When Aleisha Brown was eight years old, her mother Shawntae put her seven-year-old brother and their newborn sister into the car and drove from Oklahoma City to Texas to watch their father graduate from basic training.
Aleisha tells PEOPLE that it was already a great moment, but it became even more memorable when her mother and father Joshua stunned everyone by announcing their wedding plans.
“He was in his [military uniform], and I just remember her being so happy,” Aleisha recalls about her mother.
Shawntae also expressed her love for her children, according to Aleisha, before pulling her daughter aside for a private conversation.
“It was so weird because she told me this specifically by myself, she said: ‘Even if, for whatever reason, even though me and your dad love each other very much, if we don’t stay married or something happens, I will always love you guys and always choose you guys first.'”
That is Aleisha’s favorite memory of her mother, who, seven years later, in 2020, shared the same sentiment to her oldest daughter as she died.
“She told me she loved me,” Aleisha explains.
Shawntae had already been subjected to 24 hours of constant physical violence from her spouse, according to Aleisha.
She knows this because she and her siblings were in the house the entire time, confined to their room while Aleisha and her brother, who were 15 and 14 at the time, tried to protect their younger sister, then 7, from what was going on just a few feet away.
Aleisha recalls that things did not start out this way.
Joshua arrived home from his service in Afghanistan around 2016 a new man, according to his daughter, after spending the first 11 years of her life in an abuse-free environment.
“He was clearly more aggressive, irritated, and angry. And after that, the abuse became more severe, because it had never been abusive before,” Aleisha explains. “It would always be verbal arguments up until about 2016, when the abuse started with my mom.”
Aleisha claims that, while her father did not physically beat her or her siblings, life with him was not easy.
“It was like walking on eggshells. Aleisha describes her home life as “a constant hostile environment,” adding that her father insisted on isolating the family from their relatives.
Aleisha claims that once Joshua was caught cheating, things in the home became even darker.
He “started getting more paranoid,” Aleisha claims, which is why she feels he wanted to constantly monitor his wife and three children. “That’s when he installed cameras around the house, so we were continuously under watch. He was listening in on our chats and watching everything we did.
If Joshua suspected Aleisha or one of her siblings had “done anything, weird or suspicious at all,” she says there would be hours of questioning, and she imagines the penalty would have been significantly severe for her mother.
“She didn’t want us to know,” Aleisha says of her mother, who never told her children that their father was abusing her.
Aleisha believes this is why she feels so conflicted about him.
“When I reflect back, I realize that I am still seeing signs. I still see things that happened back then that I may have missed because I was too young, and [my mother] was attempting to conceal information from us. So a part of me still believes dad was a good father, but then I question how much of it was true and how much was [my mother’s] attempt to portray him that way to me.” Aleisha gives her opinion.
Four years after Aleisha became aware of the violence, her father went too far and fatally beaten Shawntae on September 30, 2020.
Shawntae was only 34 at the time.
Aleisha and her siblings were there through it all, she claims, trying not to listen while their father beat their mother for 24 hours.
“He would have these, these episodes, and this was an episode,” according to Aleisha.
According to Aleisha, there was always a trigger, and on that particular day, it was a curtain in her brother’s room, along with her father’s neurotic and entirely false assumption that Shawntae had been cheating on him in pornographic videos.
“That’s when it clicked and he shut off completely, it’s no longer my dad,” Aleisha confides.
She claims that during the next 24 hours, she listened to her mother saying “no” and “trying to de-escalate” the situation. Aleisha claims that she and her brother began “trying to de-escalate” to no avail.
“That night was particularly difficult since it was so awful. It was clearly the worst one we’d heard. “It was definitely the worst one we’d been through,” Aleisha says.
Then, after 24 hours, Aleisha claims her father summoned her to his room and told her to clean up her mother.
“I’m in the middle of cleaning her off in the bathtub and unfortunately she’s going in and out,” Aleisha tells me.
Her father, on the other hand, is “getting mad because she’s going in and out,” Aleisha says.
His manner abruptly changed, according to his daughter.
“He changes as soon as he understands she isn’t okay, that he has done something wrong, and that it’s gone too far. “That’s when the switch happened,” Aleisha claims.
Joshua instructed his daughter to dial 911, but Aleisha claims she was unable to tell the emergency responder what had truly occurred to her mother.
“He urged me to lie and tell them she overdosed, took too many pills, and got f—ed up on the way home. Not that he did it; nothing like that. Aleisha maintains it has nothing to do with what he did.
Paramedics arrived quickly, but Shawntae was pronounced dead on the scene, having died in the arms of her firstborn.
“I feel selfish for feeling this way, yet I am pleased she died in my arms. It’s rather reassuring for me.” Aleisha says.
Aleisha and her siblings became orphans a few hours later, when authorities arrested their father.
“The very last thing he said to me, before asking me to get his vape, was telling me to take care of my siblings,” Aleisha explains.
It was a dark day that lingered for five years, according to Aleisha, until last week, when her father and prosecutors reached an agreement in which he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and three counts of child abuse in exchange for the state agreeing to recommend a sentence of four lifetimes without the possibility of parole rather than the death penalty.
However, Aleisha claims that neither prosecutors nor her father were responsible for the bargain.
“I hate to say this, but I think it is what my mother would have wanted, and I do think that she had her hand in this somehow,” Aleisha tells me. “I know at the end of the day, she would still love him and give him another chance at life, and I really do think that is why I think this happened.”
Aleisha wonders how she would have gotten through that time without the virtues Shawntae taught in her three children.
Shawntae had huge goals, according to her daughter, and hoped to become a doctor someday.
Shawntae’s ambitions and dreams, however, changed at the age of 18, when she found that she and her high school lover Joshua were expecting a baby named Aleisha.
“She really was selfless. She never once told us, ‘Oh, I didn’t go to [college] because of you.’ She constantly told us, ‘I took this decision for the best of y’all, for the best of myself and our family, and I want y’all to know that I love you and would do it 100 times over,'” Aleisha says.
Despite enduring a number of personal difficulties in the aftermath of her mother’s death, Aleisha is finally realizing her mother’s greatest desire, even though she is not present to witness it personally.
“Going to college was always something my mother wanted for me,” says Aleisha, who is in her second year at Rose State College in Arkansas, majoring in media and communications.
Even five years after her death, Shawntae remains her daughter’s biggest role model.
“I wish to convey her selflessness, love, and passion. Aleisha adds, “She was just the best mom, and I could say it over and over again, but she really was.”
