November 2, 1999

(Note: David Junior Brown was executed in the NC Central Prison death chamber on the morning of Nov. 19, 1999)

Brown's Execution: Justice at Last?

Through A Glass Darkly, by John Myers, Internet Photojournalist

Barring some last-minute legal miracle, which is far less likely than Lazarus rising from the dead, David Junior Brown will keep his long-delayed appointment with eternity on Nov. 19, 1999, in the North Carolina Central Prison death chamber in Raleigh.
For the family of his victims, Shelly Diane Frye Chalflinch, 26, and her 9-year-old daughter, Christine, perhaps a feeling of justice finally served may ease the pain they have suffered these past 20 years each time they saw David Junior Brown's name.
I know the Chalflinch family of Robbins and finer folks you'll never find. God-fearing churchgoers most of them, but I dare say there's not one in the bunch that sees any contradiction in their Christian faith and wanting to see David Junior Brown die.

I know I'll never forget the gory details of that double-murder I covered back in 1980 as the News Editor of one of Moore County's now-defunct weekly newspapers.
Two murders are bad enough, but a mother and her daughter brutally butchered is enough to make even a "callous" reporter realize he hasn't seen it all yet. Pinehurst Police mostly kept the gory details under wraps until the trial, but then all the gore flowed forth.
To say the evidence against Brown was damning is like saying the ocean is wet.

A bloody handprint on the Chalflinch apartment wall, bloody footprints from her apartment, down the stairs to Brown's apartment. The bloody, broken knife he used on both mother and daughter, matched to a set of his chef's knives which he used a cook at the Pinehurst Hotel. And during the autopsies the most damning evidence of all, his bloody ring found inside one of the two horribly mutilated victims.
And those are just the details that were "fit to print." Some of the evidence was so terrible that this reporter couldn't bear to report everything that was disclosed in that trial. I don't even want to tell it now.
Needless to say it was a slam dunk of a prosecution for the District Attorney. Guilty and sentenced to death in short order. But as we all know well now, that wasn't the end, or even near to it.

I wrote another story several years later for another newspaper about the never-ending legal appeals systems that was keeping David Junior Brown from his appointment with eternity. Then, some 10-plus years into the process, I recall that state's legal bills for his defense had reached about $250,000. I don't know what the final tab will be, but guess whose pocket those dollars are coming from? Plus the expense for keeping him up all these years in Central Prison, plus the cost of his execution, and I presume, his burial.
The wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow and fine, the old saw goes. After more than two decades of covering cops and courts, I'd have to conclude, mostly just slow. And sometimes not very fine at all. Worse criminals than Brown have been known to slip free between the legal cogs in the wheels.

But finally it appears he will get his long-delayed execution, and once again the debate is raised, is the death penalty legal, or right, or does it deter crime? As a Christian, how can I support taking a man's life, when my Lord looked at a woman guilty of a capital crime in her day and sent her away with an admonition "Go and sin no more"?
I can't really explain the whys and wherefores of how I feel, and I'm not a Chalflinch so I don't even have that excuse. All I know for sure is the death penalty will certainly deter David Junior Brown from another murder. And maybe in the end, that's reason enough to be for capital punishment.