Domestic violence leads to daughter’s death
“On Oct. 3, 2008, a Friday afternoon, I received a phone call from my daughter’s boyfriend. They had been together maybe two years, living in North Carolina, and he had never called me before. He said Melissa fell in the bathroom, but she was fine. When I asked to talk to her, he said she was sleeping. I told him to have her call me when she woke up or when she had time. By Monday, I still hadn’t heard from her, so I called. The answering machine picked up, and I said, ‘Melissa, call me when you get a chance.’ When I didn’t hear from her that day, I tried again on Tuesday. The answering machine didn’t pick up. The phone just rang 25 times. That’s when I started getting this feeling that something wasn’t right.
“Melissa was on parole at the time because she had stolen some checks. I knew her parole officer, and I contacted him. I asked if he could go by her place to check on her, and he said he would on his way home from work. When he knocked on the door, he didn’t get a response. So he called the police. They found her in the bedroom. She was lying on the mattress with no sheet on it. She had a T-shirt on her head and through one arm. She was still alive. But she was covered in urine, feces and vaginal blood. She had bruises all over her body and her jaw was broken on both sides. According to the EMT, it was the worst he’d ever seen.
“They took her to the local hospital and later air-lifted her to a trauma center in Greenville, North Carolina. They called me that morning and said they needed to do a craniotomy to relieve pressure on her brain. She had a brain bleed. By the time we got there, they had put her on a feeding tube. She kept getting slowly worse every day. Then she started having seizures. They were doing CAT scans of her brain every couple days. They told us that she had a lot of necrosis and that more of her brain was dying each day. She was in the ICU nine weeks.
“On Dec. 16, the doctors got us all together and told us that Melissa was brain dead. They said we should go home for the night and come back the next day to let them know what our decision was, whether to shut everything off. One of my daughters lived in Jacksonville, North Carolina, so we were on our way there when we got a phone call. The doctor said, ‘You need to come back. I think Melissa made the decision for you. But we’re keeping her on life support until you return.’ So we went back, and I stood there while she took her last breath. That was one of the hardest things. When that happened, I actually felt like my heart was aching, like I had lost a piece of my heart.”
— Marian Mims
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