Chapter 114: The People v. Halloway
The grand jury indicted Bree in December, four months before Reyner vacated my conviction.
Three counts.
Reckless homicide. Leaving the scene of an accident involving death. Insurance fraud.
The fraud count was dismissed in March on a motion nobody contested, because it was seven years old and the limitation period is five.
That is the thing about a lie that holds for six years. It does not just cost you the truth. It costs you the counts.
I want to set down honestly how thin the case against her was, because I have heard people describe it as overwhelming.
It was not overwhelming. It was a seat position, a notary's book, and Dean.
The seat position proved somebody short had last sat in that seat.
It did not prove when. Voit had said so under oath, in a courtroom, on my own case.
The journal proved a statement was signed two days early. It proved fraud in the confession.
It did not prove who drove.
Dean proved everything.
Dean also had a signed agreement in his pocket and eighteen months on the table.
The car had been repaired in 2019 and sold in 2021 to a man in another state who had since scrapped it.
There was no blood, no video, no witness on the road, and no surviving physical evidence of any kind.
Bree's lawyer was a man named Corwin Feld and he was better than Vasch and he knew all of the above.
If that case had gone to a jury I think there was a real chance she would have walked.
Brandt thought so too. She told me so in her office in April, without softening it, which is her habit.
“A jury will be told the state's main witness bought his testimony.”
“And the photographs.”
“Photographs of a seat. Twelve people who have never once thought about a seat.”
So the state offered, in July, and Feld took it in September, and she pleaded in October.
One count of reckless homicide. Agreed sentencing cap of five years.
The leaving-the-scene count was dismissed at sentencing, as part of the arrangement.
Sentencing was the eleventh of November, in Courtroom 2C.
That is the room where I was sentenced in 2019. I had not been inside it since.
Same room. Same benches. The clock is on the same wall and it is four minutes fast, and it was four minutes fast then.
I sat in the fourth row.
I was a witness in that case, and witnesses sit where they are told to sit.
I had no right to speak. That is worth stating plainly, because people assume otherwise.
The victim in the case of the death of Nadine Okoro is Nadine Okoro and her family. Not me.
I was not a victim of that offence. My six years were not before that court and never were.
Theo spoke. He was twenty-six by then. He read from two sheets of paper and he did not look up once.
He talked about the bicycle.
He talked about the milk crate zip-tied to the back of it, and the shift she had swapped into for a colleague called Ottilie.
He said his mother had been dead for seven years and had been killed by a person for six days.
I have thought about that sentence more than anything else said in either courtroom.
Bree spoke last. Allocution.
She stood up, and she cried, and she said she had thought about it every day since.
She said she had been twenty-one. She said she was sorry to the family. She did say that, and I record it.
She did not say my name. Not once, in four minutes. I counted the sentences. There were nineteen.
Her wrist was bare. I looked, because I am not better than that.
The judge gave her five years.
She had no prior convictions and she had pleaded. Those things count, and they are supposed to count.
With credit for time served on remand and earned time, she was released after twenty-eight months.
I did the arithmetic on the bus and then I did it again at the kitchen table with a pen.
Seventy-two months for me. Twenty-eight for her. Two and a half to one.
She served twenty-eight months for the death. I served seventy-two for a piece of paper about the death.
Dean was sentenced in January to eighteen months on the tampering count.
He served eleven.
Renata was not in the courtroom on the eleventh of November. Vasch was, at the back, taking notes.
Afterward, in the corridor, Theo folded his two sheets in half and put them in his jacket.
He said, “That's done, then,” and I said yes, and neither of us said anything else about it.
He shook my hand at the lift. It was the first time he had ever touched me.
Then he went down and I took the stairs, because I had eleven minutes and I wanted them.