At 2:04 on the morning of November 13, 2024, David Brinson picked up the phone in a family visiting unit at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California, and told officers that his wife had passed out. Officers began trying to revive her and called 911; paramedics took over. Stephanie Diane Dowells, sixty-two, was pronounced dead at 2:51.
She was a hairdresser and ran her own small business, a mother of two and a grandmother who lived in Inglewood with her son, his wife and their young son. Friends and family called her Stevi. She also used her husband’s surname, and the sheriff’s office first released her name as Stephanie Diane Brinson. Her son, Armand Torres, and his wife, Nataly Jimenez, said afterwards that Brinson’s account of the night kept changing: that she had passed out on the floor, or that she had passed out on the bed.
The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation investigated for four months. On March 17, 2025 the Amador County Sheriff’s Office, acting as coroner, ruled her death a homicide by strangulation. The district attorney, Todd Riebe, said charges would wait on the prison investigation and the autopsy report. On August 13, 2025 he charged Brinson with her murder. A first court appearance was set for September 19, 2025, and no plea had been entered when the charge was announced.
Brinson had been in prison since he was a young man. In 1990 four men were shot execution-style in a Los Angeles apartment during a robbery that, the Los Angeles Times reported, netted a small amount of marijuana. He was convicted in 1993 of four counts of murder with firearm enhancements and received four consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole, at twenty-three. He arrived at Mule Creek from Los Angeles County in February 1994. By March 2025 he had been moved to the California Health Care Facility in Stockton.
California allows eligible prisoners, including some serving life without parole, overnight family visits in apartment-style units on prison grounds, lasting thirty to forty hours. The prison’s operations manual requires prisoners on a family visit to present themselves four times in twenty-four hours, allows unscheduled checks, and directs that every effort be made to protect the privacy of the prisoner and the visitor. Mule Creek averaged nearly fourteen such visits a week in 2024, one of the highest rates in the state. The department said Brinson had applied and met the eligibility criteria.
Dowells was the second woman to die that way at Mule Creek that year. On July 1, 2024 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 was also ruled a strangling; Curry was charged with her murder and pleaded not guilty. The state Office of the Inspector General reviewed the department’s investigation of Thomas’s death, rated it adequate and found no staff misconduct. The two families, represented together by the lawyer Michael Oppenheimer, sued the department for wrongful death.
“How could they just let this happen? I just don’t get it,” Torres said when the coroner’s finding was released. “My mom was just left alone, and she called for help, I’m sure, and there’s nothing she could do.” When the charge came, Oppenheimer said the state had finally done the right thing, and that the family knew there was still a long way to go.
The four killings in 1990 are proved. The death of Stephanie Dowells is charged, and until a court rules on it Brinson is presumed innocent of it.