenager when tragedy struck his family. Surrounded by the same drugs, the same temptations, with the same weaknesses and inadequacies and unwillingness to change.

Hundreds of people who could walk to the same edge and possibly jump.

Alpena didn’t raise a monster. It raised Brad. If the murders never happened, nobody would have raised an eyebrow at his history. He’s just one of the bad ones, we’d say, turning our attention to more important matters.

Maybe we need to do more. Maybe we need to figure out what got him from Rotary Island Mill Park to that Alpena kitchen.

Maybe we need to make changes before the murders happen.

We don’t know how, we cry. Nothing works. The systems we’ve created to stop crime before it happens and punish it when it does can only do so much. We are out of options.

So we dig deeper. Look harder. Stop calling them monsters. Stop thinking locking one man away solves the problem and prevents the next death, because it doesn’t.

I don’t have a magic solution.

But doing nothing is not an option.

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The murder trial in the deaths of Brynn and Abby runs Jan. 29 until, at the court’s best guess, Feb. 9, 2024. I’ll be here. 

I tried to create a signup that would let you receive email updates about the trial, but technology has defeated me. So I’m going to share reflections via this blog. I won’t include graphic or gory details, but murder is a difficult and painful topic any way you approach it. Please use your judgment whether it would be good for your mental health to read those posts.

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