David Brinson was convicted in Los Angeles County in 1993 of four counts of murder, with enhancements for use of a firearm, for a 1990 robbery in which four men were shot dead. He received four consecutive sentences of life without the possibility of parole and arrived at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, Amador County, in February 1994. He was twenty-three or twenty-four. The quadruple murder is the settled part of this entry and the reason he is in it.
California is one of a handful of states that still permits overnight family visits for prisoners, including those serving life without parole, provided they meet eligibility criteria. Mule Creek ran an average of nearly fourteen such visits a week in 2024, among the highest in the state. Brinson met the criteria, and his wife, Stephanie Diane Dowells, sixty-two, a grandmother who also used the name Stephanie Brinson, visited him overnight in November 2024.
At 2:04 a.m. on November 13 he alerted guards that she was in distress, saying she had passed out. Staff attempted to revive her and could not. The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation investigated for four months. On March 17, 2025 the Amador County Sheriff’s coroner ruled her death a homicide by strangulation. Her son, Armand Torres, asked how a man with that history had been left unsupervised with anyone, and said his mother must have called for help with no one to hear it. The department said Brinson had met every eligibility criterion for the visit.
She was the second woman to die that way at Mule Creek in 2024. On July 1, Tania Thomas, forty-seven, was found unconscious in the family visiting unit on the last day of a four-day stay with her partner Anthony Curry, who was serving life for carjacking and murder and who had likewise reported a medical emergency. Her death too was ruled a homicide, and Curry was arraigned for murder in April 2025 and pleaded not guilty. The state’s Office of the Inspector General found no staff misconduct in the Thomas case. The two families, represented together, sued the department for wrongful death in 2025, arguing that unsupervised visits with violent lifers showed a dangerous disregard for the women’s safety.
Brinson was formally charged with Dowells’s murder in Amador County later in 2025 and made a first court appearance. The families’ lawyer, Michael Oppenheimer, said the state had finally done the right thing, and that there was still a long way to go. There is. The charge has not been tried, and this archive does not record him as her killer. What it records is four murders proved in 1993, and a fifth death that a coroner called strangulation and a court has yet to rule on.
He is listed here as contested for that reason. If the Amador County case reaches a verdict, this entry should be updated either way.