Journalist traces final, painful days of Darryl Hunt

When Darryl Hunt killed himself a year ago, journalist Phoebe Zerwick began asking a painful question about the wrongly convicted man she had spent so much time writing about: How did he get to this place?

Zerwick laid out the answer in a haunting, sobering narrative published online last week. “The Last Days of Darryl Hunt” captures the private anguish of a man forced into celebrity in 2004 after two decades in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. Hunt had been convicted at age 19 in the 1984 murder of Deborah Sykes, a 25-year-old newspaper copy editor; DNA evidence eventually led police to Sykes’ killer.

People saw hope in Hunt, a sort of assurance that a man whom the courts had robbed of two decades of freedom could somehow recover. After his release, Hunt returned to his Winston-Salem home and immersed himself in advocacy, speaking around the country about criminal justice reform. He spent his days helping prisoners transition into the community after their release with the non-profit he created, The Darryl Hunt Project. He made it a point of meeting and welcoming home nearly every wrongly convicted man released after him. After his death, News & Observer columnist Barry Saunders lauded the peacefulness Hunt could exude after enduring so much cruelty.

His death shattered any illusion people had about the kind of recovery wrongly convicted inmates can expect after they are freed. At the end of his life, Hunt was broke, divorcing his wife and abusing cocaine.

He was missing for days before eventually being found in a truck with self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Zerwick, now a writing professor at Wake Forest University, had reported on Hunt while a reporter for The Winston-Salem Journal in the early 2000s. She and Hunt stayed in touch through the years; he spoke to her students each semester.

After Hunt’s death, Zerwick began retracing his final steps, trying to figure out what led Hunt to kill himself.

“It felt like a duty. I thought, what can I do here? I can try and write a meaningful piece,” Zerwick said in an interview this week.

Zerwick’s reporting was funded by a grant from Duke University Law School.

The piece is written in first person, in part, because Zerwick wanted to be transparent about the role she had in Hunt’s life. The article explores the fallibility of storytelling and the temptation to allow people to see only certain versions of themselves.

Zerwick said that as painful as the revelations in her article will be for those who loved and admired Hunt, she hopes that by writing it, advocates will examine how to do better by those wrongly convicted.

Asked how she imagined Hunt would react to her piece, Zerwick said she hoped that Hunt would have felt heard.

“He might feel exposed and his privacy invaded, but he was someone who believed in telling the truth. In the end, he wasn’t really able to confide in the people around him about all he was going through,” Zerwick said.

That difficulty, her piece examines, came in part because Hunt could not go anywhere without being recognized, a constant reminder that his misfortune had defined him.

“He hadn’t asked to lead a public life. It just happened to him,” she said.

This story was originally published May 3, 2017 at 6:46 PM with the headline "Journalist traces final, painful days of Darryl Hunt."