“If someone is threatening you, you take heed to what they are saying. Because the person you think loves you, sometimes they don’t love you.”
—TAMIKA TOMPKINS, SURVIVOR
Tamika Tompkins settled back in her hospital bed and admired her new baby girl sleeping in the clear bassinet. It was January 28, 2012, and Sanaa Nia was two days old, with a full head of hair and a strong cry. She also had a big appetite, which kept Tamika awake half the night as she comforted and fed her second child. Big sister Amora, a vibrant two-year-old, was with Tamika’s mom. Tamika could not wait to be together again the next day when doctors said she and Sanaa could go home.
Lulled by the rhythm of Sanaa’s deep breaths, Tamika decided a nap was a good idea. Better to relax now before she was home trying to manage a toddler and a newborn. Tamika drifted off into a light sleep, the only kind of rest a watchful new mom could expect. She smelled her daughter’s sweet scent on her own skin as she dreamed to the sound of raindrops falling outside her window at Newark Beth Israel Hospital.
Tamika’s eyes flickered. Something caused her to wake up—maybe it was the motion in the hospital room; maybe it was her mother’s instinct. As Tamika opened her eyes, she saw that the bassinet was empty. Panic raced through her veins as she tried to reconcile how this was possible. Had the nurses taken Sanaa for tests? Tamika squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again, wondering if her sleep-deprived brain was blurring her vision. Sanaa had to still be in there; she must have just missed her the first time.
No, the bassinet was definitely empty. Tamika turned her head on the pillow to scan the hospital room. And that was when she saw him. Sitting calmly in the upholstered lounge chair cradling their baby in his arms. Gazing down at Sanaa’s delicate features that so closely mirrored his own.
How did he know where to find them? Who told him she had given birth to their daughter? Tamika’s stomach immediately went into knots and her palms were sweating. She stifled a scream in her throat and willed herself to stay calm. The same hands that had punched her were now holding her precious new baby.
“That was the scariest thing,” Tamika remembers. “Like something in a horror movie. I didn’t want to say anything because I was afraid he would hurt the baby.”
It was the first time Tamika had seen her ex-boyfriend in eight months. That was when she filed the restraining order against him, after he punched her in the face but before either of them knew she was carrying their baby. Tamika pretended to sleep while monitoring his every move. When the nurse finally came in, Tamika quietly told her that the baby’s father needed to leave, that he wasn’t allowed to be there. Rahman Nichols stood up without any objection and carefully returned his daughter to the nurse’s arms and disapproving stare. Tamika refused to meet his glare and ignored him as he left the hospital room, but she had a haunting feeling that he would be back.
Tamika Tompkins and Rahman Nichols met in November of 2009 after being introduced by Tamika’s cousin, who was also Rahman’s neighbor in Newark, New Jersey. Tamika had just given birth to Amora and was living by herself with her infant daughter in an apartment on South Orange Avenue. It was a lonely time—being a first-time mom, hungry for advice and guidance but not speaking with her mother or grandmother due to a long-simmering feud. She had broken up with Amora’s father months before her birth, and he rarely came by to see his daughter.
At first, Tamika says she was apprehensive, not only about Rahman, but also about getting close to anyone. “He just showed up one day and we talked for hours outside on my front porch,” she said, adding, “I wouldn’t let him inside the house.”
As their friendship deepened, Tamika felt Rahman represented the stability she craved. “He was financially secure. He would go to the park with me and Amora. When she was old enough to talk, she called him Daddy.” Within six months, the couple had moved to an apartment in nearby Irvington together.
There were warning signs that Tamika says she ignored or faced social pressure to overlook. Rahman never said much about his family other than implying that he had a traumatic childhood. Tamika was stunned to learn that his relatives lived locally, a fact she discovered only when a woman identifying herself as Rahman’s mother approached her on the sidewalk in Irvington one afternoon. “‘Rahman is my only child; he always got everything he wanted,’” Tamika says the woman told her. “‘He may tell you that I was on drugs or that I abandoned him. It’s not true. If you’re smart, stay away from him.’” Shaken, Tamika asked the woman to never contact her again and hurried away.
Once Tamika discovered Rahman’s parents lived nearby, she says he did everything he could to prevent her from speaking with them. Upon learning his father was at the park pushing Amora in a swing, Tamika says, Rahman raced over and ordered him to leave. He would get inexplicable phone calls from his uncle at four a.m. that would prompt him to leave the apartment. His mood was sour when he returned from those outings, and Tamika never understood why.
All along, Tamika says Rahman was trying to program her to believe that she belonged to him. “He would say, ‘You can’t leave me alone; I can’t live without you.’ It wasn’t enough for him to say he loved me. It was like I couldn’t exist without him,” she recalls.
And then there were the arguments. “His habit was breaking things,” Tamika remembers. “He would sometimes shove me or push me, but nothing that would leave a mark. He didn’t want anyone to know.”
Tamika says she first called the police on Rahman in 2010, even before they moved in together. He was pacing back and forth through her Newark apartment, in a rage over something he imagined Tamika had done. Baby Amora was agitated, crying uncontrollably because of the jarring noises of the screaming and the tension in the air. When he heard Tamika on the phone with the 911 operator, Rahman gathered his things, walking past Amora’s crib to gently rub her head on the way out.
This isn’t over, Tamika, he mumbled under his breath as he stormed out of the apartment, not bothering to close the door behind him.
After she hung up with the police, Tamika called her mother, Trudy, and asked her to come over. The police showed up a few minutes later. Her mother wasn’t far behind.
Do you want to press charges? the responding officer asked.
No, Tamika answered. I just want him to leave me alone.
Do you want to file a restraining order? the officer asked.
No, she doesn’t want to do that; that won’t be necessary, Trudy answered for her daughter. Tamika nodded silently in agreement. Maybe Rahman would stop, she thought. Maybe he would calm down. Calling the police on him this time will scare him and it won’t happen again.
“I always try to look for the good in people and I was hoping he would change,” Tamika says. “And as scared as I was of him, I was also scared of my mom. I was afraid to stand up to her.”
A few more questions and the paperwork was complete. The Newark officers left the apartment with instructions to call again if she needed them. Tamika picked up Amora and collapsed onto the couch. The fear and adrenaline she had felt earlier had given way to a heavy exhaustion. Her mother washed a few dishes for her in the sink and came over to say goodbye.
You have a good man in Rahman, Tamika recalls her mom saying. He’s not perfect, but he is a provider and he will take care of you and Amora.
“I would never want my children to think just because someone has money you should stay with them,” Tamika remembers. “But that was not the message I was getting. I went along with what other people said, and I should have listened to my own advice.”
Within an hour, Rahman was back in the apartment.
By the spring of 2011, Tamika finally put an end to the relationship. She filed for a restraining order after she says Rahman kicked her in the back and punched her in the eye. Closed fist, as hard as he could. She didn’t bother to call her mother after she dialed 911 that time. The violence was escalating, and Tamika was terrified at the fury she saw in Rahman’s face as he came after her.
In addition to the abuse, Tamika had existing medical issues to consider. When she was ten years old, she fell down a flight of stairs. For years after that, she suffered from chronic headaches and was eventually diagnosed with epilepsy at age eighteen. She feared that the beatings from Rahman and the stress of living with him were exacerbating her condition, and she worried when she would black out and forget what happened for minutes or even an hour. Tamika’s seizures were happening more frequently, and the medication the neurologist prescribed was barely working.
What Tamika did not know when she cut ties with Rahman was that she was newly pregnant with their daughter. She had no contact with him during the pregnancy—at least, no contact that she initiated. He would call and text her incessantly. Baby items like a crib and a car seat would suddenly materialize, and Tamika suspected he was funneling the gifts through friends and relatives. She had not wanted him to know she was carrying their child and she felt that telling him was a kindness he didn’t deserve. But somehow, Rahman knew. Someone from Tamika’s family was still talking to him.
“He couldn’t stand it,” Tamika said. “He couldn’t take the fact that I had ended it and that I wouldn’t talk to him.”
Amora was the first one to hear the front door open. It was close to midnight on March 8, 2012, six weeks after Rahman showed up at the hospital uninvited.
Tamika and her two daughters were alone in her mother’s living room in East Orange, New Jersey. Her mother was working the overnight shift at the post office. Tamika and Amora were sleeping on the couch together and Sanaa was just steps away from the door in her crib. Tamika had decided to stay with her mother for a few days to get some help with the girls and try to sleep for more than three hours for a change.
Daddy! Amora squealed with delight. She ran toward the entry where Rahman had just let himself in. The two-year-old grabbed for his legs, embracing him so hard that her face pressed up against his knees.
Tamika shot up off the couch. Her eyes were wide with horror.
Rahman did not acknowledge Amora’s enthusiastic greeting. He stared straight ahead at Tamika and tracked her every move as she lunged to pry Amora off his legs, to get her child away from the man she already knew was there to kill her.
Tamika grabbed Amora back with all her strength. As soon as he could reach her, Rahman began punching Tamika, over and over again. With every blow, Tamika held on tighter to Amora, blocking her daughter from the violence and using her own body as a human shield. As Amora screamed, Tamika secured her with her left arm and raised her right arm to fight back, to try to defend herself. That was when she saw the blood dripping down her arm onto the beige living room carpet. That was when she realized that Rahman wasn’t punching her—he was stabbing her with a knife.
She would feel the intense, searing pain later, but during the attack Tamika only remembers the surge of adrenaline. The determination to survive and to save her babies. Tamika fought for as long as she could and then collapsed on the floor. Rahman had stabbed her in her right arm, her right leg, her back, and her chest. Blood was everywhere— on the curtains, the carpet, and the furniture. Rahman’s clothes and hands were covered in blood. His eyes were cold as he surveyed the room. Tamika was lying still on the floor. He put the knife in his jacket pocket and wiped his hands on his jeans. Tamika remembers he stopped by the crib holding his infant daughter and reached down to calmly pull the blanket over Sanaa’s face, before opening the door and walking out into the unseasonably warm March night.
Tamika’s eyes opened slowly as soon as she heard the door close behind him. Standing over her, Amora was still as a statue, staring down at her mother bleeding on the floor.
Amora, get me my phone. Bring Mommy the phone; it’s right there on the table.
Tamika’s voice was weak but insistent. She closed her eyes and waited. And then she felt the weight of her toddler lying down on her chest. Amora could see that her mother was hurting and wanted to give her a hug.
“She pressed down real hard to stop the bleeding. I lay down like I was dead. And she laid on top of me,” Tamika recalls.
Tamika dialed 911 with her uninjured left hand, put the call on speaker, and placed the phone on the carpet. “I was bleeding really badly,” Tamika remembers. “Especially on my chest; there was a stab wound under my right breast near the rib. And that’s where Amora was hugging me. It was like she knew. The weight of her on that spot stopped the bleeding and saved my life.”
Paramedics arrived and rushed Tamika to the hospital, where she would endure the first of four surgeries. She doesn’t remember much after she got in the ambulance, but she does remember detectives coming to the hospital overnight with a photo of Rahman Nichols.
Tamika was dazed from her injuries and the medication the doctors had given her. One detective showed her a photo and asked, Is this him, Tamika? Is this the person who did this to you?
Yeah, that’s him, Tamika said, instinctively turning away from his image.
Let’s go get him, the detective said.
According to what Tamika says police later told her, Rahman Nichols left her bleeding to death and went straight to his grandmother’s house. Sitting in the living room, he was completely still, staring at the blank television screen in front of him. He hadn’t changed his clothes, hadn’t even washed his hands since he walked inside.
His father entered the room, turned on the lights, and did a double take. His twenty-eight-year-old son was covered in blood.
Rahman! What happened? Are you hurt? Are you all right?
I just killed Tamika, Rahman responded flatly, his eyes half closed as if he was in a trance.
You what? his father responded, disbelieving.
Rahman blinked slowly, opened his eyes wider, and turned to look his father in the eye.
I just killed Tamika, he repeated slowly.
You sit right there, Rahman. I’m going to the kitchen to get you a cloth to wipe your hands, his father said, backing out of the room, his eyes never leaving his son. When he got to the kitchen, he dialed 911, his hands shaking. His son was arrested several hours later on March 9, 2012.
I’m still not sure who emailed the tip to Eyewitness News in New York City on Sunday, March 11. The person wrote that a young woman had been stabbed twenty-seven times by her ex-boyfriend. She was in intensive care at University Hospital in Newark with a punctured lung and a lacerated kidney. The email said that the victim had a restraining order against her ex but that he had found her regardless. Tamika Tompkins wanted to talk, the tipster added.
Getting an on-camera interview with a person in intensive care in a hospital is virtually impossible, even if the patient is inviting you inside. Hospitals are large corporations with dozens of gatekeepers. You don’t simply walk into the lobby with a TV camera and expect the security guard to wave you upstairs. Just like when we interviewed Paul Esposito in the hospital after he lost his legs in the Staten Island Ferry crash, every request for media access needs to go through a public relations department. Reporters and photographers must be accompanied by a “minder,” someone to escort the crew to ensure that we are confining our newsgathering to the one patient we are authorized to see. HIPAA laws require hospitals to closely guard all patients’ privacy, and they are rightly concerned about limiting video in hallways and other high-traffic areas.
Upon receiving the tip, my colleagues on the Eyewitness News assignment desk and I called and emailed the hospital’s public relations department. An hour or two went by, and still no word back. It was a Sunday afternoon in 2012, a few years before everyone had their email on a smartphone in their pocket at all times. Back when a weekend was really a weekend and work emails weren’t always a click away.
Photographer Jon Liles and I drove to Newark in the live truck and parked on Bergen Street outside the hospital so we would be ready to meet Tamika as soon as the hospital approval came through. As they often do, viewers approached the dark blue news van, knocking on the window and motioning us to roll it down. “What happened here? What story are you working on?” they asked. “Nothing yet,” we responded. “Tune in tonight at eleven.”
As the hours passed and it started to get dark, there was still no response from the hospital. Exasperated by the red tape and the delay, I called my managers in the newsroom with a proposal. “I don’t want to wait anymore. This story is important and it’s exclusive,” I said. “I think I should just go upstairs with my iPad in my purse and record the interview myself.”
After all, the philosophy of Eyewitness News was to prioritize the person at the center of the story: the eyewitness. We told their stories from their perspective. Of course, we interviewed and confirmed details with the authorities—police, politicians, hospital administrators. But they always came second to the eyewitness.
I had already spoken with Tamika on the phone and knew she was eager to get her story on the news. I marveled at her courage and tenacity. A woman with twenty-seven stab wounds was not thinking of herself. She was motivated by a concern for other women in our community, other people who might have dismissed abusive behavior by their partners, or who may have felt a false sense of security because they had a restraining order. She wanted to say to them, Look what happened to me. This could happen to you too.
“I wanted to let people know, if you’re going through it right now, get out while you can,” Tamika says. For a woman who considers herself shy, she was willing to bare her soul at her most vulnerable moment in the hopes that she would save someone else.
We eventually agreed that I would get through hospital security as a visitor, which indeed I was. Tamika put me on her approved list, and I got my visitor sticker and rode the elevator upstairs to the ICU. I kept my head down and strode with purpose through the hospital hallways, hoping no one would stop me to ask where I was going and why. A rule-follower by nature, I felt at once nervous and exhilarated by the ruse. I reviewed the plan repeatedly in my head: go to Tamika’s hospital room, record her interview on the iPad, ask the most important questions first in case security was called and I got kicked out, share the iPad video links immediately with Jon in the live truck downstairs in case the device was confiscated. This last detail was probably an overreaction, but I was not taking any chances.
Tamika had an oxygen tube in her nose and was lying back in her bed when I entered her room. The machines monitoring her vital signs hummed and beeped in the background. She was wearing a hospital gown and winced with every move, her entire body in agony. Her cousin Chaka Gorham met us near the door.
“I was nervous about the news being there, but I also felt it was motivational for other women,” Chaka remembers. “They could learn from what she had been through.”
Chaka guided me over to Tamika’s bedside. “Tamika, how are you? I’m so sorry,” I said, keeping my voice down. “I know you must be in pain; are you sure you want to do this?” Chaka, a nurse herself, had reassured me that Tamika wanted to talk. Still, I worried that she would regret the decision to speak with us when the medication wore off. I knew her ex was under arrest, but I still wondered if we would be putting her in even more danger by airing her story. I pulled up a chair next to her bed. I touched her left hand lightly to greet her, afraid that doing anything more would hurt her. Despite my apprehensions, I agreed with Tamika that her story deserved to be heard.
I didn’t want to linger too long on small talk—I knew the interview itself would be exhausting for Tamika, and I was paranoid about getting caught. As we had discussed on the phone, I asked her to tell me about the stabbing that had happened just three days before.
“If someone is threatening you, you take heed to what they are saying. Because the person you think loves you, sometimes they don’t love you,” Tamika said.
She spoke confidently and passionately on camera, despite being on morphine and other painkillers. Chaka helped Tamika sit up to show me some of the stab wounds on her back. It wasn’t enough for Tamika to warn people about the danger of abusive relationships; she wanted to show the world what she had endured. I focused the iPad lens on the seven stitched-up wounds on her right side, stunned that there were twenty more elsewhere on her body.
“He had been calling me, texting me, dozens of times a day. Telling me he couldn’t live without me and that I never should have left him. But even after I got the restraining order, I never thought he was crazy like this,” Tamika said, gesturing at her injuries with her good hand.
“He was overbearing, and Tamika had started to isolate herself from our family. We saw her less, so it was harder to recognize all the signs of the abuse,” Chaka explained.
I left Tamika’s hospital room less than half an hour after I had arrived. I didn’t want to press my luck, and I still needed to go to her grandmother’s house in East Orange, where I had arranged to interview her family. Tamika’s mother, Trudy, was now caring for six-week-old Sanaa and two-year-old Amora.
Sitting in her mother’s living room, Trudy told me more about the history of Tamika and Rahman’s relationship and her daughter’s efforts to end it. She told me about her love for her granddaughters as we watched Amora run around and play with her toys on the carpet. Jon was capturing it all on video, to illustrate the miracle of this toddler who had saved her mother’s life with a hug. My younger daughter was also two years old at the time. As I marveled at what Amora had done for her mother, I was troubled by what this innocent child had endured and what memories she might carry with her. Trudy shared that ever since the attack, Amora had been having nightmares.
The exclusive report aired Sunday night at eleven p.m. on ABC in New York to a large audience that included dozens of Tamika’s friends and family members who weren’t yet aware that her ex-boyfriend had tried to murder her. Tamika will never know how many people heard her story and decided to leave their own abusive relationships. She will never know how many people she saved.
Over more than two decades working as a reporter, I have reported on far too many stories about women who have been killed by their partners, where the person with whom she shared a home, her children, and her trust betrays her in the most horrific way. Each of these stories is a tragedy, not just because of the loss of life, but also because family members frequently tell us that the victim had tried to get help. That her murder was preventable if only she had received the support she needed.
One of the first stories I covered when I moved to Syracuse for my second job in TV news was a house fire in the hamlet of Romulus, New York. On November 3, 2001, Cheryl Parsons had moved out of the house she shared with her husband, Eric. She told her friends and family that he was abusive. She was not only looking out for herself—the couple had four young children: Eric Jr., Erica, Katelyn, and David. Cheryl accepted the responsibility of caring for the children on her own and was determined to get a fresh start.
The first night in the new house must have been chaotic for Cheryl with four children under age six—trying to get everything unpacked, figure out which children were going to sleep in which rooms, and settle them down for bed.
The second night, Eric Parsons followed through on his threat that his family couldn’t live without him. Investigators would later say he used his knowledge as a volunteer firefighter to light the house on fire with some sort of accelerant. He waited until the fire was raging hot and got just close enough to get slightly burned. Police said he then neglected to tell a passerby that his family was still inside the burning home, instead driving more than five miles to a convenience store for help. Wearing only his underwear, he asked people at the store to call 911, explaining that he had managed to escape the flames but his family was trapped.
There were no survivors. Cheryl and their four children were all killed in the fire. After initially playing the grieving husband and father, Eric Parsons was arrested three weeks later and charged in the deaths of his young family. He is currently serving a sentence of twenty-five years to life at Green Haven Correctional Facility and will be eligible for release in 2026.1
As much as I dreaded knocking on her door that first day I was assigned to the story, Cheryl’s mother, Joyce Brink, took an instant liking to me. Perhaps because I was the same age as her daughter, she trusted me to tell her story with compassion. I sat with her in her home and pored over photo albums of her smiling daughter and four grandchildren for close to an hour before the camera was turned on for the interview. Joyce wanted the community to remember her daughter and grandchildren for their joyful lives, and not just for the horrifying way they died.
I remember thinking about how it was possible that Cheryl was six months younger than I was and had four kids. Twenty-three years old with four babies. The past six years when I had been living in a Columbia dorm with my friends, traveling abroad to Paris to take art history classes, interning at CNN, reporting from the Bronx in grad school, and anchoring the evening news in Binghamton, New York, Cheryl had been caring for her children. Our young adult lives could not have been more different. It was hard for me to fathom how much life Cheryl had already lived, and how it had all been so unjustly taken away from her.
Perhaps because it was one of the first traumatic stories I covered up close, I found myself thinking incessantly about Cheryl and her kids. I would be shopping at the grocery store or filling up my car with gas and their smiling faces would flash in my mind. Joyce sensed how much I cared about her family and reciprocated by demonstrating a kindness and generosity that still gives me pause. It is the same selfless instinct that I would see in Tamika eleven years later. The ability to penetrate through their own grief to thank me for bearing witness to their family tragedies. The strength to tell their stories through a haze of anguish and pain to ensure that the public knew the truth.
A month after her daughter and all her grandchildren were murdered, Joyce took the time to mail me a Christmas card to the NewsChannel 9 office in East Syracuse. Inside she wrote, “You’re a fine young woman and I’m sure your parents are very proud of you, and deservedly so. Your caring manner should take you far. Thank you for being so considerate when you came to my home.”
I will always treasure that card and I keep it in my home office to this day. Joyce absolved me of the guilt I felt for intruding on her during the most exquisitely painful experience of her life. She reminded me of the essential role that my colleagues and I play in our community. Yes, we had to report the news of a mother and her four children who had been killed. Yes, we had to cover the story of the husband’s arrest and later conviction. But by going to Joyce’s home, by spending time with her and listening to her memories, we also reinforced that the community would be there to support her. That we would never forget. Just like Tamika, Joyce will never know how many people escaped from abusive relationships after hearing the story she shared.
During her lengthy hospital stay, Tamika learned to write and do other tasks with her left hand. Even after grueling physical therapy sessions, she could barely make her right hand into a fist. Doctors briefly discussed amputating her lower right leg with its disfigured ankle, but the swelling subsided and she learned to grit her teeth through the agony. When the pain became unbearable, Tamika let her mind wander to a happier place, far away from the stress and the violence.
“When I was a kid, my father used to take my brothers and me out on the boat in North Carolina and we would go fishing. We loved catching the fish and then eating them for dinner that night. Being out there on the water, it was so peaceful,” she remembered.
In between physical therapy sessions, Tamika would watch crime shows on TV: Criminal Minds, Law and Order: SVU, and Dateline. When the episodes featured domestic violence, she found it strangely affirming.
“You hear other people’s problems, and you feel like you aren’t the only one,” she said.
By the time Tamika left the hospital, Sanaa had spent more time without her mother than she ever spent with her. The baby cried when she was placed in Tamika’s lap, turning away and reaching for her grandmother. Tamika was heartbroken when she could barely grasp her right hand around a bottle to feed her own child. She was unable to prepare food for Amora when she said she was hungry, and soon, her older daughter stopped asking. Tamika’s body no longer did what was required, but it was her mind that was in real trouble.
It started with comments about how she could not walk properly. The same woman who ran the 200-meter race and 4x400 relay in high school now required a cane if she was going farther than her own driveway. At age twenty-six, Tamika was frustrated by how slowly she moved, and the extent of her injuries made it impossible to keep up with Amora. The shiny new skin around the stab wounds tugged painfully every time she moved, and Tamika felt she could never get comfortable, even when she was sitting still.
Look at how she walks now, slow like an old woman, Tamika remembers her mother saying to relatives who came to the house. Quietly enough that it sounded like a secret, but loudly enough that Tamika could hear.
Just like she did that afternoon when the police showed up at her apartment in Newark, Tamika kept quiet. She knew her mom would laugh it off if she was confronted, saying she was joking. Don’t take everything so seriously, she would scold.
Tamika says that years of being intimidated by her mother had made being quiet a habit. Tamika had learned to suppress her anger to avoid a fight. Tamika recalls she and Trudy had a tumultuous relationship long before Rahman came into the picture. According to her daughter and niece, Trudy did not want to be interviewed for this book, so her perspective remains a mystery.
“When I was a teenager, my friends would go to school, come home, eat properly. I didn’t always have that,” Tamika says. When she and her mother were fighting—which they frequently were—she would sleep at friends’ houses until they reconciled. Then she would go back home until the cycle began anew.
“I was in a performing arts program and I was supposed to be practicing the piano every day,” Tamika remembers. “But how could I practice when I didn’t even know where I was going to sleep at night?”
Tamika’s uncertainty and isolation began to erode some of her friendships. She withdrew from her childhood friends and started spending more time alone.
“I didn’t always want to talk to people,” Tamika explains. Her silence could be misinterpreted, and some classmates thought she was weird.
“I could still have fun, but I would always be the one who was really quiet,” she remembers.
On May 5, 2012, shortly after she returned home from the hospital, Tamika stopped being quiet. Her anger and frustration that had been seething beneath the surface were about to be revealed, as raw as the new skin forming around her wounds.
It all started when Tamika had been trying to change Sanaa’s diaper. The three-month-old was squirming around, and Tamika’s fingers couldn’t grip the adhesive tapes to seal the clean diaper closed. After watching her daughter struggle, Trudy walked over, secured the diaper, and turned to go into the backyard. With the kitchen window open to let the spring air inside, Tamika says she heard her mother disparaging her to a relative.
She can’t even take care of her own children, Tamika remembers hearing her mother say.
Tamika’s boiling rage clouded her better judgment. She grabbed a knife from the kitchen counter. The same kind of weapon that had been used against her was now aimed squarely at her mother. Tamika felt a sense of power and wondered if this was how Rahman felt when he stood over her. The sense of impending doom coupled with the temporary satisfaction at finally being in total control.
I heard what you said, Tamika says she yelled out the window. Why don’t you stab yourself up and see how I feel?
She pointed the knife at her mom with her left hand and threw it out the window.
The knife missed.
Her mother screamed.
Tamika had a seizure.
Trudy called for an ambulance.
By the time Tamika remembers waking up in the hospital, the police were there too.
Tamika was charged with aggravated assault. The police asked Trudy if she wanted a restraining order against Tamika. She declined. Bail was set at $5,000 with a 10 percent option. Someone from the family would need to secure $500 to let Tamika leave the Essex County Jail to go home to her daughters, to let her go home to rest and recover.
But no one came. Tamika remained in jail for more than six months waiting to be bailed out. During the crucial time when she should have been in physical therapy for her injuries and in counseling after her emotional trauma, she was locked in a cell with limited medical and psychiatric care. A grand jury finally declined to indict her on the aggravated assault charge and she was released from jail on November 19, 2012.2
By the time Tamika got home, Sanaa was learning to walk. Amora was in preschool. And Tamika says Trudy refused to let her back in the house. Tamika slept on the porch of her grandparents’ house and called Chaka and her aunt in Upstate New York for help. Finally, Trudy relented and Tamika moved back home. It felt like high school all over again. Within a couple of months, Tamika regained custody of her girls and moved out.
“No matter what she’s been through, Tamika has a good heart,” her cousin Chaka said. “She always tries to do right by her children, even if it means that she has to sacrifice doing things for herself.”
Exactly one year after her hospital interview aired, on March 11, 2013, Tamika sat silently in Essex County Court for what she hoped would be the last time she would ever see Rahman Ali Nichols. As he waited to hear his sentence for attempted murder, he asked to address the court.
“I don’t know what came over me… . What’s done is done,” Nichols said. “I just want to know if I’ll ever be able to see my baby again… . It didn’t have to happen. I wish it didn’t, but it did. I can’t take it back, but I apologize.”3
Khalil Nichols, a youth counselor and Rahman’s uncle, spoke on his nephew’s behalf and said he hoped Rahman would receive mental health treatment in prison. “I’m just hoping he gets the chance to rehabilitate himself and be the man that he’s trying to be, and just stop this ongoing situation,” Khalil said. “It’s a tragedy all around … and particularly for the young child that’s in the middle of it that’s going to have to grow up without a father present.”4
Tamika listened to the proceedings but stayed quiet, opting not to offer a victim impact statement.
The judge noted that Rahman had seventeen arrests as a juvenile and sixteen more arrests as an adult. He had spent time in mental health facilities but continued to struggle. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison and was ordered to have no contact with Tamika. He is eligible for parole on December 7, 2024.
“She never changed the carpet. Just got it cleaned, to get the bloodstains out.” Tamika is talking about her own blood, scrubbed out of the floor in her mother’s living room. Her blood was also laundered out of the draperies before they were pressed and hung again over the windows.
The living room looks the same as it did on that March day in 2012. Tamika is back home, living with her mother again. She has four children now—Amora, Sanaa, and a younger son and daughter. She says she can’t move on as long as she’s still sitting in that same room where she fought for her life almost a decade ago. She admits she feels trapped.
“As long as I am in this house, I will never feel safe,” she says ruefully.
She has tried to work—jobs at Sears and Whole Foods. But every time, her arm swells up and her hand can’t move. She needs to sit down because her leg is stiff. Her injuries are a constant, throbbing reminder of what she has endured. If she gains weight, her skin pulls across the scars and the tightness is unbearable. She asks her children to hold her hand, only to look down and see that they have already grasped it, the hand so numb she didn’t realize. Tamika tried to make it on her own, living independently in her own apartment. She even lived briefly with the children in a shelter. But now she is back home with her mother again.
“She wants to be independent, but she can’t because if she has a seizure, it’s not safe for her to be alone,” Chaka explains. “She does everything she can for her kids, helping them with homework and giving them strict rules so they won’t have to depend on other people when they grow up.”
Tamika’s experience in the hospital and later in jail made it even harder for her to trust people. Amora and Sanaa were rarely allowed to have friends over at their apartment. Tamika would avoid the other mothers at the park. When she saw a man approaching on the sidewalk, she would instruct her daughters to cross the street. The woman who used to see the best in people could now only see them as potential threats. She keeps up with her friends on social media, but rarely gets together in person. She is ashamed of the way her scarred body looks and wears long-sleeved shirts and pants, even on hot summer days. Tamika knows her protective instinct has influenced her daughters, and she wonders if she went too far.
“Amora never lets me out of her sight. If I go to the store, she wants to come with me. She won’t leave my side.”
I see this for myself when Tamika and I walk around her neighborhood in East Orange. Amora and Sanaa walk fifty feet in front of us, just out of earshot. When they get to the corner, Amora won’t turn until we catch up to them. Just like she did when she was a toddler lying on her mother’s chest, she wants to know that Tamika is safe.
Tamika says Sanaa looks exactly like her father. She hasn’t worked up the courage yet to tell Sanaa the truth about her dad. When Sanaa asks about her mother’s scars, Tamika tells her, “Mommy got hurt a long time ago.” Tamika is afraid of what Sanaa will think if she knows her father tried to kill her mother. Will she fear that the same rage lives within her?
By the time Rahman is eligible for parole in 2024, Tamika wants to be far away.
“I used to be able to do hair really well,” she remembers. “I would love to be able to open my own salon, not have to work for anyone else. I would get away from New Jersey, go somewhere quiet where I could sit back and drink my coffee and look at the trees. Where I could have a garden that I plant with beautiful flowers.”
Tamika says she’s not ready to focus on her own goals. For now, her priority is being a loving mother to her four children. “I want them to make different choices than I did,” she says. “When they see something wrong, I want them to listen to their inner voice. I don’t want them to be quiet like I was.”
Tamika does not have the resources to move away from New Jersey just yet, but she is planting that flower garden and watering it with hope.
“Sanaa and I planted marigolds and sunflowers last weekend,” she told me, a few days after her family celebrated Amora’s graduation from middle school. “Amora planted tiger lilies. We’ll see if they bloom.”
“I’m sure they’ll grow in your backyard,” I reassured her. “They’re beautiful flowers, plus they’re resilient and strong.”
“Just like me,” Tamika replied. “They sound just like me.”