Chapter 5: Hummingbird

This is the true story of my life.

I changed some names and details to protect the innocent.

It is marked explicit. Proceed with caution.

I'll be out at the ranch or on a job somewhere and there will be a hummingbird right here.

I'm Brittany Yard and this story is mine.

So she was doing some things that it was just not her typical Braley way of things.

My dad didn't get that experience with me in high school.

He did all of the normal high school stuff well.

She ended up not getting into the UW, which is where she had applied.

It really threw her for a loop because it was probably one of the first goals that she didn't just sort of automatically reach.

It hit her pretty hard.

She had been working at a restaurant in Magnolia as a hostess.

You know, you have your restaurant industry friends and they're a little older, smoking pot and drinking and sort of a little faster life than she had ever done before.

That transition from young teen to growing up into this woman was not all roses.

My mom opened her arms to Braley during that time that she was struggling.

I wouldn't say my dad and I were critical of Braley, but we were concerned and we were making that known.

It was sort of this easy peasy way for Braley to get away with some stuff because, you know, my mom isn't going to parent or raise concerns about some of that behavior.

Want to be a fuck up? Hey, I'm a fuck up too. Like, let's fuck up together.

Braley came back to Seattle because they got into some sort of fight.

I don't know the details.

My mom and I weren't talking at that time.

I have my, you know, assumptions as to what was sort of going on there.

You get sucked in and then my mom does a fantastic job of reminding you very quickly why that is not a good place to be.

That year was very tumultuous for all of us with her.

And it was a lot of her figuring out who she was, dealing with stuff that had happened in our childhood and trying to decide who she was going to be as an adult.

She had graduated high school. She's living her life.

And she was working at the restaurant.

So you go out after and party.

And she hadn't done it in high school.

Brent is Brianna's dad.

And he's also my best friend.

We split up 24 years ago this month.

We are just getting ready to celebrate our anniversary of our breakup.

Brent and Brianna have been together for a long time.

Brent and Braylee were really close after Braylee graduated.

So Brent and I were at dinner recently.

We were talking about Braylee and every time I talked to Brent I'd learn more about Braylee.

It's like the uncle.

The family, I think a lot because of how Brittany, like what had happened with Brittany and stuff, especially her parents, they became very strict with Braylee.

And so, you know, we just all hung out together a lot.

And after Brent and I split up, Braylee and Brent maintained a relationship.

Brent was in a phase.

He was promoting parties and club shows and stuff during that time.

Braylee was under 21, so he'd get Braylee in.

That was in the beginning.

She hadn't gone off the rails yet.

So that was very much like, hey, yeah, of course, it's my little sister.

And she would show up to my house at two in the morning because she was fucked up and didn't have anywhere to go and didn't want to go home.

Crash on the bed, that kind of stuff.

And it was tough because there was some hypocrisy because I'd be like, hey, Braylee, you shouldn't do those things.

She's like, Brent, you're a club promoter.

You know the things I'm doing because I'm hanging out with the people that you hang out with.

I'm like, yeah, but I'm 10 years older than you.

But they, during that time, were actually probably closer than Braylee and I because I was off raising Brianna.

I had started a company.

They were getting to do fun stuff together.

She was trying shit out.

She was pushing boundaries for the first time ever.

She wasn't even pushing him hard.

She's just 20 years old, seeing what's out there.

She had started dating this guy.

I don't know how they met or how that came about.

He definitely wasn't a typical in-her-circle guy and very opposite of the people that she had dated previously.

I met him once or twice.

You know, you look backwards and it's like, damn it.

Why did you not say no?

But you can't.

If I had said no, it would have cemented a yes for her.

So it was a weird thing that I met him and the reaction in my inside was not good.

This one's not good.

But never imagined what would happen.

And it was everything about him.

He emitted this dark energy, especially because she was so tiny.

He just sort of loomed over her.

His criminal record is very indicative of he stole a lot for a living.

I would be shocked if he had a job.

She knew I didn't approve.

So she didn't talk to me about him.

I don't know where he lived.

He hung out in the Ballard area.

When I found that poem that she wrote about me, she's talking about me being her guiding light.

And with what happened in her relationship with her boyfriend at the time and how it devolved,

I feel like I didn't give her what my dad had always given me, which was that you can fuck up and it's okay.

I feel like I was trying to tell her, you know, don't do that or, you know, do this or why are you doing that?

I did that to her in that last year.

And so to me, it felt like I had turned out my guiding light.

I wasn't offering that to her when she probably needed it the most.

This guy was, I mean, bad news.

And bad news in the sense that for a long time after she passed, I kept tabs on him through our private investigator every time he would get arrested.

The sad part is, is he probably was comfortable to her.

There wasn't actual care.

It's sort of this roller coaster.

But she was experimenting.

And so it just, you know, was a safe place to land.

And he's not going to judge her.

That year with Braley had been rough on all of us.

And so tensions, I think, were a little higher.

We spend Christmas together as a family, the whole Sunday dinner crowd.

We show up to Granny's house Christmas Eve.

We are there for two or three days.

There's sometimes 20 people that stay for two or three days.

Everybody wakes up together and does Christmas presents.

And, you know, all the cousins and aunts.

It's an amazingly fun thing.

It's also three days with a lot of people.

And, you know, a lot of, a lot of food.

And by the end of the three days, it's not even that you don't like it.

It's just, okay, I need, I need to go to my parents.

I need to go to my own house for a minute and take a shower or have a second.

When we get our Christmas presents, if it's clothes, we try them on.

Everybody tries their stuff on and sees if they like it.

Braley had come into the living room.

And her and I were the only ones in the living room.

I'm not sure how that happened.

And she had been trying her clothes on.

And then she took her pants off to, like, put on a skirt or put on a different pair of pants.

And I snapped at her.

I was like, what are you doing?

Like, go to the bathroom.

Why are you changing in the middle of the living room?

For whatever reason, I snapped at her.

And then she was like, I don't understand what the problem is.

And I'm like, I just don't understand how hard it is to, like, go to the bathroom.

It was the dumbest fight ever.

I don't know if she was in my way and I was trying to, you know, like, load up stuff.

I don't know why it bothered me because it wasn't a thing.

And I'm sure that her and I have had those interactions a thousand times where it's just sisters annoying each other.

But what ended up happening is she had gone in to change.

She then went into the bathroom to, like, finish.

And it was right around the time that we were loading up to leave.

And so we just didn't talk again.

And we all got our stuff out of that house, hauled it to our own places.

And Rowena and I swung by her apartment.

And she had broken up with this guy and was really focusing on her future.

So she was trying to separate herself from him.

She knew he was bad.

She wanted to step back into college and that goal.

And was planning on going to college for photography somewhere warm and beautiful.

But she got all this camera gear for Christmas.

So she decided she wanted to stay there and photograph the fireworks on New Year's Eve.

She lived in one of our apartments that faces the Space Needle.

She's 20.

She doesn't really want to go hang out with Mom and Dad in Clay Elm with the deer and the turkeys.

But thanks, but no thanks.

I'm going to stay here.

And we all kind of waved and said goodbye and away we went.

I remember that New Year's Eve.

I'm watching the fireworks throughout the country and I hadn't fallen asleep.

I woke up and something was wrong.

And I'm out in the middle of Clay Elm and it's quiet.

The only thing I could hear is the fireworks going off in town,

which is just, you know, nothing major, nothing like being in Seattle.

And so that's not what woke me up.

And I knew something was wrong.

I wasn't sure what.

Everybody in the family had that same but different experience somehow at that same time.

So that sucks.

She was my little sister.

It was New Year's Eve and I didn't answer it because I was home with Brianna.

I figured she was calling to see what I was doing.

Had I answered and been like, come hang out with us tonight?

I've got jobs and, you know, the world just came back alive because of the holidays.

So I've got all kinds of commitments to multiple, multiple architecture and demo excavation company.

And anyway, so I'm extremely busy and I had to take care of business a bit

and was trying to call her all day and it just kept going straight to voicemail.

She wasn't answering her phone.

So we all like, it was, we went to go check on the apartment and all went there.

And then I don't know how many minutes or years passed.

It wasn't a call an ambulance or get help. It was call 911.

But he stuck his head out the side bathroom window.

I didn't know at the time it was because she was hung on the front door.

He couldn't open the front door.

Because I'm seeing this from here to that door.

And it's not what your mind is capable of figuring out.

And immediately it's, when I went over there, it's like, you, there's no way.

You can't, you can't get there.

She's, she's a little girl. I mean, she's not big enough to get up there.

There was nothing around to get up there on.

She always trusted that the people around her were good, even when they weren't.

He was six foot five. My sister was five, four, maybe.

If I got that wrong, she's going to haunt me.

I mean, she didn't stand a chance.

I have some very specific images in my brain of what happened in the next four hours that night.

Watching them take her out in a black bag on a gurney was the moment that I knew my life would never be the same.

It was the first time that I've really understood how great it is to be alive.

And I had never experienced that before.

And the world believes that Braylee committed suicide.

To me, as her dad, the worst part of the whole story is because the world thinks something that's incorrect.

And I don't really care what the world thinks. I truly don't.

Because I know what happened.

I mean, overturned furniture, and there was a lot of things in that apartment that were not typical or right.

I just started looking around. I was like, no.

So I feel bad that my instant reaction was that she had done it.

Because everybody else that followed me in that room did exactly the same thing.

The conflicting autopsy reports are one that it was death by suicide and one that it was asphyxiation.

Because resources don't need to be dealt with.

And he had worked at a shipyard down on Lake Union.

And there was the shipyard shootings. This was 1999.

The entire shipyard was owned by close friends of mine.

And I had worked at the shipyard over summers in my teens and stuff.

So I was really close. I had just gone out the week before with Pete, who was one of the people that was killed.

And that guy did get caught and he did go through the whole system.

There were hearings and he's in jail. He got the death penalty. He hasn't been put to death.

What I knew after Braley passed was it didn't help.

When they found him guilty, it didn't fix anything.

I don't know that I could have handled going through a trial with Braley being the victim.

Part of me is grateful that we never went down that road because I might be in jail now.

I can picture myself, you know, showing up and just handling justice myself.

I don't know that I would have been strong enough to fight to bring the person that killed her to justice.

Because it's not enough.

Him sitting in jail for the rest of his life is not enough.

I think that whatever is happening to him in his life, that's worse than what jail would have been.

That's my hope, unfortunately, that the universe will make sure that he doesn't get another day of joy.

I see them coming towards me and I immediately feel better. I smile.

I recognize that same spirit that we all felt when we interacted with Braley.

She's relentless. She'll finish the picture. If it takes 20 hours straight, it will get finished.

And I told Brittany, we can't do anything to that guy, but she can.

Maybe it'll be a hummingbird coming to him. Maybe it'll be something else.

But he'll recognize it and I'm pretty sure he will feel opposite.

He will be reminded of what he did and I am sure he is going to live a tormented life while he's still here on this earth.

If she has anything to say about it, which that's up to somebody else.

we all know what we believe to be the truth is that she did not take her own life.

And there's a lot of physical evidence around why we believe that as well as just who she was.

She struggled for sure, but she was always going to reach her goal.

When we were planning the funeral, there was talk about who's going to do what.

And I had to write and do the eulogy.

Braley was born March 27th, 1985 in Idaho Falls, Idaho, when I was six and a half years old.

It was real hard at first to share the attention.

But after I realized it was easier if I kept her close, she spent the next few years on one of my hips.

My daughter Brianna told me last night that she loved it when Braley would take her to the aquarium

and the Pike Place Market in traditional style, filler full of donuts and honey sticks.

Brianna said that the only thing she didn't like about Braley was that she always had a hairbrush and she was always trying to brush her hair.

I've always told Braley that when I grow up, I want to be just like her.

And one day I hope I am.

I really feel like I was the only one that got all of Braley.

She also was the only person that knew what it was like to grow up in that house.

And so then it was, I'm alone in that.

And gratefully I have my dad who has been such an amazing support, but there's just, there's no feeling that loss.

This part of my story will always be unresolved.

There's a lot of her writings that I haven't read.

I can sort of do it in doses.

I would imagine that it's in there.

I imagine that she's told her story to us.

I just haven't had the courage to read it yet.

That's L-A-R-G Media.

Our executive producer is Brittany Ard.

Our showrunner is Sid Gladue.

Creative direction by Tina Noll.

Our associate producer is Kareem Kiltow.

Sound engineering by Chris Young and Sean Simmons.

Graphic design by Nigella Shama.

Opening theme by Youth Star and Miscellaneous.

If you want to know more about Britt, follow her on social media.

You can find her at britney.ard on all platforms.

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