Several weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about the horrific murder of a young girl in Georgia named Jorelys Rivera who was found mangled in the dumpster of an apartment complex several days after she had been reporting as missing. She was last seen playing with her siblings and a teenage sitter and had let the others know she was heading home for a drink. Ryan Brunn, a 20-year-old maintenance worker at the apartments, pleaded guilty to the abduction and murder of little Jorelys. By doing so, he saved himself a trip to death row and instead faced life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Although the state spared him death based on his admittance of gruesome details, including the fact that he slashed the girl’s throat and then beat her to death with her own skate, Brunn apparently decided that his life needed to end anyway. He was found unresponsive in his Georgia prison cell last week and the coroner has determined that he committed suicide, using his own sweatshirt as the accessory.
Many are glad that, one way or another, Ryan Brunn is now dead and that he will not get the opportunity to live out a long life, just as he had denied that same chance to his young victim. Others are saying that Brunn got it easy, taking his life on his own terms and not facing the years of guilt he may have imposed on himself and the torment he likely would have received from his fellow prisoners. Or, perhaps do you see him as someone failed by schools, family, or other support systems that maybe could have caught his obvious psychological problems from a much earlier age? No matter what, neither Brunn’s life nor his death will bring back that little girl who did not deserve such terror and pain.
How do you feel about this confessed child killer taking his own life in a prison cell?
Would you have preferred different consequences for Ryan Brunn, or is this ending one that sits just fine with you?
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Author Jennifer Chase 
My preferred consequence is that we share a world where each one of us is filled with the knowledge that all life is sacred and empowered with the skills necessary to live from that place of holiness.
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Hi Bert! Long time.
Sure, if we were all that–holiness and believe that life is sacred, but unfortunately, there are those that simply don’t “Get” that–aren’t born with the capacity to care about anything but satisfying an unquenchable thirst to be satiated.
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He’s dead–that’s all I care about. Would he have lived out his life destroyed by guilt–no, these killers feel no empathy and no remorse. Did he die on his own terms? I don’t care, he’s gone. I don’t see him as the boy who slipped through the fingers of the system, the psychologist, etc. All of my research on the criminal mind points to the fact that there is no cure for a psychopath. Check out the brain scans of a normal brain and the brain of a psychopath (http://www.thecriminalmind.us/the-psychopath-notes) and you will see that the areas for empathy and compassion is severely limited.
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Jennifer, your post raises so many fundamental questions about the criminal justice system and life in general. As the father of three daughters, I think if I were in this situation, having lost a child to such a butcher, I would like nothing better than to see him suffer and die a terrible death. His suicide is the coward’s way out. Life without parole is probably the most humane punishment he could have received and it spared the state hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs had it elected to seek the death penalty. Even if he had received the death penalty, he would have spent probably ten years on death row waiting for his appeals to be exhausted. If he had been found not guilty by reason of insanity, he would have spent years in an asylum and maybe one day have found his way back on the street where he could have killed again. It is a situation that defies any attempt to craft a suitable punishment or course of rehabilitation.
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Circumstances determine the tenor of the debate. People who revile the death penalty may be inclined to deliver the sentence themselves when faced with the murderer of a child. That is why we probably should wait until our passions subside before answering your question. That being said, I wish I had been locked in the cell with him and provided with nothing more sophisticated than a broken bottle to help on his way to his eternal judgment. Ask me tomorrow, and my answer will most certainly be more civilized.
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