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The News & Observer

May 18, 2001

The last ride home for brother

Author: Barry Saunders; Staff Writer

Edition: Final
Section: News
Page: B1

Index Terms:
Willie Ervin Fisher

Estimated printed pages: 2

Article Text:

Sally Fisher-Ervin hadn't spent any time alone with her baby brother or even touched him for 10 years, so when the opportunity presented itself March 10, she put him in her daughter's SUV, climbed in beside him and headed home.

But first, she turned the air conditioner up really high.

Once en route, they stopped for sodas and then called family members and friends to tell them that she was bringing Ervin home so they could stop by and see him. After an impromptu, 10-minute family reunion in the front yard, Sally Fisher-Ervin took her baby brother to the funeral home.

For burial.

"Ervin" -- known to the state of North Carolina as Willie Ervin Fisher -- had been executed by lethal injection at Central Prison the night before for killing his girlfriend. Afterward, his body was taken to the medical examiner at WakeMed.

That's where Sally Fisher-Ervin picked him up the next day.

"I just got up that morning and said, 'We might as well take Ervin home,' " she told me. "I just wanted to be close to him for a while."

Sally Fisher-Ervin, along with her sister, daughter, a family friend and an employee of the medical examiner's office, struggled mightily to fit her brother into the GMC Jimmy. "Honey, I was in the van trying to pull the body, and you know dead weight is heavy, and Ervin was a big, heavy guy anyway," she said.

The back seat of the truck wouldn't go down all the way, so they had to lay him across the back seat. "We couldn't get him in straight," she recalled. "When we finally got him in, I said, 'Ervin, we're about to take you home.' My sister and I sat in the back, one on each side of him, and we talked to him."

Getting Ervin into the truck was easy compared with getting him out of the morgue at WakeMed, his sister said.

"The medical examiner kept telling me, 'You can't do that,' when we went to get him, but I said, 'Oh, yes, I can.' He made a couple of telephone calls and five minutes later came back and told us we could."

Fisher-Ervin knew she could, because as deputy registrar in the Vital Records office of the Forsyth County Health Department, she deals daily with the regulations of death. She knows the rules.

She also knows that some people will think she's crazy.

"I'm not a Looney Tune," she said with a small laugh and disputed the contention of some people familiar with the case that she transported her brother's body in such an unorthodox manner to save on funeral expenses.

Indeed, Pam Walker, a spokeswoman for the Department of Correction, said the state will pay up to $300 for an indigent family if the funeral home writes a letter. Walker said, "We did not get such a letter for the Fisher family."

That's because, Fisher-Ervin insisted, money was not a factor.

"To me, it was like closure," she said. "For 10 years, I was talking to him through glass and couldn't touch him. That was my brother; he was the baby. ... I still have days where I have my little crying spells where I can't deal with his death. But bringing him back home helped me out."

I'm guessing that, somehow, it helped her baby brother out, too.