Good Samaritan Prison Visit saves a life- Brian Dion Williams

From Six Figures to Seven Years of Chaos

Brian Dion Williams was making six figures as a 21-year-old doing onsite machining at nuclear power plants. That’s the kind of money that changes everything for a young guy from Missouri. But when Brian came back from a brief, unsuccessful stint in the Army where he’d gone AWOL, he brought something with him that would eventually cost him everything: a serious drinking problem.

“I came back with a bad drinking habit, and that never left,” Brian told me when we talked on the podcast. “When I started working nuclear power plants, I just had more money to drink on.”

Brian had grown up sheltered and spoiled as the youngest child, what he calls a “miracle baby” born after his parents lost another son to SIDS. His older brother had gone to prison when Brian was in junior high, and Brian swore he’d never follow that path. He even wanted to be a cop. But life has a way of zigzagging, and Brian’s drinking led him down a road he never saw coming.

It was during one of those paid summer layoffs in Woodward, Oklahoma that everything changed. Brian knew plenty of people cooking meth in what was then the meth capital of the world, but he’d always stayed away because of the hair follicle tests at the power plant. One night, drunk and not thinking straight, he tried it. Within a week or two, he was cooking it himself.

When Everything Fell Apart

The first raid came less than a year later. It wasn’t even Brian’s lab that got hit. A mutual friend had an anhydrous explosion, went to the hospital with severe burns, and called Brian and his partner to come clean it up before the cops found it. They walked right into a trap.

“Literally, we get out there, and we’ve barely been there 20, 30 minutes, and cops start rolling up and down that county highway,” Brian explained. “Later, we would find out that they had already found it. They were just waiting for somebody to come out there to catch them there.”

That arrest should have been Brian’s wake-up call. His partner, who had a long rap sheet, took a plea deal and lied to protect Brian, claiming Brian didn’t know what was going on. The prosecutors knew it wasn’t true but couldn’t prove it, so they offered Brian a three-year deferred sentence for accessory after the fact. It would have cleared his record completely.

But Brian didn’t take the gift. He stayed clean for a while, then fell back into the life harder than before. Seven years of on-and-off arrests, jail time, and increasingly dangerous behavior followed. He was dealing with Mexican cartels, living in trap houses, carrying guns everywhere. The paranoia and violence were constant.

The Day That Changed Everything

November 1st, 2007, was the day Brian’s world collapsed completely. His mother, who had been his anchor through everything, died of a massive heart attack while he was trying to reach her. When he couldn’t get her to answer the door, he kicked it in and found her dead on the couch.

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Brian said. “I flipped out. I was high and had been high for a long time, but I called 911. At that time, I’d never been so mad at God because I never quit believing in him. But I just felt like he was through with me.”

That’s when Brian’s suicide mission began. He started shooting up for the first time, stopped caring about anything, and everyone around him knew he was on a path to destruction. His mother had been the only thing keeping him tethered to any kind of normal life, and with her gone, he had nothing left to lose.

The arrests kept coming. Brian would get busted, make bail, get busted again. In March 2008, he got hit with another drug raid and went on the run. By September, he was planning revenge against another dealer who had robbed him and hit him with the butt of a pistol, leaving a scar Brian still carries.

The Academy Sports Parking Lot

September 21st, 2008, started like any other day in Brian’s chaotic world. He was cooking dope when someone called to say they’d found the dealer who had robbed him. Brian grabbed his gun but realized he only had the ammo in the magazine. So he did something that was either the smartest dumb move or the dumbest smart move he ever made: he went to Academy Sports to buy more ammunition.

“Mind you, I was a pretty good size fella now, but back then I was like 130 pounds. It was obvious I was high. And also at the time I was on Four States Most Wanted and my picture was in the paper,” Brian recalled. “But I just didn’t care. I was blinded by anger.”

The store sold him the ammo but called the cops right after. When Brian and his friends left the parking lot, an unmarked police Expedition picked them up. After a brief chase through Joplin, they were surrounded by police cars coming from every direction.

Brian could have run. His friend was ready to give him time to escape. But something happened in that moment that Brian describes as feeling “the meaning of the word arrested.” He told his friend to pull over, hid the gun in the map pocket behind the driver’s seat, and waited to see what would happen.

The Visit That Saved a Life

After getting caught using his cousin’s ID, Brian was sentenced to 45 days in Joplin city jail for obstruction of justice before facing his seven felony warrants. Those 45 days turned out to be a divine intervention he didn’t see coming.

For the first time in nine months since his mother’s death, Brian was actually sleeping. But the nightmares were brutal. He’d wake up sweating, reliving finding his mother’s body, blaming himself for everything. One night, alone in his cell, he spotted a red sprinkler pipe hanging from the ceiling and started planning his suicide.

“I looked at that and I was like, I can hang myself from there and be done before they could ever get back here to open the door and pull me down,” Brian told me. “I’m not just thinking about it. I’m plotting it. I’m getting ready.”

At that exact moment, the guards called him for a visitor. A little old Christian lady named Mrs. Davis had driven down to see him. She was the mother of a girl Brian had been running with, someone who barely knew him but had been praying for him since his arrest.

“She told me that the Lord just kept pushing at her that she needed to come speak to me, need to come see me,” Brian said. “And she goes, ‘Well, he wanted me to tell you that you were not alone.’ That hit me like a ton of bricks, because that’s exactly what I was thinking right there when I was going back.”

Mrs. Davis had no way of knowing what Brian was planning, but her words stopped him cold. She kept visiting, kept writing letters, kept praying. It wasn’t an instant transformation, but it was the beginning of Brian finding his way back to faith and eventually to a completely different life.

Today, Brian runs a prison ministry, visiting jails and prisons to share his story with people who are exactly where he used to be. He knows firsthand that sometimes all it takes is one person willing to show up and say you’re not alone.