Americans Freed Her From Prison—And For Good Reason

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show. And our favorite stories to tell are just ordinary American redemption stories, second chances, even third chances that this country allows people to have and to pursue. It’s a beautiful part of our nature. Centoya Brown-Long served fifteen years of a life sentence for killing a forty-three-year-old real estate agent when she was sixteen years old after being forced into prostitution by a man called Cutthroat. The now married Brown-Long has never denied her crime, but alleges she acted out of self-defense. Here’s Centoya to share her story.

So, I was born for Campbell, Kentucky, which is a military base right on the line Kentucky, Tennessee. And I was raised Darre in Clarksville by my adopted parents. Uh, my father was military, and my mother, she was a teacher. I was really my dad’s sidekick. When I was younger, I considered sidekick. I guess he would consider it apprentice because anytime he would build something, I always had to go fetching the tools. I guess it was pretty convenient form. But those were one of my favorite fast times with my dad is helping him build stuff, helping him fix stuff around the house. And my mother, it was the same. Whenever my father retired from the military, he actually started driving truck, so he would be gone for long periods of time, so it would just be my mom and me.

And she was really into gardening.

I wasn’t, but I did enjoy kind of just hanging outside with her, watching her plant.

So, up until the point that I turned sixteen,

I thought school was the worst possible thing to have ever happened to me

in my life.

I should have been really great in school. I was smart, I was always getting good grades, but for some reason, I was always finding myself in the principal’s office, whether that was because I didn’t want the teacher to help me with work, I just wanted to figure it out for myself, whether I had a smart remark for the teacher, just any little thing would get me sent to the principal’s office and found myself getting suspended. I believe I was eleven when I was first expelled from school. I had brought a bottle of NōDoz to class, which are caffeine pills. I had found them in my sister’s husband’s truck. He had left the truck there whenever he was deployed, and they went to Hawaii, and I was just playing around one day and found these caffeine pills. Took them to school for show and tell, and next thing I know, I was expelled for zero-tolerance drug policies. I didn’t consider them to be a drug, didn’t know they were a drug, but that didn’t matter. I was kicked out of school and couldn’t return to public school. It seemed like they were just really looking for an excuse, so part of me wasn’t necessarily surprised, and it really just added to that feeling that, you know, I just wasn’t wanted there, and it wasn’t a place for me.

I never really fit. I was kind of an outcast.

Like I said, when I was growing up, my dad would always tell me all the stories about him, you know, in war, and what he did when Charlie was coming at three o’clock and how they did. And so I thought, ‘Okay, well, this is a game that I want to play with my friends,’ and so my neighbor, my friend from down the street, and some other kids in the neighborhood, we were all together playing random games, you know, Bubblegum, Bubblegum in a dish, and Eenie Meenie Miny Moe, and I said, ‘Well, how about this new game: Let’s play war?’ And they were like, ‘Well, what is that?’ I said, ‘Well, we’re all going to get some rocks. You stand on that side of the street, we’re going to stand on this side of the street, and we’re just going to throw them at each other and see what happens.’

And that’s what we did.

And I ended up picking up the biggest rock that I could that I found. Why, I don’t know, but I threw it and it hit my neighbor square in the forehead, and that was the moment that I knew I’m about.

To get in trouble, like this has gone horribly wrong. And she just started

bleeding and screaming. And then everybody was like, ‘This is all your fault!’ And I was like, ‘Wait a minute, and you all wanted to play!’

‘I thought we were having fun!’

So after that, nobody’s parents really wanted their kids playing with me, and of course,

I got in trouble.

My dad, he kind of understood, but it was just—I think that was—that was like one of the turning points when I kind of lost a lot of friends. So going to alternative school was a completely different experience. These kids had been involved in the justice system already. Most of them were on probation of some kind. Many of them had already been to facilities, and they returned back from the facilities to go to this school. They smoked freely; some of them did drugs freely. I had never been around that because I was raised in a military community. A lot of the kids that I was around were kids of military families.

They just, you just don’t do that.

And what was different from me being in this alternative school around these kids is these kids didn’t judge me. They didn’t make me feel like an outcast. They didn’t make me feel like I wasn’t wanted, or I had to be this or be that

to fit in with them.

And so I really found that, oh, this is kind of where I fit, like, this is a place for me. So we all decided to skip school. And sometimes when we skipped school, we would just ride the city bus around town, walk around downtown, and just see whatever we could get into. But this day, Samantha says, ‘You know, my mom, she’s not home. We can go to my house and we could just hang out,’ and we’re like, ‘Okay, cool.’ And when we get there, she’s like, ‘Oh man, I forgot my key!’

And she’s like, ‘No worries, no worries.’

‘My bedroom window was open,’ so she opened the window, and I’m the smallest one there, so they pushed me through the window, and I unlocked the door.

It is her.

House. But when her mother came home, she didn’t feel that we were supposed to be in the house. She was very upset. Some things she claimed were missing from the house that were stolen. And I mean, I don’t know if anybody stole it or not. I can’t be accountable for the other people that were with me, but we all ended up being charged not only for breaking and entering, but for theft of property.

And you’re listening to Centoya Brown-Long, and she’s the author of Free Centoia: My Search for Redemption in the American Prison System. When we come back, more of this remarkable story here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and with Centoya Brown’s story. Let’s pick up where we last left off with sixteen-year-old Centoya being charged with breaking and entering and theft of property after skipping school with friends and then going to one of her girlfriend’s homes where her mother would end up filing charges. Here’s Centoya:

‘Why does he feel the need to tell me all these things?’ He tried to tell me that he wrote the song by Lee Greenwood, ‘Proud to Be an American,’ which obviously I knew it was a lie. Like, it was really strange; it was really uncomfortable; and like with him talking about this gun. Then when we got to the house, you know, showing me this gun—it’s like I felt that—I felt that he was trying to intimidate me, and at that point, I just wanted to leave, so I kept trying to stall. So I said, ‘Well, you know what, I’m just going to go up and I’m just going to pretend like I’m asleep. I’m going to ask him if I can have a nap real quick.’

And so that’s what I did.

And while I was lying there, pretending like I was asleep, he kept getting up and going into the next room, then coming back, just like staring at me, like looking over at me, going into the bathroom, going to the next room; and like this whole time, like I’m just freaking out. I’m like, ‘What is he doing? Like, what’s really going on?’ There was a moment, like, when he had gotten into the bed and he had reached over and grabbed me, and I was like, ‘Ah!’ And I was, you know, it was a little bit more emphatic than just like, you know, somebody who was really sleeping that may just kind of shrug away. And I