The Mysterious Death of Brandon Embry, Part 2
This is part two in a three part series on the death of Brandon Embry.
Click for Part One and for Part Three
A solemn review of Brandon’s body
Three officers from the Asheboro Police Department and an Associate Chief Medical Examiner gathered over Brandon’s body in the examination room in Raleigh, North Carolina. Brandon had passed away the previous Friday evening at 8:57PM, three days prior. The weekend had passed; it was Monday morning around 11:00AM, and his naked body lay before them, face up, cold and stiff with rigor mortis. His posterior—the back of his torso and legs—were a reddish-purple color. His anterior was a deathly pale and splotchy with bits of red discoloration. They were trying to make sense of his strange death… Brandon was an otherwise healthy 33-year-old man who was taken to the hospital on Thursday, beaten and unconscious, and passed away 30 hours later, and he never awakened to tell the truth of what had happened to him. All that was left was to make sense of the clues that were left for the living.
Brandon’s many injuries
Brandon’s injuries were numerous. I’ll go slow, and I’ll begin with his head. The answers in this case may lie here.
When Brandon was brought to the ER, the most obvious evidence of injury was the blood encrusting his face. The blood seemed to come from his nostrils and from a wound on his eyebrow. The blood had dripped down either side of his face and his forehead and had dried, becoming solid and crackled. His naked body was found in his bedroom, his head lying in a small pool of blood that looked to have been diluted by the leak coming from the toilet in the adjoining bathroom. The wound to his face at his eyebrow was Y-shaped and fairly deep – the sort of cut that you would get stitched-up. Other than this cut, there were other smaller cuts to the bridge of the nose and to the right eyebrow. His forehead had many small scratches. His lips were bruised and the frenulum—the fleshy bit inside your mouth that connects your upper lip to the gums above your front teeth – was either cut or torn. Beneath his chin was another cut, but other than the blood on his face, the next most obvious head injury – or evidence thereof – was the discoloration around his eyes. Similar to a black-eye, periorbital ecchymoses (also known as ‘raccoon eyes’), is where your eyes have red, purple, or black discoloration around their sockets. Both of Brandon’s eyes had this condition. Oddly, this is not evidence of a direct injury to the eyes, but is often a sign of other trouble – most commonly a fracture to the skull. His head had several bruises and swelling, the largest of which was on the right side above his ear.
Next was the damage to Brandon’s torso. His back and sides had a number of scratches, not too deep, and no more than an inch or two long – the kind of scratches fingernails might make. The top of his right shoulder had a scratch, about 1 1/2” long and in a precise semi-circular shape. In the words of the detective on the case, “Brandon had contusions on his back which were consistent with being struck with a hard object such as a metal rod or baseball bat.” His flanks had quite a bit of bruising, and lastly, his left lung was bruised, as discovered by the autopsy, in the bottom left lobe, which had a corresponding bruise on his back.
Moving on to his arms, the back of his left arm had several deep scratches side-by-side, at least 8 inches long, these would have definitely bled. His left wrist had a small puncture wound, and the palm of his left hand had yet another – sometimes referred to as defensive wounds. There was surface skin torn away from the inside of his left thumb. The inside of the right wrist had a jagged cut with a ragged edge, about 3/4” long, which is again, the type of wound that you’d likely want to get stitched up. The right palm had a large diagonal cut on it, about 3/4” long. Again, wounds that some might classify as defensive.
Moving onto his pelvic region, Brandon’s penis had two small bruises on it, and his butt had a 5” long diagonal scratch.
Both of his legs had extensive bruising to the knees and the shins; his left knee had at least 20 small scratches and scrapes, his right knee had about 10. The inside of both his left and right ankles had bad bruising, and the top of his left foot had bruising across the top knuckles of the toes. The top of his second toe on his left foot had two small perfectly round puncture wounds. The bottom of his left foot had a 3/4” cut right around the arch. The top of the right foot had several small wounds, and the big toe on the right foot had a chunk of skin missing at its tip.
Brandon’s injuries were literally from head to toe. Hospital staff in Asheboro commented to the family that they thought he looked like someone who had been hit by a car. He arrived in the ER with blood smeared across his face and damage to every region of his body. Several medical staff members told detectives that the wounds could not have been self-inflicted, which challenged some of their initial impressions about what had happened.
Initial police theory
The police believed that Brandon had a break from reality and went on a drug-fueled rage that destroyed his apartment and reduced him to an unconscious puddle on the floor. Because of the sheet that had been draped over Brandon’s body, many the wounds had been concealed to detectives. They had their reasons, and though they are not all spelled out explicitly in the police reports, I can imagine how they stereotyped Brandon as an illicit drug-user.
They discovered hypodermic needles on the floor near his body in an unopened package and several individual needles lying on his bedroom floor. They found a psychedelic-looking bag of green powder, labeled kratom, from a smoke shop in Seattle called “Anarchy Smoke”, which they may have mistaken for a recreational drug. Brandon’s body was covered with tattoos, some of which had a demonic bent, like the large (5” X 5”) horned face, colored with yellows, oranges, and reds, on his right chest – looking to be somewhat inspired by Japanese Noh theater masks. A menagerie of sex toys – including restraints – were found near his naked body. He had just lost his job on the prior Friday, and his mom was calling in a wellness check on him to make sure that he hadn’t done something rash. They somehow got the impression that Brandon had a history of clinical depression and anabolic steroid abuse. The toilet was dislodged from the wall and the floor – presumably by someone powerful like Brandon. The sliding closet doors in his bedroom had been pulled off their track. And Brandon’s wallet, laptops, and cell phone were all discovered in the apartment, along with a safe under his bed, suggesting that robbery was not a motive. Furthermore, the front and back doors to his apartment were locked and there was no sign of forced entry. Their belief was that Brandon ransacked the apartment while experiencing a psychotic episode, but the medical evidence challenged their assumptions, so they ramped up their efforts to conduct a more thorough search of the crime scene.
Search warrants, police theory revised
There were 4 search warrants that police petitioned for (and were granted). The first one was signed off by a judge just hours after Brandon was transported to the hospital, and it was for his apartment. To close the loop on search warrants, after they are executed, police, in general, will produce lists of evidence collected and return them with the warrants to the court. The evidence gathered in connection to Asheboro PD’s first warrant included some cotton swabs of presumed bodily fluids from the home, a pair of steel handcuffs, Brandon’s black iPhone 10, hair from the bedroom wall, and what the police described as “suspected drug paraphernalia”.
The second search warrant was issued the next morning, the day of Brandon’s death at the hospital, and it was for his truck, which was parked in front of his apartment. Police discovered that its doors were unlocked, and they retrieved no evidence from the truck.
The third search warrant was issued on that same afternoon, and the target was again Brandon’s apartment. This was the most extensive search that the police conducted. They went through his apartment more thoroughly, and they, in particular, were searching for weapons that could have been used to cause the injuries to Brandon’s body. They ended up retrieving a bent shower curtain rod, a small sledgehammer, the key to the handcuffs they took previously, a metal clipboard which was bent and damaged, a metal pipe (which I believe may have been from the closet organizer box), some bloody paper, and a firearm suppressor.
In support of each search warrant, the police officer applying for it will provide a supporting narrative, and you can get a sense for their frame of mind at this point of the investigation from what they wrote. The first one betrays some confusion about what had happened, but specifically notes that Brandon had, quote, “lost his job two days ago and was not heard from again”, which implies to me that they were entertaining the possibility of suicide. The second search warrant started to express some more doubt about their initial conclusions, and said that they were, quote, “unable to find his wallet and keys.” If this were a suicide, what would explain them being missing? And then on the third warrant, feedback from the medical staff at the hospitals had caused a major shift in tone. They had—to this point—never put in writing their belief that Brandon’s injuries were self-inflicted, but they acknowledged that they were changing their mind, implicitly admitting their initial belief. In the supporting affidavit, the detective described his injuries as “consistent with being struck with a metal rod or baseball bat,” and they learned that the injuries were life-threatening. They described some of the injuries and characterized them as “defensive wounds.” They closed the search warrant with their fervent hope that the person (or people), quote, “responsible for Mr. Embry’s injuries be identified and brought to justice.”
Further dispelling the notion of suicide (or an illicit drug-induced psychosis) was the fact that the preliminary tox screen conducted when Brandon was admitted to the hospital found no evidence of illegal recreational drugs.
Autopsy results
The mood of the police would change again when they got the results from the autopsy. It’s conclusion? Brandon had died of natural causes.
The medical examiner, Dr. Lauren Scott, conferred with police to understand the circumstances surrounding Brandon’s death, so in addition to the medical records from his hospital admission, and the things that she could learn from her study of his body, she also had access to all of the information that police had gleaned.
She concluded that Brandon’s cause of death was pneumonia. Pneumonia, in the broadest sense, is simply inflammation in the lungs, and though most otherwise healthy adults don’t fear it, it can be deadly. Pneumonia is a leading cause of death in developing countries, and amongst first world countries, it can be fatal in the very old, the very young, and the chronically ill. Pneumonia is usually caused by bacteria or viruses or a combination of both. It often begins as an infection in your throat or sinuses and then moves down into the lungs.
Brandon’s lungs were carefully examined as part of the autopsy, and though she found consolidation throughout the lungs, it was particularly present in the right lower, the right middle, and left lower lobes. Consolidation is a medical term that means that normally compressible lung tissue was firm and fluid filled from inflammation. In other words, the lung tissue in those areas wouldn’t be able to absorb oxygen, so in turn, the brain and the heart were starved of oxygen.
She said that the pneumonia could cause the multiorgan failure and sepsis that the hospital had diagnosed, and based upon the chest imaging that was done when Brandon arrived, she believed that the pneumonia was present prior to admission. She noted that the kidneys were failing, literally falling apart, and there was evidence of moderate liver disease.
Regarding the rest of the injuries on his body, though she admits that she didn’t know what precipitated them, she concluded that they were, quote, “not contributory to death” and “superficial”, and thus she classified the manner of death as “natural.”
Clean up of the apartment
Meanwhile, Brandon’s family was beginning the solemn task of cleaning out Brandon’s apartment. His stepdad, Reg, had taken off of work and wanted to get started on it, so he and his brother, Russell, started going through everything, and getting the apartment ready to be returned to the landlord.
They first tried to find Brandon’s key, and though they found 5 or 6 keys around the apartment, none of them would lock the front door. Brandon’s apartment keys were never found. His sister said that he ordinary kept his house keys on the ring with his truck keys, but police took a photograph of the truck keys (discovered on the bedroom floor), and the only thing on that ring was the FOB and the truck key itself.
They also discovered a lot of blood splatter, not just in the bedroom and bathroom, but in other parts of the apartment as well. They started taking photos of their own, and they set aside bloody items – for example the comforter and the pillow from his bed, which were both soaked and had plenty of evidence of blood.
They also found streaking in some of the blood suggesting that perhaps some clean-up had been performed. It seemed impossible that someone in a psychotic rage ransacking their apartment would also have the presence of mind to grab a spray bottle to do some clean-up.
One more search by police
They called the lead Asheboro detective, Jeremy Sudduth, back to the scene and reviewed their findings with him. He agreed, at the time, that it looked like some clean-up had been done.
On September 25, about 2 weeks after Brandon’s death, Detective Sudduth returned to the apartment to do some more searching and testing using a blood-detection chemical called Bluestar. He tested the 2nd bathroom with Bluestar and found no evidence of blood. He also tested a dead-blow hammer that Sarah’s family had suggested could be a murder weapon and found no evidence of blood on it either. The bathroom that was directly connected to Brandon’s bedroom was also tested and revealed a number of spots that indicated the presence of blood.
Police investigation continues
The investigation continued through the fall, and they pieced together details about the end of Brandon’s life.
Brandon’s final purchases were discovered through a review of his financial records.
On Sunday, September 8th, at 10:26PM, 4 days before first responders discovered him, he ordered pizza from Domino’s. It was delivered to his apartment. The total was $36.83 and he signed for it. The receipt was recovered. Sarah believes that the signature on the receipt matches his handwriting. The order included a 14” hand-tossed pizza, an order of cheesy bread, and a 2-liter soda. The empty boxes were found in his bedroom.
On Tuesday, September 10th, at 11:27AM, there was an in-store purchase at an adult store called Adam & Eve in Greensboro, the nearest major city, about 30 minutes north of Asheboro. The staff there was questioned and they recognized Brandon as someone who had been in the store before, but couldn’t be sure that he was in there on that particular day. The product that was purchased was not in any of the photos from the crime scene.
Another purchase, likely made on September 10th (which posted to his account on the 11th), was at a Chinese restaurant in Asheboro called Jade Express, a little counter-service spot in Randolph Mall, a large indoor mall with a food court. The total spent was $17.28, and since the average entrée costs between $6.00 and $10.00, this was likely two entrees, though we don’t have the receipt to confirm it.
On Monday, September 9th, there were texts from Brandon’s phone to his mom’s where, at 4:21PM, he complained of being sick and being in bed all day, and that he was suffering from a terrible headache. And on Tuesday, September 10th, at 6:30AM, Sarah got the final texts from her son, two days before he was discovered unconscious. The final phone call from Brandon’s phone was on Tuesday evening at 8:26PM with a Virginia woman that Brandon was dating.
On Wednesday, there were calls placed to Brandon’s phone that weren’t answered, and a neighbor of his recalled that FedEx tried to deliver a package that afternoon around 1:30PM, but nobody answered the door.
Police tried to find out where his truck had been in the days leading up to his death. It was equipped with a built-in GPS unit. Unfortunately, the police checked with a Chevy dealer and learned that there was no location information saved locally for them to review.
They spoke to a property management maintenance man and he remembered that Brandon had asked him to come and repair some damage to the ceiling of his bedroom. When the maintenance man arrived, he said that Brandon would have to clean up his place before he would be willing to do the work. He said that there was trash, clothes, and personal stuff everywhere.
The only other fruitful lead that was tracked down is the information from his final employer about firing Brandon for the condition of his hotel room.
At the beginning of January, 2020, the Asheboro Police Department promoted Jeremy Sudduth to Sergeant and reassigned Brandon’s case to Detective Lorie Johnson. She had been involved with Brandon’s case from the beginning, but now she would be taking the lead on the investigation.
Medical examiner revises manner of death
Detective Johnson had mentioned to Sarah on a few occasions her theory that Brandon had taken some drugs which precipitated his injuries. And on February 7th, 2020, the medical examiner issued an amendment to her autopsy report, changing the manner of death from ‘natural’ to ‘undetermined’. Sarah believes that the reason for this change in classification is because of the theory that Johnson proffered to the ME about Brandon having taken some illicit drugs which were metabolized by his body before being admitted to the hospital which resulted in them not appearing on the tox screens.
That is almost verbatim what the ME wrote. Dr. Scott’s report reads, “upon further discussion of the case,” it was suggested “that Brandon’s organ damage may have been caused by a substance ingestion on September 10th that had been metabolized by September 12th.” Further, she wrote, “substance ingestion may have been the cause of death, and this cannot be proven or disproven by the autopsy findings.”
Asheboro Police close Brandon’s case
On February 27th, 2020, after five months of investigation, Detective Johnson closed Brandon’s case.
The reasons were straightforward and clear. The apartment was secured, and there no signs of forced entry. Though the mess of his apartment was extreme and bizarre, it was consistent with the account of the maintenance worker and the company who fired him. There were valuables left in the apartment, including cash in Brandon’s wallet and numerous electronics, which ruled out robbery as a motive. The autopsy results indicated that Brandon had died of natural causes. They had done an investigation and had found nothing that pointed to foul play. As far as they could tell, Brandon was down and out from being fired, may have ingested something, and all of the damage to his body was self-inflicted.
Sarah angry, doesn’t make sense
Sarah was furious. It made no sense to her that her healthy 33-year-old son had died due to pneumonia or drug use. He was adamantly opposed to recreational drug use and was very careful about what he put in his body. He never hesitated to go to see the doctor if something was wrong. In fact, she said that he was, at times, TOO eager to go. She remembered a time he had a small cut on his hand, and his sister-in-law, who works in the medical field, told him that it was too minor to get stitched, but he insisted to go to the ER. They told him the same thing, and he went home, glad that he had gotten a professional opinion. He had an ongoing, perhaps too-frequent, relationship with medical professionals, and if he were feeling ill, he would have had no hesitation to seek treatment.
She remembered the day that they brought her into the police department to tell her the news. They told her that they had found no evidence of foul play. She was furious.
But while the police were conducting their investigation, Sarah was conducting her own. And at the center of it? A woman named Cassandra.
Who is Cassandra?
Let’s back up. Remember how in Part 1, I mentioned that Brandon had two long-term relationships in Washington State before moving to North Carolina? Well, he missed that companionship a lot, and he was eager to find a partner in North Carolina. After a brief, failed, relationship with a woman he met at Lucky’s Burger-n-Tap, that moved far too quickly and fizzled just as fast, he started dating online, using apps like Tinder, Hinge, and Badoo, and through one of those apps, he met Cassandra.
The timeline of their activity in 2019 isn’t totally clear, but Brandon did tell his sister about her in February, and she was present in his life until his death in September.
Sarah came to know about Cassandra through her daughter-in-law. It was five days after Brandon had passed away, on Wednesday, September 18th, and Brandon’s sister-in-law got a Facebook message. Cassandra introduced herself, and this is what she wrote:
Hey, I know you don't know me at all, but you’re Brandon Wesley Embry’s sister, and I was your brother’s girlfriend from mid-May until his passing. I met him on a dating app called Hinge.
He sent me a text with a crying emoji on Tuesday the 10th and I haven't heard from him since and I’ve been a worried mess since then. He never told me your mom’s name but that he had a sister that was in Kentucky.
I found out the hard way yesterday when I went by his apartment at Park Place in Asheboro on South Church Street yesterday evening and some woman told me he had died.
I hope you know how wonderful of a man he was and that I thought the world of him.
It was a long message that continued by asking if she could have one of Brandon’s sweatshirts to remember him by. She also asked for some of her things that were left at Brandon’s apartment—some clothes and makeup—to be returned.
It seemed innocuous enough, so she forwarded it to Sarah, who immediately reached out to Cassandra directly, and after a one-week delay without communication, what ensued was 10 months of sometimes daily contact between Cassandra and Sarah, which gradually revealed a strange and ominous portrait of Cassandra and her relationship with Brandon.
Sarah met Cassandra in person in Asheboro. Sarah remembered that she was visibly shaking. And once they sat down inside, Cassandra made intense, constant eye contact and some strange comments. She told Sarah a story: one time they (Brandon and she) went to Walmart and bought a blender, and when they didn’t charged for it, in Cassandra’s words, they “got away with murder.” Sarah found her choice of words strange and became immediately suspicious.
Cassandra’s account of her relationship with Brandon
Cassandra came on strong. She said that she and Brandon were soulmates and wildly in love. They were going to get married. Sarah was stunned to find a photo of wedding ring from Zales on her phone with the comment, “Brandon has great taste in jewelry”. She said that she had been pregnant with his child and had miscarried. She even sent her pictures of an ultrasound. She told Sarah how many children that she and Brandon were planning to have. She called him pet names and shared intimate details of their relationship. She explained that they were getting ready to open a joint banking account together, and that she should be entitled to the money that was in his account.
Sarah talked to everyone in her family, asking if anyone knew anything about this relationship with Cassandra. No one did. Her daughter, Rachel, remembered that Brandon had mentioned to her that he was dating a girl from Russia, but that things probably weren’t going to work out because she was going to be returning to Russia.
Sarah didn’t even know Cassandra’s name until she appeared in the wake of Brandon’s death. The notion that they were in a head-over-heels relationship was simply outrageous.
Communication with Cassandra
Sarah would primarily communicate with Cassandra through Facebook Messenger, but she would also have phone calls, face to face meetings, and text conversations. All together, Sarah met up with her in person 4 times.
Over the time that Sarah maintained a relationship with Cassandra, she would also feed information to the detectives about what she was learning.
What I didn’t mention before is that detectives were aware of Cassandra because they discovered Brandon’s correspondence with her from his AT&T phone records. They revealed to Sarah that although Brandon corresponded with Cassandra, he spoke to the Virginia woman I mentioned previously 5 times as much, further casting doubt on the seriousness of their relationship. They had already spoken to Cassandra on the phone, and though that portion of the police report is redacted, she established her alibi for the week of Brandon’s death that she was home in bed.
Cassandra’s interview with detectives
As the conversations with Sarah became more strange, detectives took a closer look at Cassandra. In late November, Detective Sudduth asked her to come into the Asheboro police station for further questioning. She was panicked, and who better to vent to than her new friend, the mother of her dead boyfriend? Cassandra had a tearful 20-minute phone call where she expressed her fears about going in and talking to Sudduth about her and Brandon’s relationship.
She ended up telling the detective she was sick and couldn’t come in.
He followed up and convinced her to come in later, on December 4th. Detective Sudduth questioned her for two hours. She said that she had been to Asheboro a total of 3 or 4 times. She said that she was last in town on Brandon’s birthday, which was Saturday, September 7th, five days before he was found, and that she returned to his apartment “about a week” after his death, to check on him, which is when she learned of his death. And while I don’t know all the details of their discussion, I do know that following her interview, Sudduth asked if he could perform a “phone dump” on her cell phone. This is law enforcement jargon that means to extract all of the data from her phone. She consented, and he asked her to follow him to the Sheriff’s office, where they had the equipment to do it. He briefly left her in the interview room, and while he was out of the room, he saw that she was working quickly on her phone. While they were on the way to the Sheriff’s office, he saw her in his rearview mirror, frantically doing something with her phone. They hooked her phone up to the machine and the procedure was a success, but the forensic tech revealed to Sudduth that nothing had been recovered. No GPS data. No text messages. She had even shown him text messages on her phone between Brandon and her during their interview and those were missing. It appeared that she had likely performed a factory reset of her phone.
The next day, Sudduth sent an order to Verizon to preserve her cell phone records, and on December 20th, he sent Verizon a search warrant to produce her phone records for some critical periods of time, with which they complied.
The police have not released those records.
Immediately following the interview, Cassandra called Sarah. She was giddy, laughing uncontrollably. She said that after it was over, she thought, “Is that it?”, and laughed at them.
Cassandra is a liar
What became clear to Sarah almost immediately was that Cassandra was a liar.
She told Brandon that she was from Russia. Cassandra is from Farmingdale, Maine, along with her parents, and her grandparents.
Cassandra claimed to have multiple sclerosis, an eating disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. She said she had lifelong stomach issues. None of this is true.
Brandon didn’t have a girlfriend, much less a soon-to-be life partner. It was all of her own invention.
She said she had a masters degree in nursing. She doesn’t.
She said that she had a twin sister who died. She has a sister, but not a twin, and she is alive and well. In other phone calls with Sarah, she referred to having a brother. She has no brother.
She told Sarah that when she was 14 years old, she had a baby, but the baby got tangled up in blankets and died. Untrue.
She said that when she went to Brandon’s apartment to check on him, she knocked on a neighbor’s door, learned the news of his death, and nearly passed out, crying and wailing and begging for comfort. Sarah checked. She found the neighbor, and asked for her account of the interaction. Cassandra got the news, said thank you, and shook her hand!
But most shocking of all? Cassandra was married and lived with her husband in South Carolina the entire time that she knew Brandon.
Meet Danny, Cassandra’s husband
Danny lives in Darlington, South Carolina, a 2-hour drive south of Asheboro. Danny works at a manufacturer of paper products where he has worked for 20 years. Danny is 20 years Cassandra’s senior. They were married in 2012, when Danny was 42 and Cassandra was 22. Though he knew of her family when she was only a child, it wasn’t until November of 2011 that he met her again as an adult. She was living in a nearby town called Hartsville, and that same month they met she showed up at his place and never left. Three months later, in February of 2012, they were legally married. She kept it a secret from her family, and it wasn’t until December of 2013, on a trip to Maine to visit Cassandra’s family, that she coached him to propose to her in front of her family. He played along with the ruse.
He said that the first couple of years of marriage were good, but that things started to change. By the time 2019 rolled around, things were…. strange.
She and he had separate bedrooms at his house, and she would disappear for periods of time as short as a night away or as long as a month or two. She would claim to be in Colorado, or Virginia, or Ohio, or Maine, but he was never sure where. She maintained PO Boxes in Virginia and Colorado.
She had a number of burner phones. In addition to her main number, she would pick up new prepaid phones regularly.
He would financially support her, and even set up a checking account that he deposited money into. She had odd-jobs, but largely didn’t work. A couple of her employers were IHOP and LaQuinta Inn, but Danny suspected that she made some cash through sex work on “sugar daddy”-oriented dating apps.
They are still legally married, and he is trying to get divorced. They are currently going through a mandatory 1-year separation.
Danny cooperates with the investigation
How do we know all of this? Because Danny has been fully cooperative with Sarah’s investigation into her son’s death, and has provided to Sarah much of the information that she has learned about Cassandra, even sharing burner phones and text messages.
Cassandra’s ex-boyfriend cooperates too!
In addition to Danny, Sarah also reached out to an ex-boyfriend of Cassandra’s, who we’ll call Kevin. Kevin is a lobsterman on the Maine coast, and he had a 3-year-long relationship with Cassandra prior to her marriage to Danny.
He, too, has been fully cooperative with the investigation, and boy do these two men have stories to tell.
Continue the story with Part Three.
Links
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Sources For This Episode
Newspaper articles
Only two articles: one by Fox8 (Greensboro, NC), and one by the Courier-Tribune (Asheboro, NC). Full listing here.
Online written sources
'True Crime: The Case of Brandon Embry' (Milam's Musings), 8/20/2021, by Brett Milam
'Brandon Embry lost his life in tragic circumstances…' (Reddit), 3/19/2021, by u/hayhaylou
'Brandon Embry - Blamed for 'beating himself to death'…' (Websleuths), 3/20/2021, by Miss_Bellatrix
'Timeline' (Facebook), 1/21/2021, by Brandon's Voice
Interviews
A special thank you to Sarah Lee for spending over 20 hours with us discussing her son’s case.
Photos
Most images from Sarah Lee and the Facebook page she manages here.
Official documentation (All shared with permission)
2019, Feb 18, Medical Records - ICU admittance (18 pages)
2019, Apr 24, Medical Records - ER admittance (31 pages)
2019, Apr 25, Medical Records - Drug testing results (1 page)
2019, Jun 28, Medical Records - Urgent care visit (15 pages)
2019, Sep 12, Medical Records - ICU admittance, hospital 1 (102 pages)
2019, Sep 12, Medical Records - ICU admittance, hospital 2 (60 pages)
2019, Sep 12, Search Warrant #1, Brandon’s apartment
2019, Sep 13, Search Warrant #2, Brandon’s truck
2019, Sep 13, Search Warrant #3, Brandon’s apartment
2019, Sep 16, Autopsy report, annotated by Sarah Lee
2019, Sep 18, Search Warrant #4, Brandon’s phone records
2019, Dec 20, Search Warrant #5, Cassandra’s phone records
(Produced) 2021, Oct 22, Evidence Log
(Produced) 2021, Oct 22, Narrative from Detective Johnson
(Produced) 2021, Oct 22, Narrative from Detective Macon
(Produced) 2021, Oct 22, Narrative from Detective Sudduth
(Produced) 2021, Oct 22, Narrative from Major Jay Hanson
(Produced) 2021, Oct 22, Narrative of initial police response
Guide to manner of death classification, here
Credits
Created, researched, told, and edited by Kristen Seavey
Research, writing, photo editing by Byron Willis