RALEIGH, N.C. _ Faye Brown was a quiet, stoic woman who rose each morning in a Raleigh prison, pulled on a pair of dress slacks and walked out the gates to catch a city bus _ her routine for years.
At age 67, she had earned enough trust to work each day as a teacher and hair stylist at Sherill's school of cosmetology, carrying a pair of scissors though she was serving a life sentence for murder and bank robbery.
At the end of each day, she caught the bus back to prison, where the younger inmates considered her a grandmother _ an older, wiser prisoner who loved peppermint candy and held a vain hope she would be free one day.
She always admitted walking into a Martin County bank in 1975, carrying a loaded pistol and stuffing money into her purse. But she always resented the murder charge. As the robbers fled, Brown's accomplice Joseph Seaborn hid in the back seat of their getaway car, and when a state trooper pulled them over, he fired a sawed-off shotgun through the window, killing Trooper Tom Davis.
"She always said she didn't want to die here," said Pamela Humphrey, her friend at North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women. "She'd say 'Pam, we ain't going to die here.' She never gave up hope."
She came close in 2009, but was stopped by the North Carolina Supreme Court the next year. On May 8, however, Brown kept her promise, technically. She died in a Raleigh hospital from COVID-19 complications _ the first casualty at the Raleigh prison, which has seen upward of 90 coronavirus cases, according to the North Carolina Department of Public Safety.
Twenty former inmates recently gathered outside the Southeast Raleigh prison decrying her death and protesting crowded conditions. Inside, Humphrey and others waved to them, making heart shapes with their hands.
"They told us her family was there," Humphrey said. "I don't know if we're being told that to appease us."
