How the Unsolved Murder of My Cousin, Changed My Career—and My Convictions
There are days when time moves like a fist through water. May 25, 2025, is not one of those days.
It is a blade that split the year. The day my cousin, Alexander Dominique Dennis, Sr., was murdered in Huntsville, Alabama.
No suspect. No justice.
Just a text from my mother—“Please call me when you have a chance.”
And the slow, pulsing dread that follows when your spirit knows what your body refuses to believe.
My cousin was shot and killed in the early morning hours of a Sunday. I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry.
I just stopped.
My wife and I had been up late the night before, talking through life as we often do. Salem, our daughter, was about to wake up. My mother doesn’t usually text. She FaceTimes. To see Salem. To see us. But that morning was different. And when I called her back, everything shifted.
Alex was dead.
And I couldn’t find myself inside my own body after that.
There is a myth we tell ourselves—that death makes things clearer. That grief brings wisdom. But all I had was numbness. It was the kind of grief that doesn’t leak from your eyes but sits behind them, clouding every thought. It was not the cathartic wail of my grandmother’s passing, or the quiet release I felt when my aunt slipped away after a long illness. This was grief that bruised inward, that made me feel less human.
Alex and I were raised like brothers. My mother, his maternal aunt, loved him like a son. My father was the only father figure he had worth speaking of. We were born two years apart and grew up on the same stoops, drank from the same summers, fought over the same video games and corner store snacks. I only had one sibling—my sister, five years older. Alex was the one who taught me how to walk down the street with care: “If you want to protect someone,” he told me, “you walk on the outside, so they don’t get hit first.”
He always walked on the outside.
That memory cut deep when I saw his body in the casket. It had been almost a decade since we saw each other in person. And this—this was how we reunited. His hands were what I remember most. Blood, dried and dark, still sat in the folds beneath his fingernails. Not washed. Not covered. Just left there, like the violence hadn’t finished speaking.
They told us the bullets weren’t meant for him. But they found him anyway.
And I keep thinking: what if I had done more?
Because Alex was brilliant in ways that don’t get rewarded. The kind of self-taught, uncredentialed brilliance you don’t see in LinkedIn job titles. He could’ve been a cybersecurity engineer. Could’ve built his own software. Could’ve outrun his trauma—if the systems were ever designed to let him. He was a father of four. He had made mistakes. But he was trying. Trying to stay in his children’s lives. Trying to come home.
He told my mom he wanted to go back to Huntsville. It was his home. His resting place.
And I—I was not his keeper. I let distance become safety. I told myself it wasn’t my job to rescue anyone. That maybe if I got too close, I’d be dragged under, too. But that logic, in retrospect, was cowardice disguised as self-preservation.
After his death, I stopped believing in the path I had chosen. Just days before, I had completed the Google Cybersecurity Certificate. I was proud of it. Thought it might help me protect people and solve real-world problems. But I couldn’t protect Alex. And the hollow feeling that followed told me something I didn’t want to admit: I had mistaken career for calling.
So I pivoted. Not to escape the pain, but to name it. To honor it. To give it a place to live.
Because this world does not value Black life, not when we are brilliant, not when we are broken, and certainly not when we are both. Our stories don’t make it into policy unless they bleed. Our lives aren’t protected unless we are rich, polite, or already dead. And I could no longer participate in systems that only pretend to care.
Cybersecurity was never the problem. It was the context. I was treating symptoms while ignoring the disease.
So I moved toward public policy. Toward responsible AI. Toward the architecture of safety, not just its enforcement. I wanted to know who decided what was protected and who was expendable. Who gets to build the future, and who gets buried beneath it?
Because maybe—just maybe—if the apartment complex had working cameras, or if acoustic gunshot detection had been deployed… maybe Alex wouldn’t have died like that.
This is not a thought experiment. This is not a bullet point on a résumé. This is a body.
This is a father who won’t come home.
This is a cousin I didn’t hug enough.
This is the moment I stopped pretending that tech was neutral.
And if AI is to be our future, then I will not let it become another machine that forgets people like my cousin.
I don’t need to be the smartest. I just need to be principled.
I don’t want to regulate for profit. I want to regulate for protection.
I want AI that sees the full dignity of the people most likely to be ignored.
The kind of AI that doesn’t serve billionaires at the expense of brothers.
This pivot was never about climbing higher.
It was about choosing to go deeper.
To love more bravely.
To protect more intentionally.
To honor the life of a boy who once taught me to walk on the inside.
And now, I will walk on the outside—for him.
