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m.huffpost.com
This Is What It's Like To Survive Domestic Violence In The Military
m.huffpost.com
As part of HuffPost’s series “A Forgotten Crisis,” which examines domestic violence in the military, we interviewed many victims of abuse. We also asked readers to send us their personal stories. While their experiences occurred over decades, in different locations and across all branches of the military, many of the stories have similar themes.
HuffPost has not independently verified the details of all of their accounts, some of which contain descriptions of sexual and physical violence. All of the victims’ names have been changed to protect their safety and privacy. The accounts have also been lightly edited for brevity and to remove personally identifiable information. We have published these accounts in this form to show the variety, breadth and systemic nature of domestic violence.
The military has policies to address domestic violence. The Department of Defense says it works to “prevent and eliminate domestic abuse,” and to “provide for the safety of victims; hold abusers appropriately accountable for their behavior; and coordinate the response to domestic abuse with the local community,” according to a 2007 directive. But as the stories below suggest, the military still has a considerable distance to go in realizing those goals.
Here are the accounts of the victims, in their own words.
For two and a half years, I dated a combat-wounded Marine. He was discharged after an improvised explosive device blast left him with severe and chronic pain, a traumatic brain injury and PTSD with severe suicidal ideations. When he was angry, his favorite thing to tell me was “I’ve killed more people than you have years of life.”
The Marine Corps trains a person to kill without flinching, teaches them that the only heroes never come home and that their lives are nothing out of uniform. Yet, after stripping them of their humanity, it simply sends them home and expects them to function in society. When I tried to discuss violence with the VA, the abuse was minimized, blamed on PTSD, and I was constantly burdened with the responsibility of forcing him into help he did not want. Even mentioning treatment often turned him violent, yet ordering me to get him help was the only support I was offered by the VA.
The same sentiments were echoed in support groups for significant others of military service members. Military wives often shamed women for fleeing abuse. Eventually, I got a protection-from-abuse order from the civilian court system. That process was not without fault either, but in the end, the civilian court system gave me the support and validation I’d sought from the VA for two years.
In the late 1990s, my husband was in the Navy and we were stationed overseas with our young child. My husband’s tour of duty was for four years. I was there for 10 months before the nightmare started. He began pushing me around and being verbally abusive. I reported him to the command’s chaplain because I felt too intimidated to go to his command directly and felt that I could get better guidance from the chaplain.
The chaplain was kind and we had a few meetings in which we talked about my husband, his stress, my stress, my fears regarding our child’s welfare. He was helpful, but there was always the whisper amongst us wives that if we didn’t like being stationed overseas, we would be shipped back to the States, and in doing so, it would have an adverse reaction on our spouses’ careers. We were told that.
After I reported him, the shit hit the fan. My husband came home and stormed about our flat. I tried to stay out of his way, but he grabbed me and shouted in my face at the top of his lungs, “Do you know what you just did to me?! You fucked up my career!!” He gripped my upper arms so hard that he left bruises. He then pushed me to the floor. As I covered my head with my arms, waiting for the blows, he left. I called the chaplain, scared out of my wits. He said he would handle it.
After a week or so, my husband was ordered to go to counseling with me. The counselor was the worst counselor I’d ever been to. She told me in that office on base that I was making my husband’s stress worse and that I should go home. I was upset and told the chaplain, who by then was getting a lot of calls from me. I had to contact him because no one from my husband’s chain of command would speak to me.
I was made to feel like this was my fault. My family didn’t believe me. The Navy didn’t believe me. I carry that with me.
One night, my husband tried to kill me. He had a strange look on his face as he approached me in our flat. He said, “The only way you’re leaving here is in a body bag.” He held up a kitchen knife. The rest was a blur. I worked hard trying not to let him near me, running from room to room because the front door and the back doors were locked. I pulled furniture down behind me as I ran, swung at him as he tried to slash me repeatedly with the knife. Finally, I remember waking up on the floor in broken glass and being lifted up by some men. My husband was sitting on the floor holding his nose, blood spurting. He claimed that I assaulted him because his nose was broken in the struggle. He said that I was the one who tried to kill him. I denied it. I made his abuse known to his command. I loved my husband and wanted to save my marriage and the father of our child.
To make a long story short, I was shipped back to the U.S., where I filed for divorce. A week before our divorce was final, my husband killed himself. I never made peace with being let down by his command structure. I was made to feel like this was my fault. My family didn’t believe me. The Navy didn’t believe me. I carry that with me.
‘Military Comes First, Mission Comes First’
My husband began to abuse me before he ever enlisted in the Air Force. He pushed me around, threw me down when he was mad, that sort of thing. He’d take away my phone, lock me out of the house and confiscate my car keys so I couldn’t go anywhere. I admit neither of us came from great upbringings, so we thought this was how you treat people.
After enlisting in the military, my husband was sent to his first duty station. I had to drop out of school and quit my job to move with him. Soon, I gave birth to our first child. But the abuse continued and, in a fit of rage, my husband slammed a door with my hand in it, on purpose.
I called the military police and they showed up, along with my husband’s chain of command, and sent us and our toddler to the Family Advocacy Program (FAP) office on base. I told them what happened and they tried to dissuade me from reporting. They said I had nothing: no job, nothing to fall back on, and that it wouldn’t look good to the courts. They wanted to know if I was ready to jeopardize his career. Then they asked my husband to come back into the room and for me to repeat my story with him there. When he came back in, I froze. I told them it was probably my fault … that I put my hand in the door when he was shutting it. I was terrified I was going to lose my child.
We returned home. No one from FAP ever followed up, and his abuse continued. It became more psychological and controlling — he didn’t want me talking to other people, wouldn’t let me get a job, and told me things like nobody’s going to let me have the kids if I left him.
We had two more children and were moved to a base overseas. I went to FAP for a referral to marriage counseling. The counselor on base said, “Well, military comes first, mission comes first, so whatever he needs to do to make sure he’s happy and healthy, that’s what needs to happen in a relationship.” It boosted my husband’s confidence that whatever he was doing was normal and OK.
The abuse at home has declined somewhat but it hasn’t stopped completely. The fact that my husband keeps two guns in the house makes me nervous.
That was the last time I asked for help for myself. It’s been almost 18 years of marriage now and we have three children. The abuse at home has declined somewhat but it hasn’t stopped completely. The fact that my husband keeps two guns in the house makes me nervous. I keep the ammunition in a safe place. I don’t think he’d ever hurt the kids, but I think if he was in a rage, I don’t think he’d think twice about hurting me.
I met my boyfriend, a retired Air Force veteran who now works for the Department of Defense, online. I was attracted to him because he said, “I live my life by the Air Force Code of Honor” and I believed him. He was kind, compassionate, always giving me cards, sending me flowers, dinner dates and concerts. I was not prepared for the change that would come after moving in with him two years later. At six months, I would suffer my first physical attack.
After a particularly harrowing incident where he attempted to suffocate me with a pillow, I filed charges with the police department. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in jail. But then the judge granted him work release. Every day, he leaves the jail and drives onto the base for work. To say this is disturbing would be putting it mildly. For me, it’s like being gaslighted by the DoD. It’s a tag team that shows no mercy, empathy or justice, nor an understanding of the traumatic impact of domestic violence.
It took a lot of courage for me to file charges with the police department. I have a protective order and I was granted a confidential address. My life was torn apart. For a time, I was isolated from my friends and family; when I told them about the abuse, they wondered how I could stay. People are uneducated about domestic abuse. I am putting the pieces back together, getting familiar with myself again.
The Department of Defense failed me. It has an ethical responsibility to educate commanders and hold employees that are found guilty of domestic violence in the legal system accountable for their actions. This is why women don’t leave.
I’ve been with my husband since high school. After we got married and he enlisted in the Air Force, he started making comments about my appearance, like, “Are you sure you want to wear that?” escalating up to “You can’t wear that, this is what you’re wearing so you don’t fuckin’ embarrass me.” He would demand I clean the house to his standards, calling me useless, asking me if I wanted to get hit.
He’d throw things around the house in anger, punch holes in the wall and even keyed my car. He’d start random fistfights with strangers when drunk and belligerent, which he often was. I called military police at least twice, and they came multiple other times after neighbors heard my screams from inside our house. But my husband never took their visits seriously. He said he knew they wouldn’t do anything because they didn’t do anything the last time. He thought he’d never face repercussions from the military because “they needed him at his job.”
Two years into the marriage, he pushed me down a flight of stairs and broke my ankle. When I went to the military hospital, the medical staff asked me if I was being abused at home, but my husband stood right next to me so I shook my head no. That same year, he got angry one night and punched a hole through the wall — through the drywall, through the insulation, through the other side of the wall — to get to the room I was in. I’m 100% sure he wanted to hurt me.
When I went to the military hospital, the medical staff asked me if I was being abused at home, but my husband stood right next to me so I shook my head no.
We lived outside of the base, so I called civilian police. My husband ran away before they arrived, but they contacted his command. Typically, the commander is the one to order a military protection order, but my husband’s Air Force base was more than two hours away and said they couldn’t help me unless I drove there in person. The base said they couldn’t help me because it wasn’t their jurisdiction.
I tried to get an order of protection the next day from the local magistrate’s office, but I was turned down — they said I needed to go to the military base. I left frustrated but decided to return two days later and replead my case. The civilian court granted me a temporary order of protection that lasted for two weeks.
I later learned my husband’s command interviewed him about the incident, though he claimed I was exaggerating. He escaped any ramifications. I was told that the commander determined it was a one-time incident and not domestic violence based on the fact that I wouldn’t drive to the base to tell my side of the story. I offered an over-the-phone interview that I was willing to have recorded but they were uninterested and never responded to that offer.
I felt isolated. My closest family was 12 hours away. I called the Family Advocacy Program on the base where my husband was stationed, but they told me they couldn’t help me unless I made the long drive to see them in person, which I couldn’t do because my husband had confiscated both of our vehicles.
As I waited for our divorce to be finalized, my estranged husband started stalking me everywhere I went. When I tried to report it, I was told by his commander and first sergeant that it was a civil matter and maybe we should “talk it out.” I decided to get my concealed carry permit and a gun. You’re on edge all the time. It’s just draining.
.(HuffPost)
Before my husband came home from a six-month deployment to Iraq, his platoon captain’s wife told me and the other spouses that there might be “issues” within the first 30 days. This was normal, she said, and she would be here for them if we needed her.
He didn’t sleep when he got home, and the only thing that helped was to turn the TV to a blaring volume. He told me, “I’m used to all the bombs going off.” He was drinking heavily almost every day. Sometimes, he’d smoke marijuana.
I knew my husband had a temper, but this was different. One night, he just tore up the house. Our young children were asleep in nearby bedrooms. He was punching holes in all of the walls and I knew I was next when he backed me into a corner, screaming at me just inches from my face.
I ran and locked myself in our bedroom and called the MPs. He screamed through the wall at me that I was a cop-calling bitch. Then he tore the door off the hinges and grabbed me by my arm.
The MPs arrived and took my husband to the police station on base. His platoon sergeant later picked him up and brought him to his house for a “cooling off” period. But he was home the next night. I was scared shitless for him to come home. No charges were ever filed, and no one ever followed up with me.
When you’re a new spouse in the military, you aren’t supposed to be dramatic or create noise — it’ll look bad for your husband. You’re told not to talk about certain things. The repercussions of speaking up were well known: If you ruin your husband’s career, you won’t have money. It was a threat my husband used to prevent me from talking to anyone about the abuse.
My husband was honorably discharged from the military just shy of two years later. At this point, he was a raging alcoholic and regularly called me a cunt and a whore. I tried to get him help from the VA Clinic multiple times. He told them he had PTSD, but the VA rated him as showing 0% PTSD in their evaluation. They said his symptoms weren’t severe enough to warrant help.
While high on cocaine, my husband physically and sexually assaulted me for six hours straight. He strangled me and punched me in the face. I kept thinking about the loaded gun he kept in his car.
If you ruin your husband’s career, you won’t have money. It was a threat my husband used to prevent me from talking to anyone about the abuse.
After he finally crashed, I ran out of the house with our daughter, drove as fast as I could to pick up our other two kids and drove cross-country to my parent’s house. This was the final straw. I couldn’t take it anymore. We split up.
Someone commented to me about not leaving my husband because he’s a solider. It doesn’t matter that he’s a soldier. The military failed him and the VA failed him. But the military failed me more. More recently, he walked into the VA clinic and they turned him away again. The next day he came back with a butter knife. A guard shot him in the chest, but he lived. He was trying to kill himself that day. He knew, going in there with a weapon, that he would be killed by the police.
My Marine Corps husband was deployed twice — in 2004 and 2006. While in combat, his truck hit an IED and was blown up. He can’t remember much from the incident but seemed to somehow walk away unscathed. Nobody thought to check for a concussion.
Ten years ago, post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, wasn’t a commonly used phrase. Instead, the Marine Corps asked us spouses to keep an eye out for signs of “combat stress,” like outbursts of anger. I noticed him being a little short and a little less patient when he returned home. And after that, the psychological abuse started.
He was really nasty and ugly to me and completely checked out with the kids — we have a blended family of four children. Then, he started drinking heavily and chatting online with other women. Even though things didn’t get physical, I often felt like I was in danger if I didn’t leave the house during his rants.
In 2012, I began waking up during the night to see him standing over me in bed. He had no recollection about it the next day, but he confessed he’d been having dreams of snapping my neck. He told me, “I’ve got to get out of that house before something bad happens.”
I called his staff sergeant who said, “Oh, I’ll just check on him tomorrow at work. He’s just under a lot of stress.” The next day, my husband told me his sergeant asked him, “What’s going on with you and your wife?” He also asked my husband if he was being emotionally abused at home. By me.
Nothing ever came of me reporting. From that day on, I felt blamed for not only the abuse but also for asking that my husband get help. I even found out his PTSD diagnosis was changed to “anxiety due to marital discord.” Even when my husband went in some time later and asked for help, they told him to just get a hobby.
He was honorably discharged in 2014 for reaching his service limits, but the abuse continued. In one incident, he barricaded me inside our house during a fight. Another time, he sat on me and refused to let me get up. He threatened to throw me out a window.
I blame his command for not getting him help. They would tell him, “Your wife is crazy, she’s trying to sabotage your career.” After his discharge, I tried to get him help at the VA hospital. I told a staffer about the abusive behavior and she asked me, “If it’s so bad, why do you stay with him?” They diagnosed him with PTSD and traumatic brain injury.
Six months ago, he moved out of our home and in with another woman. He refuses to talk to me. I feel like I’ve lost my husband.
‘I Have A Gun And I’m Trained To Use It’
My Army ex-husband gets our children every other weekend and was recently awarded one night during the week with them, even though he has an over-10-year history of domestic abuse and suicide attempts. But civilian courts won’t even hear it because the military won’t release his records without his permission.
When we were still together, living on base, he would throw me on the ground, pull me by the hair, hit me in the face with doors and grab my upper arms and shake the living daylights out of me. During a period of eight months, MPs were called seven or eight times, either by myself or by neighbors. They’d ask me, “Have you been injured?” and I’d say no, at least not severely enough to require medical attention. So they never came.
What I wanted was someone of authority to run interference so he would stop and hopefully be forced to leave the house for a while. But they told me, “There’s nothing we can do for you.” At one point, the MP told me, “If you call us again, we’re arresting you both.” So I stopped calling.
At one point, my then-husband told our young children he was going to kill himself and it was all their fault. He grabbed two knives from our kitchen and left the house. I called the MPs, who said they couldn’t help me. “What do you want us to do? He probably left the base,” they asked me.
The following Monday, I marched into my husband’s commander’s office and begged him to help. He said, “We’re not going to order him to get help.” The only thing the commander said he could do was get an order of protection between my husband and the kids, but not for me. It was 90 days before he could come home again. And when he did, the physical abuse cooled off but the verbal abuse was daily. We were told to go into marriage counseling, but it made little difference.
At one point, my then-husband told our young children he was going to kill himself and it was all their fault.
A few years later, my husband was medically retired from the Army, diagnosed with severe PTSD, and we moved. We tried to get him into counseling at the Veterans Affairs clinic but got the run-around. By the following year, I’d reached my limit and we separated. Then I got a call from a psychologist at the Veterans Affairs clinic. My husband had confessed that he was going to kill me. He told the psychologist that the night prior, he had a knife in his hand with the intent to murder me, but he couldn’t do it because I wasn’t sleeping and he didn’t want the kids to intervene.
This Is What It's Like To Survive Domestic Violence In The Military
Abused military wives are often told to stay quiet about what happens at home. We talked to a dozen who feel they no longer can.
This Is What It's Like To Survive Domestic Violence In The Military
m.huffpost.com
As part of HuffPost’s series “A Forgotten Crisis,” which examines domestic violence in the military, we interviewed many victims of abuse. We also asked readers to send us their personal stories. While their experiences occurred over decades, in different locations and across all branches of the military, many of the stories have similar themes.
HuffPost has not independently verified the details of all of their accounts, some of which contain descriptions of sexual and physical violence. All of the victims’ names have been changed to protect their safety and privacy. The accounts have also been lightly edited for brevity and to remove personally identifiable information. We have published these accounts in this form to show the variety, breadth and systemic nature of domestic violence.
The military has policies to address domestic violence. The Department of Defense says it works to “prevent and eliminate domestic abuse,” and to “provide for the safety of victims; hold abusers appropriately accountable for their behavior; and coordinate the response to domestic abuse with the local community,” according to a 2007 directive. But as the stories below suggest, the military still has a considerable distance to go in realizing those goals.
Here are the accounts of the victims, in their own words.
For two and a half years, I dated a combat-wounded Marine. He was discharged after an improvised explosive device blast left him with severe and chronic pain, a traumatic brain injury and PTSD with severe suicidal ideations. When he was angry, his favorite thing to tell me was “I’ve killed more people than you have years of life.”
The Marine Corps trains a person to kill without flinching, teaches them that the only heroes never come home and that their lives are nothing out of uniform. Yet, after stripping them of their humanity, it simply sends them home and expects them to function in society. When I tried to discuss violence with the VA, the abuse was minimized, blamed on PTSD, and I was constantly burdened with the responsibility of forcing him into help he did not want. Even mentioning treatment often turned him violent, yet ordering me to get him help was the only support I was offered by the VA.
The same sentiments were echoed in support groups for significant others of military service members. Military wives often shamed women for fleeing abuse. Eventually, I got a protection-from-abuse order from the civilian court system. That process was not without fault either, but in the end, the civilian court system gave me the support and validation I’d sought from the VA for two years.
In the late 1990s, my husband was in the Navy and we were stationed overseas with our young child. My husband’s tour of duty was for four years. I was there for 10 months before the nightmare started. He began pushing me around and being verbally abusive. I reported him to the command’s chaplain because I felt too intimidated to go to his command directly and felt that I could get better guidance from the chaplain.
The chaplain was kind and we had a few meetings in which we talked about my husband, his stress, my stress, my fears regarding our child’s welfare. He was helpful, but there was always the whisper amongst us wives that if we didn’t like being stationed overseas, we would be shipped back to the States, and in doing so, it would have an adverse reaction on our spouses’ careers. We were told that.
After I reported him, the shit hit the fan. My husband came home and stormed about our flat. I tried to stay out of his way, but he grabbed me and shouted in my face at the top of his lungs, “Do you know what you just did to me?! You fucked up my career!!” He gripped my upper arms so hard that he left bruises. He then pushed me to the floor. As I covered my head with my arms, waiting for the blows, he left. I called the chaplain, scared out of my wits. He said he would handle it.
After a week or so, my husband was ordered to go to counseling with me. The counselor was the worst counselor I’d ever been to. She told me in that office on base that I was making my husband’s stress worse and that I should go home. I was upset and told the chaplain, who by then was getting a lot of calls from me. I had to contact him because no one from my husband’s chain of command would speak to me.
I was made to feel like this was my fault. My family didn’t believe me. The Navy didn’t believe me. I carry that with me.
One night, my husband tried to kill me. He had a strange look on his face as he approached me in our flat. He said, “The only way you’re leaving here is in a body bag.” He held up a kitchen knife. The rest was a blur. I worked hard trying not to let him near me, running from room to room because the front door and the back doors were locked. I pulled furniture down behind me as I ran, swung at him as he tried to slash me repeatedly with the knife. Finally, I remember waking up on the floor in broken glass and being lifted up by some men. My husband was sitting on the floor holding his nose, blood spurting. He claimed that I assaulted him because his nose was broken in the struggle. He said that I was the one who tried to kill him. I denied it. I made his abuse known to his command. I loved my husband and wanted to save my marriage and the father of our child.
To make a long story short, I was shipped back to the U.S., where I filed for divorce. A week before our divorce was final, my husband killed himself. I never made peace with being let down by his command structure. I was made to feel like this was my fault. My family didn’t believe me. The Navy didn’t believe me. I carry that with me.
‘Military Comes First, Mission Comes First’
My husband began to abuse me before he ever enlisted in the Air Force. He pushed me around, threw me down when he was mad, that sort of thing. He’d take away my phone, lock me out of the house and confiscate my car keys so I couldn’t go anywhere. I admit neither of us came from great upbringings, so we thought this was how you treat people.
After enlisting in the military, my husband was sent to his first duty station. I had to drop out of school and quit my job to move with him. Soon, I gave birth to our first child. But the abuse continued and, in a fit of rage, my husband slammed a door with my hand in it, on purpose.
I called the military police and they showed up, along with my husband’s chain of command, and sent us and our toddler to the Family Advocacy Program (FAP) office on base. I told them what happened and they tried to dissuade me from reporting. They said I had nothing: no job, nothing to fall back on, and that it wouldn’t look good to the courts. They wanted to know if I was ready to jeopardize his career. Then they asked my husband to come back into the room and for me to repeat my story with him there. When he came back in, I froze. I told them it was probably my fault … that I put my hand in the door when he was shutting it. I was terrified I was going to lose my child.
We returned home. No one from FAP ever followed up, and his abuse continued. It became more psychological and controlling — he didn’t want me talking to other people, wouldn’t let me get a job, and told me things like nobody’s going to let me have the kids if I left him.
We had two more children and were moved to a base overseas. I went to FAP for a referral to marriage counseling. The counselor on base said, “Well, military comes first, mission comes first, so whatever he needs to do to make sure he’s happy and healthy, that’s what needs to happen in a relationship.” It boosted my husband’s confidence that whatever he was doing was normal and OK.
The abuse at home has declined somewhat but it hasn’t stopped completely. The fact that my husband keeps two guns in the house makes me nervous.
That was the last time I asked for help for myself. It’s been almost 18 years of marriage now and we have three children. The abuse at home has declined somewhat but it hasn’t stopped completely. The fact that my husband keeps two guns in the house makes me nervous. I keep the ammunition in a safe place. I don’t think he’d ever hurt the kids, but I think if he was in a rage, I don’t think he’d think twice about hurting me.
I met my boyfriend, a retired Air Force veteran who now works for the Department of Defense, online. I was attracted to him because he said, “I live my life by the Air Force Code of Honor” and I believed him. He was kind, compassionate, always giving me cards, sending me flowers, dinner dates and concerts. I was not prepared for the change that would come after moving in with him two years later. At six months, I would suffer my first physical attack.
After a particularly harrowing incident where he attempted to suffocate me with a pillow, I filed charges with the police department. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in jail. But then the judge granted him work release. Every day, he leaves the jail and drives onto the base for work. To say this is disturbing would be putting it mildly. For me, it’s like being gaslighted by the DoD. It’s a tag team that shows no mercy, empathy or justice, nor an understanding of the traumatic impact of domestic violence.
It took a lot of courage for me to file charges with the police department. I have a protective order and I was granted a confidential address. My life was torn apart. For a time, I was isolated from my friends and family; when I told them about the abuse, they wondered how I could stay. People are uneducated about domestic abuse. I am putting the pieces back together, getting familiar with myself again.
The Department of Defense failed me. It has an ethical responsibility to educate commanders and hold employees that are found guilty of domestic violence in the legal system accountable for their actions. This is why women don’t leave.
I’ve been with my husband since high school. After we got married and he enlisted in the Air Force, he started making comments about my appearance, like, “Are you sure you want to wear that?” escalating up to “You can’t wear that, this is what you’re wearing so you don’t fuckin’ embarrass me.” He would demand I clean the house to his standards, calling me useless, asking me if I wanted to get hit.
He’d throw things around the house in anger, punch holes in the wall and even keyed my car. He’d start random fistfights with strangers when drunk and belligerent, which he often was. I called military police at least twice, and they came multiple other times after neighbors heard my screams from inside our house. But my husband never took their visits seriously. He said he knew they wouldn’t do anything because they didn’t do anything the last time. He thought he’d never face repercussions from the military because “they needed him at his job.”
Two years into the marriage, he pushed me down a flight of stairs and broke my ankle. When I went to the military hospital, the medical staff asked me if I was being abused at home, but my husband stood right next to me so I shook my head no. That same year, he got angry one night and punched a hole through the wall — through the drywall, through the insulation, through the other side of the wall — to get to the room I was in. I’m 100% sure he wanted to hurt me.
When I went to the military hospital, the medical staff asked me if I was being abused at home, but my husband stood right next to me so I shook my head no.
We lived outside of the base, so I called civilian police. My husband ran away before they arrived, but they contacted his command. Typically, the commander is the one to order a military protection order, but my husband’s Air Force base was more than two hours away and said they couldn’t help me unless I drove there in person. The base said they couldn’t help me because it wasn’t their jurisdiction.
I tried to get an order of protection the next day from the local magistrate’s office, but I was turned down — they said I needed to go to the military base. I left frustrated but decided to return two days later and replead my case. The civilian court granted me a temporary order of protection that lasted for two weeks.
I later learned my husband’s command interviewed him about the incident, though he claimed I was exaggerating. He escaped any ramifications. I was told that the commander determined it was a one-time incident and not domestic violence based on the fact that I wouldn’t drive to the base to tell my side of the story. I offered an over-the-phone interview that I was willing to have recorded but they were uninterested and never responded to that offer.
I felt isolated. My closest family was 12 hours away. I called the Family Advocacy Program on the base where my husband was stationed, but they told me they couldn’t help me unless I made the long drive to see them in person, which I couldn’t do because my husband had confiscated both of our vehicles.
As I waited for our divorce to be finalized, my estranged husband started stalking me everywhere I went. When I tried to report it, I was told by his commander and first sergeant that it was a civil matter and maybe we should “talk it out.” I decided to get my concealed carry permit and a gun. You’re on edge all the time. It’s just draining.
.(HuffPost)
Before my husband came home from a six-month deployment to Iraq, his platoon captain’s wife told me and the other spouses that there might be “issues” within the first 30 days. This was normal, she said, and she would be here for them if we needed her.
He didn’t sleep when he got home, and the only thing that helped was to turn the TV to a blaring volume. He told me, “I’m used to all the bombs going off.” He was drinking heavily almost every day. Sometimes, he’d smoke marijuana.
I knew my husband had a temper, but this was different. One night, he just tore up the house. Our young children were asleep in nearby bedrooms. He was punching holes in all of the walls and I knew I was next when he backed me into a corner, screaming at me just inches from my face.
I ran and locked myself in our bedroom and called the MPs. He screamed through the wall at me that I was a cop-calling bitch. Then he tore the door off the hinges and grabbed me by my arm.
The MPs arrived and took my husband to the police station on base. His platoon sergeant later picked him up and brought him to his house for a “cooling off” period. But he was home the next night. I was scared shitless for him to come home. No charges were ever filed, and no one ever followed up with me.
When you’re a new spouse in the military, you aren’t supposed to be dramatic or create noise — it’ll look bad for your husband. You’re told not to talk about certain things. The repercussions of speaking up were well known: If you ruin your husband’s career, you won’t have money. It was a threat my husband used to prevent me from talking to anyone about the abuse.
My husband was honorably discharged from the military just shy of two years later. At this point, he was a raging alcoholic and regularly called me a cunt and a whore. I tried to get him help from the VA Clinic multiple times. He told them he had PTSD, but the VA rated him as showing 0% PTSD in their evaluation. They said his symptoms weren’t severe enough to warrant help.
While high on cocaine, my husband physically and sexually assaulted me for six hours straight. He strangled me and punched me in the face. I kept thinking about the loaded gun he kept in his car.
If you ruin your husband’s career, you won’t have money. It was a threat my husband used to prevent me from talking to anyone about the abuse.
After he finally crashed, I ran out of the house with our daughter, drove as fast as I could to pick up our other two kids and drove cross-country to my parent’s house. This was the final straw. I couldn’t take it anymore. We split up.
Someone commented to me about not leaving my husband because he’s a solider. It doesn’t matter that he’s a soldier. The military failed him and the VA failed him. But the military failed me more. More recently, he walked into the VA clinic and they turned him away again. The next day he came back with a butter knife. A guard shot him in the chest, but he lived. He was trying to kill himself that day. He knew, going in there with a weapon, that he would be killed by the police.
My Marine Corps husband was deployed twice — in 2004 and 2006. While in combat, his truck hit an IED and was blown up. He can’t remember much from the incident but seemed to somehow walk away unscathed. Nobody thought to check for a concussion.
Ten years ago, post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, wasn’t a commonly used phrase. Instead, the Marine Corps asked us spouses to keep an eye out for signs of “combat stress,” like outbursts of anger. I noticed him being a little short and a little less patient when he returned home. And after that, the psychological abuse started.
He was really nasty and ugly to me and completely checked out with the kids — we have a blended family of four children. Then, he started drinking heavily and chatting online with other women. Even though things didn’t get physical, I often felt like I was in danger if I didn’t leave the house during his rants.
In 2012, I began waking up during the night to see him standing over me in bed. He had no recollection about it the next day, but he confessed he’d been having dreams of snapping my neck. He told me, “I’ve got to get out of that house before something bad happens.”
I called his staff sergeant who said, “Oh, I’ll just check on him tomorrow at work. He’s just under a lot of stress.” The next day, my husband told me his sergeant asked him, “What’s going on with you and your wife?” He also asked my husband if he was being emotionally abused at home. By me.
Nothing ever came of me reporting. From that day on, I felt blamed for not only the abuse but also for asking that my husband get help. I even found out his PTSD diagnosis was changed to “anxiety due to marital discord.” Even when my husband went in some time later and asked for help, they told him to just get a hobby.
He was honorably discharged in 2014 for reaching his service limits, but the abuse continued. In one incident, he barricaded me inside our house during a fight. Another time, he sat on me and refused to let me get up. He threatened to throw me out a window.
I blame his command for not getting him help. They would tell him, “Your wife is crazy, she’s trying to sabotage your career.” After his discharge, I tried to get him help at the VA hospital. I told a staffer about the abusive behavior and she asked me, “If it’s so bad, why do you stay with him?” They diagnosed him with PTSD and traumatic brain injury.
Six months ago, he moved out of our home and in with another woman. He refuses to talk to me. I feel like I’ve lost my husband.
‘I Have A Gun And I’m Trained To Use It’
My Army ex-husband gets our children every other weekend and was recently awarded one night during the week with them, even though he has an over-10-year history of domestic abuse and suicide attempts. But civilian courts won’t even hear it because the military won’t release his records without his permission.
When we were still together, living on base, he would throw me on the ground, pull me by the hair, hit me in the face with doors and grab my upper arms and shake the living daylights out of me. During a period of eight months, MPs were called seven or eight times, either by myself or by neighbors. They’d ask me, “Have you been injured?” and I’d say no, at least not severely enough to require medical attention. So they never came.
What I wanted was someone of authority to run interference so he would stop and hopefully be forced to leave the house for a while. But they told me, “There’s nothing we can do for you.” At one point, the MP told me, “If you call us again, we’re arresting you both.” So I stopped calling.
At one point, my then-husband told our young children he was going to kill himself and it was all their fault. He grabbed two knives from our kitchen and left the house. I called the MPs, who said they couldn’t help me. “What do you want us to do? He probably left the base,” they asked me.
The following Monday, I marched into my husband’s commander’s office and begged him to help. He said, “We’re not going to order him to get help.” The only thing the commander said he could do was get an order of protection between my husband and the kids, but not for me. It was 90 days before he could come home again. And when he did, the physical abuse cooled off but the verbal abuse was daily. We were told to go into marriage counseling, but it made little difference.
At one point, my then-husband told our young children he was going to kill himself and it was all their fault.
A few years later, my husband was medically retired from the Army, diagnosed with severe PTSD, and we moved. We tried to get him into counseling at the Veterans Affairs clinic but got the run-around. By the following year, I’d reached my limit and we separated. Then I got a call from a psychologist at the Veterans Affairs clinic. My husband had confessed that he was going to kill me. He told the psychologist that the night prior, he had a knife in his hand with the intent to murder me, but he couldn’t do it because I wasn’t sleeping and he didn’t want the kids to intervene.
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2019
Traumatic brain injury is no joke. Hundreds of thousands of Americans came back from Iraq with them, all to advance the Oded Yinon/Clean Break policies.This Is What It's Like To Survive Domestic Violence In The Military
Abused military wives are often told to stay quiet about what happens at home. We talked to a dozen who feel they no longer can.
This Is What It's Like To Survive Domestic Violence In The Military
m.huffpost.com
As part of HuffPost’s series “A Forgotten Crisis,” which examines domestic violence in the military, we interviewed many victims of abuse. We also asked readers to send us their personal stories. While their experiences occurred over decades, in different locations and across all branches of the military, many of the stories have similar themes.
HuffPost has not independently verified the details of all of their accounts, some of which contain descriptions of sexual and physical violence. All of the victims’ names have been changed to protect their safety and privacy. The accounts have also been lightly edited for brevity and to remove personally identifiable information. We have published these accounts in this form to show the variety, breadth and systemic nature of domestic violence.
The military has policies to address domestic violence. The Department of Defense says it works to “prevent and eliminate domestic abuse,” and to “provide for the safety of victims; hold abusers appropriately accountable for their behavior; and coordinate the response to domestic abuse with the local community,” according to a 2007 directive. But as the stories below suggest, the military still has a considerable distance to go in realizing those goals.
Here are the accounts of the victims, in their own words.
For two and a half years, I dated a combat-wounded Marine. He was discharged after an improvised explosive device blast left him with severe and chronic pain, a traumatic brain injury and PTSD with severe suicidal ideations. When he was angry, his favorite thing to tell me was “I’ve killed more people than you have years of life.”
The Marine Corps trains a person to kill without flinching, teaches them that the only heroes never come home and that their lives are nothing out of uniform. Yet, after stripping them of their humanity, it simply sends them home and expects them to function in society. When I tried to discuss violence with the VA, the abuse was minimized, blamed on PTSD, and I was constantly burdened with the responsibility of forcing him into help he did not want. Even mentioning treatment often turned him violent, yet ordering me to get him help was the only support I was offered by the VA.
The same sentiments were echoed in support groups for significant others of military service members. Military wives often shamed women for fleeing abuse. Eventually, I got a protection-from-abuse order from the civilian court system. That process was not without fault either, but in the end, the civilian court system gave me the support and validation I’d sought from the VA for two years.
In the late 1990s, my husband was in the Navy and we were stationed overseas with our young child. My husband’s tour of duty was for four years. I was there for 10 months before the nightmare started. He began pushing me around and being verbally abusive. I reported him to the command’s chaplain because I felt too intimidated to go to his command directly and felt that I could get better guidance from the chaplain.
The chaplain was kind and we had a few meetings in which we talked about my husband, his stress, my stress, my fears regarding our child’s welfare. He was helpful, but there was always the whisper amongst us wives that if we didn’t like being stationed overseas, we would be shipped back to the States, and in doing so, it would have an adverse reaction on our spouses’ careers. We were told that.
After I reported him, the shit hit the fan. My husband came home and stormed about our flat. I tried to stay out of his way, but he grabbed me and shouted in my face at the top of his lungs, “Do you know what you just did to me?! You fucked up my career!!” He gripped my upper arms so hard that he left bruises. He then pushed me to the floor. As I covered my head with my arms, waiting for the blows, he left. I called the chaplain, scared out of my wits. He said he would handle it.
After a week or so, my husband was ordered to go to counseling with me. The counselor was the worst counselor I’d ever been to. She told me in that office on base that I was making my husband’s stress worse and that I should go home. I was upset and told the chaplain, who by then was getting a lot of calls from me. I had to contact him because no one from my husband’s chain of command would speak to me.
I was made to feel like this was my fault. My family didn’t believe me. The Navy didn’t believe me. I carry that with me.
One night, my husband tried to kill me. He had a strange look on his face as he approached me in our flat. He said, “The only way you’re leaving here is in a body bag.” He held up a kitchen knife. The rest was a blur. I worked hard trying not to let him near me, running from room to room because the front door and the back doors were locked. I pulled furniture down behind me as I ran, swung at him as he tried to slash me repeatedly with the knife. Finally, I remember waking up on the floor in broken glass and being lifted up by some men. My husband was sitting on the floor holding his nose, blood spurting. He claimed that I assaulted him because his nose was broken in the struggle. He said that I was the one who tried to kill him. I denied it. I made his abuse known to his command. I loved my husband and wanted to save my marriage and the father of our child.
To make a long story short, I was shipped back to the U.S., where I filed for divorce. A week before our divorce was final, my husband killed himself. I never made peace with being let down by his command structure. I was made to feel like this was my fault. My family didn’t believe me. The Navy didn’t believe me. I carry that with me.
‘Military Comes First, Mission Comes First’
My husband began to abuse me before he ever enlisted in the Air Force. He pushed me around, threw me down when he was mad, that sort of thing. He’d take away my phone, lock me out of the house and confiscate my car keys so I couldn’t go anywhere. I admit neither of us came from great upbringings, so we thought this was how you treat people.
After enlisting in the military, my husband was sent to his first duty station. I had to drop out of school and quit my job to move with him. Soon, I gave birth to our first child. But the abuse continued and, in a fit of rage, my husband slammed a door with my hand in it, on purpose.
I called the military police and they showed up, along with my husband’s chain of command, and sent us and our toddler to the Family Advocacy Program (FAP) office on base. I told them what happened and they tried to dissuade me from reporting. They said I had nothing: no job, nothing to fall back on, and that it wouldn’t look good to the courts. They wanted to know if I was ready to jeopardize his career. Then they asked my husband to come back into the room and for me to repeat my story with him there. When he came back in, I froze. I told them it was probably my fault … that I put my hand in the door when he was shutting it. I was terrified I was going to lose my child.
We returned home. No one from FAP ever followed up, and his abuse continued. It became more psychological and controlling — he didn’t want me talking to other people, wouldn’t let me get a job, and told me things like nobody’s going to let me have the kids if I left him.
We had two more children and were moved to a base overseas. I went to FAP for a referral to marriage counseling. The counselor on base said, “Well, military comes first, mission comes first, so whatever he needs to do to make sure he’s happy and healthy, that’s what needs to happen in a relationship.” It boosted my husband’s confidence that whatever he was doing was normal and OK.
The abuse at home has declined somewhat but it hasn’t stopped completely. The fact that my husband keeps two guns in the house makes me nervous.
That was the last time I asked for help for myself. It’s been almost 18 years of marriage now and we have three children. The abuse at home has declined somewhat but it hasn’t stopped completely. The fact that my husband keeps two guns in the house makes me nervous. I keep the ammunition in a safe place. I don’t think he’d ever hurt the kids, but I think if he was in a rage, I don’t think he’d think twice about hurting me.
I met my boyfriend, a retired Air Force veteran who now works for the Department of Defense, online. I was attracted to him because he said, “I live my life by the Air Force Code of Honor” and I believed him. He was kind, compassionate, always giving me cards, sending me flowers, dinner dates and concerts. I was not prepared for the change that would come after moving in with him two years later. At six months, I would suffer my first physical attack.
After a particularly harrowing incident where he attempted to suffocate me with a pillow, I filed charges with the police department. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in jail. But then the judge granted him work release. Every day, he leaves the jail and drives onto the base for work. To say this is disturbing would be putting it mildly. For me, it’s like being gaslighted by the DoD. It’s a tag team that shows no mercy, empathy or justice, nor an understanding of the traumatic impact of domestic violence.
It took a lot of courage for me to file charges with the police department. I have a protective order and I was granted a confidential address. My life was torn apart. For a time, I was isolated from my friends and family; when I told them about the abuse, they wondered how I could stay. People are uneducated about domestic abuse. I am putting the pieces back together, getting familiar with myself again.
The Department of Defense failed me. It has an ethical responsibility to educate commanders and hold employees that are found guilty of domestic violence in the legal system accountable for their actions. This is why women don’t leave.
I’ve been with my husband since high school. After we got married and he enlisted in the Air Force, he started making comments about my appearance, like, “Are you sure you want to wear that?” escalating up to “You can’t wear that, this is what you’re wearing so you don’t fuckin’ embarrass me.” He would demand I clean the house to his standards, calling me useless, asking me if I wanted to get hit.
He’d throw things around the house in anger, punch holes in the wall and even keyed my car. He’d start random fistfights with strangers when drunk and belligerent, which he often was. I called military police at least twice, and they came multiple other times after neighbors heard my screams from inside our house. But my husband never took their visits seriously. He said he knew they wouldn’t do anything because they didn’t do anything the last time. He thought he’d never face repercussions from the military because “they needed him at his job.”
Two years into the marriage, he pushed me down a flight of stairs and broke my ankle. When I went to the military hospital, the medical staff asked me if I was being abused at home, but my husband stood right next to me so I shook my head no. That same year, he got angry one night and punched a hole through the wall — through the drywall, through the insulation, through the other side of the wall — to get to the room I was in. I’m 100% sure he wanted to hurt me.
When I went to the military hospital, the medical staff asked me if I was being abused at home, but my husband stood right next to me so I shook my head no.
We lived outside of the base, so I called civilian police. My husband ran away before they arrived, but they contacted his command. Typically, the commander is the one to order a military protection order, but my husband’s Air Force base was more than two hours away and said they couldn’t help me unless I drove there in person. The base said they couldn’t help me because it wasn’t their jurisdiction.
I tried to get an order of protection the next day from the local magistrate’s office, but I was turned down — they said I needed to go to the military base. I left frustrated but decided to return two days later and replead my case. The civilian court granted me a temporary order of protection that lasted for two weeks.
I later learned my husband’s command interviewed him about the incident, though he claimed I was exaggerating. He escaped any ramifications. I was told that the commander determined it was a one-time incident and not domestic violence based on the fact that I wouldn’t drive to the base to tell my side of the story. I offered an over-the-phone interview that I was willing to have recorded but they were uninterested and never responded to that offer.
I felt isolated. My closest family was 12 hours away. I called the Family Advocacy Program on the base where my husband was stationed, but they told me they couldn’t help me unless I made the long drive to see them in person, which I couldn’t do because my husband had confiscated both of our vehicles.
As I waited for our divorce to be finalized, my estranged husband started stalking me everywhere I went. When I tried to report it, I was told by his commander and first sergeant that it was a civil matter and maybe we should “talk it out.” I decided to get my concealed carry permit and a gun. You’re on edge all the time. It’s just draining.
.(HuffPost)
Before my husband came home from a six-month deployment to Iraq, his platoon captain’s wife told me and the other spouses that there might be “issues” within the first 30 days. This was normal, she said, and she would be here for them if we needed her.
He didn’t sleep when he got home, and the only thing that helped was to turn the TV to a blaring volume. He told me, “I’m used to all the bombs going off.” He was drinking heavily almost every day. Sometimes, he’d smoke marijuana.
I knew my husband had a temper, but this was different. One night, he just tore up the house. Our young children were asleep in nearby bedrooms. He was punching holes in all of the walls and I knew I was next when he backed me into a corner, screaming at me just inches from my face.
I ran and locked myself in our bedroom and called the MPs. He screamed through the wall at me that I was a cop-calling bitch. Then he tore the door off the hinges and grabbed me by my arm.
The MPs arrived and took my husband to the police station on base. His platoon sergeant later picked him up and brought him to his house for a “cooling off” period. But he was home the next night. I was scared shitless for him to come home. No charges were ever filed, and no one ever followed up with me.
When you’re a new spouse in the military, you aren’t supposed to be dramatic or create noise — it’ll look bad for your husband. You’re told not to talk about certain things. The repercussions of speaking up were well known: If you ruin your husband’s career, you won’t have money. It was a threat my husband used to prevent me from talking to anyone about the abuse.
My husband was honorably discharged from the military just shy of two years later. At this point, he was a raging alcoholic and regularly called me a cunt and a whore. I tried to get him help from the VA Clinic multiple times. He told them he had PTSD, but the VA rated him as showing 0% PTSD in their evaluation. They said his symptoms weren’t severe enough to warrant help.
While high on cocaine, my husband physically and sexually assaulted me for six hours straight. He strangled me and punched me in the face. I kept thinking about the loaded gun he kept in his car.
If you ruin your husband’s career, you won’t have money. It was a threat my husband used to prevent me from talking to anyone about the abuse.
After he finally crashed, I ran out of the house with our daughter, drove as fast as I could to pick up our other two kids and drove cross-country to my parent’s house. This was the final straw. I couldn’t take it anymore. We split up.
Someone commented to me about not leaving my husband because he’s a solider. It doesn’t matter that he’s a soldier. The military failed him and the VA failed him. But the military failed me more. More recently, he walked into the VA clinic and they turned him away again. The next day he came back with a butter knife. A guard shot him in the chest, but he lived. He was trying to kill himself that day. He knew, going in there with a weapon, that he would be killed by the police.
My Marine Corps husband was deployed twice — in 2004 and 2006. While in combat, his truck hit an IED and was blown up. He can’t remember much from the incident but seemed to somehow walk away unscathed. Nobody thought to check for a concussion.
Ten years ago, post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, wasn’t a commonly used phrase. Instead, the Marine Corps asked us spouses to keep an eye out for signs of “combat stress,” like outbursts of anger. I noticed him being a little short and a little less patient when he returned home. And after that, the psychological abuse started.
He was really nasty and ugly to me and completely checked out with the kids — we have a blended family of four children. Then, he started drinking heavily and chatting online with other women. Even though things didn’t get physical, I often felt like I was in danger if I didn’t leave the house during his rants.
In 2012, I began waking up during the night to see him standing over me in bed. He had no recollection about it the next day, but he confessed he’d been having dreams of snapping my neck. He told me, “I’ve got to get out of that house before something bad happens.”
I called his staff sergeant who said, “Oh, I’ll just check on him tomorrow at work. He’s just under a lot of stress.” The next day, my husband told me his sergeant asked him, “What’s going on with you and your wife?” He also asked my husband if he was being emotionally abused at home. By me.
Nothing ever came of me reporting. From that day on, I felt blamed for not only the abuse but also for asking that my husband get help. I even found out his PTSD diagnosis was changed to “anxiety due to marital discord.” Even when my husband went in some time later and asked for help, they told him to just get a hobby.
He was honorably discharged in 2014 for reaching his service limits, but the abuse continued. In one incident, he barricaded me inside our house during a fight. Another time, he sat on me and refused to let me get up. He threatened to throw me out a window.
I blame his command for not getting him help. They would tell him, “Your wife is crazy, she’s trying to sabotage your career.” After his discharge, I tried to get him help at the VA hospital. I told a staffer about the abusive behavior and she asked me, “If it’s so bad, why do you stay with him?” They diagnosed him with PTSD and traumatic brain injury.
Six months ago, he moved out of our home and in with another woman. He refuses to talk to me. I feel like I’ve lost my husband.
‘I Have A Gun And I’m Trained To Use It’
My Army ex-husband gets our children every other weekend and was recently awarded one night during the week with them, even though he has an over-10-year history of domestic abuse and suicide attempts. But civilian courts won’t even hear it because the military won’t release his records without his permission.
When we were still together, living on base, he would throw me on the ground, pull me by the hair, hit me in the face with doors and grab my upper arms and shake the living daylights out of me. During a period of eight months, MPs were called seven or eight times, either by myself or by neighbors. They’d ask me, “Have you been injured?” and I’d say no, at least not severely enough to require medical attention. So they never came.
What I wanted was someone of authority to run interference so he would stop and hopefully be forced to leave the house for a while. But they told me, “There’s nothing we can do for you.” At one point, the MP told me, “If you call us again, we’re arresting you both.” So I stopped calling.
At one point, my then-husband told our young children he was going to kill himself and it was all their fault. He grabbed two knives from our kitchen and left the house. I called the MPs, who said they couldn’t help me. “What do you want us to do? He probably left the base,” they asked me.
The following Monday, I marched into my husband’s commander’s office and begged him to help. He said, “We’re not going to order him to get help.” The only thing the commander said he could do was get an order of protection between my husband and the kids, but not for me. It was 90 days before he could come home again. And when he did, the physical abuse cooled off but the verbal abuse was daily. We were told to go into marriage counseling, but it made little difference.
At one point, my then-husband told our young children he was going to kill himself and it was all their fault.
A few years later, my husband was medically retired from the Army, diagnosed with severe PTSD, and we moved. We tried to get him into counseling at the Veterans Affairs clinic but got the run-around. By the following year, I’d reached my limit and we separated. Then I got a call from a psychologist at the Veterans Affairs clinic. My husband had confessed that he was going to kill me. He told the psychologist that the night prior, he had a knife in his hand with the intent to murder me, but he couldn’t do it because I wasn’t sleeping and he didn’t want the kids to intervene.
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2018
Mom abandoned kids in bus to smoke weed on boat, police say
https://www.tampabay.com/news/break...kids-in-bus-to-smoke-weed-on-boat-police-say/ (http://archive.vn/XQaQB)
A mother was arrested after an officer found her three children alone in a dilapidated bus in Gulfport early Saturday morning.
Officer Christopher Priest was on a routine patrol at 4:42 a.m. when he spotted a small school bus parked in a beach parking lot. He looked inside and found three children, ages 3, 6 and 9.
The children told Priest that their mother, 33-year-old Andrea L. Kerins, had left late the previous evening on a boat and that they had no means of reaching her, authorities said.
After canvassing dozens of boats docked nearby, Gulfport marine patrol found Kerins aboard a vessel owned by 46-year-old Yuri Radzibabam. Members of the patrol reported that Kerins had been smoking marijuana.
The three children were left on their own in a ramshackle miniature school bus. Inside, officers found an unrefrigerated bin of perishable food, a five-gallon bucket doubling as a toilet and a propane tank. Police say the children had no spare clothing.
Kerins, who was booked into Pinellas County jail as Andrea L. Boyd, was charged with three counts of felony child neglect. The Florida Department of Children and Families has custody of the children
https://www.tampabay.com/news/break...kids-in-bus-to-smoke-weed-on-boat-police-say/ (http://archive.vn/XQaQB)
A mother was arrested after an officer found her three children alone in a dilapidated bus in Gulfport early Saturday morning.
Officer Christopher Priest was on a routine patrol at 4:42 a.m. when he spotted a small school bus parked in a beach parking lot. He looked inside and found three children, ages 3, 6 and 9.
The children told Priest that their mother, 33-year-old Andrea L. Kerins, had left late the previous evening on a boat and that they had no means of reaching her, authorities said.
After canvassing dozens of boats docked nearby, Gulfport marine patrol found Kerins aboard a vessel owned by 46-year-old Yuri Radzibabam. Members of the patrol reported that Kerins had been smoking marijuana.
The three children were left on their own in a ramshackle miniature school bus. Inside, officers found an unrefrigerated bin of perishable food, a five-gallon bucket doubling as a toilet and a propane tank. Police say the children had no spare clothing.
Kerins, who was booked into Pinellas County jail as Andrea L. Boyd, was charged with three counts of felony child neglect. The Florida Department of Children and Families has custody of the children
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2018
Supremacy is for racists — use ‘quantum advantage’
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03781-0 (http://archive.vn/nbWsr)
We take issue with the use of ‘supremacy’ when referring to quantum computers that can out-calculate even the fastest supercomputers (F. Arute et al. Nature 574, 505–510; 2019). We consider it irresponsible to override the historical context of this descriptor, which risks sustaining divisions in race, gender and class. We call for the community to use ‘quantum advantage’ instead.
The community claims that quantum supremacy is a technical term with a specified meaning. However, any technical justification for this descriptor could get swamped as it enters the public arena after the intense media coverage of the past few months.
In our view, ‘supremacy’ has overtones of violence, neocolonialism and racism through its association with ‘white supremacy’. Inherently violent language has crept into other branches of science as well — in human and robotic spaceflight, for example, terms such as ‘conquest’, ‘colonization’ and ‘settlement’ evoke the terra nullius arguments of settler colonialism and must be contextualized against ongoing issues of neocolonialism.
Instead, quantum computing should be an open arena and an inspiration for a new generation of scientists.
List of co-signatories:
Syed Mustafa Ali Open University, Milton Keynes, UK.
Steve Brierley Riverlane, Cambridge, UK.
Hope Bretscher Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK.
Juani Bermejo-Vega University of Granada, Spain.
Helmut G. Katzgraber Microsoft, Redmond, Washington, USA.
Chris Granade Microsoft, Redmond, Washington, USA.
Alan Aspuru-Guzik University of Toronto, Canada.
Sabine Wollmann University of Bristol, UK.
Dominic Horsman Université Grenoble Alpes, France.
Anne Broadbent University of Ottawa, Canada.
Ariel Bendersky University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Cecilia Cormick National University of Córdoba, Argentina.
Shazeaa Nisa Ishmael University of Oxford, UK.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03781-0 (http://archive.vn/nbWsr)
We take issue with the use of ‘supremacy’ when referring to quantum computers that can out-calculate even the fastest supercomputers (F. Arute et al. Nature 574, 505–510; 2019). We consider it irresponsible to override the historical context of this descriptor, which risks sustaining divisions in race, gender and class. We call for the community to use ‘quantum advantage’ instead.
The community claims that quantum supremacy is a technical term with a specified meaning. However, any technical justification for this descriptor could get swamped as it enters the public arena after the intense media coverage of the past few months.
In our view, ‘supremacy’ has overtones of violence, neocolonialism and racism through its association with ‘white supremacy’. Inherently violent language has crept into other branches of science as well — in human and robotic spaceflight, for example, terms such as ‘conquest’, ‘colonization’ and ‘settlement’ evoke the terra nullius arguments of settler colonialism and must be contextualized against ongoing issues of neocolonialism.
Instead, quantum computing should be an open arena and an inspiration for a new generation of scientists.
List of co-signatories:
Syed Mustafa Ali Open University, Milton Keynes, UK.
Steve Brierley Riverlane, Cambridge, UK.
Hope Bretscher Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK.
Juani Bermejo-Vega University of Granada, Spain.
Helmut G. Katzgraber Microsoft, Redmond, Washington, USA.
Chris Granade Microsoft, Redmond, Washington, USA.
Alan Aspuru-Guzik University of Toronto, Canada.
Sabine Wollmann University of Bristol, UK.
Dominic Horsman Université Grenoble Alpes, France.
Anne Broadbent University of Ottawa, Canada.
Ariel Bendersky University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Cecilia Cormick National University of Córdoba, Argentina.
Shazeaa Nisa Ishmael University of Oxford, UK.
- Joined
- Aug 4, 2018
That shortbus looks like something out of an apocalypse. I'm gonna guess the kids' parents were also addicts, because that's definitely someone I'd trust with my children. Yeah, those three kids are hers, but it says "playbus and preschool" in fuckin' cominc sans, so I'm assuming she was trusted with other kids at some point.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2016
Throwing in a couple of Microsoft names was a nice touch but this had that certain smell of bullshit and deception. So I decided to google the names.
The first name on the list is "Syed Mustafa Ali"...
I'm not going to google any of the other names, my suspicions are confirmed.
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2018
- Joined
- May 3, 2019
LAPD officer arrested on charge of fondling woman’s corpse
"This incident is extremely disturbing and does not represent the values of the Los Angeles Police Department," Chief Michel Moore said.
This incident is extremely disturbing and does not represent the values of the Los Angeles Police Department," Chief Michel Moore said.
LOS ANGELES — A police officer was arrested Thursday on a charge that he fondled the breast of a dead woman in October, according to authorities and court documents.
Officer David Rojas, 27, who has been with the Los Angeles Police Department for four years, was arrested by the department’s internal affairs division.
He is charged with one count of having sexual contact with human remains in the Oct. 20 incident, which occurred after Rojas and his partner responded to a call about a woman who had died, prosecutors said in a statement.
Rojas was released Thursday on $20,000 bail, according to jail records. It was not clear if he had an attorney who could speak on his behalf. A phone number for Rojas could not immediately be found Thursday night.
The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office said Rojas faces up to three years in prison if convicted.
"This incident is extremely disturbing and does not represent the values of the Los Angeles Police Department," LAPD Chief Michel Moore said in a statement.
The LAPD said earlier this month that an officer was removed from active duty amid an investigation. The Associated Press reported at the time that that the alleged incident was captured on the officer’s body camera despite an effort to turn it off.
The officer turned off the camera after being left alone with the corpse and then turned it on, but the cameras have two-minute buffering periods that record what happens right before they are activated, the AP reported, citing a person briefed on the investigation.
The district attorney's office said Rojas touched the dead woman's breast while he was alone.
The board of directors for the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the police officers' union, called the alleged acts "vile."
"We hope that District Attorney Jackie Lacey charging Mr. Rojas for his vile alleged crime will bring some solace to the deceased woman's family during their time of grieving," the board said in a statement.
"The Los Angeles Police Protective League will not defend Mr. Rojas during his criminal proceedings," it continued, "and his alleged behavior is abhorrent and an affront to every law enforcement professional working for the LAPD."
Internal affairs detectives were examining Rojas' entire career at the LAPD, including a review of other video he recorded while on duty, NBC Los Angeles reported, citing sources.
The police department said in a statement that it presented its case to the district attorney's office on Tuesday and the single felony count was filed Thursday.
- Joined
- Apr 29, 2014
>LAPD
I am horrified but not surprised
I am horrified but not surprised
- Joined
- Mar 20, 2019
Wow, so it does exist...a crime (not involving a minor) for which the Fraternal Order won't vehemently defend one of its own. I'm frankly a lil surprised they didn't spin this into "he was searching the body for clues!" or some shit...they washed their hands of this fucker quick.
- Joined
- Jan 14, 2018
Omar's back at it again, the America-hating bitch. ONLY reason to buy her book (at Goodwill) is for a target for target practice.
Publisher Stonewalls as Ethics Questions Swirl Around Omar Book
Ilhan Omar / Getty Images
Washington Free Beacon Staff - DECEMBER 6, 2019 12:00 PM
Ilhan Omar became an instant celebrity when she defeated a longtime Democratic incumbent in a tough primary fight in 2018 —and it wasn’t long until news broke that the young congresswoman and frequent presidential sparring partner had inked a lucrative book deal after her election to Congress.
But the Minnesota lawmaker and her publisher, Dey Street Books, have refused multiple requests for comment about when, exactly, Omar signed that book deal, making it impossible to determine whether she is complying with ethics rules that prohibit House members from receiving book advances.
Some new lawmakers who, like Omar, garner national attention on the campaign trail and draw the attention of book publishers, work around the rule by signing book contracts after they are elected—but before they are officially sworn into office. Doing so allows them to accept advances that frequently run well into the six-figure range—Omar's book deal was reportedly worth between $100,000 and $250,000, according to Forbes —while still complying with House ethics rules.
Those rules prohibit "the receipt of any advance payment on copyright royalties"—that is, a book advance—as well as "the receipt of copyright royalties" unless the contract has first been approved by the House Ethics Committee.
Omar’s colleague, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R., Texas), for example, received a $250,000 advance to pen a book about "outrage culture" before his swearing in last January. The hefty sum appears on his 2018 financial disclosure report, a filing required from all members of Congress detailing the sources and value of the incomes of House members.
Omar’s 2018 filing, which covers the calendar year, does not list a book advance. It is possible that she signed a contract with Dey Street, an imprint of Harper Collins, between Jan. 1 and Jan. 3, 2019, before her swearing in on the 3rd. If so, any advance would not have been listed on her 2018 financial disclosure and would have allowed her to comply with House ethics rules. But any contract signed outside of that two-and-half-day period—and that includes a book advance—either should have been listed on her 2018 disclosure or was signed in violation of House ethics rules.
"It's very clear, a member cannot receive an advance payment on copyright royalties," said Brendan Fischer, the director of the Federal Reform Program at the Campaign Legal Center. Omar is writing her book with the assistance of a research and writing collaborator and, according to Fischer, House rules prohibit that collaborator to receive an advance.
A spokesman for Omar did not reply to repeated requests for comment about when she signed her book contract and whether she received an advance. A spokeswoman for Dey Street Books did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The forthcoming book, This is What America Looks Like, is scheduled for publication in April 2020, according to the publisher. The memoir is expected to chronicle her childhood in war-torn Somalia and her journey to the United States. Dey Street’s executive editor Alessandra Bastagli told Forbes that the book will also counter "everything we keep hearing from the current administration and the right-wing media about refugees, immigrants, Muslims, and women."
Omar is currently the subject of an ethics complaint filed by a conservative group, the National Legal and Policy Center, focusing on tens of thousands of dollars in payments from her campaign to the consulting firm owned by her alleged boyfriend for travel expenses that were not itemized, as campaign finance law requires.
The complaint comes after Omar was forced to reimburse her campaign committee nearly $3,500 after a campaign finance investigation revealed she had used campaign funds to pay for personal travel and for help correcting tax returns filed improperly.
Publisher Stonewalls as Ethics Questions Swirl Around Omar Book
Ilhan Omar became an instant celebrity when she defeated a longtime Democratic incumbent in a tough primary fight last year—and it wasn’t long until news broke that the young congresswoman and frequent presidential sparring partner had inked a lucrative book deal.
freebeacon.com
Publisher Stonewalls as Ethics Questions Swirl Around Omar Book
Washington Free Beacon Staff - DECEMBER 6, 2019 12:00 PM
Ilhan Omar became an instant celebrity when she defeated a longtime Democratic incumbent in a tough primary fight in 2018 —and it wasn’t long until news broke that the young congresswoman and frequent presidential sparring partner had inked a lucrative book deal after her election to Congress.
But the Minnesota lawmaker and her publisher, Dey Street Books, have refused multiple requests for comment about when, exactly, Omar signed that book deal, making it impossible to determine whether she is complying with ethics rules that prohibit House members from receiving book advances.
Some new lawmakers who, like Omar, garner national attention on the campaign trail and draw the attention of book publishers, work around the rule by signing book contracts after they are elected—but before they are officially sworn into office. Doing so allows them to accept advances that frequently run well into the six-figure range—Omar's book deal was reportedly worth between $100,000 and $250,000, according to Forbes —while still complying with House ethics rules.
Those rules prohibit "the receipt of any advance payment on copyright royalties"—that is, a book advance—as well as "the receipt of copyright royalties" unless the contract has first been approved by the House Ethics Committee.
Omar’s colleague, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R., Texas), for example, received a $250,000 advance to pen a book about "outrage culture" before his swearing in last January. The hefty sum appears on his 2018 financial disclosure report, a filing required from all members of Congress detailing the sources and value of the incomes of House members.
Omar’s 2018 filing, which covers the calendar year, does not list a book advance. It is possible that she signed a contract with Dey Street, an imprint of Harper Collins, between Jan. 1 and Jan. 3, 2019, before her swearing in on the 3rd. If so, any advance would not have been listed on her 2018 financial disclosure and would have allowed her to comply with House ethics rules. But any contract signed outside of that two-and-half-day period—and that includes a book advance—either should have been listed on her 2018 disclosure or was signed in violation of House ethics rules.
"It's very clear, a member cannot receive an advance payment on copyright royalties," said Brendan Fischer, the director of the Federal Reform Program at the Campaign Legal Center. Omar is writing her book with the assistance of a research and writing collaborator and, according to Fischer, House rules prohibit that collaborator to receive an advance.
A spokesman for Omar did not reply to repeated requests for comment about when she signed her book contract and whether she received an advance. A spokeswoman for Dey Street Books did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The forthcoming book, This is What America Looks Like, is scheduled for publication in April 2020, according to the publisher. The memoir is expected to chronicle her childhood in war-torn Somalia and her journey to the United States. Dey Street’s executive editor Alessandra Bastagli told Forbes that the book will also counter "everything we keep hearing from the current administration and the right-wing media about refugees, immigrants, Muslims, and women."
Omar is currently the subject of an ethics complaint filed by a conservative group, the National Legal and Policy Center, focusing on tens of thousands of dollars in payments from her campaign to the consulting firm owned by her alleged boyfriend for travel expenses that were not itemized, as campaign finance law requires.
The complaint comes after Omar was forced to reimburse her campaign committee nearly $3,500 after a campaign finance investigation revealed she had used campaign funds to pay for personal travel and for help correcting tax returns filed improperly.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2016
The next guy on the list:
Steve Brierley - Google Scholar Citations
scholar.google.co.uk
I reverse my dislike, it was a joke. It might not have been a good one but the joke in my post was to conveniently stop at the first name.
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2019
New commissioner to face questions about ‘hate group’
Fennville’s newest city commissioner is likely to face a big crowd at his first official meeting on Monday.
www.woodtv.com
- Joined
- Aug 4, 2018
Imagine being such a cuck the only tit you can touch is a dead woman's.LAPD officer arrested on charge of fondling dead woman's breastLAPD officer arrested on charge of fondling woman’s corpse
"This incident is extremely disturbing and does not represent the values of the Los Angeles Police Department," Chief Michel Moore said.www.nbcnews.com
This incident is extremely disturbing and does not represent the values of the Los Angeles Police Department," Chief Michel Moore said.
LOS ANGELES — A police officer was arrested Thursday on a charge that he fondled the breast of a dead woman in October, according to authorities and court documents.
Officer David Rojas, 27, who has been with the Los Angeles Police Department for four years, was arrested by the department’s internal affairs division.
He is charged with one count of having sexual contact with human remains in the Oct. 20 incident, which occurred after Rojas and his partner responded to a call about a woman who had died, prosecutors said in a statement.
Rojas was released Thursday on $20,000 bail, according to jail records. It was not clear if he had an attorney who could speak on his behalf. A phone number for Rojas could not immediately be found Thursday night.
The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office said Rojas faces up to three years in prison if convicted.
"This incident is extremely disturbing and does not represent the values of the Los Angeles Police Department," LAPD Chief Michel Moore said in a statement.
The LAPD said earlier this month that an officer was removed from active duty amid an investigation. The Associated Press reported at the time that that the alleged incident was captured on the officer’s body camera despite an effort to turn it off.
The officer turned off the camera after being left alone with the corpse and then turned it on, but the cameras have two-minute buffering periods that record what happens right before they are activated, the AP reported, citing a person briefed on the investigation.
The district attorney's office said Rojas touched the dead woman's breast while he was alone.
The board of directors for the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the police officers' union, called the alleged acts "vile."
"We hope that District Attorney Jackie Lacey charging Mr. Rojas for his vile alleged crime will bring some solace to the deceased woman's family during their time of grieving," the board said in a statement.
"The Los Angeles Police Protective League will not defend Mr. Rojas during his criminal proceedings," it continued, "and his alleged behavior is abhorrent and an affront to every law enforcement professional working for the LAPD."
Internal affairs detectives were examining Rojas' entire career at the LAPD, including a review of other video he recorded while on duty, NBC Los Angeles reported, citing sources.
The police department said in a statement that it presented its case to the district attorney's office on Tuesday and the single felony count was filed Thursday.
- Joined
- May 2, 2017
Restroom sign says employees may face smell check to ensure they're 'not sitting on phone'
BALTIMORE (WBFF) -- A company has a bathroom sign that claims that employees must follow a strict time limit or else face a smell check. The sign, which appeared on Reddit, attempts to stop workers from taking long breaks. “If in bathroom for more than 10 minutes, a smell check will be completed...
Restroom sign says employees may face smell check to ensure they're 'not sitting on phone'
by WBFF Staff
Monday, December 16th 2019
BALTIMORE (WBFF) -- A company has a bathroom sign that claims that employees must follow a strict time limit or else face a smell check.
The sign, which appeared on Reddit, attempts to stop workers from taking long breaks.
“If in bathroom for more than 10 minutes, a smell check will be completed to ensure employee not sitting on phone. If it does not stink, employee's name will be reported to office.”
The post got a lot of engagement with one person posting "I'd stop flushing just in case."
Another person said, "Who is the lucky employee entrusted with this noble task."
Rajeev Agrawal on Twitter
“Employees taking long breaks If in bathroom for more than 10 minutes, a smell check will be completed to ensure employee not sitting on phone," the first part of the sign says. "If it does not stink, employee's name will be reported to office," the second part warns”
twitter.com
Rajeev Agrawal
@FattyMotu
Employees taking long breaks If in bathroom for more than 10 minutes, a smell check will be completed to ensure employee not sitting on phone," the first part of the sign says. "If it does not stink, employee's name will be reported to office," the second part warns
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2019
Restroom sign says employees may face smell check to ensure they're 'not sitting on phone'
BALTIMORE (WBFF) -- A company has a bathroom sign that claims that employees must follow a strict time limit or else face a smell check. The sign, which appeared on Reddit, attempts to stop workers from taking long breaks. “If in bathroom for more than 10 minutes, a smell check will be completed...nbcmontana.com
Restroom sign says employees may face smell check to ensure they're 'not sitting on phone'
by WBFF Staff
Monday, December 16th 2019
BALTIMORE (WBFF) -- A company has a bathroom sign that claims that employees must follow a strict time limit or else face a smell check.
The sign, which appeared on Reddit, attempts to stop workers from taking long breaks.
“If in bathroom for more than 10 minutes, a smell check will be completed to ensure employee not sitting on phone. If it does not stink, employee's name will be reported to office.”
The post got a lot of engagement with one person posting "I'd stop flushing just in case."
Another person said, "Who is the lucky employee entrusted with this noble task."
Rajeev AgrawalRajeev Agrawal on Twitter
“Employees taking long breaks If in bathroom for more than 10 minutes, a smell check will be completed to ensure employee not sitting on phone," the first part of the sign says. "If it does not stink, employee's name will be reported to office," the second part warns”
@FattyMotu
Employees taking long breaks If in bathroom for more than 10 minutes, a smell check will be completed to ensure employee not sitting on phone," the first part of the sign says. "If it does not stink, employee's name will be reported to office," the second part warns
View attachment 1053951
I feel like this disproportionally favors indian employees.
- Joined
- May 22, 2016
Vladimir Putin 'still uses obsolete Windows XP' despite hacking risk
Official photos seem to show president using unsupported OS at Kremlin and residence
www.theguardian.com
Vladimir Putin 'still uses obsolete Windows XP' despite hacking risk
Official photos seem to show president using unsupported OS at Kremlin and residence
Marc Bennetts in Moscow
Tue 17 Dec 2019 13.24 GMTLast modified on Tue 17 Dec 2019 14.58 GMT
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Vladimir Putin in Tatarstan on 13 December. Photograph: Mikhail Klimentyev/AP
Russian agents have been accused of worldwide hacking operations, but someone at the Kremlin has apparently forgotten to inform Vladimir Putin of the importance of cyber-security.
Putin, 67, appears to have the obsolete Microsoft Windows XP operating system installed on computers in his office at the Kremlin and at his official Novo-Ogaryovo residence near Moscow, according to images released by his press service.
Both computers have the Kremlin towers set as their desktop backgrounds.
EU to run war games to prepare for Russian and Chinese cyber-attacks
Read more
Microsoft stopped releasing regular security updates for Windows XP and Office 2003 in April 2014. However, it appears that Russian government regulations have prevented Putin from updating to the more recent Microsoft 10.
The US tech firm warns on its website that computers running Windows XP are “vulnerable to security risks and viruses”.
Windows XP, released in 2001, was the last Microsoft operating system given the green light for use on official Russian government computers, the Open Media website reported, citing defence ministry documents. The more recent Windows 10 is only approved for devices that do not contain state secrets – something that would not seem to apply to Putin’s computers.
Moscow is gradually phasing out Microsoft and Google on government computers in favour of Russia’s Astra Linux operating system software and domestic browsers such as Yandex.
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, did not comment when asked why Putin continues to use an antiquated Microsoft operating system.
It’s unclear how great a threat Putin’s use of Windows XP poses to Kremlin cyber security: the ex-KGB officer is said to be an irregular user of the internet, which he has previously called a “CIA project”. The predecessor of the internet was the Arpanet, which was founded by the US Department of Defense.
Russia is increasingly seeking to establish control over internet technology. The Kremlin recently banned the sale of smartphones without Russian-made apps, while Putin in February approved a law giving Moscow the power to “disconnect” the country from the global internet.
Leonard Helplessness
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2018
Shame, because there were people on twitter who were quite passionate about what this event represents to the gay and trans community.
Oh, and the "lap dance" was a black tranny stripper. Here's the video:
- Joined
- Jun 3, 2016
"16 year old girl" staged her own kidnapping..... because she didn't want to go back to Honduras.
This is "16 -year-old" Karol Sanchez
Sanchez was walking with her 36-year-old mom near the same intersection around 11:20 p.m. Monday when two men hopped out of a beige sedan, grabbed the teen and forced her into the car, harrowing surveillance video shows.
The mom tried to fight off the men, but was shoved to the ground as the car peeled off, police said.
Investigators have not immediately released a motive for the apparent abduction — which prompted an Amber Alert — but the NYPD’s 40th Precinct confirmed in a tweet that Karol had been found.
Police sources said the teen’s mom was planning to relocate them back to her native Honduras over Karol’s objections, and that investigators were exploring whether that played into the disappearance.
Sanchez was speaking with police at the 40th Precinct stationhouse Tuesday afternoon to sort out whether the incident was a kidnapping at all, cops said.
LINK
Anyway, this bitch looks about 43
This is "16 -year-old" Karol Sanchez
Sanchez was walking with her 36-year-old mom near the same intersection around 11:20 p.m. Monday when two men hopped out of a beige sedan, grabbed the teen and forced her into the car, harrowing surveillance video shows.
The mom tried to fight off the men, but was shoved to the ground as the car peeled off, police said.
Investigators have not immediately released a motive for the apparent abduction — which prompted an Amber Alert — but the NYPD’s 40th Precinct confirmed in a tweet that Karol had been found.
Police sources said the teen’s mom was planning to relocate them back to her native Honduras over Karol’s objections, and that investigators were exploring whether that played into the disappearance.
Sanchez was speaking with police at the 40th Precinct stationhouse Tuesday afternoon to sort out whether the incident was a kidnapping at all, cops said.
LINK
Anyway, this bitch looks about 43