Dean Stanley Bryan was born in North Carolina on April 15, 1885. Bryan was a farmer who worked as an overseer at the prison farm at Tillery in Halifax County around 1918 and 1919. An investigation into alleged prison abuses in May 1919 revealed that Bryan allegedly assaulted an incarcerated man named Sam Wilson. By 1920, Bryan had returned to Craven County, where he died on February 14, 1970.