A mother of two shot dead, allegedly by her husband, in their Saugerties home; a Kingston man sentenced to prison for stabbing his ex-girlfriend to death and dumping her body in the woods; another man found guilty of murder for strangling his girlfriend to death with his bare hands in Ellenville.
In the first weeks of October – Domestic Violence Awareness Month – tales of women meeting violent ends at the hands of intimate partners blared from the front pages of local papers. For “Eve,” not her real name, the headlines were more than a sobering look. The everyday toll of domestic abuse was a chilling reminder that her ex, the father of her youngest child, would soon be walking out of the Ulster County Jail and, she feared, looking for her.
“I’m terrified,” said Eve, a delicately built woman in her 20s who wears a gold cross around her neck and two more in her ears. “I’m having anxiety attacks, I can’t sleep. I don’t feel safe here, I need to get away but I’m running out of time.”
Eve ended her two-year relationship with “Tom” last year after a series of abusive incidents including, she said, threats on her life and the life of her son. In January, Tom was sentenced to a stretch in the Ulster County Jail for twice violating an order of protection issued by the city’s Domestic Violence Court. He’ll be released at the end of the month and, Eve said, she’s already gotten word from people who have visited him in jail that Tom blames her for his incarceration and would like to get even. Now, she says she’s desperate to get out of her Kingston apartment and find a new home for herself and her four children. Her story illustrates the formidable obstacles faced by women threatened by domestic violence, even after they make the often wrenching decision to cut ties with their partners and go to the courts for protection.
“The first year was wonderful, I have to admit,” said Eve of her relationship with Tom, a man she’d known for most of her life and dated for about two years. According to Eve, Tom became a father figure to her three children, and helped ease the burden she faced as a single mother getting by on disability. The couple soon had a child together.
A pattern of abuse
Things began to go bad last year, when their son was about a year old and Tom stopped taking the medication he used to control his bipolar disorder. He began to verbally and later physically abuse her. Once, he shoved her into a wall; another time, he knocked her to the ground. The last straw came, she said, when he came up behind her and choked her as she was holding the baby, forcing her to drop the infant into his crib.
She went to city court to file an order of protection barring him from contact with her. A short time later, however she had the order dropped from “no contact” to “no harassment” and briefly reconciled.
“It was the typical story. I didn’t know what I was doing. I thought if he went back on his meds things would get better. I was wrong,” said Eve who now believes her ex’s mental illness had nothing to do with his abusive behavior.
Then, in January, she returned home one day to find a post-it note from the Kingston Police Department on her door advising her to call them immediately.
“They told me he had made threats to a counselor at (the Ulster County Department of) Mental Health. He threatened to assault me and kill me, kill my son and kill himself. They told me I needed to leave the house until they could find him and take him to (Benedictine Hospital’s mental health unit).”
Eve said her last contact with Tom came early this year, just before he went to jail when their son was seriously ill and she took him up on an offer to get a night’s sleep at his place while he cared for the baby.
“I hadn’t slept in two weeks, I was exhausted, I was at my wits end,” said Eve. “I didn’t want to get involved with him again. I just needed a night’s sleep.”
Instead, she woke up in the middle of the night to Tom’s voice shouting at the crying infant.
“I just took the baby and left, that was it,” she said.
Eve said the past 10 months have felt like a reprieve, free of the anxiety and fear she felt when Tom lurked constantly threatening in the back of her mind.
“When he’s in jail I feel like I can breathe, I don’t have that anxiety, I know where he is and I know I’m safe,” she said. “Sometimes I would have a nightmare and wake up so panicked that he was coming to get me that I would call up the jail to make sure he was still there.”
The aftermath of the relationship has also affected her family, especially her 8-year-old daughter, who witnessed the choking incident.
“He was like a father to her, so it’s confusing,” said Eve. “She says ‘Mommy, my heart tells me I should write him a letter, but my head tells me it’s not a good idea.’ I just have to tell her she can’t have any contact with him.”
Anticipating his release, she said, has brought back the anxiety and fear. Desperate to get out of Kingston, Eve says her day consists of poring over newspaper classifieds and online services for apartments going for $900 or less and landlords willing to take on a single mother with four kids. At 3 p.m. she bundles her toddler into the car, picks up her older children from schools and drives around for three or four hours following up leads on apartments around the Hudson Valley. Family of Woodstock has offered to find a place for her and her children in a battered women’s shelter in another county, but she’s hoping it won’t come to that.
“It’s so unfair. Because this man is so horrible I have to uproot my kids and move them into a shelter?” she said. “They should make him go move somewhere else.”
As she looks for a way to flee the city where she grew up Eve is haunted by the memory of another woman who never had a chance to run. Tracy Passaro of Saugerties was shot to death early on the morning of Oct. 3 while her two young children were in the house. Her husband Anthony Passaro Jr. allegedly told police he shot her during an argument.
Eve said she met Tracy, along with her husband and children, at a parenting support group run by Ulster County Mental Health and knew about the problems in their marriage.
“She would tell me that (her husband) was going to anger management classes and things were going really good,” said Eve. “I wasn’t so sure, but I’d just say ‘good luck, I hope it works out.’ When I heard he killed her I was really disturbed. It hit too close to home.”
Eve praised the city’s domestic violence court, which helps steer victims toward counseling and services while coordinating efforts of multiple agencies to keep track of offenders; as well as Family of Woodstock’s support group for domestic violence victims, which she attends regularly. But, the fact remains that Eve’s ex will soon be a free man with nothing between him and her except an order of protection that he has already violated twice.
“I have to wait until he violates the order of protection and hope I survive, and then they’ll send him to state prison. That’s the situation I’m in now.”