[Ricardo Thomas] This is Ma-ma in real form.
You'll never see her like this.
You only seeing this, 'cause this is home video.
You know, the hair ain't combed, you know,
she got her little robe on. That's rare footage.
[speaking]
And then she got that karaoke machine and that just gave her life.
Oh, yeah. Look at that.
Seem like it was yesterday.
We was just having a good time dancing,
and those were the good old days.
And it all changed.
[siren blaring]
[woman speaking]
It was like a movie.
A horror movie.
Like, I trusted you around these people,
and you betrayed me.
[indistinct chatter]
[narrator] It's August 18th, 1984, in Washington D.C.
and a special time for 22-year-old Belinda Glenn.
My wedding day. It was amazing day.
A lot of old-time friends, aunts and uncles that came from out of town
for this special occasion.
[woman speaking]
We all just had a ball.
[narrator] Belinda's 43-year-old mom, Mamie,
waits patiently with the guests.
[Belinda] My mom was just in charge, so her role was everything.
She was here, there, everywhere.
Wherever she was needed, she was there
if something wasn't going right.
Oh, my gosh. You look so beautiful.
I was my sister's maid of honor.
Since Belinda got married first,
I think that was the opportunity for my mother to just...
do it big, because my mother did everything big.
It was just amazing to see my mom. The expression on my mother's face,
seeing her daughter come down the aisle.
[wedding march playing]
[narrator] 45-year-old Dewitt Glenn is the proud father
who is about to give his daughter away.
He and Mamie divorced 12 years ago.
My dad's role at the wedding was to do nothing but walk his daughter down the aisle.
[laughing] And be happy.
And I think that he was really excited and he was real proud.
Dad's don't really do anything. Mom's do everything.
Go!
[horns honking]
[narrator] Mamie hosts the wedding reception at her home
in Oxon hill, just south of D.C.
[Belinda] She lived in an apartment complex
and, um, she kind of rented out the pool area.
And so we was playing music, had a DJ,
you could swim if you wanted to, um...
Me and Rick took our first dance there.
Mom was making sure everybody was comfortable, they had everything they needed.
The ones that traveled you know she was thanking them for coming.
She was greeting everybody walking around.
And she wanted everybody to feel like they were at home.
She was just-- was a amazing host, you know.
Can't no words express the way I felt that day.
It seemed like the best day ever.
And my mom, she made me feel so special.
Oh, look there.
Oh, my mama was right in her element right there.
She's very proud that her baby daughter just got married, you know.
And she put this beautiful wedding together and this gorgeous reception together,
outside in the summertime.
That's the fruits of her labor,
everything that she does, she does it to the T.
[narrator] Mamie has every right to be proud of what she has accomplished.
[Glenda] After my parents divorced,
my dad left the Washington D.C. area,
but after he left, it was life as normal, life as usual.
My mother kept moving,
she didn't falter, she didn't... she didn't get in a depression.
I'm not taking anything away from my dad,
but he wasn't there like she was there.
So, I give her all glory, all honor.
[Belinda] My mom pretty much raised us, you know, on her own.
Me and my sister and my brother Shaun.
She made sure that she got up to work everyday, so she can keep a roof over our head.
At one point, she had to get on food stamps
to help feed us and everything.
What my mom instilled in me was,
in order to get what you want,
you're gonna have to work for it.
My mother went back to school herself.
She went to the University of the District of Colombia
and winded up at the US Department of Labor.
From going to school.
[Belinda] My mom was single on my wedding,
because she was little, you know, picky.
But, um, I already knew Mom was going to meet somebody special,
you know, and she was gonna run off.
But she wasn't gonna run far, she wasn't gonna leave us, but at same time,
I knew she would get a life back.
[narrator] Mamie meets her special somebody four years later.
Shabaka WaQlimi is just 39 years old to Mamie's 48.
They marry in 1988.
My first impression of him was really remarkable.
I really found him to be a great guy
and I thought that they were a perfect couple.
Whatever she wanted done,
or whatever he felt was nice to do,
he would do it for her.
We just thought, "Okay, Mom done met her somebody good."
We just thought she had met her soul mate.
[narrator] Like Mamie, Shabaka grew up in South Carolina.
He works as a public speaker to campaign for changes to the justice system.
And he helps out at a homeless shelter in D.C.
[narrator] His words have the power to both inspire activists
and comfort Mamie's children.
[Glenda] Whenever we were crying or we were hurt
or we needed advice or we needed this,
he was always that guy that was like, "Listen,
daughter, don't worry about this.
It's gonna be okay." Whatever the situation we were discussing,
he would break it down for you,
and you felt like you had been in your dad's arms.
[narrator] By 1995, the couple shows no signs of the seven-year itch.
[Shabaka speaking]
[Mamie speaking]
They bought a house in Fort Washington, Maryland.
[Mamie speaking]
That was the love house, that was just the house where
you just felt comfortable in there.
You felt-- you know, you felt at home
when you came to Mama's house.
There was always music in the house,
you know, she would turn the music up,
and she would get on the karaoke
and have you singing and laughing
and she had a pool table down there,
so everybody was shooting pool.
[Shabaka] Well, as you can see,
we're still in front of Sam and Lucy's...
[narrator] Mamie's large circle of friends
welcome Shabaka with open arms.
Shabaka films the anniversary party of Mamie's close friend, Lucy Strait, in 1996.
[narrator] Shabaka captures all the guests.
And, occasionally, the guests capture him.
[woman speaking]
[Glenda] At the time when she found love again,
we were really excited for her.
That meant that, um...
she would have a companion.
She would have someone to love her,
and, you know, travel and do...
and just be in love again.
[Belinda] It's just amazing how they...
grew together to know each other, like, inside and out.
Like, they just reading each other minds, you know.
[Shabaka speaking]
[Mamie] I'm about to yo-yo you upside your head.
[narrator] December 25th, 1998.
Shabaka and Mamie arrive at the home of Mamie's daughter, Glenda,
to spend Christmas day with the family.
They take turns behind the camera to film Mamie's children and grandchildren.
[kid speaking]
I'm taking a break.
[Ricardo] I remember when Shabaka first came around, it was just kind of, like...
the big-bang theory.
It was just like boom, and he was there.
And then life just went on, and he fit in so well with us.
[Karissa Hayden] My earliest memory of Shabaka was that he was always there.
It was Ma-ma and Shabaka, they were a duo.
It was never her and not him.
[woman speaking]
Although he was not my biological grandfather, he meant just as much to me.
He was like my grandfather.
My relationship with Ma-ma and Shabaka was...
very strong in those early years, because they were
giving us good Christmas, just giving us good birthdays.
[Troy speaking]
And as I got older, the talks I had with Shabaka would be more so
understanding what it means to be a young Black man in America.
Um, understanding what he's been through.
[narrator] Shabaka burns with a sense of injustice
as is evident when he appears on ABC's Nightline.
My name is Shabaka WaQlimi. I spent 14 years on death row.
[narrator] TV appearances like this one gives Shabaka the opportunity
to tell his story to a nationwide audience.
If you're in a situation with, each and every awakening hour,
someone is keeping some type of
dehumanizing process against you...
[narrator] In 1973, 23-year-old Shabaka is known by a different name,
Joseph Green Brown.
[J Michael Shea] Joe was a guy from South Carolina
who was down in Tampa,
and I think he would even tell you that he was raised in hell,
and that's what he was all about.
[narrator] On July 7th, Joseph and his accomplice, Ronald Floyd,
rob a couple at gunpoint at a hotel in Tampa, Florida.
[Michael] He began to have remorse and he went to the Tampa Police Department
and turned himself in for that armed robbery.
[narrator] But Joseph's fate hinges on the investigation
into another even more horrific crime.
That same day, also in Tampa,
an attacker raped and murdered 35-year-old Earlene Barksdale
inside the children's clothing store that she managed.
[Michael] A Tampa detective got it in his belief
that there was something related to these two incidences.
And when I got to Hillsborough County jail,
I said, "Well, I'm here to see Joseph Green Brown.
I believe he's charged with, um, armed robbery.
He says, "Nope, he's charged with murder."
[narrator] Ronald Floyd strikes a deal with prosecutors.
He agrees to testify against Joseph for the murder of Earlene Barksdale
in return for lenient sentencing for the hotel robbery.
Joseph Green Brown was found guilty of rape, robbery and first-degree murder.
He was sentenced to death by electrocution.
[narrator] Joseph stays on death row for 14 years.
[Michael] September of '83, it was time for the governor to sign the death warrant.
And so when you get down to the...
the last 24 hours, or so, the prisoner is moved to the Death Watch cell.
[narrator] Joseph described this experience
at a public speaking engagement in 2011.
[narrator] A judge issues a stay
just 15 hours before Joseph's scheduled execution.
Then, in 1986, a federal court rules that
the state of Florida should have revealed at Joseph's trial
that Ronald Floyd received leniency in exchange for his testimony.
[Michael] I asked the question was there a deal made?
I asked it to Ronald Floyd in his deposition and in open trial.
He said "no," which was of course not true.
It was a lie.
The two prosecutors knew
that this witness was lying to the court and the jury.
[narrator] The court throws out Joseph's conviction.
Joseph Green Brown is a free man.
He changes his name to Shabaka WaQlimi,
a Swahili term that means "uncompromising teacher of truth."
And then he went off to start a new life in Washington, D.C.
[exhales]
He had really matured into a fine human being.
And he did a lot of work for charities.
Helped in homeless shelters and so forth.
So he really became a caring person
as part of this experience.
[indistinct chatter]
I feel like it was a miracle that Shabaka survived death row,
coming into a whole nother situation of a loving family,
and I feel like he fit right in that mode of the family setting.
When he came into our lives,
he brought so much joy and happiness.
[narrator] Shabaka credits Mamie for his rehabilitation.
[Mamie speaking]
[narrator] Mamie and Shabaka are a carefree couple that likes to party.
But Mamie's daughters have concerns.
I started to see cracks appearing in the relationship.
My mom and Shabaka used to have great parties,
but he had to have alcohol, he had to have liquor.
You know, his inebriation was ridiculous.
You know, so, he would drink to get-- just drunk.
I witnessed my mom speaking to Shabaka,
telling him that, "Listen, you drinking too much.
You need to stop drinking so much."
[Mamie speaking]
They just looked so happy.
And, you know, like, they hadn't a care in the world.
You don't know what goes on behind close doors.
Only thing that you see is what you see.
Well, life has a way of making you change.
Aw, Tracy.
Hello there.
[narrator] Mamie Brown works for over 34 years
at the US Department of Labor in Washington, D.C.
She retires in 2010 at the age of 69.
[Belinda] I'm just so happy
that she finally retired after all those working years
and just do what she wanted to do.
I just wanted her to travel the world.
You know, go places, go visit her brother in Mississippi.
You know her brother in Detroit.
You know, just start doing stuff.
Yes, hello.
[narrator] Mamie and her husband Shabaka have other plans.
They relocate to a small apartment in North Carolina
that's close to Mamie's children and grandchildren.
[Karissa] It was very exciting to know that we were gonna have her closer.
Especially since they decided to move right down the street from where I lived.
It was actually awesome to know that they were going to be close to me.
[narrator] After the move, Mamie reveals to her family
that she downsized for another reason.
She and Shabaka are close to broke.
[Glenda] Shabaka received money from speaking engagements,
and there was never any taxes paid on those funds.
So she was paying the taxes, for a situation that was incurred by him.
[laughs]
[narrator] Shabaka does nothing to help clear his debts.
[Glenda] And she said, "Now I'm paying all the bills,
and now I'm short, because you're not working.
You're not doing anything
but sitting around here drinking daily."
You're a grown man. Why are you not finding something to do?
Go wash a car. Go flip a burger.
It had started to become a little different when I would visit.
It wasn't so happy.
His drinking habits
and the things that he wanted to eat,
she was, you know, tired of buying it and paying for it.
[Glenda] They had gotten to the point where it was just getting bad.
The constant bickering back and forth.
That's when I started realizing it was getting, like, serious.
Like, this is not just, you know, something that's fizzling out, like,
they really having problems.
[narrator] September 13th, 2012.
Mamie's daughter, Belinda and Glenda,
are preparing a birthday house party for the whole family.
[Glenda] September is a big birthday month for us.
My mother's birthday was September 2nd.
My birthday was September the 6th.
Ric is September the 19th.
So, September was a good month for us.
The plan was to just-- I wanted to go pick her up.
You don't have to drive, you can get in the car with me.
[narrator] Belinda calls ahead to make sure that Mamie is ready.
[line ringing]
[Belinda] Ric was picking her up Thursday.
And we couldn't get her on the phone.
Mama was going to answer her cell phone
or her house phone, no matter what.
If she was asleep, she'll say, "Look,
I'm sleeping, I'll call you back."
But we wasn't getting an answer.
[narrator] Belinda called Shabaka's cell.
[line ringing]
No answer.
I just kept having this really bad feeling.
In my spirit, I just kept feeling something was wrong.
Because I kept calling her.
Her cell phone, her house phone, her cell phone,
back and forth, and she wasn't answering.
[narrator] Glenda asked police to do a welfare check.
[women speaking]
And, I also talked to my daughter, Karissa, and I was telling her
to go check on Mama.
And I said, "But don't go by yourself,
I'm feeling some kind of way. I'm feeling something is not right."
[Karissa] So I asked one of my co-workers
if he would follow me
to my grandmother's house, and he said sure.
As we pulled up,
I saw that there were two police cars outside.
I got out of the car, and as I stand there, I noticed that...
there's another police car that pulls up,
and then another one, and then another one, and then another one.
I started to walk up the steps,
I had the key in my hand,
and I saw the police officers looking at me,
wondering where I was going.
And she said, "Can you please go stand by your car?"
So, at this point, I'm kind of starting to panic.
Our officers had received several 911 calls
asking us to check on the welfare, um,
at this particular apartment.
There were no signs of forced entry.
We found that the living room, the kitchen,
most of the bedroom,
and the parts of the apartment were very orderly.
When we walked into the bedroom itself,
we noticed a large amount of suspected blood
on the carpet as well as a broken perfume bottle.
And attached to the master bedroom is also a bathroom.
[camera shutter clicks]
That's when we located our victim, deceased,
covered with a blanket on the bathroom floor.
We did see multiple stab wounds
about the victim's body.
Forensic pathologists later report the contributing factors of strangulation.
I'm just on the phone with my mom,
and she's asking me what's happening,
and two detectives come over to me.
And I said, uh,
you know, "What's going on? What's going on?"
And he said, "You know, I'm not gonna lie to you, ma'am.
There is a deceased in the house."
And, um...
my mom said, "Ask him if it's male or female,"
and I said, "Is it male or female?" And he said... um...
"It's a female."
[Glenda] Karissa calls me,
and I'm panicking right now,
'cause I'm not believing this.
So I said, "Belinda, Belinda, Mama's dead, Mama's dead!"
She was like, "What are you talking about? What are you talking about?"
I said, "Just get in the car, just get in the car."
[Belinda] And when we finally got there...
I said, "Oh, my God." And we just grabbed each other hand,
you know, and everything was just lit up, all around us.
And that's when we find out...
that she's been murdered.
[inaudible]
[Glenda] We never got opportunity
to say goodbye to my mother.
We never got a opportunity to look at her,
or talk to her, or...
tell her we love her, or to thank her for being a great mom.
We never got that opportunity. That was taken from us.
[camera shutter clicking]
[Grande] What we discovered was what appeared to be
drag marks or move marks of present blood
from one side of the bed, around the foot of the bed,
all the way into the bathroom.
And the fact that it had been cleaned up concerned me
that there was a suspect that was trying to clean up the scene,
and make it look better than it really was.
Any time we see anything like stabbing or strangulation,
it usually indicates some level of intimacy
between the victim and the suspect.
So, they knew each other.
It also tells us a lot about their rage.
[narrator] Mamie's car is missing.
[Grande] A review of the apartment security surveillance
show that that vehicle was seen leaving the gate
around 6:45 in the morning.
[indistinct shouting]
We did speak to one neighbor close to the victim's apartment
that had reported hearing an argument
in the apartment around 2:30 in the morning.
The fact that the victim's vehicle was shared between
the victim and Mr. Brown told us that we definitely need to locate Mr. Brown.
[narrator] Investigators have a time frame for the murder
and a potential suspect.
But why would Shabaka kill his own wife?
Granddaughter Karissa tells detectives about her visit to Mamie's apartment
eleven days before the murder.
[Karissa] She invited me over,
and I went to her house.
There was a little eerie vibe in there.
She really wanted to take pictures.
Um, so we took selfies.
Um, I took pictures with her
in certain spots of the home that she wanted to be photographed in.
We took pictures in his bathroom and hers,
and we also took pictures in her bedroom.
She also wanted to hear a particular song.
And this song...
still replays in my head to this day.
Some of the lyrics were,
"I know my ship is coming in."
She knew that something was wrong.
She wanted me to see her beneficiary information.
She really wanted me to see what was on her beneficiary form.
I remember specifically her telling me, like, "Well, you know,
he's not getting anything."
Mamie had worked for over 40 years
and had built up a retirement package,
so she was financially stable.
But Joseph Brown had not worked any stable job all his life.
He basically lived off of Mamie Brown.
She had written information out of all of her benefits
and her will, so that he wouldn't receive anything from her.
So there were preparations that we had discovered had been made
that this relationship was coming to an end.
[Karissa] She didn't have, you know, a silent tongue. She spoke her mind.
And she didn't hold back.
At all.
And, when it came down to Shabaka,
she told him exactly how she felt when she felt it.
[Mamie speaking]
[narrator] All the signs suggest that Mamie wanted out.
And for good reason.
[Grande] We have looked at their history of
interaction with the police and found out that 911 had been called several times
over the course of a few years before this murder happened.
Each of those calls indicated that there was some sort of an argument,
or a potential assault that had occurred,
and the two people that were involved in each of these
were both Mamie Brown and Joseph Brown.
[indistinct shouting]
And in every one of them, it was Mamie alleging
that Joseph Brown had done something to her.
This told us we were dealing with a very violent individual
that had to be apprehended as quickly as possible.
[narrator] Shabaka is strapped for cash.
So detectives put a trace on Mamie's bank card.
[Grande] The card was not only active,
but it indicated a path moving away from the residence.
We noticed that some money had been withdrawn from an ATM
not too far from the apartment complex.
It was used at a gas station, driving down the Interstate.
And then again, down in Charleston, South Carolina.
We were able to locate the vehicle at a motel complex.
[suspenseful music playing]
We notified our Violent Criminal Apprehension Team.
These are officers that are trained in higher-level tactics
with extra weapons
for their own defense and protection.
Um, and they do everything that they can to peacefully apprehend that suspect.
[banging]
[suspenseful music playing]
[Glenda] It was a sigh of relief.
We're thinking he might come for us.
So, of course, we were overjoyed when we found out that they had arrested him.
[narrator] In custody, Shabaka claims that he has no memory of what happened.
He requests a lawyer and says nothing more.
[Belinda] Shabaka didn't wanna speak about it.
Like, he didn't remember any of it, you know, like,
he had got amnesia.
I think Shabaka pretended he didn't remember,
because he knew that he had hurt me, he had hurt my sister,
he had hurt my son, he had let the grandchildren down,
he let everybody down.
[Grande] It's frustrating when they don't answer those questions
that we can give the family.
"Why did this happen?"
"What happened in the argument?"
"What took place that led him to this point
to commit such a brutal crime?"
[Grande] In the course of the investigation, we discovered that there were several videos
showing Joseph Brown talking about the criminal justice system.
He talked about his guilty conviction down in Florida,
his experiences on death row.
[Joseph speaking]
[Grande] When I saw that video for the first time, that told me motive.
I think he knows exactly what was going through his mind.
He had predicted it.
It's gonna come.
Because we're human.
[narrator] Detectives piece together what happened
on the night of September 12th, 2012.
[Grande] Based on the behavior that we'd learned of him,
his controlling, his anger, everything about his personality
told us that eventually Mamie Brown was gonna put him out.
She was gonna end the relationship.
They had an argument about this relationship that was going downhill.
That argument grew to physical assault.
There were things that were broken, such as a perfume bottle.
It appears that, at that point,
Joseph Brown was not only strangling Mamie Brown,
but also stabbing her with a knife.
The excessive blood that was there on the floor suggested a large amount of blood loss.
The drag marks in the carpet, around the bed,
shows us that he moved her from that side of the bed over to the bathroom.
[narrator] Shabaka covers Mamie with a blanket.
Then he makes a crude attempt to clean up her blood.
[Grande] He took a lot of time with that scene,
and again, for whatever reason, we may never know,
but we can only speculate that he wanted this to appear...
less violent than it really was.
Shabaka pleads guilty to second-degree murder
to avoid another trip to death row.
On September 12th, 2013,
the judge sentences him to 18 years in prison
with no possibility of parole.
Mamie's family attends the hearing.
[Karissa] I remember, in the hallway, his attorney came up to me,
and she hugged me, and she said, "Joseph... speaks very highly of you."
[Joseph speaking]
It hurt.
And I just couldn't fathom
him doing such a horrible thing.
And I didn't wanna believe it.
He took her away.
[Ricardo] It's like...
It's just one day I woke up, and my grandparents were gone.
And this monster came in and killed both of them.
That's kinda what it was like.
You know what I mean, and it's like...
Shabaka died that night, too.
[Troy] That's the same man that I saw, as a young kid,
loving her and dancing and teaching me things
turns out to be the man who kills my grandmother.
And it's, uh... It's difficult to process.
[Glenda] What we saw was him being a loving husband,
him being kind to her children,
him being, you know, a great father figure to us.
So, killers have two faces.
What Shabaka didn't take away from me
that my mother gave me
was joy.
He didn't take away my hope. He didn't take away my future.
He didn't take away anything that my mother gave me.
If I were to see her right now, I would just hug and love on her
and tell her how thankful I am that she made me who I am.