Rodney Hulin, A 17 Year Old Texas Inmate Committed Suicide

Dad, I'm really scared.

Scared that I will die in here.

-- Rodney Hulin, 16, writing to his father from an adult prison in Texas.


It's a subject most of us would rather not think about. We see it depicted in movies and on cable television shows like "Oz," but few of us can ever imagine it happening to our loved ones or ourselves. Linda Bruntmyer wasn't so lucky. Bruntmyer's then-16-year-old son, Rodney Hulin, was brutally raped while serving a prison sentence for setting a dumpster on fire. But their horror didn't end there.


"Rodney was a small guy, only 5'2" and about 125 pounds. And, as a first-time offender, we knew he might be targeted by older, tougher, adult inmates," Bruntmyer told the audience gathered in the Cannon House Office Building. "Then, our worst nightmares came true," she said. Rodney was brutally assaulted and raped. "But that was only the beginning. Rodney knew if he went back into the general population, he would be in danger. He wrote to the authorities requesting to be moved to a safer place. He went through all the proper channels, but he was denied."




Bruntmyer described her own efforts to rescue her son from the torture he was now enduring on a regular basis. When she called the warden to plead for her son, he told her Rodney needed to grow up. "This happens every day; learn to deal with it. It's no big deal," this callous official instructed the distraught mother.




Desperate, Rodney started violating prison rules in order to be segregated from the regular prison population. Finally, he was put in segregation and allowed one 10-minute phone call home in which he tearfully told his mother that he was "emotionally and mentally destroyed."




"That was the last time I heard his voice," Bruntmyer said. "On the night of Jan. 26, 1996, my son hanged himself in his cell. He was 17 and afraid, and ashamed and hopeless. He laid in a coma for the next four months before he died."