WITNESS TO MY BROTHER’S EXECUTION: A troubled life begins

When my brother was born July 26, 1962, on New York’s Long Island, he didn’t even get his own name.

My parents christened him Michael Joseph Passaro—named after a brother who had died two years before of a heart defect after only four hours outside the womb.

The second of five children, Michael was always considered our family’s “problem” child. He was a mediocre student with little self-esteem. He was a follower, not a leader. He hated to fight - even to defend himself from bullies. That duty fell to me, his older sister by 13 months.

One day in sixth grade when we were walking home from school, two bullies followed close behind with plans to beat up my little brother. When one of the boys pushed Michael to provoke a fight, I stepped between them. Michael ran down the street and watched from 100 yards away while I fought the boys. One quickly backed down. The other bully got kicked, scratched, pinched and punched; I jerked out a clump of his hair.

Let’s just say he and his buddy never bothered my brother again.

It’s not that I liked to fight. Far from it. I always used my verbal skills to avoid confrontations as a child. Sometimes you have no choice though.

Later, as an adult, the knowledge that I could defend myself would serve me well when I worked as a corrections officer - in a men’s maximum-security prison.

At 5-foot-2 in high school, I still defended my brother Michael, who stood 6-foot-3. Some of the battles even were in my own family. My brother, John, a year younger than Michael, once came after Michael with a running lawn mower. Again, I put myself between Michael and the threat. I pounded on John’s chest (he was 6-foot-1), and also gave him what-for verbally.

When things went wrong, it was often Michael’s “fault.”

One time, Michael and our “baby” sister, Mary, who was two years younger, scuffled over a children’s powder puff she had given him as a gift but wanted back. The result was a pile of perfumed talcum powder scattered about the floor. From my bedroom, I heard the commotion and my father’s arrival to mediate.

As usual, it was Michael’s fault, so my father’s idea of punishment was to make him lick up the powder.

Years later, I asked Michael if he had actually done it; he said no. But I will never forget my father yelling at him to lick it up and Michael’s crying that he didn’t want to.

Our father was not abusive, but if pushed, rendered unusual and harsh punishments when it came to Michael. One year when I was in college, both of my brothers came home from a party. Michael was drunk, and my father told them to go to bed. Michael ended up getting sick after he laid down, scaring my father into thinking that his son would choke to death on his own vomit. He threw Michael into a cold shower and dragged him outside. “Don’t come back,” Dad told Michael, “until you can recite the Pythagorean theorem” - a geometry law regarding right triangles.

My mother and I stayed up, too, waiting for my brother’s return at the back door with the proper password. It took Michael more than a couple of tries - his first reaction was to forget our father’s instructions and the second was to ask of the theorem, “What is that?”

Our mother pleaded with our father to let Michael back in. While she petitioned Dad, I whispered the answer to Michael, not knowing if he’d even remember it. He returned in a few minutes and gave the “A squared plus B squared equals C squared” that Dad required.

Michael often was my companion growing up; he even tagged along on outings with my friends. He lacked his own social and life skills. I nicknamed him “Meekie,” and everyone assumed it was a variation of Michael. But it actually was a play on the word “meek.”

Even a stint in the Navy did little to build Michael’s confidence or self-worth. Always naïve, he ended up completing his tour of service in a Philadelphia brig after accepting a gift of old tools from a superior on board his duty ship. Michael’s superior told him the tools were going to be discarded anyway, so he should have them. Michael was arrested while trying to cart the tools off the USS Hunley, a sub-tender. It never crossed his mind that once something was government property, it always was. His ignorance cost him an honorable discharge.

Michael fared no better with women than with men. They rejected him. That was until he met Donna Jean Knapp.

The love of his life

Donna was just out of a troubled marriage and had a daughter, Missy, about 7. Michael met her through his job at Kings Park Psychiatric Center on Long Island. She was a nurse. He was an orderly.

Donna was about five years older than Michael. I met her once, in the fall of 1987. Michael made her meet me before they married. He wanted my approval first, so she visited me in Florida.

She saw my brother as a loving, tenderhearted man - the opposite of her alcoholic and abusive ex-husband.

I liked Donna - she saw through Michael’s eccentricities. She encouraged him to go to school to become a nurse himself because he enjoyed caring for people.

The couple married in February 1988 and settled on Long Island.

Five months later, the unthinkable happened.

After Donna and Michael played a game of darts at home, Michael went to sleep. Donna heard a car slam into a utility pole at the end of their street. While Michael slept, she ran to the scene to nurse the victims. That’s when a wire knocked loose from the pole whipped Donna and launched her 50 feet, over a hedge.

That was June 18, 1988. I got a call the next day from my mother, who wished me a happy birthday and then told me she had some tragic news: Donna had died that morning.

Before heading into surgery, Donna had begged Michael to take care of her daughter, Missy, then 8. My brother promised he would - but he was sure he’d see her when the surgery ended.

Donna died on the operating table. She was buried in the family plot the couple had bought just months before.

Her parents pressed for custody of Missy and were awarded the 8-year-old.

Michael was devastated. Not only did he lose his beloved wife, but he lost the stepdaughter he had promised to care for. His in-laws afforded him meager visitation opportunities, and then engaged him in legal battles for Donna’s life insurance and her wrongful death settlement - roughly $150,000 combined. (Michael’s stepdaughter got about $25,000, and Michael $75,000. Attorneys got the rest.)

A life spirals into hell

For the next eight years, Michael’s life was marked by grief, self-pity and despondency. He tried to continue with school (in Donna’s memory), but dropped out. He changed jobs over and over - electrician, cabbie, ambulance driver, paramedic.

He moved to Florida to live with me and restart his life, but within six months, my own life and marriage were in shambles.

My husband and I split. After years of his drinking, I’d had enough. My children and I moved in with the only family we had in the area, my in-laws. Michael stayed at the mobile home I’d bought with my husband, until he was able to find a place of his own.

Nothing worked.

In the summer of 1990, Michael went back to New York. He turned to cocaine and alcohol and began a gradual descent into darkness.

He hit rock bottom, or so we thought, when he got drunk and stabbed a friend with a 2½-inch pocketknife for refusing to give him his car keys. His friend was trying to prevent Michael from driving drunk.

The knife wounds were superficial, and the friend refused to press charges. But Michael ended up on probation and was ordered to get counseling.

In 1995, after completing his probation and counseling, Michael moved to South Carolina to live with our retired parents in Longs, west of North Myrtle Beach. Michael enrolled at Carolina Coastal Community College and worked at a kidney dialysis center. He continued with counseling on his own and was prescribed Zoloft to treat his depression.

At the dialysis center, Michael began a relationship with the director, a former nurse named Karen Monk Martin. She was older - a single mother of two grown girls.

They married Jan. 18, 1996, and by March, Karen was pregnant with Michael’s child. The family’s joy would be shortlived.