‘I’ve tried to change’: man who killed most of his Rochester family in 1988 to leave prison

David Brom, convicted of killing four family members with an ax in their home on the outskirts of Rochester in 1988, is set to be released later this month because of a change in state law.

After more than 35 years behind bars, Brom is scheduled to be freed July 29 and then move to a halfway house in the Twin Cities. He will be on work release and subject to supervision and GPS monitoring, according to the Minnesota Department of Corrections.

The Legislature in 2023 reduced the minimum time for imprisonment for offenders who were given life sentences under the age of 18, making Brom eligible for parole. Brom was 16 at the time of the crimes.

Now 53, he was convicted of using an ax to kill his father, Bernard; his mother, Paulette; younger sister, Diane, 13; and younger brother, Richard, 11. His older brother, Joseph Brom, did not live at the family’s home at the time of the murders. He was 46 when he died of cancer in 2016 in Ohio. David Brom is mentioned in his obituary.

Brom was originally to be tried as a juvenile, which would have resulted in about a three-year sentence. The ruling was reversed by the Minnesota Supreme Court. The judge presiding over the case sentenced Brom to three life sentences requiring he serve 17½ years on each charge.

Brom met remotely with the prison’s Supervised Release Board earlier this year and was asked to explain why he killed his family members. He said he’d long struggled with depression and that it had clouded his ability to process things.

“I’d grown to a short-sighted view,” he said. “I thought these things were going to last forever. I know I couldn’t live that way forever. In the cloud of depression, I started to believe other people were at fault for how I felt.”

He was more depressed when he was at home, he said, so he blamed his family.

In a public video of the interview, he sits in a nondescript prison office, wearing a blue buttoned shirt over a white T-shirt. His hair is parted on the side in a style similar to when he was a teen.

He was calm, well-spoken, thoughtful in each response.

Brom outlined a vision for his future: A halfway house, saving money, finding a job outside the Department of Corrections and building his support system within the community.

“I’ve tried to change everything I could about myself,” he said. “I’m a good example of what a transformation can look like in a person’s life through the Board of Corrections. I’ve demonstrated consistency in that process, maturity and growth. I believe I’m ready for parole.”

Generally, when individuals are released from prison, they return to the county of their conviction — Olmsted County in this case. In a board hearing, it was decided Brom would not return there for work release or any potential future parole, the Corrections Department said in an email to the Minnesota Star Tribune.

While in prison, Brom has had a single infraction: He once had too many people in his cell. It’s not a complete picture of his time there, he told the board. In his early days, he had a bad attitude and was reluctant to continue his schooling. He believed he didn’t need a college degree to perform any prison job. He was hopeless and experiencing despair.

Then he started taking advantage of opportunities. He said staff and friends invested in him. His faith helped him to transform.

“I did not want to disappoint my grandparents after I had harmed them so much by continuing destructive behavior,” he said. “That was a strong motivator for me as well, early in my incarceration.”

In newspaper accounts from the time, David Brom was described as gentle, kind. He cleared snow from a neighbor’s driveway and filled another’s wood box. His family appeared idyllic, according to neighbors, though friends said he had problems with his father.

The family was part of a tight Catholic school system — his siblings at St. Pius X, David Brom at Lourdes High School — where everyone knew everyone.

School officials alerted authorities when they were told by a student that Brom had said he planned to kill his family and later admitted to another that he had done so. He was briefly on the lam, though spotted by Rochester residents several times before he was caught using a pay phone at the post office.

Two family members were found in bedrooms, two in a hallway. All had been struck several times with an ax, seemingly in the early hours of the previous day.

Some 1,200 people attended the funeral, which included overflow space in the basement of the Pax Christi Catholic Church.

Patti Price lost a “sister” that day. She vividly remembers meeting Diane Brom on a tricycle in front of her house. They did everything together, Price said, including attending school. Price was an eighth-grader, alongside Diane Brom, when her friend was killed.

She never had to forgive David Brom; Price has always felt that there was more to the story.

“I’m in the small minority who understand this decision and think it’s a long time coming,” she said of the release.

Brom would have graduated with Lourdes High School’s class of 1990. When he was a sophomore, he had more than 100 classmates. After the murders, that number dropped to the mid-70s — with dozens transferring to Rochester’s public school system. They have never had a class reunion.

His former classmates who stayed have mixed emotions about his release.

Steve Werle, who now lives in Minneapolis, met Brom in grade school and connected over a mutual interest in bicycling. In the mid-1980s, they competed in the Rochester Centurion, a 100-mile loop through neighboring communities. Brom, Werle said, had the far superior bike.

They weren’t as close in high school as they were as kids and Werle said he hasn’t talked to Brom since they were 16.

“If I didn’t believe in redemption and atonement, I wouldn’t be able to call myself a Christian in any way, shape or form,” he said. “I believe that David was suffering tremendously at that time. I’ve always thought of David as someone who was very sick and in a very dark place.”

Tim Beaudette also spent years in school alongside Brom, though they were not friends.

“I can’t believe he’s getting out,” Beaudette said. “My math is that he’s served nine years per victim. That’s an embarrassment for the state of Minnesota and to the justice system. I know he was only 16 years old, but that is a brutal, heinous, evil crime to be out at an age where I still feel young.”

Jerry Hrabe taught at Lourdes High School for 39 years and retired in 2008. He remembers Brom as a bright student and that some of his classmates were waylaid in the aftermath. He said his wife asked him what he thought of Brom’s release.

“I said, ‘Amen,’” Hrabe said. “I always felt he wasn’t justified in what he did, but something happened. Either internally or externally. You don’t just wake up some day and do that.”

The news of Brom’s coming release brings back the horror of that day for Olmsted County Sheriff Kevin Torgerson.

Torgerson went to the Brom residence north of Rochester when school officials raised concerns the teen had harmed his father. Torgerson arrived to find the grisly scene.

“It is still hard for me to accept and forget the sights and smells of what I saw that Thursday evening in 1988,” Torgerson said in a video posted on Facebook. “I, we as the public, must trust the parole board’s decision and must hope Mr. Brom is ready for this transition in his life.”

Brom’s next appearance before the Supervised Release Board is scheduled for January.