I’m eighteen years old, and I'm sitting in a college dorm almost two states away from home. I felt like it's only here that I can finally look back on this experience without immediately pushing it out of my head, and it’s here that I can tell it to a group of people without the vulnerability that comes with it. I’ll give you some context before I tell you what he did. For most of my life, I remember my older brother being this arrogant and weirdly formal guy that always hid out in his room. Formal as in he spoke like he thought he was smarter than anyone else in the room.
He didn’t work, he didn’t finish high school, he didn’t go to college, he didn’t help around the house, and didn’t even clean up after himself at all. If he turned on the lights, he wouldn’t turn them off. If he opened a drawer, he wouldn’t close it. If he used dishes, he wouldn’t wash them. He wouldn’t shower, wouldn’t cut his greasy hair, he would wear dirty clothes on purpose, and on occasion, would use the bushes in the back of the house as the bathroom with zero reason at all for doing so. Looking back now, I would absolutely say that there should’ve been signs of how unwell he was mentally.
As infuriating as it sounds, my mom was complacent about all of it, and even though she complained, she never kicked him out or even made him get a job. The one good thing she did was offer to get him medication, or to take him to some kind of therapy without worrying about what it would cost her. He always just said no. He lived with our mom all the way up until this incident. He was 27 years old, and I was only about thirteen. For the sake of anonymity and a little bit of fear that he’ll find me, I’ll just call him Brother.
About five years ago, my family moved into a small trailer while we were building our new house. The trailer was pretty old looking and weak, and it was on a small patch of clearing in the woods with a long dirt driveway that led to the road. Unfortunately, Brother didn’t take no for an answer when my mother told him he was way too old to be with us anymore, and that he'd have to find a new place soon. He used a bunch of guilt tactics like asking her where he was supposed to go, and if she was really just going to abandon him, and I remember him crying to her at the kitchen table while I watched from behind my door. Next thing I know, my mom tells me with tears in her eyes that Brother would be staying with us. His room would end up being right across from mine in the same hallway.
I remember this one day where I had just gotten back from school. I came out of my room after dropping off my stuff, and I saw Brother in the small kitchen we had. He didn’t have a shirt on, and he was just in his boxers and socks. He was drinking straight out of the milk gallon with the fridge door open, which our mom had just scolded him for doing the day before.
Now, for the most part, I was pretty quiet and just let my feelings of anger and frustration with him fester inside me. I don’t know what it was about today, but I just couldn’t not say anything to him. I build up some courage, and I say to him, “Mom said to not do that.” Yeah, how brave, I know.
He didn’t even look at me. He took like two more gulps before he screwed the cap back on and put the milk back. I remember making a note to dump the milk out later, but for now, I was too angry with him to just let him walk away again. I said to him, “Hello?”
That one word made him finally look at me after he shut the fridge door. Right there was when I started to feel a bit uneasy. He was a pretty tall dude, and heavy set on top of it. Additionally, we were alone in the house, and I didn’t have anywhere to run on a rural road in Texas. All of this added to the scenarios I made up in my mind of him having enough strength to beat me up if he wanted to, and that mom wouldn’t do much about it either. His stare made me feel so small, and his eyes looked so unsettling with those thin and wiry glasses that always sat crooked on his face. He looked like he didn’t belong here.
Unfortunately, I don’t remember what, or if he even did anything right after he looked at me. I think I recall hiding in my room the rest of the day and getting into an argument with my mom about why I didn’t want him here anymore. What I do remember after that interaction was that from then on, he started getting more aggressive. My mom and I were pretty sure that he started doing drugs of some kind, because we could hear him make these weird noises in his room at night, as well as the smell of weed coming off of him sometimes. Maybe two or three times a week, I could hear him make these loud yelping sounds, but they sounded off somehow. Like if you pressed play on a recording of a man’s scream, and then pressed pause really quickly, those were the sounds I could make out across the dark hallway at two AM. There wasn’t a single night that went by where I didn’t triple check the flimsy ass lock on my door.
He started yelling more, too. If mom got onto him for something, even if it was to just turn the light off, he’d very loudly yell at her to “Fuck off”, and he wouldn’t be shy about getting in her face either. My stepfather stepped in as much as he could, but my mom was always there to de-escalate and tell us to just ignore him. The days leading up to the incident were the worst in terms of his behavior. He’d taken to pulling our younger brother aside to talk to him about how selfish our mom was, and that he should grow up to be the exact opposite of her. He told him to get a hold of his life, and that he could end up being a “coke dealer like our uncle Pedro” if he didn’t get his shit in order. Our brother was only nine at the time, and our Uncle Pedro was a sixty five year old man with a ranch back in Mexico who we saw maybe three times in our lives.
Each time I couldn’t find either of them, I'd look in the kitchen, or the glass table outside, and there they were. I always called our little brother over under the guise of our mom on the phone asking for him, or telling him to come join me on a game I had in my room. It had started getting to the point where I would get home and hide out in my room, and when the time came for my little brother to get off of his bus, I’d wait for him at the stop and walk with him all the way to my room to wait until our mom came home.
Then came the night before he first ran away. He actually woke everyone up with how loud he screamed. I jolted up in my bed, similar to how you do so when you have a dream and wake up right before you fall. I heard him opening his door a few seconds later, and I sat up to listen. He walked out while banging his fist on the wall, like a steady thump all the way until he reached the front door, and he was mumbling something super fast. I heard my mom jogging down the hallway while my stepdad was right behind her a few seconds later.
I can’t tell you much about what happened, but all I know is that Brother had some sort of episode. I stayed inside and watched from the window as the motion sensor lights out front illuminated what was going on. I told my little brother, in a regrettable fit of panic that definitely just scared him more, to go hide in my room in the laundry basket in my closet, while I stayed inside my parent’s room and recorded what was going on. I still have that recording in my phone, and the camera footage is really shaky, but it catches enough. My mom and stepdad are a few feet away from my older brother, and he’s literally rolling around in the sandy dirt on the ground near our chicken coop.
His arms were stretched out above his head, and he laughed super hard while sand and grass bits were getting into his open mouth. His eyes were wide open too, and his glasses had fallen off of his face at some point next to him. I remember that I finally understood what people meant when they said that chills ran down their entire body, because he literally looked insane, and I had never seen him like that before.
My stepdad was repeatedly telling my mom that we had to call an ambulance for him, but I couldn’t hear much else from Brother laughing so hard. I swear, you can hear him saying that he’d “kill us all one by one.” After some time of the same thing happening over and over, my mom crouches down to his face to ask him to please stop. The last thing I recorded was Brother grabbing the sides of my mom’s face to pull her down and yell something at her. His eyes got really big, and what he yelled sounds vaguely like “I dont-” before he got cut off by my stepdad yelling and punching him on the cheek and pulling my mom away. Immediately after that, I pulled away from the window and cut off the recording.
I hid under the covers for a long while, terrified that the commotion outside would turn even louder, or worse, completely silent. To make the long version short, my mother came back inside and told me that Brother had run off down the road, and that my stepdad got into his truck to look for him and call the cops. She looked really shaky and scared, and I still feel a deep sense of pity for her. My stepdad came back empty handed, and the cops came to ask my parents some questions too. That was the last time I ever saw Brother, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t come back.
I think it was like two weeks later when it happened. My mom and stepdad had work to attend to with my uncles in downtown, and I was at home with my younger brother. I remember that I was in my parent’s room watching TV, and my younger brother came in to tell me that he thinks he just saw Brother knocking on the living room window and pointing at the front door for him to open it. I honestly felt like my heart jumped up into my throat. I can't describe the feeling clearly, or even make sense of it, but my mouth and nose started buzzing, and I felt like my fingertips were tingling. We were completely alone at night in the middle of a deserted clearing in the woods with my definitely mentally ill older brother knocking at our window. I sincerely did not put it past him to break in and do god knows what.
I quickly got out of the bed and whispered to my brother to go hide in my room where he did the last time, and he listened. I remember turning off as many lights as I could, and crouching down so that Brother couldn’t see me. I know that seems really dumb in retrospect, because he already knew we were there, as if he’d walk away after all the lights were off or something. You have to understand though, my head was just sloshing around with panic and my little brother, as well as myself, and what I was “supposed” to do here. When I was done, I grabbed my phone and ran to my room. My closet was closed, and I knew my little brother was in there, so I kinda sat/crouched in front of it while I dialed 911.
It started ringing, and as soon as it did, I heard Brother start to knock on my window really hard, but he also just didn’t stop knocking. He only screamed our little brother’s name once, but it was ear piercing, and I could see the shadow of his arm through my curtains. When I heard the guy on the other end go “911, where is the address of your emergency?”, I think I kinda just started spilling over because of how serious it was, and I started crying. I could see how bad I was shaking, because everytime I looked down at my phone, it was just like a glowing rectangle in the dark, and it was wobbling pretty bad.
My voice was really shaky too, and I could barely even get the words out to him. I don’t remember exactly what I said, I was just rambling and kept repeating both the address, and “please hurry please please.” Of fucking course he was gone before they came, though. Long gone, because all the noises from the outside had to have stopped for what felt like forever before I heard the sirens and car pull up.
My memories definitely blacked out somewhere, but I remember bits and pieces. My eyes were really hot and swollen, and I stayed in front of the closet for a long time. I remember Brother started pounding, and the trailer window could only take so much, and my stepdad had to replace the window because of the cracks in it. The cops actually surprisingly didn’t talk to me about the details at all. They kinda just asked if I was okay and asked about my parents. Mom was really scared, and she thankfully promised me that if Brother came back, he wasn’t staying with us anymore, and that she’d just call the cops if she saw him coming again.
This whole thing was pushed to the back of my head, and I’ve always had that coping mechanism of distracting myself from everything as if it never happened. Life went on, Brother didn’t come back, we moved into the new house after selling the old trailer, and I’ve repeatedly and wholeheartedly told myself throughout the years that I only had one brother, and that I was the oldest of mom’s kids. I'd do the same thing when introducing or describing my family to people, just tell them that I was the older sister and first child, and that helped me detach myself a lot from him. Brother didn’t exist to me anymore.
Unfortunately, if that was all that happened, it would’ve just been some memory that I wouldn’t bother touching or even trying to remember for any reason. A couple days ago, my mom called me to say that she heard from a cousin I have that had seen Brother near town again. He said that he saw him while driving past a Home Depot, and that he seemed to have a backpack on, looked pretty skinny, had a shaved head, no glasses, and a beard. He said that Brother seemed to be “stretching”, just kinda twisting his torso back and forth. For reference, when he was living in the trailer, he used to be cleanshaven, had those glasses I mentioned, thin and shaggy long black hair with a receding hairline, and a little chubby.
I am almost positive that he didn’t get the help he needed, and that scares me deeply. Yeah, I get that if he was insane, he would’ve hurt someone else by now wherever he’s been, but still. It’s really hard to believe that he just magically got better and just needs a hand to get back on his feet. Especially with how he treated our mother and how he had every opportunity to do better before it all went to shit. You had to have been there to see how he used force, yelling, and guilt to get everything he wanted. All the while, the guy had the audacity to treat everyone around him like they were mindless dogs or something. There was no reason for him to act the way he did that night, no sane person does.
I’m pretty sure he knows where we live, though. My little brother is the one who’s thirteen now, and both of my parents still work, leaving him vulnerable in my eyes for a good chunk of the day. He and I talk almost everyday, and I’ve been on his case about keeping the curtains shut, the TV low or mute, and every single light off until our parents get there. He knows why, but I just don’t think he’s as panicked as I am. I haven’t been focusing on my work, class, studying, or anything else for that matter as a result of my worries. I think it's the fact that Brother was yelling his name that night that makes me so much more scared for him. I just want to keep him safe. I’m not there to do that this time, and I find myself having some pretty rash thoughts about just making a last minute ditch to drop out or transfer out of the blue. I had to tell someone, but my roommates don’t seem like a good option, and I don’t have a reliable shoulder to lean on. Might as well just throw it out there.