The Perfect Victim Is a Dead Woman

This is a story about choices that are not really choices. It is a story about impossible circumstances propelling us down pathways we believe unimaginable. You always believe it could never happen to you, until it does.

Naomi planned to end things with Moses (both names changed for privacy). Apprehensively, she entered their dilapidated red house, subconsciously knowing two truths: There would be a fight and he would be violent. She wandered to the kitchen to make chicken sandwiches with the fresh tomatoes she’d purchased at the Rochester Public Market. Suddenly, she felt him behind her, and saw the flash of a blade. Smiling menacingly, his giant frame filled the doorway. “He was preventing me from leaving the kitchen. How the fuck am I about to get outta here, that’s what I was thinking,” Naomi tells me.

Before she registered the danger, Moses punched her in the face and she bit through her lower lip. She shows me the scar sadly. Naomi begged him to call an ambulance, but he taunted her: “There’s nowhere you can go where I won’t find you. If I hear about you bein’ with someone, I’ll find y’all and kill you. I’ll find you. I’ll wait outside your bus stop.” He slammed her against the floor. “I have to get in defense mode, because I don’t know what’s about to happen,” she says to me. She ran for the kitchen, desperately searching for a way to protect herself. He followed her, again blocking the doorway with his bulk. He lunged for her throat. She grabbed a knife.

“And…I guess you know. Our last encounter was him trying to choke me, and me stabbing him.” Naomi sighs and leans against the passenger seat of my car, ending the story of the night she killed her abuser.

A grand jury indicted her for second-degree murder. A year later, she pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter. Initially facing five to 25 years in prison, her sentence was reduced under New York State’s Domestic Violence Survivor Justice Act to three years’ incarceration, with five years of post-release supervision. Even the District Attorney’s office acknowledged that Naomi was a victim of domestic violence, which “was a significant contributing factor” to her behavior. When the options available to her were kill or be killed, why was she even indicted?

The post The Perfect Victim Is a Dead Woman appeared first on Ms. Magazine.