COCOA — At 5 a.m., the officer's whistle echoes through the concrete cells.
Nathaniel Brazill awakens in prison to another never-ending day.
David Spencer/The Post
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Inmate Nathaniel Brazill stands in the visiting area at the Brevard Correctional Institution. The framed Serenity Prayer on the wall at left is something he has taken to heart, he said.
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He and his cellmate take turns on the stainless steel toilet, lace up their boots, make the bunk bed, then wait for the officer to call inspection before breakfast.
"Plenty of time to get ready," Brazill says.
Indeed. Plenty of time for nothing in the never-ending day.
Brazill may spend six hours cleaning the grounds at Brevard Correctional Institution on this sunny day in May. The "grounds" are square patches of grass, between square brick buildings and cellblocks, crisis-crossed by concrete paths. They are neat. They already are clean.
Brazill and 130 other young males are assigned to pick up garbage there. They each scour a small area for cigarette butts.
"You may find some for about the first 30 minutes, but after that there's nothing else there. It's pretty boring," he says.
The seventh-grader who killed his teacher is done with school for the time being. Now 18, he finished his GED in prison years ago.
He would've graduated from high school this week. Presumably.
It is easy to presume things about him.
To presume that prison is terrible. To presume that he feels its punishment. To presume that he often thinks of the reason why he's there, a precious, popular teacher named Barry Grunow.
Those presumptions are wrong.
From one prison to another
Brazill is new to Brevard Correctional Institution. Before that, he spent about a year at a prison by a garbage dump in Vero Beach. It's called Indian River Correctional Institution.
Indian River is a prison for teenage boys, ages 14-18. "A gladiator school," as one staff member called it, where half the teens are gang members.
Brazill says he got transferred from Indian River in February after he witnessed abuse by prison officers there, repeatedly striking an inmate in the mouth, grabbing another by the throat.
Some Indian River officers were eager to see him go. "He brings too much light with him," said one major of Brazill's high profile. "He was not a dummy like the rest of 'em here."
Parts of the teen prison look like a summer camp. Minimum-security dorms with doors that lock from the inside, the chapel, the classroom. Brazill used to work there as an educational aide.
There is a saying stenciled on one of the dorm walls: "Watch your thoughts, they become your words. Watch your words, they become your actions. . . ."
There are no sayings on the wall where Brazill stayed.
It's a special cellblock built for this new breed of teen. Three wings of white cement walls and cell doors, gray floors, a few shower stalls with steel bar doors, a guard tower in the middle. It looks just like an adult prison.
There's something that looks like a makeshift hockey goal on one wing.
There's no hockey, of course.
It's a privacy screen for when officers have to "extract" boys from the shower. They have to videotape it for legal reasons. They attempt to cover the teens' private parts, an officer explains to a group of visitors.
It is the one shred of privacy in prison.
The visit is around lunchtime. Most of the boys confined to their cells as discipline are asleep, pillows pulled over their heads to block out the din and light. One boy has fallen asleep with his hand down his pants.
The brown plastic lunch trays are wheeled into the wing. The teens will eat in their cells. There's a piece of bread, spiral pasta with mayonnaise and Sloppy Joe that looks like cat vomit.
While at Indian River, Brazill stayed in a slim cell with a stainless steel toilet and sink. There's a metal bunk bed and flat mattresses, a sliver of a window and an air vent system. The vent system moves the air around a little bit but doesn't cool it.
"At times they turned it off, for some reason," Brazill says.
On weekends, he spent 23 hours a day inside that cell.
Re-creating his identity
His anger put him there.
He was furious after being sent home for throwing water balloons. It was last day of the year at Lake Worth Middle School in 2000. He told a friend he was going to come back and shoot another teacher and be "all over the news." He got the cheap little gun he had taken from "Granny's" house and sneaked back into school. He went to Mr. Grunow's classroom to see two girls. He pointed the gun at Mr. Grunow and demanded to see them.
Mr. Grunow laughed and refused. Brazill fired. He was 13. The 35-year-old father of two died in front of his classroom door.
Brazill faced life in prison for first-degree murder. In the year before trial, he morphed from the skinny seventh-grader who wept when police told him Mr. Grunow was dead, to a steely pubescent who revealed more anger than remorse when he testified at trial.
On the stand: Yes, he was mad. Yes, he knew how to use the gun. Yes, he pulled the slide back and popped the bullet into the chamber. Yes, he pulled the trigger.
But he didn't mean to.
A jury convicted him of second-degree murder, and he got a 28-year sentence.
His release date is May 2028. No gain time, no time lopped off for good behavior. 2028.
He'll be 41 years old.
It's the flashes of anger that always have been the mystery. That rage. Where did it come from? His mother was ill, his grades we're failing. Brazill's jaw clenches, and the conversation stops, though, when asked about it.
And where has the anger gone?
He's now a choirboy in prison. Literally.
Experts say that children sentenced to long prison terms after impulsive crimes go into denial. And they will try to regain the identity they had when they were still seen as good kids.
Exhibit A: Brazill.
He leads the Brevard Correctional Institution choir, is hoping to get a job with the chaplain soon. He's polite, spelling out the F-word as he relays what someone else said. He's bookish, reading The New York Times and bestsellers when he can get them. Brazill said he tries to counsel other inmates, encourage them not to revert back to crime when they get out. Most of them will be out decades before he is.
At 18, he's now forming the complex thoughts of an adult, writing letters to the editor. He opines that the causes of youth violence are "parental delinquency" and "criminal advocacy" — kids hanging around violent kids.
But neither apply to him.
His parents had nothing to do with it, he said. And he hung around good kids.
The only thing wrong at home may have been too much television and videos available there, he hypothesizes. The movies of mass killings, the video games, the gun Web sites.
"I can't say with certainty, but I believe that maybe had there not been so much overexposure to it, there may be a possibility this never happened," he says.
When asked, though, if he felt like he was in some movie or video that day, he answers: No.
Nor can he recall what movies or videos he saw immediately beforehand.
There was a crusading attorney who wanted to raise a video-game defense. Jack Thompson wanted to argue that it was an intentional killing but that videos made him do it. Brazill fired him last year, unwilling to argue that it was intentional.
"It was not," he says.
Brazill's father, also named Nathaniel, disagreed with his son about that. He stopped visiting. He stopped writing. Brazill pauses to think of the last unanswered letter he wrote to his father. "It was October, I think."
Brazill's mother was the one parent who really raised him, the one he misses the most. She still visits the prison about once a month.
There's not too much to talk about with her, he says. Nothing new ever happens.
Being freed among fantasies
The prison in Cocoa is close to Kennedy Space Center. So close, the ground trembles when the space shuttle lifts off.
It's quite cruel, really. That time traveler, that wonder of discovery flaring right there in front of 1,000 young men parked in place for years.
It is an observation entirely lost on Brazill.
The future is 8,400 never-ending days. And he's adapted to the place he must live them.
For a boy who came of age in a concrete cell, prison is not a god-awful place.
It's not even a bad place, Brazill says.
Why, there's his books and TV in his cellblock, the weight room and vocational classes, three meals a day and treats for sale in the canteen. There's a cooking class soon that's he's going to sign up for.
Prison is not really much of a punishment, Brazill says. Just a way to keep dangerous people off the streets.
"We're here as punishment, but we're not really being punished."
When asked if he's sad at being there, he hesitates. Sad is not a word he uses often, he says.
That doesn't mean he's not fantasizing about his release.
Brazill has completed a legal correspondence course and knows something of the law. The other inmates call him "Johnnie Cochran" for all the legal research he does. He once got in trouble in prison for charging legal fees.
His first round of appeals — argued by a lawyer — failed. The appeals court judges said he was lucky he wasn't convicted of first-degree murder and stuck with life in prison.
There are future appeals to go. The my-lawyer-did-a-bad-job argument in state court, likely turning on the complete lack of mental health testimony at trial. There's a federal appeal, too. Brazill's mulling representing himself from now on.
In his fantasy, he's granted a new trial and ends up convicted of manslaughter. Release date would then be 2015, plus time off for good behavior. Out by 2013.
He is hopeful, he says, of that. "I would say it does go through my mind about every day."
Grunow's absence 'terrible'
How often does Barry Grunow go through his mind?
Brazill always has said he liked his English teacher and never meant to hurt him.
"Me and Mr. Grunow, we're like good friends," Brazill told police just hours after he shot the father in the face.
At trial, he bowed his head at the defense table and sobbed at the photos of Grunow lying in the hallway in a puddle of blood.
That emotion is gone now, repressed by the mind, recessed in time.
In all the endless hours to think — hunting for cigarette butts, waiting for inspection — he rarely thinks of Grunow, he says. "It's not a common thought that comes to me."
There's a photo of Barry Grunow and his wife, Pam. Barry's holding their children in his arms, a son and a newborn girl sucking on her hand. Barry and Pam are smiling, their family complete.
When Nathaniel Brazill looks at that photo, he stares at it, expressionless. It is the first time he's seen the family of four all together.
"It's heartbreaking that he's not there with them," Brazill says flatly. "I remember meeting his daughter . . . at the Lake Worth High School graduation. He was there with his daughter."
He's never written the Grunow family a letter, never had any contact with them. A court order forbids it, he says. He would like them to know, though, he's sorry for their loss.
When Brazill talks of his thoughts, he speaks as if this were a tragic thing that happened at someone else's hand.
"I think of how terrible it is that he's gone."
He never adds, without prompting, that he's the one who did it.
"I am responsible for the loss," he finally acknowledges without one whit of emotion.
Widow, family try to fill void
The loss.
It's such an inadequate word.
Barry Grunow was a kind, funny, peaceful human being. A family man. A career teacher with legions of students, co-workers and lifelong friends who loved him. Barry Grunow had brothers, a sister, a mother.
They all "lost" him.
They and people all over lost humanity to horror that day. How could this happen to a gentle man who wouldn't even step on a cockroach? How could a teacher be killed at his classroom door? Why would a child do that?
Pam Grunow wonders.
Five years later, she's still wondering about the anger, too. "Was he mad at Barry?" she asks.
She wonders whether the girls Brazill went to see in that classroom were supposed to be in that classroom. Whether fate's fluke sent Brazill to Barry's door.
Pam Grunow used to be a teacher of special-needs children. She's struggled with the fact her husband's killer was a child. Still today, her strongest words regarding Brazill are: "I feel sad about the choices he made that day."
The year after the shooting, all the world bandied about what should happen to Brazill. But Pam Grunow did not. She focused on her children and what would happen to them.
She still does.
Grunow volunteers at their school and fiercely protects their privacy. She asks that they not be identified. She wants to shield them from the news and the comments from people it always brings.
The boy will be 10 this year. The girl is now 5.
Pam Grunow left the little clapboard house in Lake Worth and moved north in the county to be closer to her parents and Barry's family.
"I am doing my best to heal, be happy and move forward. Sometimes, it feels like I am on track, and sometimes it doesn't," she says.
She says she and the children are doing well. She's grateful to Barry's siblings who help her care for them. "They help fill the emptiness for the kids."
About a week before Barry Grunow was killed, he had a cancer scare. He sat down his mother and brother, Kurt, and made them promise to help Pam raise the children if anything happened to him.
The cancer test came back clear, but the promise was made.
And it is kept today.
Kurt and another brother visit the children a few nights a week. Kurt coaches his nephew's basketball team, stays involved in the children's lives.
"I'm not trying to replace Barry. I'm just watching out for them," Kurt says.
The boy looks just like Barry, tall and thin. He has the same brown hair and intensity playing basketball, the same kindness for animals. Kurt's not sure if his nephew picked that up from stories he heard or if it's just a part of Barry in him.
"To me, I don't know what's sadder," Kurt says. "That Barry's son knew him or that his daughter didn't."
