Tonya Boyd lives with the what-ifs of Oct. 12, 2009 -- the last time she talked to daughter, Tyesha McNair, who was to move from Columbus back to her hometown of Topeka, Kan., the next day.
The next day McNair was dead, shot seven times by the father of her two little girls. Also gunned down at Columbus' Crystal Court apartments was her friend Terence Clark, shot five times.
Convicted of the double homicide on March 7, 2011, James Brock today is in prison, serving life without parole. The mother of his daughters is buried in the Topeka Cemetery, just 10 blocks from Boyd's home.
Boyd drives past the graveyard twice a day, going to and from work. Before her daughter's death three years ago, she checked on McNair every day, either calling or texting her cellphone. Today she still talks to her, every day, as she passes the cemetery.
And she thinks about that evening when she called her daughter's cellphone and Brock answered.
He wasn't supposed to be near her daughter, because of a restraining order issued after an altercation months earlier. But there he was, on McNair's phone, in her home.
"As he started talking to me, every hair on my body just stood up," Boyd recalled last week. "It was like a chilling conversation."
McNair was taking a shower, Brock told Boyd. "I'm watching my daughter sleep," he said of older daughter Koriona, who was 2½ then.
Of infant Jae'Briona, just seven months old, he said: "My young baby, she needs to be asleep with her little fat self, but she ain't going to sleep no time soon."
Then Tyesha came to the phone, and said Brock was there to take the kids while she packed their things for the trip home. "We talked about the kind of things she wanted to do when she got here with her kids, for her first night here, what she wanted my mom to cook for her for dinner," Boyd remembered.
Instead of happily anticipating their reunion, Boyd felt foreboding: "I just had this feeling after talking to him and to my daughter that I was never going to see her alive again. I told her I loved her and everything and I couldn't wait to see her. It was just a very emotional conversation I had with her."
Her worry persisted into the night: "Even when I was going to sleep, I'm like, 'Should I call the police there and tell them to go and keep an eye on her apartment?' It was just a what-if thing. Would they have listened to me or would they have thought I was crazy?"
She still wonders that, three years later. And she is not alone.
Lethal separation
Each year, 30 percent of the women killed in the United States are slain by intimate partners, leaving friends and family wondering whether more could have been done to help those victims before it was too late.
A woman abused by her spouse or boyfriend often is too scared to leave, and with good reason: She knows that if she tries to leave, he will kill her -- particularly if she tries to take his children.
That's what makes leaving so dangerous for women dominated by violent men.
"Once a woman decides to leave, that's when the threats increase, that's when the violence does escalate," said Diane Hett, executive director of the Columbus women's shelter Hope Harbour, to which police and prosecutors refer abuse victims who need safe haven.
Most fatalities resulting from domestic violence occur after a woman has left her abuser, Hett said. Getting the woman to safety during that transition is crucial. That can mean not just getting her into a shelter, but getting her out of the area.
"One of the first things we do is, if there is a degree of lethality, we try to get them out of town, if they have relatives or somewhere to go they can start over," Hett said.
Flee or fight
Tyesha McNair left town more than once to escape James Brock, but she kept coming back.
The first time, she was pregnant with Koriona. She went home to Topeka, to stay with her mother after Brock hit her, Boyd said. Koriona was born in Topeka, and was seven months old when McNair moved back to Columbus to be with Brock.
"He said he was going to change and all this stuff," Boyd recalled. "My daughter was a very demanding person; she wanted him to do this and do that before she even thought about going back to him there. She wanted him not to drink anymore because he had an alcohol problem. ? He made it sound like all this stuff, he made it happen."
But their conflicts persisted. Boyd remembered times when she told McNair to take Koriona into a bedroom and lock the door until the police came.
Sometimes Brock called Boyd, almost incoherent as he told her he loved McNair and feared losing her.
"I'm like, 'I think both of y'all just don't really need to be together.' I told him that several times: 'Y'all just don't really get along.' I think they just tried to stay together for the children," Boyd said.
That's common in domestic abuse cases, Hett said: Women don't want to leave because of children, or because the man has threatened a pet. Sometimes they are financially dependent on the man. "There are so many entanglements for the women, especially if they share a child," Hett said.
The next time McNair left, she was pregnant again. That time she went to North Carolina to live with a friend and her husband, but when they divorced, McNair had to move.
Boyd tried to get her to come to Topeka. Instead, McNair moved back to Columbus, where Jae'Briona was born March 27, 2009. The baby would never get to know her mother.
The relationship between Brock and McNair accelerated its decline, until McNair got a restraining order after a particularly violent brawl. Brock went to jail for about a month, and Boyd urged McNair to move back to Topeka before he got out.
McNair waited too late.
Both she and Clark were 21, each the parents of two young children, Clark having two twin boys about Jae'Briona's age. That was the basis of their friendship, Boyd said: "They built this relationship on these kids."
Police responding to 911 reports of gunshots at 3:50 a.m. Oct. 13, 2009, found Clark in the apartment's parking lot, shot in the chest and head. McNair lay inside, curled up on the floor, her hands covering her face.
In the days that followed, family and friends converged on the bloody apartment, where Boyd collected clothes for the children, who the night of the murders had been with Brock's mother. She also got her daughter's big flat-screen TV, something McNair had told her she didn't want to leave behind, having bought it with her first paycheck.
After-effects
Three years later, Boyd is an advocate for victims of domestic violence, joining marches and wearing purple ribbons in October, Domestic Violence Awareness Month. She lives every day with the what-ifs of her daughter's death, something Koriona also cannot forget, and Jae'Briona cannot remember.
"Bre doesn't know anything about her mother, except for what we tell her," Boyd said of the younger child, who now asks what color her mother's house is. "So I explain to her, her mother's at the cemetery, and her house is pink, because her coffin is pink, so she's all right with that, right now."
Koriona was close to her mother. Now 5 years old, she suffers separation anxiety.
"Koriona doesn't want to go anywhere unless I'm there with her," said Boyd, who's 47. "I just now am able to get her to sleep in her own bed the whole night, in her own room. ? She's had a couple of bad, bad dreams where she'd come run in my room crying. She talks a lot about her mom, and her mom dying, and her daddy, and why'd her daddy do it."
Boyd can't answer that.
Knowing other women today face what her daughter did, and still have time to escape, she offered this advice: "I would say whoever's in that situation, they need to get out of it; they need to go and get help, because it's not going to get any better. It's going to get worse."
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario