Casey Smith was just under 3 years old when he lost his mom Judith Robirds Smith and two half brothers, Chad and Jason Burnett.
His father, Oscar Franklin Smith, is scheduled to be executed Thursday morning for the 1989 murders. It would be Tennessee’s first execution by lethal injection since 2019.
Casey said his life has been unstable at best. He struggles to keep relationships with his family — including his own two children and his twin brother. Over the years, he’s been in wilderness camps, group homes, boot camps, and incarcerated more than 30 times.
“I've only been on the streets like six years since I was 12,” Casey said. “I don't have a lot of experience out here. You know, some way shape or form, something always happens. … My dad didn't rob me of a life. I allowed my emotions to keep me from moving past it.”
His most recent prison stint just ended in March and, since then, he’s been living in a halfway house south of Nashville. He said he takes full responsibility for his decisions and actions and, at the same time, recognizes the long-term impact his dad’s crimes have had on him and his family.
“Everyone seems really thrilled and really excited by hearing someone's scheduled to be executed,” Casey said. “But no one really talks about the impact that it has on the people that survived the incidents that led up to it.”
‘It changed all of us’
Rebecca Lester lived on the same street as the Smiths when the murders happened. She remembers Casey’s half brothers being polite and helpful.
Lester said the family struggled to make ends meet, so she and another neighbor “adopted” the boys.
“ We made sure they had lunch,” she said. “We made sure they got what they needed at school. … And if I'd bake cookies, I would stop them and give them some.”
After the murders, Lester said the neighborhood wasn’t the same.
They had a harder time trusting people. Lester kept a closer eye on her own kids and limited where they could play and whose house they could go to.
“It changed our neighborhood,” she said. “It changed us. It changed all of us.”
Lester’s feelings about Oscar Smith’s execution are complicated. She worries about its effects on Casey and other family members.
At the same time, she said she hopes Judy, Chad and Jason get justice, and she feels frustration with people who are opposed to the death penalty.
“How many of those people that are fighting for him … how many of them have ever known anybody to be murdered?” Lester said.
‘Coexisting with this trauma is the best it's ever going to be’
Oscar Smith has built numerous relationships with pastors during his long incarceration — including Rev. Timothy Holton, who started visiting two years ago.
Holton said his own family’s traumatic experience shaped the person he is today. When he was a 17-year-old high school senior, four of his family members were murdered.
“One Sunday evening, we get a call that my cousin had taken the lives of his four children,” he said. “It's the only time in my life I've ever been a pallbearer — and I carried four small caskets to their resting place in the cemetery.”
Holton grew up in a faith community believing execution was Biblical law. Even so, he said the death penalty never quite made sense to him.
After the execution of his cousin in 2007, he said it didn’t bring his family peace.
“We needed professional help,” he said. “There is no one, there are no resources. You’re just told, ‘This is justice, this is going to fix it.’ And it makes it so much worse because that's when the actual horror begins.”
Holton's now a death penalty abolitionist and chaplain to Tennessee's death row. He calls Oscar Smith his friend.
”I'm coming to that point where I see that coexisting with this trauma is the best it's ever going to be,” he said. “ But I couldn't have gotten there without a professional trauma therapist.”
Casey Smith did not maintain a relationship with his father after the murders.
He said he'll probably be at work during the execution, and a friend will let him know what happened.
“For all intents and purposes, he's been gone since I was 2,” Casey said of his father. “Whenever I quit blaming him for everything, he quit being a factor in my life completely. … But, if this man's killing three people is deserving of death, why would anybody think it of any benefit to go and watch the state do the same thing to him?”
This story was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU in Kentucky and NPR.
