2011-08-04
Victim testifies in assault trial
Posted: August 4, 2011 - 10:36am
The victim of a 2009 assault told jurors Wednesday she saw her longtime boyfriend raise his hand to strike her — but she could not identify what knocked her unconscious.
“I could see him coming at me with something,” she said. “I can’t say exactly what.”
State prosecutors allege Terry Lynn Fleetwood, 59, attacked his live-in girlfriend with a totem-like wooden instrument that usually hung on the wall of their home.
The victim, who suffered serious head injuries, described the messy, verbally abusive end of her 18-year relationship with an Amarillo chiropractor who has been charged in the case.
Fleetwood is charged with two counts of aggravated sexual assault and one count of aggravated assault, according to the September 2010 indictments.
When police arrived at the house, about a day after the attack, officers said they found the totem on the floor surrounded by scattered pieces that had broken off.
State prosecutors allege Fleetwood beat the victim senseless with a wooden instrument and sexually abused her while she was unconscious.
Before the attack, the victim recorded the verbal arguments with Fleetwood for about six months, hoping he would stop his abusive, drunken rants after he heard the audio when he was sober, she said. The jury on Wednesday heard about 30 minutes of an argument that included profane back-and-forths.
“I was recording Terry to get him to see what he was doing to me,” the victim said.
Jesse Quackenbush, Fleetwood’s attorney, said the victim recorded his client after “pushing his buttons” when Fleetwood was drunk. The victim would taunt Fleetwood about a previous marriage, his “sexual prowess” and his relationship with his mother, which fueled Fleetwood’s rants, Quackenbush said.
Quackenbush pointed to numerous instances in the recordings when Fleetwood told the victim she could leave if she was unhappy, but she said ending the relationship was never a viable option.
“He didn’t think I was strong enough to leave,” she said.
She called Fleetwood a “sociopath” who liked to control her and her child.
“If the state of Texas did not go after him, I would have somehow still been with him,” she said.
After the attack, the victim was unconscious and intubated at Northwest Texas Hospital, where she underwent emergency brain surgery.
Quackenbush said the possibility remains that the few memories of the attack she can recall could be the product of stories she was told by police or doctors.
The victim said she now suffers from severe memory lapse and delayed speech.
“It seems like a whole world ago, like a bad dream,” she said.
But she said prosecution investigators, doctors or her family never instructed her about memories she should recall in court.
The victim, who has visited a Colorado therapist since March 2010, said she is slowly regaining her memory of life before the attack.
Kyla Hauer, the therapist, said the attack has left the victim — who had a history of abusive relationships with other men — with severe anxiety issues.
“She has a tremendous amount of guilt for allowing her son to grow up in an abusive home — feelings of being a bad mom,” Hauer said.