NOVEMBER 16, 2007: Allegan news

NOVEMBER 16, 2007: NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
Murder victim ‘loved to teach’
November 16, 2007, 10:48 AM EST
By Daniel Pepper, Staff Writer
Allegan News
http://www.allegannews.com/articles/2007/11/16/local_news/1.prt

Co-workers remember Pam Brainard as being perfectly suited to be a nurse.

“Her job was perfect for her because she was everything a nurse should be,” said Jennifer Dentler, who worked with her at Allegan General Hospital.

Brainard was found murdered Nov. 4, according to police, by her husband, Kevin, a Plainwell Public Safety Officer, at the couple’s home in Otsego.

Co-workers from the hospital remembered her working to bring new people into the world at the hospital’s birth center. She’d worked at the birth center about a year, while previously working in home health care.

Dentler, a fellow nurse, said Brainard’s best skill was working with patients.

“She loved to teach, she was really great with the moms and babies with getting out parenting info or anything they needed,” Dentler said.

She knew how to ask the right questions of patients, Dentler said, to get the answers nurses needed.

“She was great at just counseling and helping the moms and babies, beyond just providing care,” she said.

Brainard took it upon herself to become certified in putting in car seats and would go out to the car with mothers and babies leaving the birth center to make sure their car seats were put in correctly.That was just one example, Dentler said, of her going above and beyond.

“Always after somebody delivered, she’d call and check back in even when she wasn’t working to check on them,” she said. “She’d go above and beyond. When she was off-duty she’d call and check on her patients.”

The nurses at the birth center work 12-hour shifts, but Brainard was always busy.

“She was always, always, always working,” Dentler said. “She was never one to just sit back and read when we were down, she’d always have something we were doing.”

She was survived by her two children, Kyle, 14, and Kayla Marie, 2.

“She talked a lot about her children,” Dentler said. “That’s what we talked about a lot.”

That seemed very in line with her personality at work, Dentler said.“Pam just exuded a very motherly nature about her. She was very much a caretaker. She was very intuitive with the patients and with us. She’d see if you were sick or sad and she’d want to take care of you.”

Brainard was born July 2, 1974, Kalamazoo to David and Debra Aukerman. She grew up in Mattawan and was buried Saturday, Nov. 10, in Kalamazoo.

According to their funeral home’s Web site, the family has asked that in lieu of flowers donations be made to the Y.W.C.A. Domestic Assault Program.

Dentler said she’d be missed.“Deeply, deeply missed,” she said. “It’s a very hard thing to understand, but she’ll just be missed.”