VIDEOGRAPHER: JACOB LANGSTON
The day they came face-to-face with the teen who accidentally shot and killed their son, Brad and Meagan Hulett confirmed, in their minds, that prison was the last place the shooter should end up.
“He was a cowering little kid and he was crying,” Bradley Hulett said of Christopher “Ramsey” Bevan, 17, who killed Bradley Hulett II while toying with a faulty gun believed to have fired without being triggered.
“He didn’t know what to do,” Hulett added. “And I said, ‘You can get up. It’s okay. I’ll give you a hug.’ I think I probably needed it as much as he did … I hugged him and there’s nothing to him, just bones.”
That meeting last October at the Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office in Tampa, Fla., was the first step in laying out how Bevan would avoid a jury trial and the possibility of up to 30 years in prison for the manslaughter of Bradley and Meagan Hulett’s firstborn.
Instead, the restorative justice agreement that the Huletts chose requires Bevan to undergo mental health treatment and drug and alcohol evaluation and to do 150 hours of community service at the foundation the Huletts launched to honor their boy’s life. Bevan also must remain employed or in school, not possess a weapon, drugs or alcohol and not be arrested.
If he completes the three-year program, which began last November, the manslaughter charge will be dismissed. If he doesn’t finish the program, he could stand trial.
“Meagan and I came to the conclusion it was the right thing to do,” Brad Hulett said of the couple’s decision to spare Bevan, who was their son’s close friend.
That decision, said Lindsey Pointer, associate director for the National Center on Restorative Justice “offers a promising shift in the way we think about crime and the meaning of justice.”
Continued Pointer, an assistant professor at the Center for Justice Reform at Vermont Law School: “Our criminal legal responses so often cause additional harm to responsible parties and harmed parties and can actually fuel recidivism through dynamics of shame, separation from community, and creating barriers to securing employment and housing. Restorative justice allows us to respond to significant harm in a way that considers the broader context and the needs of the individuals involved and focuses on repairing harm to the extent possible.”
Angry, grieving, hoping not to do more harm
The afternoon of Dec. 13, 2019, Bradley Hulett II died from a gunshot wound to the back of his head while he played video games at the home of a friend in a Tampa suburb. He, like Bevan, was 15.
Bevan’s trial, initially scheduled for the second and third weeks of February 2022, likely would have concluded on what would have been Bradley’s 18th birthday on Feb. 18. But, instead, on Oct. 7, 2021, the Huletts sat across from Bevan in that state attorney’s office in Tampa for a meeting integral to the restorative justice process they had embraced.
Their attorney, Anthony Rickman, said the Huletts wanted justice for their son.
“And to them, justice for him was not sending his friend to prison. Justice to them was getting the answers. Making sure that he has a meaningful life in the future. Educating the community. And getting that closure, with all those aspects coming together,” he said.
“And hopefully, making sure with their foundation, that something like this doesn’t happen again.”
Brad Hulett, who wanted to end his own life in the first months after Bradley’s death, was ahead of his wife in embracing the idea of restorative justice.
“It was kind of a long and winding kind of path. My wife and I weren’t aligned on that. At first, Meagan said, ‘He killed my son.’ For about five or six months, we were completely at odds,” he said.
“I feel,” his wife said, “like I got all caught up in the justice aspect of it and for a while, I was so angry. I just wanted everybody to pay for what happened. But as we kept getting more and more information about how the events went down, it was hard for me to then even imagine putting Ramsey in jail.”
This was her son’s friend.
“If he was not guilty and celebrating, then I would’ve been super upset, because my son’s still gone. In my opinion, there had to be some kind of consequence. You cannot just say, ‘Oops, sorry. Your son’s dead. It’s nobody’s fault.’”
A found gun and a fatality
Three of Bradley’s friends found a weapon inside that home on that December afternoon, according to a press release from the state attorney. “They’re showing off the gun and at some point, the gun goes off and it kills 15-year-old Bradley Hulett,” Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren said.
“We ended up filing charges in the case against Christopher “Ramsey” Bevan, who was the one who was holding the gun when it went off, under the theory that he pulled the trigger — whether intentional or recklessly — and his handling of the gun ended up killing Bradley Hulett. And that’s manslaughter in the state of Florida.”
Further investigation revealed that the SIG Sauer P320 had a design flaw that allowed it to fire without the trigger being pulled.
The news precipitated “a roller coaster of emotions” for Meagan Hulett.
“You go from being mad at the person to being mad at a gun?” she wondered.
Revelations about the gun’s defect helped cement the Huletts’ growing desire to pursue a restorative justice path.
From that October meeting with Bevan, the couple wanted to walk away with two things: To know exactly what happened to their son; and for Bevan, now 17, to agree to help them raise awareness about gun safety with children and young people.
That impromptu hug between Bradley’s father and Bevan was one aspect of an emotional face-to-face.
“The first thing that happened when we walked in, Meagan went over and gave him a big hug. And they cried together. And when it was over, they stood up and hugged again. And he expressed how sorrowful he was about what happened,” Rickman said.
Restorative justice is “a process that seeks closure for victims through reconciliation and through a defendant accepting responsibility,” Warren, the state attorney said.
It is, he added, a victim-based approach rather than punishment-based. “It’s about viewing the process not through the lens that a law was broken,” but “viewing the harm it caused to the victim. We wanted to take the Huletts’ wishes into account and we ended up finding a resolution.”
But it couldn’t ease the angst of confronting the boy who caused their son’s death. “It was extremely difficult,” Meagan Hulett said.
“We really wanted,” Warren said, to get to the truth and that was the way to get to it. We probably spent an hour just going through the few minutes of the incident.”
What came afterward, he added, “was talk between grieving parents and their son’s best friend, all of whom were mourning his loss.”
The Huletts’ decision honored their son’s memory, they said, and it will help provide a way forward for Bevan. State officials say he will complete his 150 hours of community service working on behalf of the BH3 Foundation, whose twofold mission is teaching gun safety and raising funds to help underserved kids participate in team sports. Bradley was an athlete.
Lawsuit against maker of a faulty weapon
Last December, Brad Hulett filed a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the SIG Sauer P320 gun resulting in their son’s death. The suit alleges that SIG Sauer “knew and continued to learn of P320 defective discharge events, including discharges resulting from ‘drop’ events as well as non-drop discharges, known as ‘jar-offs.’ ”
Other defendants in the suit include the Tampa Police Department. One of its officers, Edwin Perez, owned the SIG Sauer and the home where the tragedy occurred. The suit alleges that the department should have warned officers “about defects that it knew, or should have known, existed in weapons” that officers registered with it.
Brad Hulett is also suing Shoot Straight Tampa, Inc., the shop that sold the weapon.
He wants the gun manufacturer to fix its defective firearms and gun owners to secure their weapons: “If you own a gun, is it that difficult to strip it and lock it up? I grew up in a farming community. I got my first gun for my eighth birthday. Some of my best memories are hunting with my father. I would like to see a gun safety class in middle school.”
The Perez gun should have been secured, he added. “The boys shouldn’t have held it. Ramsey held it, and according to him, he held it, flipped it over. It’s not a safe thing. Fifteen-year-old boys know better and should know better.”
In describing what occurred that afternoon, the Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office said the officer’s son jimmied the lock to get into his father’s master bedroom to use the toilet, since another boy was using the only other one in the house. The Perez boy later returned to the master bedroom with two other boys. The gun was in a safety holster on a table and the officer’s son, believing it was unloaded, engaged the safety release to remove it from the holster. There was no magazine in the weapon, though there was a single round in the chamber. The Perez boy took it to his bedroom, where Bradley was at a desk playing video games. Bevan took the gun, which fired and struck Bradley in the back of his head.
Hulett wants Florida laws strengthened to be less ambiguous about gun storage. “The fact that the [Perez] gun was out was not illegal. It was in a holster,” he said.
“If it’s on your person, you have every right to carry a gun, loaded, unloaded. If you’re going to put it down, you should put it in a safe. But if you just leave it laying on the counter and a kid picks it up and kills himself or someone else, that’s your fault.”
“And it happens all the time,” Meagan Hulett said. “I didn’t notice it until it happened to us.”
Trying to manage an unimaginable tragedy
On the Sunday after Bradley died, his father traipsed through the house, searching for his guns.
“They had taken my weapons,” Hulett recalled. “I just wanted to be with him, because your mind goes to all these weird places. Like, I was seeing him. I was hearing him. I was totally gone and it’s such a weird thing.”
For the first six months after his son’s death, the father added, he’d tried to pretend his killing never happened. “So, there was a point where it just all fell apart and I had to kind of pick up the pieces and work it out,” he said.
He and his wife now are agnostic. But she’d grown up Catholic and her husband, as a Southern Baptist. As they’ve struggled to move forward, they let their values drive their ultimate response to a child who accidentally killed their child.
An overarching kindness is what they are reaching for and trying to model, especially for their three daughters and another son. Those siblings have been reeling from the loss of their oldest brother and recently began “intensive counseling.”
During that face-to-face, Bevan had told the Huletts he’d held that faulty gun for “two, three seconds.”
“And it changed his whole life,” Meagan Hulett said, “and lost Bradley’s life, changed all of our lives, all of our kids’ lives, affected so many people … When does it stop?”
Origins of restorative justice in America
Restorative justice ”is rooted in indigenous communities around the world, including in North America,” said Pointer, of the national center. “The applications within the criminal justice system that we now call restorative justice, that term really emerged in the 1970’s and has since expanded to schools and other communities.”
She said the approach has largely been implemented in cases of misdemeanor and juvenile “responsible party” cases. However, she added, “The impact of the process in terms of accountability and healing and these positive outcomes that we see are often even greater for more serious offenses.”
Pointer uses the terms “harmed party” and “responsible party” rather than what she views as the stigmatizing terms of victim and offender.
Access to restorative justice varies by jurisdiction, with different states and cities implementing it differently, she said. “It’s a little bit of a patchwork across the country.”
Florida does not have a formal restorative justice program, Warren said. He backs such efforts, nevertheless, to the extent that “the goal is to achieve justice that the victim or victim’s family wants, where the victim or victim’s family is seeking something beyond punishment, appropriately involving first-time offenders.”
The Bevan case was such an example. “The loved ones are saying, ‘We want to see good come out of this.’ We agreed that’s the absolute right approach in this case,” Warren said.
The Huletts believe the resolution is what Bradley would have wanted.
“Whenever you bring up Bradley’s name to anybody, they’d be like, ‘Oh, he was the nicest person and he was so kind to everybody,’” his mother said.
“We got stories out of the woodwork after it happened. People emailed us or posted on the “Justice for Bradley” page. Things that we didn’t even know.”
Meagan told the story about a Halloween party that Bradley had been looking forward to attending. The night of the party, though, he asked his mother to pick up the friend at whose home he was shot. The two boys stayed in Bradley’s room playing video games.
“All his friends went to this party. They all came and slept over afterwards,” Meagan Hulett said.
The next day, she asked Bradley why he hadn’t gone to the Halloween party. The other boy hadn’t been invited, he said.
