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If you just found this show, you're going to want to start at episode one. 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've had hummingbirds in places that I didn't know where hummingbirds existed. I'll be out at the ranch or on a job somewhere and there will be a hummingbird right here.
You probably think this story is about you. I'm Brittany Ard and this story is mine. It wasn't her normal, don't touch that sort of thing and just move on. And so she was doing some things that it was just not her typical Braley way of things.
She was that great kid. 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. She was going back to her mom and she was experimenting a little with drugs. My mom had an incredible way of convincing you to be there for her.
My mom opened her arms to Braylee during that time that she was struggling. When, I wouldn't say my dad and I were critical of Braylee, but we were concerned and we were making that known. It was sort of this easy peasy way for Braylee to get away with some stuff because, you know, my mom isn't going to parent or raise concerns about some of that behavior. You want to be a fuck-up? Hey, I'm a fuck-up too. Like, let's fuck up together. ♪
Braylee 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 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.
I think that mine and Braylee's relationship was I was someone who was close with her, who was not judgmental of her. 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. Braylee spent a lot of time with Brianna when she was younger and we were working. 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 like he'd get Braylee in and that was in the beginning. Like 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 come to me and she was very honest with me and very real with me. 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 like, I was very much like, 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, right, you're a club promoter. You know, like, you're...
"You know the things I'm doing because I'm hanging out with the people that you hang out with." And I'm like, "Yeah, but I'm 10 years older than you."
It was a safe-ish place for Braylee to hang out and party because he always kept an eye on her. 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. He was a certain different sort of evil. I met him once or twice before.
You know, you look backwards and it's like, damn it. Why did you not say no? But you can't. If I'd have 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. The first time I saw him, it was...
an instant, you know, like you want to step back from a person. 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 later,
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 Braylee 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 and... It's an amazingly fun thing. It's also three days with a lot of people and, you know, 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 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 closed, we try them on. Everybody tries their stuff on and sees if they like it.
Braylee 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 left.
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 or I...
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 reactions, like 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. We had just finished our...
traditional Christmas gathering. And we all got our stuff out of that house, hauled it to our own places, and Rowena and I swung by her apartment. Rayleigh was living in the top floor of a building that my dad owned, 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. We'd given her this really cool camera and all this before the digital stuff, but she
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.
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That's G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y dot com slash podcast. Grammarly. Easier said, done. I remember that New Year's Eve. I'm watching the fireworks throughout the country and I had fallen asleep. I woke up and something was wrong. And I'm out in the middle of Clay Elum 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 I, 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. Yeah. I got a call from her the night that she died and I didn't answer it. 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 and I figured she was calling to see what I was doing and like, had I answered and been like, come hang out with us tonight. All day Monday, we're back in town, 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. And
I was in third grade. I would have been eight. She wasn't answering her phone. So we all like, it was, we went to go check on the apartment and all went there. Her door was locked. I'd been up there banging on the door. The door's locked. The way the building was situated in her apartment, he went up over the balcony and went in. And then I don't know how many minutes or years passed. And so I climbed up the ladder and over the balcony and went in and she was there.
He stuck his head out the window and said, you know, call 911. It wasn't 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. Immediately, I'm like, oh, no, what have you done? Because...
I'm seeing this from here to that door and it's not what your mind is capable of figuring out. And immediately, when I went over there, it's like, there's no way. You can't get there. 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 had such an amazing heart. 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 really understood how grief was physical pain, and I had never experienced that before. Braley was killed by her boyfriend, and the world believes that Braley committed suicide. To me, as her dad, the worst thing
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. We were hoping that they were going to be able to investigate this crime scene because it looked like a crime scene. I mean, overturned furniture. And there was a lot of things in that apartment that were not typical or right. The bathtub, the
There was a big mess. I just started looking around. It's 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. We didn't go back into her apartment for a year.
The conflicting autopsy reports are one, that it was death by suicide, and one, that it was asphyxiation. What I've learned about police work is when that shit happens, it's way better in their world to just click a suicide and move on. Because resources don't need to be dealt with. Before Braley had passed, I had a really good friend, family friend, 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 Braylee 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 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'm blessed with a hummingbird in my life. 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 Braylee. 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. All of the people that know Braylee and were lucky enough to be a part of her life, 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, you know, who's going to do what. And I had to write and do the eulogy. Brayla 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 Braylee would take her to the aquarium in the Pike Place Market in traditional ant style, filler full of donuts and honey sticks. Brianna said that the only thing she didn't like about Braylee was that she always had a hairbrush and she was always trying to brush her hair.
I've always told Braylee 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 Braylee. 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 filling 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. ♪
You probably think the stories about you is a production of large media. That's L A R J 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. Graphics by
Graphic design by Nijela Shama. Opening theme by Youth Star and Miscellaneous. If you want to know more about Brit, follow her on social media. You can find her at britney.ard on all platforms. If you like what we're doing, don't forget to hit that follow button wherever you're listening to this podcast right now. And also, give us a rate or review on Apple Podcast or Spotify.