The Gun Industry Fed Me and Failed Me: Part 6
Patriot’s Day
Previous parts: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
Weapon/Subject:
Various firearms /Husband #2
The Victim-Witness Coordinator’s words echoed in my head, my heart keeping time hammering through my blouse. I wondered if the microphones in the court room were picking it up.
“You’re the best victim we’ve ever had.”
She didn’t meant it how it sounded, and we’d grown close enough over the preceding months that I knew it was a compliment. She still corrected herself, saying she only meant they’d never had someone remain so level-headed, so understanding of the process, so mindful of the importance of things like evidence preservation and validation of accusations by independent witnesses, sometimes coworkers or innocent bystanders at the grocery store.
Have you ever stood in a parking lot and asked the gentleman pushing a cart out next to you to please make note of the green pickup truck sitting there, and of the person in it, and the personalized license plate, and the gestures he is making, and apologize in advance that he is getting dragged into this vortex of ridiculousness, but can you please get his name and contact information and that a police officer or prosecutor may want to interview him?
No? Okay.
Delivering my victim impact statement at sentencing was easier than testifying in his stalking trial, where I confiscated my father’s hearing aids on my way to the stand in an attempt to shield him from the hurt I knew would wash over him to realize all the things that I had kept from my family. Where my face burned hot with apology for those strangers who were perplexed about having been subpoenaed to appear. Where I pushed through the tunnel vision that takes over your body, my brain’s reaction to the stress.
I hadn’t expected a good outcome that day. Our courthouse doesn’t even have a statue of Lady Justice blindly holding her scales out front. We have a horse instead. One a repairman with no hands patched up like new after someone blew it up that one time.
Kids and their shenanigans, you know.
Today I was mostly worried that my milk-laden breasts would leak through my shirt if I talked about my children. It had been 269 days since he was charged and I’d left my one month old infant to be here, not willing to squander an opportunity to be heard.
He sat alone at the defendant’s table. Two attorneys had abandoned him in this case, finding him a difficult, narcissistic sociopath, too much even for their tastes. They knew he was guilty as sin and had no viable angle to suggest as a defense other than advising he plead guilty early on, advice he refused to take. Some clients test the limits of even the skeeziest defense attorneys, I guess.
His control differed from my first husband, the one who used direct threats and emotional blackmail to keep me around. During our marriage, this one found it easiest to get sex from me if I were unconscious, rendered as such by him drugging my drinks, something I’d later learn from a friend who overheard his confession. It only served to confirm my existing suspicions.
My leaving became an exercise in negotiation, me agreeing to delay the divorce another month or two or six in relation to and consideration of an upcoming event he didn’t want to face with the shame of explaining why his third wife had left him.
When he sensed time was running out, he made one request: that I go for a drive with him and that we talk. If I still hadn’t changed my mind he would help me pack when we returned home.
My sunglasses dropped out of my purse when I tossed it on the passenger floorboard. As I contorted my arm to retrieve them, I saw the handle of his pistol sticking out from under the driver’s seat. Initially I ignored this, chalking it up to his post 9–11 paranoia, fueled by those friends in his ex-military circles.
The ones who convinced him that Dubya was coming for us and our guns, the ones who I’d politely declined an invitation to spend the weekend with in their impenetrable bunker.
The ones who warned us our house was in an open and indefensible location when the government invasion began and insisted every fenced-off area was a holding pen for us, modern day concentration camps.
The ones I ignored when they implored me to seek a concealed weapons permit.
The ones I ignored when they implored me to obtain a hunting license and tags and to fill out proxy statements so my husband would be unfettered in his harvesting of more animals than he was allotted.
The ones whose advice he took when he started hoarding ammo.
The ones who ran in the same circles as people who made headlines for their parts in precipitating some ATF actions gone south.
The ones who slapped him on the back and congratulated him on his new tattoo, Old Glory under a trompe l’oeil of his shredded forearm skin.
You know…Patriots.
He drove further from home, over bridges and on winding gravel roads, further into wooded areas, tall pines smoothing shade over the car. He talked of all the spots he knew just over no-tell-um ridge, of his intimate knowledge of this land, and the places he’d been where no other humans had been. You could park a truck out there and nobody’d find it. “Hell,” he said… “you could probably dig a pretty nice hole, put a treasure box there and it would be safe forever.”
It dawned on me what he was getting at about the same time I realized I had no idea where we were, no landmarks to reference, no idea how to get home. I stopped coming with him to “hunting camp” back when he assured me he could convince folks I had just run off one day and that he knew a sack of lye was enough to make sure I never resurfaced. You don’t follow a guy into the woods anymore once they say that.
I told him what he wanted to hear so he’d turn the car around: I would stay.
I didn’t stay, of course. Not after he joked about how he wouldn’t hurt me, but mainly because it would probably be dark and from 100 yards away so I wouldn’t know it was coming and he’d make sure it was a clean shot so I wouldn’t feel anything.
His dad gifted him a night vision scope that Christmas.
I thought he had moved on before I even moved out. I walked in on him and another woman in our bed — the one I was going to let him keep anyway. He hadn’t even washed the sheets. He went from that one to another to another (and married her) and I thought that was that. He was over me.
I’d moved on too. But at each major life event, a baby, a marriage, another baby on the way…his behavior escalated. Within a week, I’d gotten calls from two separate women. One warned me he had been following me home. The other said her husband — a coworker of his — was one of several he’d posed disturbing theoretical questions to.
“What do you think? Should I kill her in front of her kids so they’re fucked up for the rest of their lives? Or should I kill her kids in front of her so she’s fucked up the rest of her life?”
Items began appearing in my yard, subtle reminders of the abuse he was proud of. In the mail, a rambling typewritten letter in a vein usually reserved for psycho criminals and called “manifestos” on the news. He hand wrote the envelope, addressed to my child. He’d drive by me slowly, finger pointed like a gun, one insane eye taking aim.
I was 28.
And so I laid out all the reasons I believed he remained a threat, in as calm a manner as I could, to the judge whose hair didn’t move, whose poker face I couldn’t read, and I became anxious that I was taking up judicial time, time that could be better used to help someone else.
I reminded the judge he had been a distinguished marksman in his short military service, that he was an avid hunter with access to any number of firearms, including one fitted with a night vision scope. That he’d bragged about knowing nine different ways to kill someone with his bare hands. That he demonstrated the proper way to stab someone to make sure you hit the heart, a lesson he learned in boot camp.
That these were things he casually worked into conversations at the local watering hole.
I reminded him of the offenses for which he’d never been held to answer, and that criminal behavior escalates, only stopping when forces outside the offender’s self should intervene. I asked that the judge take personal responsibility to explain to my children how someone would allow this man to continue on this path if the worst happened to me, one day when they’d be old enough to understand.
The prosecutor asked for a 30 day jail term, followed by a year of supervised probation.
When afforded time to speak for himself, he had an ask of his own: That his record be expunged because Second Amendment.
Second Amendment.
That was it. When asked to elaborate, he complained that he was being unfairly targeted because he was a hard-working American man and that in order to preserve his God-given rights, he couldn’t have this nonsense hanging over his head. That this right written especially for him by his forefathers was being trampled upon and that he would not stand for it.
After a long deep breath, the judge issued his ruling. He outlined the provisions for expunging records, which did not apply in this situation. He reiterated the firearms restrictions did not apply in this situation because the charge at hand was not a felony. Additionally, we lived in a state where domestic violence didn’t prevent you from being armed, and where there was no such a thing as raping your wife.
These were all things that, had he retained counsel, would be made clear to him as they were very basic.
This judge with the still-unwavering hair went on to posit that he believed many more things had been done than what had been presented to the court, and that he’d been lucky to only have been caught the times they knew about. The sentence would be six months in jail and two years of supervised probation, one he would petition the court over a year later, attempting some kind of early release from probation because it “made him look bad”.
His motion was denied.
