Martina had an older sister named Brandi. Brandi lived a few hours away from Cleveland in Warren, Ohio. The two hadn’t been in touch much, but one day in the summer of 2015 Brandi’s daughter, Bresha, showed up on Martina’s doorstep. Bresha showered her aunt with stories of her father’s years of abuse. Cruel and terrifying stories. He’d cut off Brandi and Bresha and the rest of the children from their family entirely; Martina recognized the tactic of isolation. And she’d known of some of the abuse. Years earlier, Brandi had wound up in the hospital with seizures and a stroke after a severe beating. She was in such bad shape that a priest had come to read her her last rites in the hospital. Martina visited Brandi at the hospital. “Her left side was all numb,” Martina says, “and that girl doesn’t even remember me being at the hospital visiting her.”
After that, Brandi left her husband for six months, and stayed with her children at her mother’s house. But then she’d eventually gone back, and Martina and the family had little contact, until the day Bresha showed up on Martina’s doorstep and refused to return home. Bresha begged to stay with Martina, said her father would kill them all if she went back. Martina called social services. She called the police. She got all sorts of people involved.
Brandi’s husband had broken her ribs and her fingers, given her black eyes.1 Brandi said she believed he once broke her nose—for which she never received treatment. Jonathan controlled their money, their social lives, their work lives (the couple worked together). She didn’t have a car of her own, had never had a bank account of her own. Brandi was so beat down she couldn’t think for herself, didn’t know how to make a decision, didn’t know how to keep her children safe. Martina would come to call it the worst case of domestic violence she’d ever witnessed.
A year later, Bresha ran away again. “Now she’s a little grownup and she comes to my house,” Martina tells Grace. “And I notice she has cut marks. She’s fourteen years old.”
Martina says Bresha was suicidal, needed to be hospitalized. Bresha told everyone she’d rather be dead than go back home to her father. “July twenty-eight,” Martina says, “she picked up her father’s gun and she shot her dad and killed him in his sleep.”
On that day, Martina got up early, let her little dogs out (Sammy, Barkley, Bosco), and noticed that she had text after text, missed call after missed call. It was 5:36 in the morning. Five thirty-six a.m. is the kind of detail someone who writes a lot of police reports would remember. She knew something was wrong, but she didn’t want to find out what, exactly. Her family was still recovering from the accidental overdose of one of Martina’s nephews; he’d been leaving Martina a voice mail when suddenly, his voice on the line just cut out. It turned out that he’d passed out, choked on his own vomit after taking some bad drugs, and died. Martina took it hard. The two of them had been close, and he’d left behind three little kids. Everyone, it seemed, in the whole family called Martina to help them out of their problems.
She let her dogs back in and saw her sister pull in the driveway. It was a sign of something truly terrible, something big enough that she felt a hammer of dread in her gut. Her sister gave her the news. Bresha had shot and killed her father.
Martina remembers stumbling backward, almost falling.
Minutes after she got the news, Martina’s phone rang. It was Bresha on the line. “Don’t you say a thing,” she told Bresha, knowing anything she said could be used in court. “Not a word, not a single word. Don’t even say my name. Do not talk until I get there.”
Martina tore down the highway in her car to Warren. By the time she reached the police department, Bresha’s story had hit the news. It spread immediately across Ohio, and before the end of the day, it would make major headlines, from the New York Times to the Daily Mail in the UK. Eventually, even outlets like People magazine and the Huffington Post covered it.
The story is so powerful it sits like a vapor in Grace’s living room. Grace’s eyes haven’t left Martina’s freckled face. Finally, Martina breaks the silence. “So your children see all this … When I tell you this affects your children, you got to stay the hell out of that house … You have to put them in a safe environment. If you cannot do that, I will step in.”
Grace promises. “I’ve dealt with this for years. I’m done.” She says part of why she stayed was that she was scared of shelters, and she had nowhere else to go. She’s staying now with one of her exes; her friend lives upstairs.
“Don’t let money or food make you go back,” Martina says, promising her that’s something they can help with.
“If you call me and tell me you changed your mind, which I expect you to, I am going to talk you out of it, but just know, I’m going to do my job. I’m going to call children’s services.”
For the first time, Grace half smiles. She tells Martina she is absolutely, one hundred percent sure. She is not going back this time.
The story of Martina’s niece and sister populates half the conversations I ever have with her. It’s as ubiquitous for her as her next-door neighbor’s homicide, and as present in every moment as the air around us. She tells me how prosecutors wanted to try Bresha as an adult, but Martina knew it would be the end of Bresha’s life if that happened. “She’d be just another young Black girl stuck in the system,” she told me. She promised Brandi she’d do all she could for Bresha, everything in her power, but Brandi had to follow Martina’s orders. Martina started a GoFundMe page to cover attorney’s fees for her niece. She spoke to the press, to anyone she could, about how this had happened. The hashtag #FreeBreshaNow became a symbol not just of the racial injustice in the judiciary and law enforcement, but a rallying cry for Black Lives Matter. Demonstrations cropped up for months in front of the Cleveland courthouse and even nationally in cities across the United States.
Jonathan’s sister, Talema Lawrence, in an interview with Vice News, said Bresha had killed her father in his sleep, when he was defenseless, which made her a murderer. But Jonathan’s family also said she needed mental health counseling to grapple with “her issues” and with what she’d done. They were adamant that domestic violence had “nothing to do with” the murder since she hadn’t killed him in the midst of an escalating fight. Advocates will recognize this scenario, the abused killing the abuser in his sleep. Sleep is that rare moment a fighter can’t fight back. Sleep is when abused women who’ve finally worked up the courage to fight back sometimes kill their abusers. (Others kill in a violent moment out of self-protection.) Many women across the country today languish in jail cells because their histories of domestic violence were barred in court in their own defenses.
The evidence of Jonathan’s violence had been substantial. In 2011, after the beating that landed her in the hospital, Brandi was granted a protection order. She spoke of his threats to kill her and kill the children if she ever tried to leave, his years of beatings, isolation, and control. She said she had to wake him in the middle of the night to ask if she could use the bathroom, so heightened was his paranoia that she was cheating on him. After the protection order was granted, she and her three children moved to where her parents were living by then, in Parma, Ohio. Those six months are the only time that Martina had much contact with Brandi at all.
Eventually, Jonathan convinced Brandi that things would be different. And the order of protection was dropped. Martina remembers her mother sobbing when Brandi returned. “We had just learned these horror stories of what he did to her … I was like, ‘Mom, she is going to do this, like, ten more times,’ ” Martina said. “They always go back.”
Martina knew she couldn’t force her sister to stay away from Jonathan. Brandi didn’t live in Martina’s jurisdiction, where she could have built some protections around her sister, and the local police department didn’t have a specialized domestic violence unit, or even one dedicated officer.2 (They did have a courthouse advocate.) Martina talked to the police station in Warren, told them who she was, who her sister was, about the family’s history. She elicited promises from them that they’d do what they could, drive by more often, make their presence known. Martina had little faith in this promise, but she felt there was not much she could really do until Brandi made the decision to leave. With every domestic violence expert I’ve ever spoken to, this is a crucial step: that a victim has to decide when enough is enough. “So for the next couple years we call [the police] to do checks,” Martina says. “They question her in front of him. She doesn’t say anything.”
This is the long-term fallout from a lifetime of violence directed toward you: the rewiring of a brain geared solely and entirely toward survival. A brain that reacts to being under constant attack will continue to send danger signals; increased levels of cortisol, adrenaline and other stress hormones, contributing to a vast constellation of physical and mental health issues. Disassociation is one of the more common issues, but victims of chronic domestic violence can also have a wide and long-term range of problems, from the emotional to the physical. They may have long-term cognitive loss, memory problems or sleep disorders. They may suffer from inattention or irritability. Some researchers link a host of physical ailments to unresolved trauma, including fibromyalgia and severe digestive issues. In his book The Body Keeps the Score, the author Bessel van der Kolk writes, “The most important job of the brain is to ensure our survival, even under the most miserable conditions … Terror increases the need for attachment, even if the source of comfort is also the source of terror.” Van der Kolk believes that while post-traumatic stress in soldiers garners the most attention these days, victims of trauma, including domestic violence, are “arguably the greatest threat to our national well-being.”3
Domestic situations, Martina told me, aren’t like any other calls that police get. With other situations, you take the call, make an arrest, write your report, and then you’re more or less done with that person. “In a zone car, you only get called to people’s nightmares,” she says. “Domestic is not the same … I do less cases, but they’re so much more involved.” It’s not uncommon for Martina to see a victim so often the two of them are on a first name basis. The cases are emotionally complicated for the victims, and often carry addiction issues and financial issues; Martina must take all of it into account when she advises clients or meets with prosecutors on any given case. Sometimes the barriers come from the victims themselves. There was a young girl, eighteen years old, that Martina and I visited one day. She’d scored a seven on her Danger Assessment. (The Cleveland team altered Campbell’s twenty questions to suit their territory, so their assessment has eleven questions total.) It wasn’t a particularly high score, but Martina knows how important it is to address violence when victims are young. Advocates have warned for years now about how often the cycle of abuse begins in one’s youth—teenage years, even pubescent years. And here was a teenager telling a detective she didn’t want to prosecute. Martina wanted to get face-to-face with this girl, even if she couldn’t convince her to change her mind. In fact, her primary goal wasn’t even getting the girl to court. Her primary goal was far simpler: she wanted this girl to hear from at least one adult that abuse was not normal.
The girl was still in high school, living at home with her mother. Her boyfriend’s brother was in the house at the same time we were there. The girl had left a voice mail for Martina earlier that day telling her to mind her own business, cussing her out. Martina called her back anyway, said she was on her way over even if the girl didn’t want to prosecute.
“If [your boyfriend] does something to you,” Martina told her shortly after we arrived, “I look like a failure, okay?”
“Okay,” the girl said. She had a large gash across her neck that she said was from a fight with a girl at school.
“Are you afraid of him?” Martina asked her.
“I mean, no,” said the girl. “Only certain times when we fight, yeah. But that’s normal. I went through it with my dad.”
Martina stopped writing and stared at the girl. “That’s not normal. Don’t you say that to me,” she said. “That is not normal. You listen to me. If you’re scared, that’s fine. You’re supposed to be scared; you’re a young girl. You take my card and you call me if that man touches you.”
Then Martina turned to the brother, who was pacing in the other room. “That’s your brother. What is wrong with you guys?”
“Not you guys,” he said. “I got some problems, too.”
“But he’s crazy, right?” she said. She didn’t roll her eyes, but she might as well have.
“Everybody’s crazy,” he said. “It’s how you handle it.”
The girl’s mother was in the bathroom, getting ready for work. We were standing at the kitchen table, beside a living room entirely devoid of even a single piece of furniture. “You can’t just be hitting people,” Martina said to him. “Would you agree?”
“I would agree,” he said. “Whatever you say.”
Which sounded, of course, like he didn’t agree at all.
In the end the court, perhaps bowing to public pressure, tried Martina’s niece as a child. She was held in a juvenile detention facility for a year and released in February of 2018. If she maintains good behavior, her records will be expunged when she is twenty-one. But for Martina, the story is ongoing. “The first fourteen years she was abused and then the last two she was incarcerated … so she hasn’t really been free free,” she says. She talks to her niece about once a week. And her sister Brandi is slowly learning how to operate in the world on her own. Martina has taught her basic finances, and she got her a car so Brandi could get herself back and forth to see her daughter, who was held several hours away from her home. Making sure Bresha doesn’t wind up the victim in her own abusive relationship as an adult is a nagging kind of existential concern for Martina. And in that, only time will tell.
Brandi and Bresha are an immersion for Martina into the particular emotional and psychological dynamics of a criminal act. It’s an unusual perch from which to see. Martina is not simply a cop sitting there telling a civilian what to do, pretending any of it is easy, pretending these problems aren’t part of her world, too. She’s grappled with this from nearly every possible angle: public, private, professional, personal. She sits in court and sees it. She sees versions of Brandi and Bresha and Jonathan every single day. Not just the crime and punishment, but the terrible and terrific toll of violence—the whether and the how you rebuild your life, and the whether and how you convince your children to make different choices than you made. The ancestral manifestation of emotional and physical terror.
Before we leave Grace’s house, Martina does a few minutes of safety planning. They talk about schedules, about Grace’s job. About whether she can alter it some or alter her route to work or enter and exit a secured door so that Byron can’t track her so easily. She calls Mark back into the room and says if he sees Byron on his way to or from school, he is to run as fast as he can to the nearest house and call the police. “You get the hell away from him. Open a door and go right in. Call the police. Be loud. Jump in someone’s car. I don’t care. But what I don’t want—and not to scare you, Mark—is for him to grab you and then tell your mom. Then we got a big problem.”
Joey flops his body from the kitchen onto the floor of the living room. “Joey?!” Martina says with a giant grin, “What’s goin’ on?”
He ignores her. Monkeys up his mother.
“He is going to kill you,” Martina says to Grace. “I am telling you. This is the most crucial time. You have to figure, his whole world just came to an end, right? You were his punching bag, his target with that gun.”
Grace wipes at Joey’s face with her tissue. Mark does not seem at all taken aback by Martina’s candor. His stepfather’s violence is well known to him.
Martina gives Grace a bus ticket to get to court because she doesn’t own a car. She has Grace program 911 into her cell phone speed dial for efficiency. She reminds Grace that she’s on her way toward freedom, toward getting her life back. “Quit looking at the bad things you did. Look at the good things,” she says. “You called the police. You agreed to meet with me. You let me take photos. We did the protection order. We’re getting the warrant out.” By the time we leave, Grace is smiling, is making promises to Martina, and Joey’s back in the kitchen, trampolining on the chairback.
Before she leaves, Martina stands at the screen door and turns around to Grace. She asks about the police who came when Grace called, the ones who first took the order. “Were they nice to you?” Martina asks her.
“Oh,” Grace says, “they were very nice.”
“Good,” Martina says. She asks every client this same question. Were the police nice? Did they do their job? Were they polite? No one requires her to ask this question, she just does. The Cleveland police, she is well aware, have long had a reputation for corruption, for racial profiling. The Tamir Rice killing thrust the force into the national spotlight more than any other event in recent history. “The hardest thing to do is call the police on someone,” she tells me later. “Everyone has a bad day, but it’s important to me to know how people view the police. It should be important to the police to know how people feel.”
“How do you feel now?” Martina asks Grace.
“I feel everything,” Grace tells her. “Happy, sad, scared.”
When Byron goes before the judge, he will be put on a GPS bracelet. And he’ll face multiple charges in court that include felonious assault, endangering children, kidnapping, and intimidation, among others.
Later, over pizza, Martina takes a call from Grace. Byron has stolen her credit card and run up a bunch of charges. Martina goes through the steps of what Grace should do: call the credit card company, get a new card, cancel the old one, keep a record of it all. Martina says she’ll add it to her report. It’s the kind of thing that is maybe beyond the scope of her job, but she takes these calls anyway. “When I have to handle your case, there’s a big problem,” she says, as she hangs up with Grace. “But I try to be the detective that I wanted my sister to have.”
More than a year passes, and I catch up with Martina on the phone late one winter afternoon. Grace held out for a long time, months, much longer than Martina thought she would. But then, just as Martina had predicted, Grace recanted. Instead of jail time, Byron got probation. And Grace? The last Martina heard she’d taken Byron back. Before we hang up, Martina makes one last prediction: “I’m sure I’ll hear from her again.”