Because Bryten Can’t
Felicia Burg turns loss into a legacy of love
At 42, Felicia Burg carries a grief most of us can’t imagine. She’s pulled herself out of homelessness after years of living on the streets or in her vehicle. She’s battled the demons of addiction. And, two years ago, her 17-year-old son was murdered while coming to the defense of another. Instead of being gripped by heartbreak, Felicia has made it her mission to help prevent families from falling through the cracks and to love on them every step of the way.
She’s doing it as the executive director of Family Promise of Yellowstone Valley.
After her son, Bryten, died, her purpose in life started to become a little bit clearer. When families hurt, she knows that pain can create cycles of trauma, which can take generations to turn around.
She used to be part of one of those families.
“As a parent, you can do everything for your child, but my boys still struggled,” she says with tears welling in her eyes. “All the writing was on the wall. Bryten was skipping school. He was running away from home. I didn’t have money for a private treatment center,” Felicia says of her son back in 2024. Felicia is a mom to three — Bryten, Eli, who is now 17, and Penny, now 8. “Even though I had connections, there weren’t the resources that I needed for my boys.”
She remembers crying to those who served kids, begging for help.
“All the professionals said, ‘Yeah, we see he’s going down a really bad path. So, here’s what we do. We can wait until he commits a crime bad enough to go to Pine Hills (Youth Correctional Facility) or we wait until he is in full blown substance abuse disorder and then Medicaid will pay for his treatment,” Felicia says, adding neither choice was an option for her.
After Bryten got connected with a case manager at Tumbleweed, a program that serves homeless and runaway youth, she started to see a change.
“I thought we were on a better track,” Felcia says. “He was talking more positively and making plans.”
Then came a phone call that would ultimately shatter so many lives.
“Bryten called and asked if he and a friend could walk up to the Holiday,” Felicia says. It was 9:30 in the morning on April 20, 2024. It seemed innocent enough. She said yes. Bryten and his friend, Cruise, headed up Monroe Street where they were confronted by the new boyfriend of Cruise’s ex, a 16-year-old boy named Shyrone Wolfblack.
“Bryten is there on the sideline,” Felicia says, adding that’s when Shyrone came at Cruise, knife in hand. “When Bryten sees this, he hops in to help his friend. His friend only got a scratch on the back from the knife. Bryten got stabbed four or five times in the heart and several times in the back. From what witnesses said, Bryten was walking up the street, staggering, before he collapsed.” After a woman ran out of her house to check on him, Felicia says, “He told her several times, ‘call my mom. Call my mom.’”
By the time Felicia got there the ambulance had already taken Bryten to the hospital. While medical staff worked to stop the bleeding, the bigger concern, Felicia says, was the impact on her son’s brain.
“He was without blood and oxygen to the brain for about 15 minutes, which obviously causes a lot of issues,” she says. “For the next five days, we just sat there.”
The swelling to Bryten’s brain was severe and doctors feared he was brain dead.
“They took him off oxygen to see if he could breathe on his own after a minute,” she says, pausing to wipe tears from her cheek. “I knew. So, I just laid on his chest until his heart stopped beating.”
In the days and weeks that followed, more came to light about her son’s killer, who is now serving 65 years in prison for deliberate homicide with the use of a weapon.
“Looking at Shyrone’s past, so many things could have been avoided,” Felicia says. “The kid didn’t have a good life. He was in and out of foster care, trouble, in and out of Pine Hills, just horrible things at a very young age.”
Felicia says she isn’t angry at Shyrone. She’s angry at the system.
“If we had a system that was truly set up to support his parents, I feel like things could have been different,” she says. “Shyrone was recently let out of Pine Hills. He cut off his ankle bracelet and killed my son within days of being of let out.”
And then, there is the crime that Shyrone was never charged with.
“There’s talk that he stabbed another person and killed her earlier, when he was 14,” Felicia says.
That case revolves around 24-year-old Jessie Jane Guardipe. She was stabbed to death on July 3, 2022. After the crime, a relative of Jessie’s shared with a TV news reporter that Jessie and Shyrone were arguing about a parking spot. When things escalated, Shyrone reportedly lunged at Jessie with a knife. Lt. Samantha Puckett with the Billings Police Department confirmed that a warrant request for Shyrone was filed with the Yellowstone County Attorney’s Office in August 2022. The suggested charge was negligent homicide. Today, that case is listed simply as “charges unfiled.”
“There are some complexities to that case,” says Deputy Yellowstone County Attorney Hallie Bishop. She’s also the attorney that prosecuted the case against Shyrone involving Bryten’s murder. When questioned about progress in the Guardipee case, Hallie says, “I want to tread lightly because the case is still open.” She couldn’t comment further.
“I am so mad because the family that lost their family member to this stabbing wanted to come in for their justice,” Felicia says. “Nobody snitches. If somebody would have just stood up and told the truth, my son would be alive.”
When asked if she feels called to try to change the system, she quickly shakes her head. “You are not going to win that battle against the justice system and how it works,” Felicia says. “What I can do is fight harder to recognize parents and kids who are struggling before it gets to that point.”
That is a battle where she is making strides. Last year alone, Family Promise served more than 2,000 people. Some were helped through the organization’s emergency shelter program; others through their eviction-prevention program; others still through their life skills classes designed to keep people stably housed. Of those served, roughly 1,000 were children.
When YVW first featured Felicia in 2019, she shared her gritty past and how she was a graduate of the Family Promise program herself. When she first walked through the doors of Family Promise in 2013, she was a single mom of two without a car, a job or a place to live. She’d been sober for about nine months. After graduating from the program, she applied for a part-time job as a bus driver for the nonprofit. Eventually, she moved from that job to one as a program assistant, then to a marketing assistant, to development coordinator, to eventually being a development director in charge of Family Promise’s fundraising and public relations efforts. When we chatted seven years ago, she made it clear that she wanted to one day run the nonprofit as its executive director. It’s a title she earned in January of last year.
“God and the universe had to align so many things to make it so that I could be here and have the opportunities that I had,” Felicia says. “He opened doors and created space and brought people into my life that helped me.” She admits she still has days when she has to learn on the fly.
“Taking a look at the community. Where are the gaps? What can we do? And then, being able to communicate that with funders to fill those gaps,” she says about the issue and the urgency.
For the first time last year, Family Promise expanded services to cover people along the full housing insecurity spectrum — from someone facing an eviction notice to those who are homeless, to those who become housed but later become unstable. The organization got funding through the Siemer Institute to put together a stabilization and eviction-prevention program. It started last October and brought another case worker to the organization. When Felicia started in her current leadership role a little more than a year ago, she had one case worker. Now, there are three. They are also serving more than twice as many people.
“It blew my mind,” Felcia says, adding these are real people with real struggles. “We were able to have 250% more impact.”
She knows this is what she was meant to do.
“I thought my purpose had to be more elaborate,” she says with a smile. Instead, it’s rather simple. “It’s my job to remind our community to love your neighbor. If we are doing that, we won’t let these families fall through the cracks. We won’t let kids sleep in cars on the street. That’s not what love does.”
Felicia is quick to add that this love is unconditional.
“What I know now, deep in my soul, is you have to also love those you don’t like. It’s not my job to judge Shyrone or his mom. I have to love them,” Felicia says. “It’s a commandment because it’s hard.”
Felicia begins to talk about the last time she saw Shyrone and his mom in the courtroom at his sentencing. Security guards stood between her and Shyrone’s mom, preventing Felicia from speaking to her.
“I really wanted her to know that I feel for her. She lost her son too,” Felicia says. “She had her issues very similar to what I had but I had people who loved me out of that. I don’t know if she had that.”
Felicia would love it if they met face to face one day.
“How powerful of a testimony would it be if we could talk together? If we could use both of our kids’ lives to help other mothers and kids?” she asks.
As we talk, Felicia mentions Shyrone turned 18 at the end of January. When asked why she knows the date, she says she wants to make a point to never forget him. She issued him a challenge when she shared her victim impact statement at his sentencing.
“When I got up to the stand, I said, ‘Look at me.’ I told him that I don’t want him to go to prison and just sit his time. Now he has to do twice as good. He has to turn his life around and he has to do twice as good because Bryten is not here to do good. He looked at me and cried,” Felicia says. “I said, are you hearing what I am saying? Lots of good things have happened from a jail cell. I don’t know what that is going to be, but now that is your calling.”
Last Christmas, Felicia says she was tempted to send Shyrone a Christmas card. The reason was simple. “Hey, don’t forget what I asked you to do,” she says.
Since then, she took a grief support course through RiverStone Health. Ironically, she found more value in the lessons taught to her 8-year-old daughter, Penny, in the children’s version of the class.
“The way children grieve, I think it is so beautiful,” Felicia says. “When a child grieves, it is short. They will have a memory and they will miss the person but then their brain switches quickly to the happy memories.” She is quick to add, “I became bound and determined to grieve like a child.”
She has also embraced a mantra that underscores creating the life she wants to live. “Find the things that bring you joy and then, go after those things,” she says. Anger, she adds, isn’t just an emotion. It’s a choice.
“I know hate and anger won’t bring Bryten back,” she says. “I know that love wins. I’m stubborn enough that I want to win, whatever that looks like.”
