'The Most Vulnerable of the Vulnerable:' The Story of Erica Sheppard, a Lifelong Victim of Abuse on

(lengthy, very disturbing article)


‘The Most Vulnerable of the Vulnerable:’ The Story of Erica Sheppard, a Lifelong Victim of Abuse on Death Row
8/3/2022 by Natalie Schreyer



Erica Sheppard before death row. Left: with Sister Helen Prejean in the late 1990s. Right: at age 17 holding Haybert—prosecutors labeled her a ‘bad mom.’

When Erica Sheppard wakes up in solitary confinement every morning, she can’t escape her first thought: “Lord, give me the strength to make it through another day.” Her days inside a tiny Texas prison cell have turned into years—27 years—waiting to die for her unwilling role in a robbery gone wrong. Sitting in a barren space the size of a small closet, the 48-year-old sometimes sings, “And soon I will be free,” lyrics from the Christopher Cross song “Sailing.” She cannot see outside through her only window, which is covered with bars and darkened by a glaze. This is home for at least 22 hours every day. Sheppard is one of 50 women on America’s death row, most of whom, like her, are victims of domestic violence, mental illness or child abuse, according to an analysis of the women’s histories conducted by Ms.

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A Child Victim

Sheppard was just a preschooler when the abuse began (she was sexually assaulted by her babysitter’s boyfriend). She still remembers the blood—wiping it up, shoving the red towel under the bathroom sink, trying to hide it in fear of being punished, she later told psychiatry professor Rebekah Bradley, who evaluated her at Mountain View Unit prison in 2008. After the abuse came abandonment. When her mother heard about the abuse after Sheppard’s brother Jonathan, a witness and victim himself, reported it to their grandmother, she accused her children of lying. “It was one thing for Erica and me to have been physically and sexually abused,” Jonathan said in a 2008 affidavit. “But it is another thing when the person who is supposed to love you and care for you does not believe you. It made it even worse.”

From then on, sexual assault marred Sheppard’s childhood repeatedly. When she was orally raped at knifepoint after a stranger pulled her into a car while she was walking to buy food, 16-year-old Sheppard told a friend that she wanted to call the police. “They’ll turn it around on you,” Sheppard recalls her friend telling her. “You’re gonna have to learn you can’t tell.” Raped and possibly drugged at a party when she was 16, she didn’t tell her mother or grandmother about the assault, convinced that no one would believe her. By then, she had learned. “You stuff it, and you move on,” she later told Bradley, the psychiatry professor.


Erica Sheppard before death row. Left: Sheppard as a young girl—she was a preschooler when she was first sexually assaulted. Right: with her mother and her son Haybert, the only one of her children with memories of her outside of prison.

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She was only 17 when she met Jerry Bryant Jr., who later beat her in the parking lot of a hospital where her infant daughter, Audria, was receiving treatment. Sheppard wouldn’t leave Audria’s side, and when she refused to go home with Bryant, he hit her in the face so hard that she fainted. Such unending abuse led to brain damage, according to a 2008 evaluation of Sheppard by clinical psychologist Myla Young. As a result of constant fear, constant tumult and constant head injury from abuse, Sheppard has the approximate mental age of a 14-year-old girl, Young’s report says. Just four weeks before the incident that landed her on death row, Sheppard sought refuge at a women’s shelter with her 3-year-old son Haybert and 10-month-old daughter Audria. When she left after nine days, she knew she couldn’t go home to more abuse, but she had no idea she’d soon be facing prison and a death sentence. All she knew was that she was hurting. By the time she was 17, Sheppard had run away from home more than 10 times.
“Erica came by to pick her things up,” wrote Jennie Mozley of the Matagorda County Women’s Crisis Center on Sheppard’s last day at the shelter. “She’s in a lot of pain. I wished her luck.” About a month later, Sheppard cried as she was forced to watch her brother’s friend stab and beat a woman to death.

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NOTE: Information not available for every woman on death row, so these numbers could be an undercount. (Ms. magazine)


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A cell for women on death row at the Texas prison where Erica Sheppard is housed.

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https://msmagazine.com/2022/08/03/erica-sheppard-abuse-death-row-penalty-domestic-violence/