Brent Radford

Brent Radford is a character in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. He is an aged private investigator involved in the Acquaintances Forgotten sidequest.

Background
Brent Radford is an aged private investigator, hired by David Sarif. Radford's job was to dig deep into Adam Jensen's past as a background check, since Sarif hired Adam at the behest of Megan Reed, right after Jensen quit the police force, following the Mexicantown Massacre. Sarif himself created a secure tunnel network in the company's firewall, one of which even Frank Pritchard was unaware, and streamed whatever data he had on Adam to Radford for investigation.

When Jensen finally finds him, Radford is badly wounded by unknown men, but gives enough information to make him realize that there's something suspicious about his past, with the location of a storage unit where all the information related to the case is being stored.

Radford's data describes Jensen's past in great detail. First, Brent checked the report of the SWAT team in which Jensen worked before he resigned, and Radford suspected that it was fabricated to shift the blame for Mexicantown onto Adam, since all former colleagues still talked with respect about Jensen. Later, he found out that the Illuminati were closely monitoring Jensen's progress, and though Radford himself was still not believing in conspiracies, he hinted to Jensen that his own past was being so well hidden and protected by unknown people, that even Sarif seemed afraid to look further into it. Brent also said that Adam's past is tied to the fire that started in White Helix labs, a subsidiary of VersaLife, and the Jensens are not his parents. The mere mention of VersaLife made Sarif back out of the investigation, leaving it unresolved.

Radford's files mentioned a new lead however - a woman named Michelle Walthers, who played a crucial role in Jensen's own survival. She was his "guardian angel" and that he owes her for still being alive, and should ensure her well being.

Trivia

 * When the player first encounters Radford, he is chatting with his guard, which he ends the conversation with an insistence that the guard replace his rug, since it "really tied the room together".  This is most likely a reference to the movie The Big Lebowski.
 * Upon the player granting his final wish and injects him with the lethal morphine dose, Radford will, in his last breath, call Jensen an "iron giant with a heart of gold". This is a probable reference to Ted Hughes' novel The Iron Man and subsequent animated adaptation The Iron Giant.
 * Jensen is comparable to the titular Iron Giant in that both are mainly mechanical (Jensen being augmented and the Giant being an extraterrestrial mechanoid), are "alienated" by much of the society for that reason, but eventually ended up being the saviors of the many at the climaxes of their respective stories.