Every Little Step: My Story (25 page)

I finally got a chance to spend time with my daughter on Father’s Day 2014. She came to my hotel in Atlanta and we had lunch at the Palm restaurant in Buckhead. I was in town for several weeks with New Edition to rehearse for our upcoming tour. She even had a lengthy conversation with Alicia before our meeting. She told my wife that she was excited to come out to LA to spend time with Alicia and Cashy, to establish a relationship with both of them. Alicia was thrilled, since she had been feeling for so long like she was possibly
some sort of impediment, in Krissi’s mind, to Krissi and I reestablishing our bond.

Krissi talked to Cashy on the phone. He called her “sister,” which is what he called LaPrincia. She told him she was going to come to LA and hang out with him and have a bunch of fun.

When we saw each other, we ran to each other and hugged, like a scene from a Hollywood movie. I lifted her in my arms and twirled her around. My heart was so full as we sat in the restaurant, laughing and acting up like we used to do. It was the first time we had spent any substantial time together in several years, which looks outrageous just seeing it written down. She was in a great mood, smiling and happy. You can see the pictures of us together that Krissi posted on Instagram that day to confirm that. I felt some of the anxiety I had been feeling for such a long time start to slip away.

Over the next several months we stayed in steady phone contact. We had many conversations that ended with a heartfelt “I love you.” We would talk to each other on FaceTime, make video recordings for each other. And we would keep up our communication with a steady stream of texts, filling each other in on our days and our lives. She came to see me perform in Atlanta, but for some reason she told me she couldn’t stay to visit with me backstage. I was disappointed but was glad to get her text that she loved the show.

“Oh my God, Dad, the concert was so good!” she wrote in the text. “You were jamming! I was singing so loud!”

When Krissi found out that Alicia was pregnant again and that we were having a girl, she sounded excited on the phone.

“Oh my God, I have a sister coming!” she said.

Then she quieted for a second and asked, “Dad, she’s not coming to replace me, is she?”

I couldn’t believe she would ask me that.

“Krissi, how the hell can anybody replace you?” I said.

I felt that she was finally growing up, maturing. She was realizing that she needed to have a relationship with her father. She was actually telling me her feelings, her fears, in a way she never had before. As part of this new maturity, I also got the sense that she was breaking away from Nick, trying to create some distance from him. She had gotten over this childhood infatuation she had with him. But it appears that perhaps Nick didn’t want to let her go.

We started making plans for her to come out to LA for my birthday on February 5. Everybody in the family was giddy about the prospect. We missed her so much.

But on January 31, I got yet another heartbreaking phone call. Somehow, my baby girl was in a coma.

A FEW WORDS FROM BOBBY BROWN JR.

Believe it or not, after my father and Whitney split, I went more than seven years without ever really seeing my little sister Krissi. The more I think about it, the crazier it sounds to me. I
don’t even count the time I saw her at my grandmother’s funeral in 2011 because I didn’t spend much time with her that day, and she was acting like a totally different person.

I know there’s a perception in the public that the Brown family was not there for my sister, but the thing is we weren’t allowed to be there for my sister. I would try and try, but I’d be unable to get in contact with her. I almost felt like since my father and Whitney weren’t together, everyone around her would make her feel like she didn’t have to have a relationship with us. Maybe it grew into a false hate for us. Or maybe she wanted to talk to us, but nobody let her. I wasn’t there with her, I’m not a witness, so I can’t say. But it was clear something was going on with her—she was going through a lot and she had the wrong people around her. And the people who were around her were not trying to let her talk to the people who would steer her in the right direction and get her out of that bad situation. It was tragic and painful for us to watch.

Krissi and I had a great relationship growing up. We were only a year apart, but she was my little sister. She was always hilarious, always a goofball. Sometimes I felt she had a jealousy issue with Princie. Sometimes she’d get mad because Princie wasn’t giving her enough attention. She was the silver-spoon child of the family. She grew up spoiled and she could do anything she wanted. She was definitely disciplined way less than we were. The way my sister and I were raised was very different from the way Krissi was. We were raised by my mom. I’m not trying to throw any shade, but two celebrities
going through what my dad and Whitney were going through and having to raise a child, it’s going to be hard for them to be in the child’s life consistently and be in the proper mind-set to teach the child right from wrong, be a role model, be around all the time.

Even though my mom had some financial struggles at times, I was never jealous of Krissi’s life. I never thought,
I wish I had it like that
.
Because even when I was young, I didn’t think the way she was raised was fun. I thought the way I lived with my mom was fun. I went to public school; I had friends and they weren’t people I could boss around. Krissi had a rough life. Maybe from the outside it didn’t look rough, but looking back it definitely wasn’t ideal. I mean, she didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to do, so if she didn’t want to go to school, she wouldn’t have to go to school. As she got older and my dad wasn’t in the picture, she just stopped going to school altogether. She was in a bad environment and nobody around her was trying to help. Everybody on the Houston side said they were trying to help, but if that was the case none of this would have happened.

After my little sister lost her mother, everybody who was allowed to be around my sister should have been there for her. After Whitney passed, everything should have gone into lockdown mode. That’s how the Browns would have treated it.

Every time I spoke to my sister she told me she was coming to see me. She’d say, “I’m coming up, I’m gonna be there, I can’t wait to see you.” But then she’d never show. She did
that with everybody. I don’t think it was all her, because she was around Nick; she was around people who were very manipulative. And the way she grew up, she didn’t learn real from fake. When you don’t know real from fake, you’re going to be easily manipulated and you’re not going to know who’s really in your corner. She wasn’t given the tools to understand how things work, how people are—to know that when you see people do something wrong, you’re supposed to learn from that.

When I would stay with my dad and Whitney during the summers, I started to feel like Whitney didn’t like me. I found out that my dad was messing around with my mom while he was talking to Whitney and she got pregnant with me. It started to affect me as I got older, especially when I was told Whitney made my dad take a paternity test to make sure I was his. That messed me up a lot. And then I started thinking about their naming my little sister Bobbi, which is my name. I grew up thinking they were trying to replace me with her. It didn’t result in my having any animosity or hate toward my sister, since she didn’t have anything to do with it, but I did have pain from that. Sometimes they would send for LaPrincia to come visit them and not for me. And when I was there, LaPrincia would stay in the big house, but I’d get sent to stay in Crossways, which was another house where the studio was that was across from the big house. I would be sent over there with my boy cousins. Since I grew up with my older sister, I would want to stay with her and with my father in the big house.

I would notice that Whitney called me Robert instead of Bobby, which made me feel like they were trying to replace me. Everybody always called me Bobby. The only time I’d be called Robert was if my parents were mad at me. But when I went to New Jersey, suddenly I’m Robert because my sister’s name is Bobbi? I’d be thinking,
Shouldn’t you guys be calling her Krissi, since I’m older? After all, I was Bobby before her.
It was mainly Whitney doing it. She would call me Robert all the time. My dad would call me Little B, Bob, Bobbo. He would never call me Robert unless he was mad, though sometimes he would do it when he was with Whitney. I’m not sure how my mom found out about that. Maybe my sister told her. She would call and complain and that would create conflict, with me in the middle. I didn’t want him to be mad at me. But I always felt that Whitney didn’t like me, that her entire family didn’t like the Browns.

When we were at Whitney’s funeral, we saw her family at work again. I think the Houstons set my father up. They knew all of my father’s children were going to be there, that we deserved to be there. That was my father’s wife for a very long time. Everybody with him was in Whitney’s life for a long time. Yet the Houston family treated us like that, told my father’s children we couldn’t sit down in the front with my father, where my sister would be sitting. We got called his “entourage” when everybody knew we were her stepchildren.

After we walked out of the church, as we were leaving, Krissi’s limo was pulling up. We all got excited because we hadn’t seen her in so long and we would have a chance to
make sure she was okay. As we were about to go up to her car, a bodyguard stepped to my father, with his hand on his gun. He said, “Sorry, we’ve been told not to let you near the car.” My father wasn’t even allowed to say hello to his own daughter. Everybody in my family and the Houston family knows my father has a good heart and would want to make sure his daughter is okay. If he’s not being allowed to do that, someone is stopping him. I think it was Pat Houston or Cissy. I’m not the type of Brown to broadcast my opinion all over the national news, but I have my suspicions.

I’ve used my music as a way to stay sane through all the craziness and tragedy that’s gone on in my family. Having the same name as my father has been both a help and a hindrance. When it’s a hindrance I realize it’s all in my head. Everything is in my head. The way I look at it, my father built his legacy, now I’m building mine. People can say I have big shoes to fill but I have my own shoes to fill; I’m building my own legacy. His legacy is great; mine will be great too. I won’t allow myself to make the mistakes my father made because I learned from them. I thank him for that, being able to learn from him in more than just a positive way. Every time I do music, every day I wake up, I want to better myself as an artist and a man. I don’t look at it as a competition between me and my father, I see it as a competition between me and myself as an artist. Of course my father is one of my biggest inspirations; I want to be like him. But I also want to be better than him because I want to be the best.

Raising sons is hard enough, but it’s especially hard when you’ve achieved a certain amount of success in your life and you want your children to hunger for achievements in their own right. For those reasons, I suppose I did treat my daughters differently than my sons. I always felt like the girls needed more attention, more watching over. I was raised by women, so I’ve always given them more of my time. I was on my own at the age of fourteen, out there in the world, so I guess a part of me felt like my boys should do the same, like throwing the young out of the nest so they can take flight alone.

It’s very tricky when you raise children with lots of money around. Coming from the projects, to me money
did
mean everything—it was always a major motivating force in my life. But what happens when that motivator is taken away?
What’s going to drive you if you were raised in the suburbs and didn’t want for anything? Money can make you soft, entitled, lazy. I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen with my boys. I wanted money to make them confident, protective of their family, their sisters. I wanted them to be kings of their castles.

If my son tells me he doesn’t want to go to school, he doesn’t want to go out and get a job, then at some point that’s on him. I’m going to have to take a step back and let him be a man. Before stepping back in, I want to give him a chance to see how a man lives, what a man does.

I still want and need to be in their lives; that’s extremely important to me. But at the same time I want to give them the space to explore what it means to be a man. I understand that there may be some hurt feelings from things that happened when they were younger, when perhaps I wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have. But what are we going to do now, moving forward? We can’t change the past; we can’t have a do-over. It’s behind us. But how do we move on from there?

I gave my daughters more attention, because I purposely didn’t want the boys to be lacking in the toughness I had growing up. I wanted the boys to have some grit, some resiliency. I needed for them to be hungry. Maybe I should have explained it to them a bit more, the method to my madness. Maybe I should have acknowledged the pain that some of this may have been causing. But it was all done for a reason,
a purpose. I didn’t want them to feel neglected, but I didn’t want them to be too entitled either. All we had to do was look at Krissi to see the dangers of a child being given too much, having too much handed to them.

I am still trying to process the incredible pain I have endured over the past year of my life, from the very moment I got the phone call on January 31, 2015, telling me my daughter was in a coma. Alicia and I were working with a group we had signed, a talented R & B duo named Paul Campbell. We were in the midst of a photo shoot when we found out what had happened to my little girl. Any parents who are reading this who have experienced profound tragedy with their children know the impossible emptiness that you have to fight on a daily basis, the enormous energy it takes just to get out of bed every day.

After I got the news that my daughter had been found unresponsive and submerged in a bathtub in her Roswell, Georgia, town house, I went into a state of paralysis. It was like my body shut down along with Krissi’s. I was forcing myself into movement, but at nearly all times my mind was in that Atlanta hospital with my daughter. Tyler Perry was incredibly gracious in offering me and Alicia a ride from Los Angeles to Atlanta in his private jet so that we could get to her as soon as possible. During the trip, he filled us in on his efforts to help get Krissi under control after her mother died. He said he just felt like he had to do something and she was responsive to him, so that led to his offering her an acting
job on his sitcom
For Better or Worse
. He said he was trying to keep her close. Tyler gave Krissi a handful of basic requirements that she had to follow, such as showing up to work on time and being prepared. But she failed to fulfill every single one of his requirements and eventually just drifted away.

When I walked into her room at North Fulton Hospital and saw my baby lying there with tubes and machines connected to her body, I was devastated. At that moment, it all became tragically real to me. My first order of business was to make sure everyone understood that as her father, I would be the one making all the decisions regarding her care. The doctors and staff were all looking to Pat Houston as the official voice of the family, but I had to make sure they knew Pat was just the executor of Whitney Houston’s estate. I was the girl’s father, her next of kin.

Over the course of several hours we met with doctors, with security, with law enforcement, but there were still a ton of questions about what had happened to my daughter. She was found face down in a bathtub, but they didn’t know how long she had been underwater, how long she went without getting oxygen to her brain. We didn’t yet know anything about the drugs in her system or the abuse that she had endured. We needed to know who was there with her when this happened—who witnessed all of this? Right away, I made it clear that no matter what, Nick Gordon couldn’t be allowed anywhere near my daughter. We said she was to have no more visitors at that time.

When we got a free moment, Alicia and I decided to run over to the hotel and drop off our bags and take showers. We were gone no more than two hours, but when we returned we were shocked to discover that Nick had been let into her room to see her. I was outraged at the lack of respect for my position as her father that had been shown by the Houston family. When I pressed them on it, the lawyer for the Whitney Houston estate explained that Nick had been calling Pat, so they figured if they let him in the room while the lawyer was there, perhaps they could get him to provide more details on what had happened. But that sounded crazy to me. If we suspected that he was somehow to blame for her predicament, then the details were to be gleaned by law enforcement—and the last place he should have been was in her hospital room. How dare the Houstons place their suspect judgment over the wishes of her father? I had to set the tone right away, to let them know that it was their supervision of Krissi and management of her life that had gotten us to this hospital in the first place. This all had happened on their watch. I told Pat, Gary and Donna that now we would be making a huge pivot, changing to my way of doing things. Under the father’s watch, Nick Gordon was to be kept far away.

It was the beginning of an extremely difficult six months, having to fight with them on every tiny decision regarding my daughter.

Not long after we arrived, we sat down and talked to the neurologist. He told us that in his medical opinion, North
Fulton Hospital didn’t have the necessary equipment to assess and treat Krissi properly. He suggested that we move her to Emory University Hospital, which was more advanced in this particular area. We told him we sincerely appreciated his honesty. But then we were shocked when the Houston family fought us on moving Krissi to Emory. They said it would be tough on security and mentioned all the news media outside the hospital. I was incredulous. I didn’t care how many news vans were parked outside—if the doctors said my daughter needed to be moved to get the proper care, why the fuck wouldn’t we want to move her?

Things
were
much better at Emory—we could tell that the medical team was more advanced, more knowledgeable about brain injuries. We all became students in Brain Medicine 101, spending many, many hours talking to specialists, reading as much as we could find, researching the latest medical advances.

During those months, we all first stayed in the Atlanta home of Alicia’s sister, Kim, who is the founder of the Mixed Chicks hair products company. Then we moved into an apartment in downtown Atlanta. Tyler Perry helped us secure the apartment; he was constantly making sure we weren’t in need of anything. He truly was like an angel to our family during this ordeal. He was also an important support for me—a fellow father who could understand what I was feeling and serve as a confidant. I was in such a constant state of dehydration, my body rebelling against the never-
ending tears, the lack of appetite, the depression. I actually had to go to the hospital several times myself so that I could have fluids pumped into my body.

I would sometimes sit very still in the apartment, look out over the city and think about my life, all the twists, turns and traumas that had gotten me to this point. What had I done wrong, what moves did I make, that had put this hex on me, cast my baby into this vegetative state? How much did our behavior—the drugs, the time I spent locked away from her—contribute to what she had become? It was a tough internal dialogue, coming to grips with my own responsibility for how my daughter had turned out. Were there things that she saw in the way I treated her mother that made her more likely to stay in what I knew had to be an abusive relationship? I was wracked with very tough, painful questions.

I tried to remain hopeful, to grab on to the little things that told me there was a chance Krissi could make it out alive. I didn’t really care what state she would be in, as long as she was still with me. I was committed to rolling her around in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, sitting down and feeding her every day, by myself, if that’s what was necessary. If that’s what would keep her in my life. After all the years, this is what it finally took for me to have her around me? That was some cruel stuff.

As I was grappling with my grief, I was also dealing with an incredible amount of anger. The more I found out what
kind of life she was living with Nick Gordon, the things that young man had done to my baby girl, the more I felt like I was on the verge of exploding. We were meeting on a regular basis with the police to get updates on what they had learned. When our lawyer Chris Brown came into town, he began to make inquiries on our behalf. One day he told us he had found out that Pat Houston had taken out a restraining order against Nick.

I was like,
Wait, say that again? What the hell are you telling me?

So we had a meeting with law enforcement and one of the detectives asked Pat about the restraining order. We were sitting around a table in a conference room—Pat, Gary, Donna, and Pat’s brother Ray, who used to do security for Whitney and then had been in charge of Krissi’s security. All of them were on the payroll of the Whitney Houston estate and were charged with caring for my child when her mother died. But now Pat recounted a story that I found hard to fathom.

She said that at a birthday party for Krissi, Nick got into it with Gary and Ray, aggressively getting up in their faces in an extremely disrespectful way. Out of respect for Krissi, they tried to play nice and let him leave the house with all his limbs intact. But according to court papers, Nick made threatening comments and posted pictures of guns intended to make Pat fearful for her personal safety. She said that’s when her relationship with Krissi became strained, because she told Krissi she couldn’t be with the family when
Nick was with her. So she said Krissi stopped communicating with her. And Pat took out the restraining order.

I was outraged and dumbfounded. Crazy thoughts were flying through my head:
Wait, you had a restraining order against Nick and you didn’t think it was dangerous for my child to be living with him? And you continued to pay the rent on a condo where he is living with her? And nobody thought it was a good idea to pick up a phone and tell her father?
I had to stop myself from flying across the table and strangling somebody.

It got even worse. At the hospital it was discovered that she had bruises all over her body. And then there were the missing teeth. We saw that she had a couple of front teeth missing. We were told that a tooth had fallen out when they were putting the breathing tube down her throat. But there was a second missing tooth. Pat told the detective that she had received a call from someone telling her that Krissi was missing a tooth. She said she confronted Krissi, who claimed she had fallen in the kitchen.

While we weren’t discounting the possibility that Nick had something to do with Krissi’s incident in the bathtub, we also wondered whether the car accident she had been involved in just four days before she was found in the bathtub might have had something to do with her brain injuries. Bobbi Kristina lost control of her Jeep one afternoon while driving in Roswell with a female friend and it swerved into oncoming traffic, hitting a Ford Taurus. Even though the driver of the Taurus sustained serious injuries and Krissi’s
friend Danyela Da Silva Bradley was hospitalized, Krissi was checked at the scene and sent on her way. We asked the doctors whether she could have suffered some type of brain trauma or hemorrhage that didn’t present itself until four days later, resulting in the bathtub incident. But the doctors couldn’t really give us definitive answers. They couldn’t rule out the possibility that the accident was related but they couldn’t say it was, either.

At one point, a doctor at Emory told us that if she were his daughter, he wouldn’t continue Krissi’s life. We thanked him for his honesty but kindly told him it was our decision and we chose to fight until we had exhausted every single possibility. But it wasn’t easy, particularly since we were getting so much negativity from the Houston clan about our decision. I’m not saying they didn’t want Krissi to recover, but they were bombarding us with a steady stream of doubt about whether she would ever come out of her coma and suggesting that we should just give up.

I must add that we were seeing what appeared to be steady improvement. After Emory, we moved her to DeKalb Medical, where we hoped she would learn to breathe on her own rather than through the machine. And she would breathe on her own for an extended period, like twenty-four hours, but then she’d start struggling and they’d put her back on the machine. She also was getting physical therapy at DeKalb, where she would sit up in a chair with her eyes open and track my movements around the room with her eyes. We all
would do therapy with her—me, Alicia, Landon, Bobby Jr., Tommy. We would stretch her legs, move her hands, touch her tongue, have her track us with her eyes. For the most part she was responding, exhibiting little movements from time to time that we saw as huge leaps in her development. This is when I announced during one of my shows that she was awake and responding. While these changes might not have been as medically significant as we prayed for, to us they were positive signs that she was on the road to some sort of recovery—certainly better than the alternative. We chose to use these small improvements as a reason to remain hopeful. And her cells were still alive, which was great news after she had suffered such a severe injury, when brain cells will often wither away. We knew her brain had gone quite a long time without oxygen, but we didn’t know how long. And we didn’t know exactly why it had been deprived of oxygen. Though she was found face down in the tub, there wasn’t water in her lungs, meaning she didn’t drown. There wasn’t blunt-force trauma to her head. There wasn’t any indication that she had been choked. So we still had too many questions.