Michael Brooks

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Photo by Meggan Haller

Story by SPLC and Alabama Appleseed for Alabama's War on Marijuana

A few grams of marijuana ruined Michael Brooks' life. His home was raided by Mobile PD twice and he was charged with distribution, making him a felon. The charges hung over his head for years, despite never distributing marijuana.

Full Story:

Sabrina Mass sat on her living room couch, her arms twisted behind her by handcuffs. Her thin bathrobe gaped open in front, leaving her breasts exposed to the police who had knocked down the door. Her son Michael Brooks, 24, lay on the floor with an officer’s gun to his head. Her daughter and tiny granddaughters, ages 1 and 3, emerged from a bedroom, only to be driven back at gunpoint by the officers searching the house. 

She had seen the news about unarmed black men like her son being killed by law enforcement officers.

Mass prayed the police would not shoot Michael.

“I started having these visions like they’re gonna kill my son.”

The officers – who, according to Mass, said they decided to come in with guns drawn after seeing military decals on the cars outside (Brooks was a member of the National Guard) – didn’t shoot Brooks. Instead, after finding a few grams of marijuana in a bedroom, they took him and his girlfriend to the station.

An investigator with the Mobile City Police’s Narcotics and Vice Unit told Brooks he had confidential informants who would testify that Brooks had sold them marijuana. 

Everything would be fine, the officer told him, if Brooks would be a confidential informant – and as long as he said no one and promised not to call a lawyer.

Mass, a retired nurse who now works as a security guard, knew something was wrong when her son returned from the police station so stressed that he was throwing up. After growing up in a Texas orphanage, she was as protective of her children as she was strict with them. When she pried the story out of her son, she immediately found a criminal defense lawyer, Chase Dearman.

Dearman spoke with police, and Brooks believed his troubles were over. But a few weeks later, he started getting texts from the police officer asking when he would provide information about drug deals.

Brooks ignored them.

He got an offshore job in Houston's oil and gas industry.

In late December 2015, while Brooks was working, Mobile police executed another raid on Mass’ house, using the same warrant they used the previous July. Though Brooks wasn’t even living there the first time, they returned twice before dawn to turn the house upside down, looking for him.

Mass called Brooks, and he turned himself in as soon as he could return to Alabama. But he couldn’t fathom why they were after him.

A former honor student and a football player for Mobile’s W.P. Davidson High School, he had attended college for three semesters before returning home to support a son he was expecting. He joined the National Guard and worked in a restaurant, earning enough to live independently. He did not sell marijuana.

Indeed, Brooks’ case file shows that the police were uninterested in him when they began their investigation. Instead, they were focused on his girlfriend. Because she sometimes stayed over with Brooks at Mass’ home, they sent an informant there regularly to attempt to incriminate them.

The search affidavit indicates that the girlfriend, in July 2015, sold the informant four grams of marijuana, and a narrative written by the officer who arrested Brooks says he confessed to occasionally distributing marijuana. At a different point, according to attorney Dearman, the officer alleged that the girlfriend got the marijuana she sold to the informant from Brooks. Under the same Alabama law that makes passing a friend a marijuana cigarette at a concert “distribution of marijuana,” that act would make Brooks a felon.

Brooks says he never distributed marijuana to anyone and never told the officer that he did.

The charges hung over his head for years. 

When the state repeatedly moved his court date, he lost his oil job, forcing him to delay returning to the long stints offshore. He was honorably discharged from the National Guard. He obtained a commercial driver’s license in 2017, but no one wanted to hire a young black man with a pending felony charge.

At 26, after years of living independently and paying his way, he ran out of money and moved back in with his parents. “Offshore, I was averaging $55,000 a year – to nothing,” he said.

Finally, in February 2018, Brooks could stand it no longer. When the state offered him a chance to plead guilty to possessing paraphernalia – a violation for which he would serve informal probation for one year – he took it. Soon after, he secured a job driving trucks for Amazon. But the case “set me back years,” he said.

“All my bank accounts are closed. I’m used to working and making money. My credit’s messed up. I had to do this so that I could continue my life. I’m trying to get back to where I was.”

The experience scars the whole family. Mass’ granddaughter, who was 3 when police first burst in that day, is now 6. She is so traumatized by the incident that she cannot bear to see Mass dressed for work as an armed security guard. She is currently in counseling.

And Mass, who used to love seeing police in her neighborhood because they made her feel safe, and who once stood with a former Mobile police chief to testify in favor of a teen curfew within city limits, doesn’t know what to think.

“The kids go through the baby phase, elementary, middle school, high school, as a minority family, and they beat the odds,” Mass said. “They beat the odds! And then, this.”

“We’re actually paying the police to come to violate families,” she said. “We’re paying you to come to violate our house and our home and our families. Our money, out of our hard-working sweat. Now how stupid does that sound?”