Amy Byrd fought for the indigent but lost her life to cancer

If you knew Amy Byrd, you are either a lawyer, you know one or you have been seated on the wrong end of the defendant's bench in the Forsyth County Hall of Justice.

Whatever the case, you probably came away admiring her -- even if your next stop was at Central Prison's intake unit. Byrd was one of those special people that everybody liked.

Even if you never heard of Byrd, you know somebody like her. She was nice, but not so much that she was a pushover. Ask any of the misguided clients who might have thought that they could get by a skinny, young public defender who barely looked old enough to have finished college.

Byrd was smart, friendly and funny. She would laugh at corny jokes, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of sports and rock music. She was also very sick.

Barely 30 years old, already a cancer survivor and married for just over a year, Byrd got bad news a few days before Christmas. An aggressive cancer invaded her liver and her lungs.

"Cancer sucks," she typed in a recent text message to her friends, the only moment that any of them recall her being down.

Amy Byrd, surrounded by her loved ones, died early yesterday morning.

Her death is a tragedy. Byrd is no less a victim than a young mother whose minivan was crushed by a drunken driver or a convenience-store clerk who was shot during a robbery gone bad. Except that in her case, there's nobody to blame.

On paper, Amy Byrd looked a lot like any number of smart young professionals just getting a good foothold in a long, promising career path.

She got a degree in business administration from James Madison University before graduating from Wake Forest University's law school in 2003.

Not a person to back down

After a short stint practicing family law in High Point, Byrd -- she was Amy Delp then -- went to work in the Forsyth County Public Defender's Office.

If you are unfamiliar with that office, consider yourself lucky. Public defenders are assigned to work for indigent clients who can be -- and this is putting it nicely -- difficult to work with, drug addicts or both. The work is thankless, and the pay is relatively meager. It is not a place for the meek.

It was in that job that Amy Byrd, all of 120 pounds soaking wet, told off a hulking miscreant who had the temerity to question her legal judgment and issue a veiled threat.

"Sure I was scared, but I couldn't let him know that," she said when recounting the story months later.

Then there's a note handwritten last month by a former client who is awaiting trial on charges of assaulting a female.

"I will pray for you and I know God will work it out for you," wrote Kevin Moses after he learned of Byrd's illness. "He is a great healer.… I believe in Him just like I believe in you, you are a good-hearted person and you have done a lot of good in your life."

Beyond the stories about a bantam-size lawyer fighting well above her weight class was a woman who worked behind the scenes as an advocate for Insight Human Services, an organization set up to provide substance-abuse treatment, counseling and psychiatric services, and who had served as the president of the county's Young Lawyers Association.

It was no surprise that when a new judgeship for Forsyth District Court was created in 2007, Byrd's name was frequently mentioned as a potential candidate.

Not enough time to know her

Instead of being sized up for a black robe, Byrd spent the last eight days in a bed at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. She slipped away about 1:30 a.m. yesterday.

Her husband, Jones Byrd, a friend of mine, was by her side. Her mother, Barbara Delp, was there, too, no doubt in a state of disbelief. She had lost Amy's father to cancer not too long ago, and now she has to bury her daughter.

As recently as two weeks ago, Amy Byrd was in her office and passed word not to send her flowers because they're "for sick people." She and her husband had insisted that they be treated no differently now than a month ago. A pile of paperwork, her courthouse ID and a bag of Lay's potato chips on her desk indicated that she had planned on beating cancer again.

Unfortunately, she couldn't. Her doctors discontinued one treatment and tried without success to figure out another.

It's difficult to keep this from sounding like an obituary because it's not. It's a story about loss, plain and simple. So why write about her at all, especially considering that she wasn't particularly well-known?

Because Amy Byrd represented the best in Winston-Salem's future, that's why. And because hers was a name that many of us would have known had she been given enough time.

■ Scott Sexton can be reached at 727-7481 or at ssexton@wsjournal.com.