Adeola Adeyemo
“Please don’t kill me. I’ll do anything”.
As a 10-year-old growing up in Capitol Heights, Maryland, a suburb of Washington DC, William Kellibrew had learned how to do certain things, but begging for his life was not one of them. He already knew how lethal the gun pointed at his face was; his mother Jacqueline and 12-year-old-brother, Anthony, were lying lifeless beside him, with scarlet red blood forming pools of sorrow around them.
With his heart thumping hard in his chest, he found his voice again. But this time he wasn’t talking to his mother’s killer, a man who up until that moment was known to Kellibrew as her abusive ex-boyfriend. “God, please don’t let him kill me,” he pleaded, his face turned upwards.
Later that day, in complete shock and unable to speak, he would draw figures of his mom and brother lying on the floor in red crayon because all he could think of was the blood, so much blood, to show the police what he had witnessed. In that picture, the killer was still standing. This was before he took his own life.
The events of July 2, 1984, were traumatic enough to propel young Kellibrew to a life of depression, drug abuse, crime, and other vices. And for a period of his life, he recalls that he was in so much pain that he almost jumped off a bridge on his way to school the day he became a teenager. But at a gathering of health workers who specialize in trauma care at the St Francis Xavier Church in Baltimore city one warm spring afternoon in 2019, you could almost hear a pin drop as Kellibrew spoke about his journey to recovery. “Healing is possible, that’s really the big message here,” his voice bounced across the room. “We can survive, and we can do it!”
Through therapy and a network of support, Kellibrew’s life was transformed. As an international advocate and motivational speaker, he now takes his message of hope and courage around the world on issues relating to trauma and recovery, substance use, trauma-informed care, multiple victimizations, juvenile justice, corrections, and public policy issues. His advocacy message has taken him to the United Kingdom, China, Ireland, Japan, Guam and across the United States where he works closely with nation’s leaders, professionals and others who continue to put children and youth first.
His other surviving brother, who is serving 97 years in a federal penitentiary after being convicted of 18 felony counts, was not so lucky.
“After my mother and brother were murdered, my oldest brother went straight to the streets,” Kellibrew said, as we chat by the corner of Baltimore’s historic East Oliver street. The Church we had just left is the first African-American Catholic Church in the United States. “He became a baby of the 90s era. That is when the crack epidemic was horrifying in Washington DC and around the country.”
Kellibrew had grown up seeing his mother use heroin in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Alcohol and drugs were introduced to him and his siblings at a very young age. “We had that around us, this was sort of like a normal thing for us – the alcohol, the drugs, things like that,” he recalls.
But in all of this, he is a survivor and now inspires other people to share their stories thereby breaking the scourge of pain and silence. Kellibrew takes no credit for this and calls people like his grandmother who raised him after his mother’s death and his Assistant Principal who fueled the wheels that led him to get therapy, the “bridges” that saved him. “I’m very lucky and very blessed not to have gone down that pathway for all of my life”.
Photo Credit: Obama White House Archives
