Brandon Bernard was an American man from Texas, United States. He was one of the accomplices of Christopher Andre Vialva, the man who killed Todd Bagley and Stacie Bagley at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas.
Because the murders were committed at Fort Hood, Bernard and Vialva were tried in federal court. They were both sentenced to death.
Kim Kardashian West started a petition to stop him from getting executed. In 2018, she started working with the Donald Trump administration on prison reform.
In 2020, five of the nine surviving jurors who sentenced Bernard and Vialva to death for the killings of Todd and Stacie on Fort Hood called on Trump to commute his sentence. Among them were Jason Fuller and Gary McClung.
Angela Moore, who served as an assistant U.S attorney for the Western District of Texas from 1998 to 2002, was the federal prosecutor who defended Bernard’s death verdict on appeal. In an IndyStar op-ed published on November 18, 2020, she explained why a court or Trump should stop Bernard’s execution.
“I crochet many items; some I sell, others I donate,” Bernard wrote in his Write a Prisoner profile. “I like to play guitar. I love to read; fantasy is my favorite genre. One of my favorite books is ‘Pillars of Earth.'”
As a kid, Bernard struggled with asthma. As a teenager, he became involved with loosely organized gang of neighborhood friends called 212 Piru Bloods while he was actively attending a Seventh Day Adventist church.
Bernard’s two daughters Kiara Bernard and Taneah Bernard first met each other as teenagers while visiting him at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, USA. Weeks before his execution, Kiara, his mother Thelma Bernard, his two siblings and his aunt Rahsha Williams visited him in Terre Haute.
Brandon was born in San Antonio, Texas at the same hospital where Thelma worked as a U.S. Army nurse. Here are 13 more things about him:
- In 1982, his mother was transferred to Fairbanks, Alaska, USA so they moved there. In 1984, they moved to Fort Hood where he spent most of his childhood.
- In 1986, he entered the Seventh-Day Adventist Academy in Killeen. In 1987, he spent the summer in Colorado, USA with his mother who was temporarily assigned there for a medical training. He has a sister named Quiona Bernard and a brother named Max Bernard, who were born in December 1987 and in 1991, respectively.
- In June 1992, his mother had an open-heart surgery to correct a hole in her heart. In September 1992, his drunk father struck his mother in the chest and sprayed her with mace. His parents divorced in 1993. His father left their house and was later diagnosed as HIV-positive.
- His cousin Melsimeon Pollock came to live with his family in 1994 and encouraged him to help him burglarize houses in January 1995. The two were eventually caught and he bounced between his parents’ houses, switched schools several times and spent five months at a juvenile residential living facility in Brownwood, Texas in 1995. In 2016, Pollock wrote in a declaration, “Brandon stole things with me because Brandon knew I needed the money and Brandon wanted to support me and feel a sense of belonging. Brandon would not have broken into these houses on his own. He is not a mastermind, Brandon just followed what others had planned.”
- In 1996, he tried to look for a job but failed. He passed the GED examination in July 1997 and enrolled in the 12th grade at Killeen High School for the 1997-1998 school year but failed to maintain good attendance and good grades.
- In the summer of 1998, he tried to enlist in the U.S. Army but was rejected because of his juvenile record. In the fall of 1998, his parents explored a possible reconciliation, which he did not support.
- On June 21, 1999, Vialva and their fellow 212 Piru Bloods gang members Christopher Lewis, Tony Sparks and Terry Brown carjacked Todd and Stacie. They called him because they needed someone with a car to escape in so he joined the group at 7:30 p.m. It was Vialva who shot the couple. Following Vialva’s order, he set Todd and Stacie’s car on fire using lighter fluid while the couple was in it. Todd was already dead before being burned while Stacie died of smoke inhalation.
- On June 13, 2000, a jury of 11 white people and one black person at his trial in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas found him and Vialva guilty of carjacking, first-degree murder on a government reservation, aiding and abetting and conspiracy to commit murder. The jury unanimously voted for the two to receive the death penalty.
- In 2018, his lawyers discovered that the government had withheld evidence that may have helped him during his trial years earlier.
- On July 3, 2020, he turned 40.
- On September 24, 2020, Vialva was executed by lethal injection at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute. On October 16, 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that he was scheduled to be executed there also by lethal injection on December 10, 2020.
- During a court hearing on Zoom from death row at the federal prison in Terre Haute on December 2, 2020, federal public defender John Carpenter argued that the U.S. government could not legally execute him because he has not yet exhausted all of his appeals. After an hour, Judge Alan Albright decided that his execution could go forward as planned.
- On December 10, 2020, Kardashian took to Twitter to ask Trump to commute his sentence to life in prison while lawyers Allen Dershowitz and Ken Starr joined his defense team. In the end, he was executed and was pronounced dead at 9:27 p.m.
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