Death row inmate Tremane Wood’s sixth-grade English teacher was standing outside the gates of his Oklahoma prison praying for his soul — and thinking he had already been executed — when she got word that .

It was 10:01 a.m. Thursday — a minute after Wood, 46, was scheduled to receive a lethal injection — that Cindy Birdwell and other supporters in the crowd learned that Gov. Kevin Stitt had decided to accept the state Pardon and Parole Board’s recommendation and commute Wood’s sentence to life imprisonment.

There was “whooping,” tears of joy and jumping up and down, she said. Birdwell said she was humbled and grateful to have played a part in it, saying she represented educators when she spoke before the parole board last week on Wood’s behalf. She wanted the outside world to know the “little Tremane” that she knew back in Stillwater Middle School in the early 1990s, she said, and for other teachers to recognize “they have little Tremanes” in their class, too.

“Someone who is quiet sometimes, who’s ornery sometimes, who doesn’t do their work quite up to their potential, who stays back because they want more of your attention, who wants to tell you something but can’t,” she said. “We just have to slow down a little and say, ‘I see you. I hear you.’”

Stitt said he came to his 11th-hour decision not to execute Wood for his role in the 2002 robbery and murder of a young farmworker after It marked only the second time in the Republican governor’s seven-year term that he granted clemency to a death row inmate.

The from his family, religious leaders and many others were mounting as his scheduled execution drew closer. Among those closely watching were Dan Losen, an attorney and senior director at the nonprofit National Center for Youth Law, who dug deep into Wood’s childhood records and interviewed his former teachers and administrators to argue that Wood was a victim of the school-to-prison pipeline.

In a 23-page report shared with The 74 and a letter sent to the parole board, Losen concluded that school officials ignored overwhelming evidence that Wood was being beaten and neglected at home and that he suffered from learning and behavioral issues, such as ADHD and post-traumatic stress disorder, as a result. Instead of reporting that abuse or having Wood evaluated for special education services, as the law requires, they severely punished him. In middle school, Wood was suspended for six months — the end of sixth grade and the entire first half of seventh — for acting out and chronic absenteeism.

“I am so deeply grateful to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board for recommending clemency and to Governor Stitt for granting clemency to Tremane Wood,” Losen said. “I hope Tremane’s clemency, and the voices of similarly situated adults, will contribute to diminishing the unjust and disparate harm experienced by children due to inadequate training, supports and resources for schools. There are many schools that are doing a great deal to support traumatized youth, but far too many school districts, and far too many educators that still dismiss struggling students as ‘bad kids.’”

Working with Losen were Birdwell and Alton Carter, the former assistant to Wood’s middle school vice principal, who was directly involved in disciplining Wood. He told Losen school officials knew the boy was “traumatized, neglected and beaten” and just wanted him out of school.

Carter has since gone on to be a child advocate and now he, Losen and Wood are planning to work together to better inform educators and school districts on how to support abused students.

“Hopefully, Tremane Wood’s story has already helped raise awareness of the importance of trauma-informed responses,” Losen said.

Death row inmate Tremane Wood is set to be executed Thursday for a fatal stabbing he was . Now, in a last-ditch effort to save his life, the Oklahoma man’s sixth-grade teacher and a leading expert on student disability and the ties between school discipline and incarceration are calling on Gov. Kevin Stitt to spare him.

The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board recommended in a 3-2 vote last week that Stitt commute Wood’s sentence to life imprisonment. The 46-year-old is in a matter of days for the murder of a young farmworker that took place during a botched 2002 robbery, one that his older brother confessed to committing and was sentenced to life in prison for. 

While Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond maintains Wood is a callous killer, who carried out the fatal stabbing and whose life as a violent gangster continues today behind bars, his former English teacher Cindy Birdwell said Wood’s case is the result of an education system that failed him. 

In her testimony, Birdwell described how Wood was the victim of severe emotional, physical and sexual abuse as a child and expressed regret that she and other teachers at Stillwater Public Schools had missed the signs. The first time Birdwell visited Wood in prison, she said, she offered an apology. 

“The first thing I said to him was, ‘I am so sorry, Tremane. I am so sorry that I didn’t see your pain and tried to get you relief from that pain,’” she said. “He just looked at me with his kind eyes, he smiled and said, “That’s all right.” He said that school had been his happy place, the place where he felt safe and happy.” 

The argument that Wood’s public school and the adults there could have changed his life trajectory is the basis for a 23-page report by Dan Losen, an attorney and senior director at the nonprofit National Center for Youth Law. Losen, who sent a letter to the clemency board and shared his report with The 74, had access to Wood’s education, medical, juvenile court and state Department of Health and Human Services records, and conducted interviews with numerous educators and administrators from a pivotal time when Wood was a student at Stillwater Middle School in the early 1990s. 

Losen concludes that school officials ignored overwhelming evidence that Wood was being beaten and neglected at home and that he suffered from learning and behavioral issues, such as ADHD and post-traumatic stress disorder, as a result. Instead of reporting that abuse or having Wood evaluated for special education services when the boy acted out in school or was chronically absent, they severely punished him. 

“These failures all entailed choices by adults not to evaluate, not to investigate, not to communicate, and not to intervene, despite legal requirements to do so,” Losen wrote. “These inactions by public school staff and administrators subjected Tremane to inadequate care and protection during his childhood, and had immeasurable negative consequences for his life.”

It was during this period that the school decided to suspend Wood for an extraordinary amount of time, the last several months of sixth grade and the entire first half of his seventh-grade year. Losen points out that if Wood had been evaluated and classified as a student with a disability, there would have been legal safeguards in place against excluding him from school for that long and required provisions for educating him while he was suspended, such as placement in an alternative program. 

“But when Tremane was only 12, rather than protect Tremane and find therapeutic ways to engage him in school, Stillwater school officials’ punitive response to his minor misconduct and chronic absenteeism caused Tremane to spend even more time in what school staff knew was a violent, dangerous, and neglectful home environment,” he argued. 

The reasoning for all this, Losen said, came out in what he described as “perhaps [his] most revealing interview” with Alton Carter, the assistant to the Stillwater Middle School vice principal three decades ago. “Without question [Wood] was traumatized, neglected and beaten,” Carter told Losen, and school officials “just wanted Tremane out.”

Losen pointed to academic research findings that school suspensions are . The research has led to an effort by schools across the country to like suspensions and expulsions. 

A spokesperson for Stillwater Public Schools said Wood’s case is “a deeply sad situation for everyone involved,” but that federal student privacy laws prevent the district from divulging student records. Because Wood hasn’t been a student at the district for nearly 30 years, the spokesperson said, “I could not locate any personnel who can speak to the events or circumstances of that era.” 

‘I’m not a monster’

During Wood’s clemency hearing, which hinged primarily on whether he received adequate legal defense, Birdwell was one of only two outside witnesses who spoke on his behalf. 

The former teacher said she got involved in the defense of Wood, who is Black, years ago after prosecutors portrayed him with “words like sociopath, psychopath, blah blah blah,” while an incompetent, appointed by the court failed to defend him before a nearly all-white jury. 

“I knew Tremane and I knew that he was not some soulless killer,” Birdwell said in an interview with The 74. “I’m a Christian and I believe that I felt a calling.” 

Wood was convicted of felony murder and in 2004 sentenced to death for the slaying of Ronnie Wipf, a 19-year-old migrant farmworker who was lured into a hotel room near Oklahoma City on New Year’s Eve in 2001 and robbed. While Wood acknowledges he participated in the robbery, it was his brother, Jake Wood, who fatally stabbed Wipf. Both were convicted at separate trials of killing the young man. Jake Wood died by suicide in prison in 2019.

Tremane Wood was found guilty under Oklahoma’s felony murder law, which holds someone criminally responsible for murder if they take part in a violent felony that leads to someone’s death. 

At the clemency hearing, members of the parole board appeared swayed by Wood’s lawyer, who noted that the court-appointed attorney defending him at the time had devoted just two hours to the case and, before his death, wrote an apology to Wood on the back of a business card: “It’s not your fault. It’s mine.” 

The factors that led Wood down a path of violent crime include “the institutional failures of schools and juvenile services agencies to provide a sustained, therapeutic response to Tremane’s needs as a neglected and abused child,” Amanda Bass Castro Alves, the assistant federal public defender, wrote in an email to The 74. Prosecutors surfaced his experiences as a misguided teenager to support their case for the death penalty. 

“Institutions often responded to Tremane’s acting out behaviors as a juvenile by punishing rather than helping him,” she said. “He was subjected to extended long term suspensions in middle school that left him vulnerable to the harmful influences that ultimately paved his pathway to prison.” 

After the parole board vote, Drummond, the state attorney general, reemphasized Wood’s alleged misconduct since his incarceration. 

“After this dangerous criminal took a young man’s life, he stayed fully active in the criminal world from behind bars,” Drummond said in a statement. Prosecutors presented evidence during the clemency hearing that Wood was a gang leader who allowed drugs and violence to proliferate inside the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.

“My office will continue to pursue justice for Ronnie Wipf. We intend to make our case to the governor on why clemency should not be granted and why the death sentence, as determined by a jury, should be carried out.” 

Assistant Attorney General Christina Burns testified during the hearing that Wood’s murder conviction was based on a “series of direct personal choices,” and that early warning signs from his youth showed that he could be “impulsive, aggressive, and acted out in an antisocial manner, which can ultimately lead to antisocial personality disorder as an adult.”

“Persistent adult antisocial behavior generally begins in adolescence and it can be flagged in children with symptoms that include poor anger controls, early developmental issues, early behavioral problems, manipulation of others and a failure to accept responsibility,” Burns said, pointing to evidence that incarcerated teens experience a .

“As this case and Tremane’s most current prison activities show, these concerning personality traits are unfortunately validated by his adult behavior,” she said.

Speaking from video feed via prison, Wood said he was “a man who has deep flaws,” who has made poor decisions — including behind bars. But he doesn’t deserve to die. 

“With the pressures of your life hanging in the balance, it gets tough trying to balance it all,” he said. “But I’m not a monster. I’m not a killer.” 

Stitt, a Republican, to a death row inmate only once during his seven years in office while rejecting clemency recommendations for four others. A “does not take the process lightly” and will meet with attorneys for all parties before making a decision this week.

Bright spots turn dark again

Wood’s very upbringing was rooted in violence and trauma. As a teenager, watching his father — a police officer — tie his mother to a chair, pour alcohol on her and threaten to light her on fire before beating his two sons. 

Twice during Wood’s young life he was removed from his violent home — and twice he did well, Losen documents. In 1994, Wood was placed in a therapeutic foster home in Cromwell, Oklahoma, where he attended Butner High School for his freshman year and had “nearly perfect attendance, earned all As and Bs, and was a standout cornerback” on the football team.

“His lengthy period of success provides a clear and positive picture of what Tremane might have experienced the rest of his childhood had his disabilities been identified, had support been provided, and had the pattern of abuse and neglect that he endured been ended permanently,” Losen wrote.

Later, Wood was sent to a Department of Juvenile Justice residential program in Tecumseh and received “glowing reports of his cooperative good nature.” Each time Wood was returned home from these more structured settings, Losen said, his problems resurfaced.

Losen cites documents in Wood’s record indicating that school officials suspected him of having a disability and being in need of services but they never evaluated him. Under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, any suspicion of a disability in a student should trigger a referral for evaluation. 

Oklahoma has “a long history of non-compliance with the provisions of the IDEA pertaining to [identifying students with disabilities]  as well as a history of unjust discipline,” Losen writes, citing a to the Oklahoma Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

It’s not alone. Losen refers to that notes an estimated 85% of young people housed in the juvenile justice system in 2007 had a disability, yet only 37% had been receiving any supports or services at school.

This is the population of public school kids that Wood now wants to help, Losen said. The researcher said he has already started working with the death row inmate to use his story to raise awareness among educators about the needs of traumatized children. It’s outreach that Alton Carter, the former vice principal’s assistant at Wood’s middle school, has already been doing and is now interested in teaming up with Wood as well, Losen said. 

The question now is whether Wood will still be here.