Every Little Step

by Bobby Brown

  She said that at a birthday party for Krissi, Nick got into it with Gary and Ray, aggressively getting up in their faces in an extremely disrespectful way. Out of respect for Krissi, they tried to play nice and let him leave the house with all his limbs intact. But according to court papers, Nick made threatening comments and posted pictures of guns intended to make Pat fearful for her personal safety. She said that’s when her relationship with Krissi became strained, because she told Krissi she couldn’t be with the family when Nick was with her. So she said Krissi stopped communicating with her. And Pat took out the restraining order.

  I was outraged and dumbfounded. Crazy thoughts were flying through my head: Wait, you had a restraining order against Nick and you didn’t think it was dangerous for my child to be living with him? And you continued to pay the rent on a condo where he is living with her? And nobody thought it was a good idea to pick up a phone and tell her father? I had to stop myself from flying across the table and strangling somebody.

  It got even worse. At the hospital it was discovered that she had bruises all over her body. And then there were the missing teeth. We saw that she had a couple of front teeth missing. We were told that a tooth had fallen out when they were putting the breathing tube down her throat. But there was a second missing tooth. Pat told the detective that she had received a call from someone telling her that Krissi was missing a tooth. She said she confronted Krissi, who claimed she had fallen in the kitchen.

  While we weren’t discounting the possibility that Nick had something to do with Krissi’s incident in the bathtub, we also wondered whether the car accident she had been involved in just four days before she was found in the bathtub might have had something to do with her brain injuries. Bobbi Kristina lost control of her Jeep one afternoon while driving in Roswell with a female friend and it swerved into oncoming traffic, hitting a Ford Taurus. Even though the driver of the Taurus sustained serious injuries and Krissi’s friend Danyela Da Silva Bradley was hospitalized, Krissi was checked at the scene and sent on her way. We asked the doctors whether she could have suffered some type of brain trauma or hemorrhage that didn’t present itself until four days later, resulting in the bathtub incident. But the doctors couldn’t really give us definitive answers. They couldn’t rule out the possibility that the accident was related but they couldn’t say it was, either.

  At one point, a doctor at Emory told us that if she were his daughter, he wouldn’t continue Krissi’s life. We thanked him for his honesty but kindly told him it was our decision and we chose to fight until we had exhausted every single possibility. But it wasn’t easy, particularly since we were getting so much negativity from the Houston clan about our decision. I’m not saying they didn’t want Krissi to recover, but they were bombarding us with a steady stream of doubt about whether she would ever come out of her coma and suggesting that we should just give up.

  I must add that we were seeing what appeared to be steady improvement. After Emory, we moved her to DeKalb Medical, where we hoped she would learn to breathe on her own rather than through the machine. And she would breathe on her own for an extended period, like twenty-four hours, but then she’d start struggling and they’d put her back on the machine. She also was getting physical therapy at DeKalb, where she would sit up in a chair with her eyes open and track my movements around the room with her eyes. We all would do therapy with her—me, Alicia, Landon, Bobby Jr., Tommy. We would stretch her legs, move her hands, touch her tongue, have her track us with her eyes. For the most part she was responding, exhibiting little movements from time to time that we saw as huge leaps in her development. This is when I announced during one of my shows that she was awake and responding. While these changes might not have been as medically significant as we prayed for, to us they were positive signs that she was on the road to some sort of recovery—certainly better than the alternative. We chose to use these small improvements as a reason to remain hopeful. And her cells were still alive, which was great news after she had suffered such a severe injury, when brain cells will often wither away. We knew her brain had gone quite a long time without oxygen, but we didn’t know how long. And we didn’t know exactly why it had been deprived of oxygen. Though she was found face down in the tub, there wasn’t water in her lungs, meaning she didn’t drown. There wasn’t blunt-force trauma to her head. There wasn’t any indication that she had been choked. So we still had too many questions.

  In June, we decided to bring Krissi to Chicago to be evaluated by some of the top neuroscience specialists in the country at Northwestern University. The hope was that they might be able to figure out how to repair the part of her brain that hadn’t been responding. We had done quite a bit of research that brought us to the conclusion that Chicago was one of our last hopes for a recovery. My brother, Tommy, flew with her from Atlanta to Chicago; Pat and I flew to Chicago on different flights. But things didn’t go as we had hoped in Chicago. They were much more aggressive in their treatment than we had been led to believe they would be. Krissi had a really bad seizure while she was there. We hadn’t seen her responding to treatment so violently up to that point. Before, if her brain was having seizures, we would reduce the treatment levels. But in Chicago the treatment felt much more invasive. Tommy and Pat wanted to stop it and bring her back to Atlanta. I wanted to keep her there and wean her off the medicine at a slower pace. But the doctors in Chicago didn’t see it my way, so we brought her back to Atlanta.

  After Chicago, things began to move swiftly downhill with Krissi’s prognosis. Her body began to shut down and for the first time things were looking grim instead of hopeful. There were far fewer signs of progress for us to hang on to. We had been intent on getting her weaned off the breathing machine, hoping that might eventually lead to our being able to bring her to Los Angeles and ultimately to our home, where we were committed to caring for her around the clock.

  During this time I also went to the courts to file all the necessary paperwork so that my status as her guardian couldn’t be challenged. This was made much easier by the fact that she had not married Nick; if they had married, I would have had to fight him for control over the decision-making, which likely would have driven me crazy.

  Alicia and Cassius were spending so much time in Atlanta that we withdrew him from his school in LA and homeschooled him, with Alicia taking over the responsibility for his kindergarten lessons every day.

  Krissi couldn’t stay at DeKalb any longer after the Chicago intervention because she was no longer responsive enough to meet their stringent requirements. So we then had to move her to the Peachtree Christian Hospice in Duluth. Because hospices tend to be the end stage, we had to tell them to continue feeding her. To not do so in my mind would have been like pulling the plug. But at some point after she moved to Peachtree, a change occurred in my mental state. After fighting for more than five months, I allowed myself to come to peace with the probability that we would soon be losing my daughter.

  At the same time, I was also dealing with the imminent arrival of another child—my daughter, who was inside Alicia’s belly, growing bigger every day. In fact, Alicia was so far along in the pregnancy that she went back to LA when we brought Krissi to Chicago and she didn’t return to Atlanta when we brought Krissi back because she was no longer allowed to fly. I had a private conversation with Krissi, sitting next to her bed in the hospice, moving my face very close to hers.

  “It’s okay for you to let go now, baby,” I told her. “You’ve been fighting for a long time. It’s all right. You can let go.”

  I got on a flight to head back to Los Angeles so that I could accompany Alicia to her final doctor’s appointment on a Friday before the C-section birth that was scheduled for the following week on Tuesday. While we were waiting at her doctor’s office, Alicia told me she was hungry, so I headed downstairs to get her a sandwich. By the time I had gotten back upstairs with her food, she had been given monumental news: her doctor didn’t want to wait until Tuesday to deliver the baby. R
ather than wait any longer, the doctor wanted to go ahead and do it. That night.

  We went to the hospital, where we were soon joined by Alicia’s family. Several hours later, on July 9, 2015, at 8:24 P.M., we welcomed Bodhi Jameson Rein Brown into the crazy Brown clan. I was able to feel moments of pure joy—the first I had felt in a long time—when I held this precious baby in my arms. We had prepared ourselves for the roller-coaster ride that we might be facing, dealing with a new life and a death at the same time. And damn it, my joy turned out to be short-lived. On the third day after Bodhi’s birth, the day before Alicia was going to be able to come home with the baby, I got a phone call from the hospice while Alicia was struggling through a shower in the bathroom. It was a nurse, regretfully informing me that Krissi had taken her last breath.

  I thought I had prepared myself, but it still felt like my heart had been torn from my chest. I leaned into the bathroom and called to my wife.

  “Alicia? She passed,” I said.

  Alicia came out and hugged me. We sat there on the edge of her hospital bed, sobbing for my daughter, for the unrelenting tragedies of the previous four years, for the cruel sequence of events that had finally brought her back into our lives. Alicia’s sister picked me up and drove me to the airport. It was back to Atlanta on a painful, emotional red-eye flight across the darkened skies of America, tripping through memories of my years with Krissi—and the anguish of feeling for so long that she was just beyond my reach.

  When I arrived at the hospice, I got another jolt of mind-boggling news: Krissi wasn’t dead. The nurse had made an unbelievable mistake. I thought about the nurse’s call a few months later when we discovered that one of the “nurses” caring for Krissi wasn’t really a nurse at all. Taiwo Sobamowo, thirty-two, was arrested for fraud, for stealing the identity of another nurse in order to get the job at Peachtree Christian Hospice. At one point she was one of the staff in charge of Krissi’s care, but I don’t know if she’s the nurse who called me.

  During the hospital ordeal, there were some crazy things being written in the media and charges being lobbed back and forth. Some of it was led by my sisters, particularly Leolah. I come from a large, passionate family and we wear our emotions on our sleeves. Leolah can be loud and brash and I don’t always like her timing. And while the Houstons plant stories in the media hiding behind anonymous sources, LeeLee doesn’t hide. When she says something, she’s going to put her name on it. Some may want to dismiss her claims as outlandish or extreme, but the substance of her claims shouldn’t be dismissed. Some unbelievably ugly, suspicious stuff had gone down over the last few years. I think the Houston family has stayed on the offensive, pointing fingers at us, to keep suspicion and scrutiny away from them. After all, though they continued to try to give the media the impression I was some kind of nefarious character, both Whitney and Krissi had been tragically lost on their watch, not mine.

  When I got back to Krissi’s side after the birth of Bodhi, I knew that it was just a matter of time before she left us. Her organs were failing and the doctors were telling us she had just a few more days. But she actually hung on for two more weeks. The night she passed, I had another little talk with her.

  “I love you, baby girl. And I just want you to know it’s okay for you to rest now.”

  I kissed her, got up and walked out of the room. Within an hour, I got a phone call from another nurse. This time she really was gone. My baby had packed a lot of living into her twenty-two years. As the daughter of two very famous people, it wasn’t always easy for her. I just wish I had been there with her and for her in the last few years to help ease her transition to adulthood. Such thoughts will undoubtedly pain me for the rest of my life.

  Alicia got on a flight the next day with Cashy and our newborn to join me in Atlanta. Time to plan yet another funeral.

  A FEW WORDS FROM LAPRINCIA BROWN

  The time we spent in Atlanta with my sister was like going through a long, drawn-out nightmare. Everything was so hard and painful. Not only was it hard to be there because my sister was in the hospital, but it was also hard because I felt certain people were playing politics with my sister. Some of the people on the Houston side were making me uncomfortable. It’s almost like they were making the whole ordeal theatrical or something, calling attention to themselves, asking the wrong questions.

  My father was distraught, as you can imagine. I felt so bad for him. It seemed like year after year after year, he had something terrible happen. Most people don’t go through that much pain in a lifetime. And it was all happening within a few years of his being off narcotics. Sometimes I’d worry that he might revert. But also sometimes I would forget about what he was going through. I’d be thinking, He needs to do this, and not understand that he was still struggling with so much. I’d then remember that I needed to take a step back and consider how good he was doing.

  He and I got a lot of time to talk in those months, since we had to find things to pass the hours and days while we waited. Other than talking, there was TV and there was eating. The Browns are big foodies, so going out as a family to get food would be a big event. But it was all very mentally exhausting. We were all in and out: Bobby Jr. was there, Landon was there. Alicia and Cassius were there. I went back home to Massachusetts for a week or so and then I’d go back to Atlanta for another couple of weeks. Uncle Tommy was there the whole time.

  When Krissi’s grandmother Cissy saw my father, she seemed very happy. If there was animosity between them in the past, I feel like she was at peace with it now. There were far more important things for them to worry about. When Krissi finally passed, I was in shock—though we were all preparing ourselves and my father had told us there was nothing else that could be done. Sometimes I wonder if the reality of it all has really hit me yet.

  I let the Houstons take over most of the planning for the funeral. I was still too distraught to get into the details anyway. The conversations about laying her to rest were unbearable for me, so Donna would communicate primarily with Alicia when she had questions. At the wake, the night before the funeral, I broke down when I saw her body lying there in the casket. It was the first time I had seen her since I walked out of her room at the hospice. She looked so beautiful, so young, so precious. I couldn’t believe I would never hear her voice again.

  The funeral service was lovely, a fitting memorial for my baby. Even Cissy sang for her. The only sour note was provided by Leolah, who made a scene when Pat went to the mic to talk about Krissi.

  “Uh-uh, no, I’m sorry, but I cannot sit here and listen to all these lies!” Leolah cried out. The Houston side all stood up to object, but we handled it right away. I told Leolah that she was out of line and she walked out of the church on her own. The drama was over quickly, so I don’t think it marred the service.

  Krissi’s body was flown from Atlanta to New Jersey, where she was buried in a grave next to her mother. I still haven’t been able to visit the grave site. I’m not yet ready to stand there, alive and functioning, knowing my baby’s body is under a pile of dirt. Lifeless. Gone.

  Maybe one day I will muster the strength to do it.

  The administrator for Bobbi Kristina’s estate filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Nick Gordon, alleging that Bobbi Kristina died after he injected her with a toxic mixture and placed her unconscious in a bathtub. The suit was originally filed in June and amended in August after Krissi died. It accuses Gordon of assault, battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and transferring $11,000 from her account into his own without authorization. The suit alleges Krissi “died following a particularly violent altercation with [Gordon] that left her battered and bruised, with a tooth knocked out.” It alleges Krissi confided to a friend that Gordon “was not the man she thought he was” and made plans to meet on January 31 to discuss the situation further.

  Gordon has responded to the lawsuit by denying the allegations, calling them “scandalous” and “improper.” But he did admit that he went out partying
the night she was found in the bathtub and that he got into an argument with her after reviewing video footage. He admitted that he changed his clothes after the argument. But he didn’t say why he did that.

  As of February 2016, there have not been any criminal charges filed against Nick Gordon.

  I’m a Brown and the one thing we believe in is family. My entire adult life, my kids have always been a big part of everything, there with me every step of the way. I’ve tried my hardest to never let anything get in the way of my taking care of and being with my children. That’s why it was so hard for me when I felt that people were purposely denying me that relationship with Krissi.

  I had Landon when I was just seventeen. That was my exit from New Edition, my point of no return. I was going to move to Los Angeles and I was going to take care of my son; I was going to be there for him no matter what. And that’s what I did. My whole life has been based on family. I come from a big, raucous family. We’re Browns until the end. We take care of each other, we stand for each other and we protect each other as much as we possibly can. That’s what the Browns do. Sometimes we may open our mouths and say dumb shit that doesn’t make any sense, sometimes we may speak when we’re not being spoken to, but through it all we always have love for each other.

  All my kids appreciate that about our family and they all have my back in every way. And they know I have theirs. That’s the one thing that keeps me going, no matter what. My kids. My family. By myself, I’m so fuckin’ scared. I’m still this little kid in this big bubble who had a dream of becoming an entertainer and having success and bedding the most beautiful women in the world. And I’ve done all of that. Losing the love of my life was the hardest thing, but I was able to find someone who gave me the strength to pick myself back up and keep moving on. Then I had to find a way to get through the loss of my child. But I take one day at a time, keep putting one foot in front of the other—and continue to be a strong, loving presence for Landon, LaPrincia, Bobby Jr., Cassius and Bodhi. Not to mention Alicia. That defines me, more than anything else you might have ever heard or read about me.