On the day before Thanksgiving in 1991, Pauline Brown did not come in to work. She was a cook in Birmingham, Alabama, and a coworker, Tyrone Mitchell, went to her apartment to see why. He found her dead in her bedroom. She had been raped and shot in the back of the head.
The man who killed her was a nineteen-year-old from Detroit named Demetrius Terrence Frazier. Nobody in Birmingham knew his name until the spring of 1992, when Detroit police arrested him for the killing of a fourteen-year-old girl named Crystal Kendrick and during questioning he told them that he had killed a woman in Birmingham too. He was convicted in Michigan in 1993 and in Alabama in 1996. He spent more than eighteen years in Michigan prisons before the governors of the two states agreed to send him south to Alabama's death row. On February 6, 2025, at the age of fifty-two, he became the fourth person in the United States to be executed with nitrogen gas.
Little of Frazier's early life is on the public record outside of the claims his lawyers made in his appeals. His age is fixed by the courts: he was nineteen at the time of Pauline Brown's death in November 1991, and fifty-two when he was executed in February 2025, so he was born around 1972. He grew up in Detroit.
In a 2001 petition for postconviction relief in Alabama, and later in federal court, his lawyers argued that his trial attorneys had never properly looked into his background. The Eleventh Circuit's 2011 opinion lists what the petition alleged. These are allegations from his own side of the case, not findings by any court. According to the petition, he was raised in poor and violent neighborhoods of Detroit. He never knew his father, and his mother was a teenager when he was born. The household involved substance abuse, criminal activity and violence. The family moved often, and he dropped out of school. The petition said he had been physically abused by his mother's partners and by relatives, that he had suffered several head injuries, had been stabbed and shot more than once, and had chronic asthma. It said he had been placed in Michigan county and state facilities as a teenager and young adult, that he showed symptoms of a serious mental disorder, that a Michigan court ordered psychological testing in 1992, and that he was addicted to alcohol and drugs before the crimes.
His mother, Carol, was alive at the time of his execution, and so was a sister. Both visited him on his last day.
According to the Alabama Attorney General's office, the first crime attributed to Frazier in the record took place in Detroit on September 1, 1991. He came through a window into the home of a woman, armed with a knife and with a T-shirt belonging to her son pulled over his face as a mask. He raped her several times. She went along with his demands, the office said, because she was afraid for the children in the house. Frazier told her that he had done it "because of a bet, and he had won." He was later convicted in Michigan of crimes against her.
After that attack, the attorney general's office says, Frazier left Michigan, apparently going first to California and then to Birmingham. How long he spent in each place, and why he went to Alabama, is not explained in any source consulted for this page.
Pauline Brown was forty or forty-one years old in November 1991; WVTM 13, the Alabama Reflector and Agence France-Presse give forty, and the Associated Press gives forty-one. She worked as a cook in Birmingham. She was the mother of two, and her daughter, Phyllis, had recently made her a grandmother for the first time. Prosecutors at Frazier's trial described her as a woman in the "prime of her life" and her family as "good, decent, honest people," according to court documents summarized by WVTM 13 in Birmingham.
She lived alone in a ground-floor apartment in the Fountain Heights Apartment complex, according to court records quoted by 1819 News.
The facts as the Alabama Supreme Court found them, quoted by the Eleventh Circuit, are these. In the early morning of November 26, 1991, Frazier saw a light on in Brown's ground-floor apartment. He took the screen off a window and climbed in, armed with a .22 caliber pistol. In a bedroom he found only five or ten dollars. He then woke Brown at gunpoint and took $80 from her purse. He forced her to have sex with him while she begged him not to kill her. Then, in the words of the court record as quoted by 1819 News, he "put the pistol to the back of her head and fired the gun."
He checked to see whether anyone had heard the shot. He searched the apartment again for money and made sure Brown was dead. He ate two bananas. Then he left, and on the way he threw the pistol into a ditch. The Associated Press, citing prosecutors, described the bananas as a snack he came back for while he looked for more money. The attorney general's office put the total he took at less than $100.
The date is given two ways. The Alabama Supreme Court, the Alabama Department of Corrections and the attorney general's office use November 26, 1991. The Associated Press and WVTM 13 use November 27, the day before Thanksgiving, which may be the day Brown was found. WVTM's account, based on court documents, is that Tyrone Mitchell went to the apartment after she missed a shift and found her in her bedroom.
Crystal Kendrick was fourteen years old and lived in Detroit. The sources available for this page say very little about her life, and the Detroit Free Press coverage of her death in 1992, which included profiles of her and interviews with her family and friends, could not be opened for this page.
According to the Alabama Attorney General's office, in the early morning hours of March 8, 1992, Frazier forced Crystal Kendrick into a vacant house at gunpoint and ordered her to undress. When he put the gun down to undo his pants, she ran. He chased her across the street and shot her in the head. A passing driver found her body.
Detroit police arrested Frazier a few days after Crystal Kendrick's death. The attorney general's office says he faced a long list of pending charges, including second-degree murder and felony murder, several counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct, and armed and unarmed robbery-related charges.
During his interrogation in Detroit, he confessed to killing Pauline Brown. The Alabama Department of Corrections, in its 2011 account, described the confession as one to the rape, robbery and murder of Brown, given while he was in Detroit police custody on unrelated charges. Detroit police contacted the Birmingham Police Department, and a Birmingham detective traveled to Michigan to interview him. In a recorded statement, Frazier confessed again. That statement, as later summarized from court documents, described entering through a window screen with a gun, taking $80 from Brown's purse, assaulting her at gunpoint and throwing the pistol in a ditch afterward. The name of the Birmingham detective is not given in the sources consulted.
Frazier was tried in Michigan first. The Alabama Department of Corrections said in 2011 that in April 1993 a Michigan court convicted him of armed robbery, criminal sexual conduct, felony firearm possession and felony murder, and sentenced him to life in prison. The attorney general's office says that in 1993 he was convicted of the crimes against Crystal Kendrick and the woman raped in September 1991, and received four life sentences. Agence France-Presse described his Michigan sentence as a life term for the Kendrick murder together with two separate rape convictions.
The Eleventh Circuit, drawing on the pre-sentence report prepared for the Alabama trial, listed the Michigan convictions as first-degree criminal sexual conduct, armed robbery, murder and a felony firearm offense, and in a footnote placed them in March and June 1992. That cannot be squared with an arrest in March 1992 and a conviction in April 1993; the footnote dates may refer to the offenses or to separate case events. This page uses 1993 for the convictions, as the Department of Corrections, the attorney general and the Alabama Reflector all do.
Michigan has had no death penalty since 1847, and its constitution forbids it. Frazier began serving his life sentences in Michigan prisons.
In November 1993, a Jefferson County grand jury indicted Frazier on three counts of capital murder: murder during a robbery, murder during a burglary and murder during a rape. He pleaded not guilty. He was brought to Birmingham for trial while still a Michigan prisoner.
Two court-appointed lawyers represented him. The trial was tense. According to court records summarized by WVTM 13, Frazier refused to wear leg braces, insulted his own lawyers and threw a pen at the jury. Agence France-Presse reported that Frazier, who is Black, accused the mostly white jury of racism during the trial.
On June 5, 1996, the jury convicted him of capital murder. Two days later, in the penalty phase, it recommended a death sentence by a vote of ten to two. The State relied on a single aggravating circumstance: that the murder was committed during a rape, robbery, burglary or kidnapping. The defense's main mitigating circumstance was Frazier's age, nineteen at the time of the crime; the Eleventh Circuit later noted that counsel also presented some evidence of his unstable upbringing. On August 8, 1996, the trial judge followed the jury's recommendation and sentenced him to death.
The attorney general's office, in its 2025 statement, said Frazier was tried in Birmingham in 1995. The Department of Corrections, the Eleventh Circuit, the Associated Press and the Alabama Reflector all give 1996, and the specific dates reported by WVTM 13 are in June 1996. This page uses 1996.
After the trial he was returned to Michigan to continue serving his life sentences there, with his Alabama death sentence waiting.
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and death sentence in 1999, in Frazier v. State, 758 So. 2d 577. The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed the same year, in Ex parte Frazier, 758 So. 2d 611, which is the opinion that sets out the facts of the Brown killing as later quoted by the federal courts. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2000 (Frazier v. Alabama, 531 U.S. 843). The full text of the two Alabama opinions could not be opened for this page; what is known of their contents here comes from the Eleventh Circuit's later summary.
On September 26, 2001, Frazier filed a petition for postconviction relief in the Jefferson County Circuit Court under Alabama's Rule 32. It raised about twenty-six claims. The one that mattered most later was that his trial lawyers had been ineffective at both phases of the trial, and especially that they had failed to investigate and present evidence about his life to the jury that weighed his sentence.
The circuit court denied the petition without a hearing on February 8, 2002, and refused to reconsider on April 3, 2002, without looking at an amended petition. On February 28, 2003, the Court of Criminal Appeals sent the case back (Frazier v. State, 884 So. 2d 908). On remand, on May 7, 2003, the circuit court denied the petition again without an evidentiary hearing, finding that the ineffective-assistance claim had not been pleaded with the specific facts that Alabama's rules require. The Court of Criminal Appeals adopted that order and affirmed on August 15, 2003, and the Alabama Supreme Court declined review.
Frazier filed a federal habeas corpus petition in the Northern District of Alabama on February 3, 2004. The district court refused to hold a hearing but allowed his lawyers to add affidavits and childhood records to the file. On September 28, 2007, it denied the petition, holding both that the key claim had been defaulted in state court and, in the alternative, that it failed on the merits. It denied a motion to reconsider on September 22, 2008, and refused to certify any issue for appeal on October 27, 2008. The Eleventh Circuit granted that certificate on June 10, 2009.
On October 25, 2011, a panel of the Eleventh Circuit, Judges Gerald Tjoflat, Frank Hull and Stanley Marcus, with Tjoflat writing, ruled in Frazier v. Bouchard. The court held that the district court had been wrong to find a procedural default, because the state court's ruling that the claim was not pleaded specifically enough was in substance a decision on the merits. But it affirmed the denial of relief anyway. Assuming without deciding that his trial lawyers had performed deficiently, the court held that Frazier could not show he had been harmed. If the lawyers had presented a fuller account of his childhood, the State would have been free to answer with his violent Michigan convictions, including a murder and a rape, as further aggravation. Under the deferential standard that federal law requires in reviewing state court decisions, the panel concluded that Frazier "cannot make this showing."
The Eleventh Circuit denied rehearing on December 2, 2011. Frazier asked the United States Supreme Court to review the case, in Frazier v. Thomas, No. 11-10111, naming the Alabama corrections commissioner as respondent. The Court denied the petition on October 1, 2012. That ended his ordinary appeals.
While the Eleventh Circuit was deciding his appeal, Frazier was still in Michigan. On November 2, 2011, the Alabama Department of Corrections announced that he had been moved to Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama's death row prison, after more than eighteen years in Michigan. Alabama's death row held 199 people at the time.
The transfer was arranged by an agreement between Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, according to the Alabama Reflector. The attorney general's office described it in 2025 as an executive agreement made so that the death sentence could be carried out.
Years before his execution date was set, Frazier chose nitrogen hypoxia as his method of execution, the State said in court filings reported by WVTM 13. Alabama approved the method in 2018, according to the Alabama Reflector, but did not use it until January 2024.
On January 7, 2025, Governor Kay Ivey sent a letter to Corrections Commissioner John Hamm setting a thirty-hour window for Frazier's execution, running from midnight on Thursday, February 6, 2025, to 6 a.m. on Friday, February 7, at Holman. It was Alabama's first execution date of 2025. The Department of Corrections said the Alabama Supreme Court had ordered the execution and set a tentative start time of 6 p.m. on February 6. It limited state media witnesses to five reporters: one from the Associated Press, two print reporters and two broadcast or online reporters, with one slot in each of the last two groups reserved for outlets from Jefferson County or nearby.
Alabama had carried out three nitrogen executions in 2024: Kenneth Eugene Smith in January, Alan Eugene Miller in September and Carey Dale Grayson in November. Media witnesses at all three reported that the men shook, struggled or gasped on the gurney.
Frazier's lawyers fought on two fronts in the final weeks.
The first was the method. In November 2024, federal defenders for the Middle District of Alabama filed a lawsuit on his behalf arguing that Alabama's nitrogen protocol "necessarily causes conscious suffocation, in violation of the Eighth Amendment." They pointed to the media witness accounts of the earlier executions. A filing quoted by WVTM 13 said, "Conscious suffocation violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment." As the alternatives the law requires a prisoner to propose, they offered sedation before the nitrogen, or ketamine followed by a lethal dose of fentanyl. The State asked the court to dismiss the suit. Its lawyers wrote in a Christmas Eve filing that "ADOC officials do not agree with Frazier that other inmates executed by nitrogen hypoxia suffered 'terror and pain,'" and argued that Frazier's proposed alternatives were "untried and untested." In January 2025 his lawyers asked for a preliminary injunction to delay the execution while the suit went forward. About a week before the execution, a federal judge refused. The judge ruled that the witness descriptions of the earlier executions did not show that any of the men had "experienced severe psychological pain or distress over and above what is inherent in any execution."
The second front was Michigan. His lawyers argued in a federal habeas petition that the 2011 transfer had been unlawful, that it "was done with the intent to deprive Mr. Frazier of his Fourteenth Amendment right to life," and that Michigan law required a life sentence to be served in "a state correctional facility or a county jail." If he were executed, they said, he would be "the first prisoner executed while in the state of Michigan's custody." Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel's office answered that the federal court could not force Michigan to take him back, that the petition raised questions of state law, was filed too late and had not been brought first in the state courts, and that "Michigan does not seek to return Frazier to a Michigan correctional facility." Michigan took no position on the death penalty itself. The federal courts rejected the request.
Frazier's mother, Carol, wrote to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer asking her to step in, and a petition supporting her request gathered more than 4,000 signatures, according to the Alabama Reflector. Death penalty opponents joined the appeal. Whitmer told The Detroit News, as quoted by the Associated Press, that her predecessor, Rick Snyder, had "unfortunately" agreed to send Frazier to Alabama. "It's a really tough situation," she said. "Michigan is not a death penalty state." She did not intervene. Attorney General Steve Marshall later called the effort to return Frazier to Michigan "last-ditch" and unsuccessful.
On February 6, 2025, Frazier spent the hours before his execution with his mother, his sister and his legal team. His last meal came from Taco Bell: burritos and a Mountain Dew.
He was strapped to a gurney in the execution chamber at Holman with a blue-rimmed gas mask covering his whole face. A corrections officer checked the mask, and the attorney general cleared the execution to begin at 6:10 p.m.
His final statement began with an apology. "First of all, I want to apologize to the family and friends of Pauline Brown," he said. "What happened to Pauline Brown should have never happened." The Alabama Reflector reported that he also said, "I want to apologize to the Black community." He criticized Governor Whitmer for not stepping in. According to the Associated Press, he also suggested that his confession to Crystal Kendrick's killing had been false. He ended, "My last word. I love everybody on death row. Detroit Strong."
Associated Press witnesses described what followed. For the first minute or two, Frazier moved his outstretched palms in slow circles. At 6:12 p.m. his hands stopped, and he grimaced, quivered and took a gasping breath. About a minute later he lifted both legs several inches off the gurney and lowered them. By 6:14 his breathing had become sporadic, and by about 6:21 he had stopped moving. The Alabama Reflector reported that witnesses saw his last breath at about 6:20. The curtains to the viewing rooms closed at 6:29, and he was pronounced dead at 6:36 p.m.
Some of Pauline Brown's relatives watched. They did not speak to reporters.
Commissioner Hamm said afterward that the nitrogen had flowed for about eighteen minutes and that monitoring instruments showed no heartbeat thirteen minutes after the gas began. He said he believed Frazier lost consciousness quickly and that the leg movements and periodic breaths were involuntary. The execution, he said, "went according to plan like our protocol says."
It was the third execution in the United States in 2025, after lethal injections in South Carolina and Texas in the days before, and the fourth execution by nitrogen gas anywhere in the country.
"For more than three decades, the family of Pauline Brown has waited for justice. Tonight, that wait is over," Attorney General Marshall said. He called Alabama's nitrogen method "constitutional and effective."
Governor Ivey said, "Rapists and murderers are not welcome on our streets, and tonight, justice was carried out for Pauline Brown and her loved ones." She added, as reported by the Alabama Reflector, "In Alabama, we enforce the law," and "You don't come to our state and mess with our citizens and get away with it." She said she prayed that Brown's family, "all these years later," could "continue healing," with the assurance that Frazier "cannot harm anyone else."
Frazier's legal team said they were "disappointed that Michigan chose to ignore requests to intercede" and that Ivey had not granted clemency. They quoted Martin Luther King Jr., "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," and ended, "Tonight, we grieve for everyone."
Abraham Bonowitz of the group Death Penalty Action called nitrogen hypoxia "experimental gas suffocation" and said the federal courts should look at it more closely. Independent experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, quoted by Agence France-Presse, have said the method "may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, or even torture."
Demetrius Frazier was executed on February 6, 2025. His death was confirmed the same evening by the Alabama Attorney General's office, which gave the time of death as 6:36 p.m., and by the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. There are no further proceedings in either state. His Michigan sentences ended with his death; his Alabama conviction for the capital murder of Pauline Brown and his Michigan conviction for the murder of Crystal Kendrick stand as the courts left them.
Proven by conviction: the capital murder of Pauline Brown in Birmingham (Jefferson County jury, June 1996, affirmed on direct appeal and in state and federal postconviction review); the murder of Crystal Kendrick in Detroit and the rape of a Detroit woman in September 1991, with related robbery and firearm counts (Michigan, 1993).
Confessed: Frazier confessed to Brown's killing twice, first to Detroit police and then on tape to a Birmingham detective. At his execution he apologized to Brown's family and said what happened to her "should have never happened."
Disputed by Frazier: in his final statement he suggested, according to the Associated Press, that his confession to Crystal Kendrick's killing was false. No source consulted for this page reports any court finding to that effect, any formal innocence claim in the Kendrick case, or any evidence offered for it. The conviction was never overturned.
Unsettled details in the record:
The date of Brown's death is given as November 26, 1991, by the Alabama Supreme Court, the Department of Corrections and the attorney general, and as November 27 by the Associated Press and WVTM 13.
Brown's age is given as forty by WVTM 13, the Alabama Reflector and Agence France-Presse, and as forty-one by the Associated Press.
The Alabama trial is placed in 1995 by the attorney general's 2025 statement and in 1996 by every other source, including the Department of Corrections, which gives a sentencing date of August 8, 1996.
The Michigan convictions are placed in April 1993 by the Department of Corrections and in 1993 by the attorney general, but in March and June 1992 in a footnote of the Eleventh Circuit's opinion. The number of Michigan life sentences is given as four by the attorney general and as one by the Department of Corrections.
The mitigation evidence about Frazier's childhood, head injuries, institutional placements and addiction comes from his own lawyers' petitions. No court made findings about it, because no court held an evidentiary hearing on it.
About 1972: Demetrius Terrence Frazier born; raised in Detroit.
September 1, 1991: Rape of a woman in her Detroit home, by the attorney general's account. Frazier then leaves for California and later Birmingham.
November 26, 1991 (some reports: November 27): Pauline Brown raped and shot in her Fountain Heights apartment in Birmingham. A coworker finds her after she misses a shift.
March 8, 1992: Crystal Kendrick, 14, shot in the head in Detroit after escaping from a vacant house.
March 1992: Frazier arrested in Detroit; confesses to the Brown killing, then repeats the confession on tape to a Birmingham detective.
April 1993: Convicted in Michigan of felony murder, armed robbery, criminal sexual conduct and felony firearm; sentenced to life.
November 1993: Indicted in Jefferson County, Alabama, on three counts of capital murder.
June 5, 1996: Convicted of capital murder in Birmingham. June 7: jury recommends death, 10 to 2.
August 8, 1996: Sentenced to death.
1999: Conviction and sentence affirmed by the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals and the Alabama Supreme Court.
2000: U.S. Supreme Court declines review.
September 26, 2001: Rule 32 postconviction petition filed. Denied 2002; remanded February 28, 2003; denied again May 7, 2003; affirmed August 15, 2003.
February 3, 2004: Federal habeas petition filed in the Northern District of Alabama. Denied September 28, 2007.
October 25, 2011: Eleventh Circuit affirms the denial of habeas relief (rehearing denied December 2, 2011).
November 2, 2011: Moved from Michigan to Holman Correctional Facility under an agreement between Governors Snyder and Bentley.
October 1, 2012: U.S. Supreme Court denies review in Frazier v. Thomas.
November 2024: Federal suit challenging the nitrogen protocol filed.
January 7, 2025: Governor Ivey sets the execution window.
January 2025: Frazier's lawyers and his mother ask Michigan to take him back; Michigan's attorney general declines.
Late January 2025: A federal judge refuses to block the execution.
February 6, 2025: Executed by nitrogen hypoxia at Holman; pronounced dead at 6:36 p.m., aged 52.