When Vicksburg native Stuart Brooks was killed Feb. 21 in his prison cell at the East Mississippi Correctional Facility, a family member’s old fear was proved prophetic.

“Stuart is very much in need of psychological help,” Brooks’ aunt wrote in 1995, before he was sentenced for the sexual battery of her 9-year-old son. “I know that with his mentality, he would not survive in a prison, someone would probably kill him. I don’t think he’ll ever be able to function in a normal society.”

Brooks was 18 when he was found guilty in Warren County Circuit Court of assaulting his young cousin. Writing to then-Judge Frank Vollor as part of Vollor’s pre-sentencing investigation, Brooks’ aunt was torn — angry about what happened to her son but concerned for her nephew.

“He’s going to need help for the rest of his life and should be locked up that long,” she wrote.

Instead, Brooks was released after serving 15 years of a 30-year sentence, was rearrested and sent back to prison for failing to register as a sex offender.

About halfway through that three-year sentence, he was strangled, an autopsy showed, and authorities believe Brooks was killed by his cellmate at the Meridian facility, 23-year-old Thomas Hall.

Lauderdale County Chief Deputy Ward Calhoun said an affidavit has been signed and a warrant for murder has been issued against Hall, who is serving a six-year sentence for residential burglary and grand larceny in Pontotoc County.

Calhoun expects a Lauderdale grand jury, convening this week, to indict Hall for murder.

“Officially, no, we have not charged him,” Calhoun said Wednesday in a phone interview. “There’s no point in doing that right now. He’s not going anywhere.”

Hall’s earliest release date is in June, Calhoun said, and with a detainer against him, if he were to be released Lauderdale County officials would take him into custody and hold him in the county jail, subject to any provision for bond, until trial.

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With Brooks’ death, all those close to the 1995 case are gone.

Brooks’ aunt, who wrote to Vollor, died in 1996; his mother died in 2006. The victim died in 2007. Brooks, who was 35, was given a pauper’s burial March 6 in Vicksburg’s Cedar Hill Cemetery, the $500 expense approved by the Warren County Board of Supervisors the day before and the plot provided by the city.

The burial was attended by Brooks’ sister, Leslie Crosby, now of Madison, his aunt Cynthia Brooks of Houston, his friend Annie Sims of Vicksburg and 10 or 15 others, Sims said.

Crosby, 37, said she last saw her brother in 1993, before she moved away from Vicksburg.