Remember victim in deadly heist

Thomas Brannan was a man loved as much by his community as by his own family. I went to school with his daughter Regina at Merion Mercy, so I have some idea of how much he was adored by his wife and children. Multiply that by a hundred, a thousand, and you get to a reasonable appreciation for what this man, a pharmacist by trade and philanthropist at heart, meant to his community.

His business, the aptly named Love Pharmacy in Overbrook, was a place where 35 years worth of people could get the things they needed to settle an upset stomach, calm a raging fever, soothe an abrasion or get their prescriptions filled with efficiency, and kindness. Thomas Brannan was beloved.

On Nov. 12, 1992, two men went into Love Pharmacy and bought some antacid. And then, one of them, Arthur Hawthorne, took Brannan to the back of the pharmacy. The other, David Sheppard, acted as a lookout. This is testimony from the cashier Maureen Quinn given at the preliminary hearing in Municipal Court, as reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

“(Moments later a shot rang out.) I ran to the back. Mr. Brannan was lying on the floor. He was bleeding from his lower right side. (Hawthorne demanded drugs.) Sheppard asked where the safe was, and I told him we didn’t have a safe, and the only money we had was in the register. (Quinn said she was ordered to open a small, locked cabinet and put the drugs into a bag. Before she could hand the bag to the robbers, the gunman in the rear shot Brannan.)”

David Sheppard did not kill Thomas Brannan, but he acted as a lookout in an armed holdup that resulted in his murder. David Sheppard was sentenced to life. Recently, he became the pet project of Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who has been pushing the state Board of Pardons to grant clemency to 20 lifers. Sheppard is among that group.

There are a few problems here. Let’s start with the most glaring one, the fact that when Sheppard was being considered for clemency, the family of Thomas Brannan was not notified. The way they found out about it was when an assistant District Attorney from Delco called to let them know what was going on. The Board of Pardons, overseen by Fetterman, did not have the decency to let Regina Brannan Marcellus and her sisters know that one of the men who was responsible for their father’s murder was up for a sweet deal, something their father had been denied: a chance to go home to his family. This is another example of how victims are increasingly irrelevant to those who only want to make life easier, better, more just for those who have been convicted of felonies.

But there’s another problem, one that has nothing to do with bureaucratic failure: the media’s absolute inability to show respect to victims, and their survivors.

Virtually all of the stories written about Sheppard’s possible commutation painted him as a reformed criminal, a man with children he hadn’t been able to raise, a man who had educated himself in prison, a man who still had so much to give back to society. They turned him into a caricature of rehabilitation, and conveniently left out many of the details of why he was in prison in the first place.

Worse, most of those accounts omitted the name of Thomas Brannan. Most of them omitted any mention of the kind of man he was, of the people whose lives he’d touched, of the ways in which he had improved his community.

If Thomas Brannan were my father, I would have a very hard time showing the grace that his own daughters have shown. My friend Regina has repeatedly said that her complaint is with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in not contacting her family when her father’s killer was being considered for clemency. They deserve better from Pennsylvania. They deserve better from the media. They deserve better from a society that continues to look at criminals as works in progress, as people who deserve a second chance, as victims themselves of a society that forces them to engage in criminal activity to survive.

David Sheppard is home with his family. Thomas Brannan never went home on Nov. 12, 1992.

Remember that, before anything else.