Murder trial may focus on Klan ties

Attorneys for a wife accused of killing her spouse are expected to point to his violent past.

By BABITA PERSAUD

© St. Petersburg Times,
published June 18, 2001

TAMPA -- From her jail cell, Brenda Russian told her attorneys where to find the evidence that would become the crux of her defense.

Inside her blue-trimmed house on W Price Avenue, she told attorneys John Grant and Walter Foster, was an old photo album tucked in a bookcase.

There, among the faded images, was a 20-year-old snapshot of her husband, Brad, in full Ku Klux Klan regalia, cuddling his then-infant son.

"This was a violent man, who lived a violent life," Grant is expected to tell a jury when Brenda Russian goes on trial today for shooting her husband to death on Christmas Eve last year. "It was self-defense."

Prosecutors will tell jurors there is no evidence of a violent argument and remind them Brenda Russian fired seven times. They have charged her with first-degree murder and are seeking a life sentence.

The trial is expected to lift the curtain on Brad Russian's racist past.

To his parents, Albert and Beverly Russian, the Klan was a dark part of their son's past, one they dread reliving. He was 24 when he was sent to prison for his part in the drive-by shooting of an interracial couple in Kentucky in 1979 -- and 30 when convicted of distributing hate literature and plotting to build bombs in Pinellas County in 1986.

His last years were spent working as a mortician in Tampa. He was married to Brenda for one year before she shot him. He was 45.

Regardless of the pain he caused in his past, "he doesn't deserve to die like this," Albert Russian said.

Another photo of Brad Russian, the one in his U.S. Army uniform, sits on the living room table in his parents' Treasure Island home.

The Russians have struggled to understand their son's affinity for the Klan. They once followed him to a Klan meeting "just to see what it was about," Albert Russian said.

"Disgusting, absolutely disgusting," he said. "Bums, that's what they are. They can't make it on their own, so they are going to blame blacks or someone else."

He said he pleaded with his son to quit, but "you can't talk to Brad."

"He was an adult," Beverly Russian said. "You can only control your children to a certain point," she said, crying.

The Army was going to be Brad Russian's life, and after boot camp he became a member of the elite paratrooper team, the 82nd Airborne.

Then, mysteriously, he was stricken with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a nerve inflammation that left him paralyzed from the neck down. He received an honorable discharge from the Army and was placed on 100 percent disability. Doctors thought he would never walk. But he slowly regained the use of his legs.

He married and moved to his wife's home state of Kentucky, where he knew no one, did not work and became friends with Klan members.

Albert and Beverly Russian learned of his Klan involvement in a phone call telling them he was in jail for the shooting in Paducah, Ky., that critically injured the interracial couple.

The Russians were shocked. Albert Russian said he and his wife had black friends and black customers at their restaurant in Bedford, Mass., where their son grew up, and black friends and customers at the motel they bought on Treasure Island after leaving Bedford.

Their son served seven months of a 21/2-year prison sentence. When he got out, his parents brought him to Pinellas County to keep him out of trouble. But he found Klan members in Pinellas.

In St. Petersburg in the 1980s, he and fellow Klan followers placed recruitment stickers on store windows, benches and newspaper racks. They stuffed Klan newspapers in the private mailboxes of St. Petersburg City Council members.

The St. Petersburg Police Department and the Pinellas Sheriff's Office began watching them after learning the men practiced paramilitary maneuvers and experimented with explosives.

Brad Russian, 30 at the time, was charged with firearms possession and violating the Florida Anti-Paramilitary Training Act. He was sentenced to two years of house arrest, followed by three years of probation.

After his house arrest, Brad Russian's Klan footprints diminished. He ran a motorcycle repair shop in Pinellas Park in the late '80s and, in his mid 40s, went back to school at St. Petersburg Junior College to become a mortician, eventually taking a job at a funeral home on Nebraska Avenue.

Brenda Elaine Derby, 35, was Russian's fourth wife. Originally from Maryland, she had 18 years with the Army at MacDill Air Force Base as a junior marine engineer. Their relationship was hot and cold, said John Grant, her attorney.

On Christmas Eve, the two watched a Bucs game at a friend's house, had a few beers at a tavern near MacDill and went home. They were eating tuna sandwiches, a midnight snack, when Brad Russian, intoxicated, became violent, Brenda Russian told detectives.

She got her handgun from the nightstand and shot him seven times, including twice in the neck, twice in the face and once through the pocket of his T-shirt, near his heart.

She thought about killing herself, she told detectives. Instead, she called 911. Investigators found Brad Russian's body on the living room floor, arm draped across the love seat.

Brenda was stroking Pete, her white-haired dog, repeatedly saying, "It can't be happening."

- Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report.

Recent coverage

Slain man had Klan ties (December 27, 2000)

Man shot to death; wife held by police (December 26, 2000)

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