- Born
- Died
- Birth nameJoseph Dean Brackley Jr.
- Dean Brackley was born on August 9, 1946 in Wynantskill, New York, USA. He died on October 16, 2011 in San Salvador, El Salvador.
- Jesuit priest who moved to El Salvador during the late 1980s to assist the country's poor after the civil war that devastated the country earlier that decade.
- On November 16,1989, six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her 16 year old daughter were killed execution in El Salvador. He insisted upon completing his next assignment in Sal Salvador university dormitory where the murders had occurred by government military forces. Since 1990, he had taught at the university in San Salvador and ministered to a rural parish about 50 miles away.
- He completed a doctorate in theology at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois in 1980. He declined several offers to teach at colleges. He chose to work with the South Bronx People for Change in 1980 in New York City where he worked with drug addicts, tenants, residents, and the police at the time. Until 1990, he rode his bicycle to Fordham University where he taught ethics and theology classes.
- The oldest of four children of J. Dean Brackley and Inez Brackley. He was ordained into the Jesuit priesthood in 1976. He is survived by his mother, Inez Brackley; two brothers, Douglas Brackley of Glen Burnie, Maryland and Richard Brackley of Mechanicsville, Virginia; and a sister Jane Brackley Davis of Brentwood, Tennessee.
- [on going to El Salvador in 1989] My body began to factor it in before my head - I found my knees shaking, without really knowing why.
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