Suicide Note

On January 26, 1996 Rodney wrote a suicide letter to his family. He passed this letter to inmate Scott Gibson, who was in the adjoining cell. Panicked inmate Gibson, passed the letter to a guard who refused to read it or to act.

DirectorÕs Note:

Entirely let down by his best efforts to get help from "the system", a defeated and hopeless Rodney Hulin hung himself on January 26, 1996 at the Clemens Unit in Brazoria, Texas. He was resuscitated minutes later and survived on a respirator in a Texas prison hospital for 4 months, in "utter filth" according to his mother Linda Bruntmyer. While the TDCJ contended he was brain dead after his suicide, family and friends report that he was awake and aware, able to cry and to laugh with family. By May 1996 he contracted a trachea infection and then pneumonia. He died alone in a Texas prison hospital on May 10, 1996. In a tragic case of too little too late for a teenage petty criminal thrown to the wolves in adult prison, then Governor George W. Bush pardoned Rodney just prior to his death.