The Mysterious Death of Brandon Embry

This is part one in a three part series on the death of Brandon Embry.

Big decision, big surprise

Sarah was simultaneously shocked and proud of her 18-year-old son when he burst in with some stunning news: he had enlisted. He was going to be in the Navy. He was going to work in nuclear submarines. Sarah was in the Navy, herself, and though Brandon had talked about getting some information from a military recruiting office, she never expected that he would come home with the papers signed. After all, it had been his younger brother, Scott, not Brandon, who had been the one to march around the house calling cadence like a pint-sized drill sergeant.

Brandon was no stranger to the military. He had grown up with his mom and stepdad both in the military, moving frequently.

Though Sarah was surprised by Brandon’s quick decision to enlist, his physicality made him a good candidate. He played football from middle school through high school and was into power lifting. He was a big guy and would be well-prepared for the physical demands of the Navy. Not only was Brandon strong, but very bright. He got mostly A’s, read voraciously, and loved learning. He always excelled in math, science, and history, and had even competed in spelling bees as a young student. His family had a nickname for him: “Webster”

Brandon’s personality as a boy

Brandon was different from his brother, Scott, and many of his peers. He had no trouble entertaining himself and was a self-described introvert. Sarah recalled as a boy, when some neighborhood kids came by to ask him to play, he said, I’m reading a book but I’ll think about it.” He loved reading and had a penchant for epic fantasy sagas. I can imagine him finding his way through the 12,000 pages in the 14-book Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan that was very popular in the 90’s and early 2000’s.

He was kind-hearted and well-liked, but he kept to himself.

Difficult role, and big enlistment bonus

After he entered the Navy, he traveled around the eastern US to enter basic training and then several specialized training programs to prepare him for his role in the Navy as a nuclear submarine machinist mate. This is one of the most difficult roles to fulfill in the Navy and has the highest enlistment bonus of any position in the Navy (in 2022, it is listed on their website at $38,000). It requires smarts and fitness. He had to have scored very highly on the standardized test given to all new recruits. The test is aptly called a “battery” and covers math, reading, science, electronics, spatial visualization, and mechanics. Your raw score doesn’t matter, only how you do compared to other test takers. Your results are given to you in percentile, and for Brandon to have been eligible for, he would have had scored in approximately the 85th percentile across several disciplines.

Stationed in paradise

Brandon, after his training, was stationed out of Hawaii and spent a great deal of time aboard nuclear submarines at sea. Even though he was in paradise – on a remarkable little island marked by year-round perfect weather, mountains, rain forest, beaches, and scuba diving – his mom remembered (most of all) his complaints.

Brandon was a big guy. He was 6 feet tall and muscular. I can only imagine his discomfort in being cooped up in a tiny sardine-can under the ocean. It surprised me to hear that he chose a job for himself that lacked the creature comforts of home – his mom recalled that he never enjoyed camping or outdoors trips because of the many small annoyances that came with them.

He was based in Pearl Harbor, and after a 5-to-6-year career in the Navy, he was out unexpectedly early. It was cut short by a back injury and PTSD. He was honorably discharged, packed up, and headed back home to Washington state as a civilian, retiring with the rank of petty officer, 2nd class. He was about 23 years old and he had his whole life ahead of him.

Surprise return home

When he returned to Monroe, Washington in 2009, he moved in with his parents and got a job in the area. Monroe is suburb north of Seattle. His mom remembered him working at a soup factory for a while, but big changes were ahead.

His mom, his younger adopted sister, Rachel, and his stepdad, Reg, were going to be leaving Washington for good in just two short years, and his brother and his wife, just a year after that. In the meantime, he got his own apartment in Everett, Washington, where he would stay for many years. He was receiving disability payments from the Navy, which helped to ease the burden of living on his own in Seattle. He had likely accumulated some savings from his fairly lucrative career in the Navy, too.

On his own, he finds himself

It was his first time to truly be on his own. Though he was away from his family at 18, he was still under the strict supervision and support of a new family: his military family. Without that structure in his life, he was left with a void to discover his own interests, and his own identity.

He found musical inspiration in heavy metal / thrasher bands like Five Finger Death Punch, Disturbed, and Slip Knot. He got into Viking culture—mythological and tribal tattoos covered his arms, chest, and back. He grew out his coarse reddish-brown beard and even braided it into three long plaits that were each over a foot long. He got into home brewing, but instead of beer, he fermented honey, making one of the oldest known alcoholic beverages to have ever been created: mead.

He became a fan of Insane Clown Posse and counted himself among their devoted fan group—the Juggalos. He even dyed his hair bright aqua blue one time, to the surprise of his family. He was always into video gaming, even as a kid, and with some disposable money in his 20’s, he picked up several consoles and a powerful computer to run all sorts of games.

A return to learning

After a few years of work, he decided he wanted to return to school. He took advantage of the G.I. Bill promise to pay for his schooling and enrolled in a local community college called Green River, south of Seattle. He moved into some off-campus housing, and even got a living stipend from the navy for the time that he was enrolled as a full-time student. He studied bio-engineering and chemical pre-engineering and, in two years, earned his associates degree from Green River before moving onto the University of Washington, where he planned to finish a 4-yr engineering degree.

He moved once again to be closer to his new school and found housing at Veranda Green Apartments in the southern part of the city of Seattle.

Brandon was a late bloomer when it came to dating. He hadn’t dated anyone in high school, and when he was in the Navy, he was predominantly surrounded by men, so it wasn’t until he was 23 and had returned to Washington that he had much of a chance to begin dating. Even so, his mom doesn’t remember him having a long-term relationship until he was in his late 20’s – around the same time that he was going to Green River Community College. When he began schooling at the University of Washington at 29, he was in his second long-term relationship of his life, and he and his girlfriend moved in together.

Pressure mounting, a difficult decision

Other than his girlfriend, Brandon was on his own in Seattle. His parents and his siblings had all left the city, and difficulties in Brandon’s life were mounting. His relationship was putting a tremendous financial strain on him which was compounded by the fact that Seattle is a very expensive city. He was working part-time along with being a full-time student, and he had a very challenging course load on chemical engineering. The larger apartment that he had leased with his girlfriend was suddenly his sole financial burden in the wake of their failing relationship. Plus, the most important thing in his life—his family—was on the other side of the country.

With only one semester to go, Brandon made the difficult decision to leave the University of Washington and to move to North Carolina to be closer to his family. Brandon put everything he owned into a box truck, towed his Camaro, and in July of 2018, made the long drive from Seattle, Washington to Greensboro, North Carolina.

A new chapter in North Carolina

When he got to Greensboro, he put his stuff in a storage unit and moved in with his parents, Sarah and Reg. They hadn’t lived with Brandon for over a decade. He moved out when he was just 18, and here he was, 13 years later, at 31 years old, back at home with them.

His younger sister, Rachel, finally drinking age, remembered going to Lucky’s Burger-N-Tap with him. It was a bar, restaurant, and music venue—the kind of place where you can get a burger piled practically a foot tall with fixin’s, grab a beer, and listen to live music five nights a week.

Living with the folks didn’t last long. He met a girl at Lucky’s in his brief time in Asheboro, and they started dating. Things moved fast, and after a little tension with his mom, Brandon decided to get an apartment with his new beau at Park Place Apartments on Church Street, just south of the town center of Asheboro. Sarah didn’t get a good vibe about the area, and if you were to walk around the apartment community, you’d find that it backed right up to some train tracks and industrial buildings, making it feel a little rough around the edges and deserted – especially at night. Just across the street from the community was a bunch of tennis courts, a pool, and a park that also felt especially quiet at night.

Yet another move!

The apartment buildings were long, skinny, red-brick rectangles—two stories tall—that formed sprawling U-shapes around central parking lots. White, shutterless, double-hung windows were punched into the flat unadorned brick facades. His unit was on the ground floor in one of those 6-to-8-unit buildings. He signed a year lease, got his stuff out of storage and staged it in the two-bedroom ground-floor apartment. He never really got completely unpacked. His living room and spare bedroom became areas to store his things.

His relationship ran its course quickly and it fizzled out in a few months, around February of 2019. Brandon’s stepdad, Reg, remembered during this time how disappointed Brandon was that his relationships had failed. He liked living with a partner, and told him that ‘he hated being alone.’ Perhaps compounding that pressure was the fact that his younger brother had already married and had three children.

In the meantime, he was having success finding work. He had a number of welding certifications and most of his work involved metal work. His employers were in North Carolina and beyond. He found himself traveling to Texas and to Detroit. It was a lot easier to afford the $500 or $600/month rent in Asheboro than more than double that in Seattle. But in the brief time he was in North Carolina, he had about 4 different jobs. He was still trying to find the right fit. He had lost a couple of those jobs. One because he threatened to call OSHA because of his safety concerns.

Health concerns

I asked Sarah about Brandon’s health, and she told me about a few issues that he was contending with. He had discovered that his testosterone levels were low, so he was administering hormone shots to himself regularly. Each shot contained a small amount of HCG or human chorionic gonadotropin which is used to stimulate the body’s production of testosterone. It required that he use a supply of disposable hypodermic needles, so he always had liquid vials and needles with him. Sarah said that he felt hot anyway, and with this hormone therapy he found himself feeling especially overheated.

He had some lingering back issues from his injury working for the Navy, and he had a shoulder surgery from an injury he had sustained at the soup factory in Washington. Before he had left Washington, he also had a major powerlifting injury. He had broken his left—dominant—arm. Sarah said that he had made a full recovery, though, from it.

He also suffered from sleep apnea, and Sarah remembered being surprised when he showed up in North Carolina with a CPAP machine. CPAP stands for ‘continuous positive airway pressure’ and it is essentially a mask you wear to sleep with a tube attached to it that goes to a machine to help you breathe at night.

February 2019 – major health scare

It was February of 2019, and he was at work at an employer in Greensboro. He hadn’t been feeling well, but he was still going to work. His employer noticed his state at work and could tell something was off. He asked Brandon to leave and get drug-tested. He agreed and left and decided to get some food, so he pulled over and stopped at McDonald’s. But his state was beginning to deteriorate. He started to lose control. He was throwing up outside of his truck. He had terrible abdominal pain. He was screaming and had an unsteady gait. Someone at the McDonald’s called 9-1-1 and EMS responded quickly. From the records, it appears that the dispatcher told the EMS unit that they suspected drug overdose or poisoning. The first responders asked him some questions and found his behavior and his answers bizarre. Though he could appropriately answer some of them, he couldn’t explain to them how he had gotten to McDonald’s. They took him to the hospital. He insisted that he be allowed to pee, but once he got to the door, he wasn’t sure how to operate the handle.

Once he was admitted to the ER he immediately fell unconscious. His mental state was erratic, delirious and combative, so they sedated him and put him on a ventilator. He had acute respiratory distress, and they had trouble stabilizing him. He was in a medically-induced coma and was held in the ICU for several days. His kidneys were failing and so they put him on dialysis. He was given a blood test but nothing came up.

After an intense, 5-day stay at the hospital, he was discharged. He had no recollection of the entire stay. The only thing that he told his mom is that he felt like he had been profiled as a drug-user from the very beginning, which is definitely true. It doesn’t, however, explain what this mysterious near-death episode was all about. His employer, too, wanted to be sure Brandon was not using drugs, and asked him to produce a clean drug test before returning to work. It had a 1-week lead time from the hospital, and he didn’t feel like waiting, so he just got another job. His mom said that he was getting calls from recruiters pretty regularly looking for his skillset and experience.

April 2019 – more health issues

And not two months later, on the morning of April 24th, he had another major health scare. He was at work, and that morning, around 7:30AM, he suddenly felt very hot and passed out, falling to the ground and hitting his head. Fainting from a standing position as a 6-foot tall, 300-pound man can be dangerous, and he was lucky to have not been badly injured. He quickly woke up and resumed work, and about an hour later, the same thing happened again, but fortunately he was sitting in a chair the second time. EMS was called and they took him to the main Asheboro hospital and dropped him off at the ER at around 9:00AM. Brandon was conscious and lucid and explained he had diffuse abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, and—unsurprisingly—a headache. He wasn’t sure what to make of it and told the doctor perhaps it had something to do with some outdated meat that he had eaten the night before.

They ran his bloodwork and found no sign of any illegal drugs. He seemed to have recovered, and he, again, was left with few answers, little choice but to move on.

These incidents didn’t make a lot of sense to Brandon. He was a strong and healthy guy. He would log his food and his workouts. He often cooked for himself and would often take health supplements. He was active and on his feet for work. He worked out regularly. He was even pursuing certification in personal training.

June 2019 – health issues persist

Two months later, in June 2019, he had another incident. He was sent home for work because he was pale and jittery. When he got to an urgent care, he explained his symptoms: fatigue, general weakness, over-heating, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. They did blood testing and an EKG, but they didn’t provide him a clear diagnosis. He wasn’t sure what to do.

August 2019 - New job takes him to Detroit

It was August of 2019, and Brandon had found a job based out of Charlotte, NC, an hour and a half away from Asheboro. He was making the long commute, he was happy with the job, and he was looking to move closer to work. It had been about a year since he had gotten his two-bedroom apartment, and he let management know that he did not want to renew, but rather go month-to-month. He was starting to get his place packed and ready for yet another move. His mom and family was helping him to get organized, but there wasn’t too much work to be done – he hadn’t really unpacked from his initial move-in. Sarah remembered helping him and him complaining of being very tired.

In late August he went on a work trip to Detroit, from Tuesday, the 27th, to Thursday, the 5th of September. The very next day after he returned, Friday, the 6th, he was brought into the office in Charlotte, and he was fired. The reason? They told Brandon it was because of the condition of his hotel room. They put him up in his own room, and he stayed in the same room for the entire trip. Fairly early on, the hotel staff began taking photos of the room. It’s not clear if the photos were requested by his company, or if the hotel took the initiative to document its condition. The things that they shot seemed to be centered around “messiness” and his medications. The images invoke a strange feeling of invading someone’s privacy. They had close-ups of his pill bottles showing the medication that he was on. In addition to the HCG and disposable syringes that I mentioned earlier, he also had some prescription pills of different hormone medications. There are images of a bag of onions, a dirty cutting board, and a brand-new unused slow cooker. There were some empty Chinese-food to-go containers with some sauce left in it, and dirty clothes on the floor. But perhaps most concerning were the small spots of blood on his white bed sheets.

Brandon’s last words

That same day, after he drove back from Charlotte, he went over to his mom’s house and dog-sat for her. He explained what had happened, but he was in good spirits about it. He said that he had even spoken to a recruiter that day about where his next job might land him. In fact, he was more stressed about getting the A/C working at his mom’s house than he was about getting fired. He felt overheated and the T-stat had been automatically disabled when the family left town.

Sarah was on a trip to Kentucky to pick up his sister, Rachel, and Brandon was happy to hold down the fort. What Sarah did not know was that when she left the house that day, it would be the last time she would see her son alive.

On Saturday, Sarah was on the way back from Kentucky. She spoke to him briefly on the way home to tell him happy birthday. He was turning 33 years old. Sarah and Rachel got home around 8:00 or 9:00PM, but Brandon had already left. He had plans to meet up with a girl, but he had texted his dad saying that she had canceled on him. This was the last time that Sarah heard Brandon’s voice.

Over the next couple of days, Brandon and his mom exchanged some texts, but they never spoke on the phone. On Tuesday night, September 10th, Sarah called Brandon in the evening at 8:00PM and 10:08PM and he didn’t pick up or call back promptly (which was out of character for him).

She kept waiting for his call on Wednesday, but that call never came. She called him again that afternoon at 3:32PM, and it went to voicemail. By Wednesday night, Sarah decided that she was going to go over to his apartment and check on him the next day.

Mom calls 9-1-1

On Thursday, September 12th, Sarah called Brandon’s phone 8 times between 11:53AM and 2:16PM to no avail. She, along with his sister, Rachel, made the short trek over to his apartment and at 2:45PM, knocked on his front door. There was no response. She tried to open the front door. It was locked, and she didn’t have a key. As she had pulled into the parking lot, she saw that his truck was there. Something was wrong. She called 9-1-1 and asked them to come quickly.

As she was waiting for first responders, she contacted the apartment management company to get keys to his front door. She made her way around to the back and discovered some damage to the back window. The outside pane of the insulated glass window was broken, and the screen was bent and damaged.

When they arrived, Sarah was told to wait outside. They would enter the apartment and check on him. What they discovered was devastating:

Brandon barely clinging to life

They had discovered Brandon in his bedroom, laying on the floor, barely breathing, unconscious, nude, and badly hurt – with scratches, cuts, and bruises over his entire body. They put him on a gurney, covered his body, and brought him out.

By 4:00PM, they took Brandon to the main hospital in Asheboro to try and help him. Asheboro Police Department detectives arrived soon after and asked Sarah and Rachel questions about Brandon in the waiting room. The ER doctor came out and spoke to the family and revealed that Brandon’s prognosis did not look good.

He was transferred to nearby Moses Cone Hospital in Greensboro for a higher level of care, but Brandon’s health continued to decline. Sadly, Reg was in Seattle at the time and couldn’t be with Sarah and Rachel. A chaplain came and spoke to them at the hospital, providing some comfort and support. They were confronted by a terrible situation: doctors said that there was no hope and that it was time to decide whether or not to continue life support functions. They decided, that without hope, it was time to let him go, and on Friday, September 13th, Brandon died at 8:57PM.

His apartment is a wreck

While the family and the hospital medical team were all fighting to save Brandon’s life, detectives were trying to figure out what had happened to this young man.

I have 276 images taken by the Asheboro Police crime scene techs on Thursday and Friday, and boy, they are strange. His apartment is a disaster area. From the moment that you open his red painted front door, you are greeted with a mountain of stuff. His front door opens into the living room, and to your right, as you walk in, you see piles of moving boxes, about 4 feet tall, mostly half-open, with clothes thrown on top of them. Buried underneath them is a dark brown leather sofa. One of the boxes is badly mangled, ripped and torn. There’s a neat pile of flattened boxes and other moving supplies, suggesting the upcoming move. The flooring was a 12” X 12” vinyl ceramic tile and the narrow walkway through the mess was littered with empty plastic wrappers, broken zip ties, little rocks and soil, used tape, pens and pencils. To get to the other side of the room you had to walk over a small suitcase that lied with it’s top unzipped and open that was filled with crumpled clothes. It still had tags on it from a recent trip – perhaps Brandon’s visit to Detroit. On a far table in the living room sat some liquor bottles: Knob Creek, Svedka, Old Forrester, and Bacardi. And next to them sat a big tub of protein powder.

Beyond the living room was the kitchen, and there was so much stuff littering the floor, you couldn’t even walk into it. Dozens of Tupperware lids and even a blender were strewn on the floor. Every inch of counter space was filled with dirty dishes, pots and pans, small appliances, and food. The washer and dryer were in the kitchen on the left and the dryer door was open with dirty clothes laying on the ground in front of it. All of the blinds to the windows – the standard cheap horizontal louver blinds – were shut.

There was one main corridor from the living room that provided access to the spare bathroom, the spare bedroom and Brandon’s bedroom. Though the corridor’s floor was free of debris, you could see dirty clothes spilling out of Brandon’s bedroom at its end. The spare bedroom, to the left, was packed with moving boxes and the floor was filled with dirty clothes. Its closet was stuffed with things.

But it wasn’t until you got to his bedroom that you started to understand the gravity of the disarray.

Brandon’s bedroom

His bedroom door had been removed from its hinges and staged in the hallway bathroom (perhaps by EMS). The sliding doors on his bedroom closet had been removed and were lying on the floor, stained with blood. The same VCT flooring in the living room ran all the way back through the corridor and into his bedroom. When you looked down from the entryway, you found a roughly 10” X 10” stain of blood on the floor. His bed was relatively free of debris, but all of the floor space was completely covered with a bizarre mix of crumpled moving boxes, dirty clothes, household trash like pizza boxes and crushed soda cans, his shower rod and curtain, and valuable electronics. To the right was one of his bedroom closets and it contained one of the strangest things in the whole unit. There was a large closet organizer system, still brand new, in its original cardboard box sitting in the corner of the closet. And its packaging was torn open and blood-stained, the brown cardboard shell ripped open and dangling down.

This is where Brandon had been found by EMS, unconscious and laying on the floor.

His bed was stripped of sheets and blankets, and his mattress was riddled with dozens of large blood stains. On the far side of his bed—which was snugged up against the white bedroom walls—was an empty pizza box stuffed between the mattress and the wall. Above the box were a number of fresh-looking red blood stains. His naked bed had a handful of unopened cans of Red’s Wicked Apple Ale, and a package of chewing tobacco (Brandon was a regular user).

Bathroom destroyed

As you got closer to the door of the bathroom, you could tell that there had been a water leak. Papers on the floor were soaked. But there was no standing water. His nightstand, adjacent to the bed, was toppled over and lying on its face, exposing the fiberboard back panel, its bottom edge visibly damaged by the water.

The bathroom was destroyed. The seat and seat cover were ripped off the toilet bowl. The porcelain cover to the tank was broken in half. The toilet itself was coming up slightly from the ground, and the slow water leak that spilled out into the bedroom originated from it. The lever for the tank was broken and dangling and the water in the tank was gone. The bowl of the toilet was stuffed full with toilet paper and looked to be backed up. All of the towel holders and toilet paper holders had been ripped from the walls. The bathtub faucet was left on and running. The sink was filled with toiletries and the mirror-faced medicine cabinet above it was broken into shards.

As the police sifted through the mountain of stuff, they discovered his wallet under the bed, with around $100 in it. They found a mangled metal clipboard that looked it had been an object of aggression. The found his CPAP machine buried under a mountain of stuff. They found a pillow that had tons of bloods stains on it, and a number of sex toys and restraints. Console gaming systems and laptops were mixed in with the pile of stuff.

The last thing of particular note is that the T-stat was set to 60 degrees – perhaps an indication of Brandon’s feeling of overheating.

Truck searched

Police later got a search warrant to return and search Brandon’s truck. When they opened the back door, chicken nuggets started to spill out from trash and debris at the floorboard. The front passenger floor was filled with empty containers of energy drinks. The mess was everywhere.

Join for Part 2

It’s hard to make sense of the condition of Brandon’s apartment. Sarah acknowledged that he was messy, but this didn’t look like mess, it looked like someone had ransacked the place. Trash and valuable personal possessions were indiscriminately mixed up and thrown into huge piles. It was bizarre.

Sadly, we don’t have Brandon’s own account of what happened – he was found unconscious by EMS and never recovered. But when had he lost consciousness? When was his last bit of communication? So many unanswered questions.

His mom, after starting to come to terms with the loss of her son, began a tireless search for answers. And for the past 2 years, since the beginning of 2020, she has gotten many, and unearthed more questions.

Continue the story with Part Two