“I think the stress was what got them,” a family member said.
There was nothing out of the ordinary about the request Danny Nelson received in a phone call from his 34-year-old son, Brian, on Thursday.
Would you babysit at 3 o’clock?
Danny and his wife, Marilyn, frequently pitched in to watch their grandchildren. But Marilyn, 74, has health issues that keep her close to home, and there were six grandchildren to wrangle now — including a 1-year-old and 2-year-old.
Danny asked if the children could come over to their grandparents’ south Tulsa apartment instead, so he wouldn’t have to take on all six kids alone in their Broken Arrow home.
“OK,” Danny said Brian told him, “but we’ll bring them over at 5.”
“Five came and went. Then it was 6. I texted them — no responses,” Danny said. “I turned on the 6 o’clock news, and they said there had been a fire near Hickory and Galveston in Broken Arrow. That’s where my son lives.”
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Danny said he wasn’t worried — but he still felt compelled to go.
“I’ve had almost psychic feelings before, and dreams,” he said, explaining why he hopped in his car and made the 5-mile drive east.
When he pushed past the crime scene tape, he came upon a scene too horrifying even for a parent’s worst nightmares.
Broken Arrow Police said six children were found dead in a back bedroom of a 980-square-foot home that was on fire at 425 S. Hickory Ave.
But not from smoke or burns.
Two adults, whose bodies were found near the front of the house, are law enforcement’s prime suspects — meaning they could have been killing their children in the same time frame Danny was originally asked to come there to babysit.
Police have not released any more details or the identities.
But in their South Tulsa apartment home on Friday, the Nelsons told the Tulsa World in their first in-depth interview that their son Brian Nelson, 34, daughter-in-law Brittney Nelson, 32, and six grandchildren — Brian II, age 13, granddaughter Brantley, 9, grandsons Vegeta, 7, Ragnar, 5, and Kurgan, 2, and granddaughter Britannica, 1, are the deceased family.
“All night last night, I kept saying: `It’s not real! It’s not real! It’s not real!’ And I couldn’t stop. But today, I know it’s real — too real,” said Marilyn,” her voice catching in her throat. “I never dreamed this would happen.”
Financial strain and a head injury
A federal bankruptcy court listing in Tulsa reveals that Brian and Brittney Nelson had a crushing amount of debt.
The chapter 7 bankruptcy petition they filed on Dec. 31, 2020, reveals they had $8,803 in assets versus nearly $138,000 in liabilities, the vast majority — $127,081 — in unpaid student loans.
Both indicated they were unemployed at the time and their only income was from SNAP benefits, some limited government utility payment assistance and rental assistance from the Oklahoma Housing Authority.
Brian Nelson reported he grossed $4,510 in income in the previous year of 2019, while Brittney reported no income.
Among what little personal property they had to their names were nine firearms — five pistols valued altogether at $1,600, one .22-caliber rifle worth $100 and two shotguns worth $150.
Marilyn said Brian always had a pistol in his pocket, but “he had a permit,” she noted.
The Nelsons said they knew their son and daughter-in-law were struggling under the weight of growing financial pressures compounded by the births of their fifth and sixth children in very short order. And in the last year or so, they were more distanced from Danny and Marilyn.
But they helped the young family with utility bills as often as they could and readily babysat, noting Brittney had suffered from gallstones and more recently, seizures, so she often needed to go to doctor’s appointments.
Where did Brian say they were going on Thursday, when he had asked Danny to come over and babysit?
A doctor’s appointment for Brittney.
“I think the stress was what got to them — trying to figure out how to make it from one month, to one month, to one month,” Danny said of Thursday’s tragedy.
Then Marilyn interjected: “Then every time one of those headaches came around, he just would lose it because it was so excruciating.”
Danny and Marilyn agree their son was forever changed after sustaining a severe concussion in a workplace accident years ago at a large retail chain.
Neither could recall exactly how many years ago, maybe Brian was in his early to mid-20s when he was working an overnight shift, stocking the dairy refrigerators.
“One night when he got there, the guy who had just gotten off work before him had spilled something and did not mop the floor and Brian fell, and he hit his head really hard. The doctor said that it was a very rare concussion and told Brian that either it would go away or it would stay — and it stayed,” Marilyn said, her voice straining. “The headaches were horrible, and he never knew when he was going to get them.”
Danny shook his head, saying he wanted Brian to be able to continue with medical treatment for his head injury, but a lawyer told him to do so indefinitely was impossible so he accepted a settlement. He and Marilyn both said Brian never laughed as easily or seemed as happy afterward, and he had “episodes” related to the pain he experienced.
Of her daughter-in-law Brittney, Marilyn said was clearly stressed from caring for six children, including home-schooling.
“She basically went along with my son Brian, but she usually was OK,” she said.
Brian and Brittney
Brittney’s mother “had issues,” her in-laws said, and died early in her childhood. Her father wasn’t around, so Brittney had to live with relatives she claimed had been “mean” to her.
She and Brian met when they were both students at Tulsa’s East Central High School and quickly formed a bond so ironclad that Brian, who was a grade ahead of her, figured out a way to remain in high school for a fifth year so they could graduate together.
Were Danny and Marilyn ever aware of any violence in the younger Nelsons’ home?
Both gave an emphatic “No,” but then Marilyn recalled, “Well, the first couple years of marriage, when they just had a baby and they were very young, they struggled. They were just out of high school.”
Public records indicate Brian and Brittney married in November 2008 and their first birth announcement, for son Brian II, appeared in the Tulsa World just four months later.
Rather than holding down a job for very long, their son had devoted a lot of time to college over his adult life, taking courses at both Tulsa Community College and Oklahoma State University, possibly as recent as this semester, the Nelsons said.
“He was very intelligent,” Marilyn said. “Maybe too much so for his own good.”
Brittney also had some college classes under her belt but never worked outside the home.
Memories of the innocents
Marilyn got weepy and Danny’s eyes welled with tears as they talked, but they said they wanted the world to know their grandchildren were beautiful, happy, normal children.
And they adored and loved them.
Their tears were interrupted by broad smiles and laughter as they picked up framed photographs from a shelf in their living room and got out their cellphones, with their wall-to-wall grandbaby photos, and recounted each child’s personality or a funny anecdote.
Brian II was the only child to ever attend school. He went to kindergarten and one semester of first grade at a Broken Arrow elementary school but, “His father didn’t get along with what they were teaching,” Danny said.
“They wanted boys to dance like girls. That was the final thing,” Marilyn recalled.
Brian and Brittney opted for home-schooling from then on.
The two oldest children, Brian II and Brantley, doted on their younger siblings, Danny and Marilyn said.
They swiped through their cellphone images to show off videos of Brian II toy sword fighting in the backyard with Ragnar, who Danny and Marilyn said was the rough-and-tumble one of the bunch, and of their son Brian in a snowball fight with Brian II and Ragnar.
Brantley, they said, was the artist in the family, and Marilyn proudly showed off their refrigerator papered with Brantley’s many drawings of all manner of bears — her grandmother’s favorite. And she was over-the-moon happy to finally have a baby sister.
“She had really long eyelashes, and she knew how to bat them at you,” Danny said of baby Britannica, who was 19 months old.
The three youngest boys, they said, had rather unusual names thanks to their father’s favorite entertainment programs. “Vegeta the Prince” as he was known in the Nelson family, was named after a character in the Japanese anime television series Dragon Ball Z, while they were told Ragnar and Kurgan were named after Viking characters from something or other.
“My son has a weird sense of coming up with names,” Danny said.
Vegeta the Prince, they said, kept everyone on their toes. He was the only mechanically inclined grandchild, so he loved to watch YouTube repair videos with Danny, who prefers to figure out how to fix things around the house himself.
“I’d give him tools for his birthday instead of presents, and he liked that,” Danny said, beaming.
Both grandparents laughed hard at a picture of Vegeta from this summer, when he had gotten ahold of a pair of clippers and shaved a stripe of hair off the top of his head, from front to back.
“He asked if he could try the clippers on me and I said, `No, I’ve seen the way you give haircuts,’” Danny recalled, laughing.
Then their memories turned to their own son, because he had done something similar in kindergarten.
“He had cut clumps of hair off with scissors here and there. He wore a hat to school but apparently took it off,” Danny said. “They asked me, `Did you do that to him?’ and I said, `No, he did it to himself!’”
Never dreamed this could happen
Hindsight sometimes brings clarity, but it’s far too early for the Nelsons to have any of that.
What Danny hopes the public takes away from the senselessness that just wiped out an entire family of eight is to not put off seeking help for yourself or your loved ones.
“A lot of people say well, we’ll check into it tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow — and sometimes, tomorrow don’t ever come,” he said.
Marilyn said one memory of her son, in particular, keeps replaying in her mind.
When Brian was first attending Tulsa Community College after high school, he aspired to be an actor in plays and maybe even movies one day.
“He did a play in this big theater, and we were there to see it. In it, he played a soldier and of course, he was in an Army outfit or whatever, and he had a scene where he had broken down,” she said. “When the play was over with, people were swarming up to him telling him how great an actor he was.
“I asked my son, ‘How were you able to pull that off and it was so real?’ He said, ‘Mom, it’s those damn headaches.’”
Marilyn started to cry again just then.
“I want people to know that at one time he had all his brain together,” she said. “I just don’t understand why they did what they did. I just don’t understand why he ended up in that situation. I talk to God all the time — and I just don’t understand.”
Staff writer Curtis Killman contributed to this story.