Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/84343
"It never occurred to me to call the police," says Sara Cornell, recalling the night her fiancé's controlling behavior turned physical. Cornell, a nurse from Mineral Point, was sleeping in a bedroom across the hall from her 4-year-old and 6-year-old sons when an argument from the previous day turned brutal. The impetus: Her fiancé discovered she'd moved an expensive showerhead from his bathroom to hers. The next morn- ing, that small act of defiance brought him storming into her bedroom, where he be- gan beating Cornell with the showerhead as he screamed vulgarities and tried to choke her with the hose attachment. "The whole time I kept thinking, 'Oh my gosh, my kids are right across the hall. Keep it down.' I was trying to get him to be quiet," she recalls. But the struggle was too loud, and when thought he was either going to kill me or my kids. I kept saying to them, 'Run! Go in your room and lock your door! Just go in your closet!' I just kept thinking, 'This is it. It's all come down to this?'" It took Cornell several days to accept the fact that she was the victim in the situation. She was in denial largely because she didn't fit the common stereotype for domestic abuse victims—low-income, uneducated women with an unstable past. She couldn't see herself as someone who would need a shelter. In fact, Cornell's relationship with her the kids ran into the room, they witnessed something no child should ever have to see—their mom being held with a gun to her head. "I seriously thought it was over. I 52 BRAVA Magazine October 2012 fiancé, an accomplished professional with three master's degrees and deep pockets, began blissfully. She was introduced to her abuser by someone who knew him from church. Then three years into the relation- ship, the brutal beating occurred.