At Grace’s house, Martina shows her the mug shot. Lynn Nesbitt, the domestic violence advocate, is sitting on the other side of Grace. Grace affirms that it is him, her partner, whom I’ll call Byron. She signs her name to the paper in front of her—the sheet that Martina will use in her report on Byron and Grace.
“I get nauseated just looking,” Grace says.
“Okay,” Martina says, and puts the paper away in a clipboard box she’s holding on her lap. “You don’t have to look at him ever again.” She takes out a blank report, ignoring Joey’s constant screeching, the television, and even Grace’s tears, and she asks Grace to tell her story.
“All of it, or just …” Grace asks.
“All of it,” Martina says.
Martina has a reputation for detail in her reports. In the world of domestic violence, a police report is a first step in what can feel like an endless and incomprehensible system. But it’s crucial. An incomplete report means possible charges won’t get prosecuted, so an abuser who shows many of the most urgent signs of lethality—for example, Rocky Mosure—can easily be dropped by the system. Martina says she is constantly impressing on patrol officers, in the many trainings she conducts, that it’s better to be overly detailed than under. I’ve spoken to prosecutors across the country who look at the thoroughness of police reports as the single most important element they need to make their case.
This is probably the most common complaint I hear, too: that police reports are unspecific, ambiguous, terribly written, lacking in detail. And, as a result, prosecutors will be left with a weak case or often no case. Take that report from the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention, for example, which found that officers downplayed the incidents because they weren’t properly trained on how to identify strangulation injuries that weren’t instantly recognizable, like memory loss, a raspy voice, urination or redness in the sclera of the eye.1 Such reports leave prosecutors with scant evidence.
I think of what might have happened had someone like Martina gone to the Mosure house—not asked Michelle to come in to the office, but gone there herself—and seen the children, seen the control Rocky had over her, been able to make Michelle believe that the system would protect her. It’s important to see the environment they’re in, Martina told me once, to go to their homes. “I could have had Grace down here all day long, but I wanted to go where it’s comfortable for her,” she said. “This gives me an idea of who they are, where this all occurred … I always say, ‘Shame on me as a detective, if I don’t get my ass out of this chair, go to her house, take my own pictures.’ I want something you can see.”
Grace begins her story for Martina. She and Byron have lived together for several years.2 They have children together, and she also has children from her previous relationship. Five days earlier, Byron had come home from work drunk, storming in the front door asking where his gun was. “Under the bed,” she told him. He went outside to empty some work gear from his car, so she pulled out the gun from under the bed and went outside to give it to him. When he saw her, she says he began playing around like he was going to run her over with the car. She couldn’t gauge his mood, if he was serious or kidding. His intoxication made him hard to read. She was half asleep. So she “held the gun up” and she said it “made him flip.” Martina asks her to clarify how she was holding the gun. At him? Toward him? “No, over my head,” she says.
“And then what happened?”
Grace says, “He starts playing around like he’s gonna murder me. So I went back in the house and put it back under the bed.” He followed after her, asking where it was.
Then the doorbell rang. This added to the confusion, to the increasing hostility. It was the middle of the night, somewhere around two a.m. Someone had been doing this recently, ringing their doorbell and then running away. They’d never answered it. But Grace says Byron had been accusing her lately of cheating on him, and he’d used the ringing doorbell as evidence of his theory. She didn’t know who was at the door and neither of them answered it, but it was an occurrence they’d experienced several times over the past few weeks.
Martina asks if Grace knows who it was.
“No idea.”
Byron got the gun back out from under the bed. Grace was awake now, alert. Joey was asleep on the couch. “He pulls it back.” Grace mimes with her hands cocking a gun. She doesn’t know the lingo.
“That’s called ‘chambering a round,’ ” Martina says. “He’s putting one in the chamber.”
Grace nods. Her son Mark is clasping his fingers together, hands between his knees, eyes trained on the floor. Joey continues to scream and jump on various pieces of furniture that he’s been able to knock over.
“Then he lays me down on the bed,” Grace says, “and he put it to my temple.” She’s sniffling as she tells this story, trying not to cry, wiping at her face with the stretched-out sleeve of her sweater. “I could feel the tip moving. I don’t know. I don’t know how to say it.”
“As if you would click the top of a pen, right?” Martina says, demonstrating with her pen.
Grace nods. “He said, ‘I know you’re fucking around on me. I’m the only one that’s been there for you, and you’re fucking around on me’ … He kept saying we were going to be on the news tonight.”
Martina interrupts her every few seconds to clarify one point or another: which temple did he hold the gun to? How long did this go on? Where were the children? How long did the doorbell ring for? What was he saying? What was she saying?
Grace continues with her story. Byron tells her over and over how they’ll be on the news, how he’s the only one who gives a shit about her, and she’s hearing him, but she’s not hearing him, because he’s got that gun trained on her temple and she can hear the clicking of it, and so all she’s doing, she says, is laying there with her eyes squeezed shut, and she’s praying.
“What’re you praying for?” Martina asks.
“I was saying goodbye to my kids in my head and telling them I loved them, because I was sure he would kill me.” She’s crying again now and Lynn hands her a tissue. Mark is crying a little, too, but also trying to hold it in, and I can see his chest heaving a little bit. He’s a little man, standing right there on the brink of adulthood, stranded between feeling like he wants to save his mom and needing her to protect him.
I want to stop here in this moment and acknowledge how easy it would be to blow past, how important it is to really understand. The Danger Assessment is one thing that gives an idea of risk, a kind of mathematical calculation of a life in which there are infinite variables. Martina’s question is the kind of drilling down detail that many don’t think to do—police, advocates, even attorneys. They ask for the facts, the play-by-play of a violent moment, but they may not ask what the person was thinking or feeling in that same moment. But Martina learns, from Grace’s answer, not only about Byron’s dangerousness, and his carelessness with another life, but also about Grace’s vulnerability. She thought she was going to die. This is sometimes where the discrepancy comes from when people say victims aren’t aware of the dangerousness of their own situations: it’s not so much that they’re unaware as that they don’t know they know. A kind of cognitive dissonance. Martina will underscore then what Grace knows, but may not be fully aware of: that she can trust her own gauge of danger. She is Michelle. She is Dorothy.
Even if Byron didn’t mean to kill her, Grace says, he was drunk, and he had the gun cocked back, and he could have slipped, accidentally pulled the trigger.
“Can he hear you praying?” Martina asks.
“No,” Grace says. She shakes her head. Martina lets her collect herself. She asks another boy who’d been in a back bedroom to watch Joey, take him out of the living room. After that, Grace says, he pulled her up by her hair off the bed and slapped her. Or maybe he punched her. She doesn’t remember exactly. It happened three times. Punches or slaps. Her eye has marks around it, but they’re faded now. She couldn’t call the police for nearly a week, because he didn’t work that whole week and so kept her in the house. The kind of passive hostage Kit Gruelle talks about. Byron didn’t have to lay a hand on her after that. He already had her cowering.
She lived with him all during that week, obeying him, listening to him, pretending it was all okay, she was okay, what he had done was okay. Her love was bigger than his violence for a long time, but this time—when he bought her flowers the next day for the first time ever—scared her just enough. She spent five days making him believe that love was still enough to forgive him (and maybe she wanted to keep on believing it, too, for another minute). She pretended to love him to stay alive and to keep her children alive. And the moment she had a window of freedom—the very next time Byron left for work—she ran. Took her kids and ran across town. And that was yesterday. And she called the police as soon as she could, and they sent a zone car to take her report, and the report landed on Martina’s desk this morning because Grace was scored as high risk by the police and so here we all are. Grace has been out of the house for less than a day and doesn’t quite know what comes next: the rest of her life or imminent death.
After he slapped her, Grace says, she fell to the floor and pretended to pass out. Then she mentions to Martina and Lynn Nesbitt, almost like it’s an aside, how several years earlier she’d had a brain injury. She was fine now, for the most part, but she feared that his pounding on her would exacerbate that earlier injury and she’d die accidentally. As she lay on the floor pretending to have passed out, though, he saw right through her act, she says. He lifted her under her arms, banged her into the wall, and said, “You want to play dead? Okay. I’ll shoot you right now if you want to play dead.”
That’s when Joey darts into the room and climbs up his mother’s shins, snatches Martina’s business card from his mom’s lap.
“Joey,” Martina says. “Joey, don’t you take that card!” But she’s smiling at the boy; she opens her clipboard case, takes out another one, and hands it to Grace.
Martina tells me later the thing that really signaled the dangerousness of Grace’s situation was her pretending to play as if she’d passed out. “That to me is every sign of wrong,” Martina said. “You got to play like you’re passed out?” After a mass shooting, people often describe how they played dead to stay alive. In Sutherland Springs, for example, a victim named Rosanne Solis told the media, “I played dead and it saved my life.”3 During the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting, a young man named Marcus Godden said he “lay on the ground. I could hear shots. I played dead.”4 In Oregon, in Tobago, in Mississippi, in Norway, in England, shooting victims use this exact phrase: “I played dead.” For victims of intimate partner terrorism, it’s an autonomous survival response. They play dead, and play dead, and play dead again.
Once Grace finishes her story, Martina goes back over the entire thing in detail, this time repeating it back to Grace to make sure she has it all right. “I don’t want to put words in your mouth,” she says. Was his first slap before or after he held the gun to you? Did he slam you onto the bed first or into the wall? Slaps or punches? What happened after? He made you swear you wouldn’t call the cops on him or he’d take Joey? Okay. Okay. Okay. Martina’s scribbling notes as Grace talks.
Grace mentions again the flowers he bought the next day. That’s when she got really scared. Because he’d never bought her flowers before. He didn’t apologize. But he bought her those flowers. It reminds me of a poster in Martina’s office: He beat her 150 times. She only got flowers once. The pink and white flowers are atop a casket. Byron told her that if she ever called the cops on him, and he got picked up, he’d get a local gang after her. The Zulus. He told her they owed him.
“Dumbass,” Martina says, of Byron. She knows all about the Zulus. “They’re mainly a social thing, not like the Heartless Felons. I’m not worried about the Zulus from a police perspective, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s not an idiot in there that’s crazy.”
Grace nods but doesn’t look convinced by this. Nesbitt asks if she’s had a doctor check her (she hasn’t). Joey is back and forth, running into the living room, the kitchen, the back bedroom, zooming like a lizard. Martina nudges Mark. “Why don’t you take him in back for a minute?”
Once they’re gone, she pitches herself on the edge of the couch, facing Grace. “This is the most dangerous time for you,” she says, “so we’re going to hurry up and get this warrant out.” Even though it’s Sunday, the warrant will be issued immediately. Martina writes down her cell number. It’s her second cell, actually, a phone dedicated just to the victims she meets with. She tells Grace to call her any time of day or night. I will spend days with Martina, returning on several trips and visiting victim after victim, and to each one of them, she says this: call me any time of day or night, twenty-four seven. “So we are going to take Byron down,” Martina says. “You’re on my team. But this protection order is not knife proof. It’s not bulletproof. So when you see him, you have to call the police. You have to let me know. It’s okay to call me crying, and it’s okay to call me and say you want to go back. As much as you love him, you have to call me when you get that urge.”
Grace is nodding, crying in fear and relief. She swears she is not going back this time. She swears it.
Joey darts into the room, his head a swivel. “Joey! What’s going on?!” Martina says, like he’s a long-lost nephew. Mark skates into the room, grabs his brother, and out they go. Split second. Comic timing. Dynamic duo.
Nesbitt starts in now with a Danger Assessment on Grace. Has he strangled you? Beaten you while pregnant? Does he have access to a gun? Is he a substance abuser? Is he unemployed or underemployed? Are there children in the home that aren’t his? Has he threatened to kill you? Threatened to kill himself? Threatened to hurt the children? Has he ever avoided being arrested for domestic violence? Have you left him after living together? Does he ever choke (strangle) you? Does he control all or most of your daily activities? Is he constantly jealous? Do you believe he is capable of killing you?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. To every question, yes. To all of it. Yes. The answers pile up in emotional strength; her face crumples; she wipes repeatedly at tears as they fall, and I imagine her thinking of all the times she’s returned, all the decisions she’s probably blaming herself for, all the times she maybe didn’t call the police. I can picture her thinking about her kids’ faces, imagining maybe the angry face of Byron, wondering how she ever got to this place. No victim of domestic violence—man or woman, adult or child—ever imagines that they’re the type of person who would wind up in such a situation. Whatever we envision when we envision a victim, there is one universal truth to each and every one of those images: none of us ever picture ourselves.
What we might conjure, if anything at all, is a punch. Someone we’re dating, one punch, and we’d be gone. But that’s not how it happens. It evolves over time. A partner who might not like your makeup. Or a suggestive outfit. Maybe he’ll say it’s for your own protection. Then a few months later, maybe he yells a little louder than you’ve heard before. Maybe he throws something, a fork, a chair, a plate. (It’s worth noting that should that plate bounce off the wall and break into shards, and should a shard cut you in the face, the Supreme Court considers it “intentional” abuse.5) Then, in between weeks and months of some good times, and some not-so-good times, you might hear how he knows men look at you, he sees other men looking at you. You might even feel complimented by this. But then maybe he follows it up with a request that you stay home with him a little more. Maybe this, too, is for your “protection.” And that one friend you have, the loud one? He knows she doesn’t like him. And before you even realize it’s happening that friend’s falling away from your life. Then, a couple of years in, he loses his job, comes home in a mood, pushes you into a wall. And you know that’s not him, not really. You’ve been with him awhile now. Anyone would feel bad, losing a job. And he apologized, right? Seemed truly remorseful. And then the next month it’s a slap, a backhanded shove, another thrown plate. But neither the control nor the abuse tend to come at once, lit up like a punch. They leak out slowly over time like radon.
For battered men, who comprise anywhere from 15% to 40% of the victims in America (depending upon which study you read6), the stigma is even greater. Men rarely seek out shelter. They rarely call law enforcement. The culture that tells women to keep the family intact, to find love and be loved at all costs, is the same culture that emasculates and shames men in abusive situations, that tells men if they are victims, it is because they are weak and not real men. It is the same culture that tells them violence is acceptable as a response to any external threat or internal pain, but tears are not. It is a culture that limits both victim and perpetrator, the abused and the abuser.
Same-sex partners fare no better. They, too, rarely report their situations to police or advocacy centers, despite rates of violence being generally higher in LGBTQ couples compared to heterosexuals, with transgender individuals and bisexuals experiencing the highest rates of violence out of all groups.7
Grace’s score is about as high as they come. Some victims need to be told what it means, the danger they’re in. But not Grace. I can see by her tears, by her shaking her head, that she knows exactly what all those yeses mean. “What’s wrong with me?” Grace says, quiet as a sigh. “Why do I feel empathy towards him? Like I feel bad that I’m talking about Byron?”
“It’s okay to still love him,” Nesbitt says, reaching her hand toward Grace’s leg. “But we’re involved now, and we’re going to get you and your children the help you need.” She tells a story then that might be true, might be apocryphal. This one detective, Nesbitt says, used to be on their squad, and he was lactose intolerant. Wouldn’t you know it, his favorite food was ice cream. He loved ice cream. But every time he ate it, it made him sick. Luck of the draw. What were the chances? Didn’t mean he still didn’t want to eat it. Just that he knew if he ate it, he was going to get sick. Grace gets it.
“This is going to be the hardest thing you ever do,” Martina says. “It’s also the most courageous.” And just then I think she’s going to offer Grace a pep talk, a tough love diatribe about making sure she actually leaves. But she doesn’t. Instead, Martina brings up the kids, the abuse they’ve witnessed, and how Grace has a responsibility to them. “The environment we put our children in will have a profound effect on who they are when they grow up,” Martina says. “So these little boys, they may start to do this to others.”
Grace wipes at her eyes. “I know, I know.”
But Martina doesn’t let her off the hook that easily. “You doing this is going to let them know it’s not allowed, okay?”
Grace nods.
Later, I will ask Martina if she thinks Grace will really go through with leaving Byron, and she nods. She thinks she can sometimes tell when victims are ready; when they go from being victims to being survivors. Domestic violence literature talks about that average of seven tries before a victim actually leaves.8 But it’s not entirely accurate, because victims vacate emotionally first, sometimes years before they are actually physically able to leave. And for Grace, it seemed clear that whatever fear she was feeling about Byron, and whatever sadness may have set in about the breakup, the thought of leaving her children to be raised without her was now driving her decisions. Byron had tipped the scales.
But Martina doesn’t take chances when it comes to these kinds of promises. She’s seen victims return too many times. So when Grace’s story is all finished, and Martina has filed her notes in her binder, she shifts on the couch and looks and Grace and says, “I’m going to tell you a story about my sister. True story. You can look it up.”