ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, September 24, 1996 TAG: 9609240027
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: BETH MACY
SOURCE: BETH MACY
Linda Jackson has seen women mangled. She's seen them maimed.
As the needs assessment officer for the Turning Point domestic violence shelter, she once helped a woman whose husband had bitten her nose off. Another shelter resident had been jarred awake by her ex-husband and thrown against her bedroom wall, causing her to lose 95 percent of her hearing.
But of all the abuse cases Linda Jackson has seen, Amy Peters was the worst.
The worst among those who've lived to tell about it, that is.
And Amy Peters does tell about it - in her slow and stammering, but very articulate speech.
It takes Amy five times longer to say this sentence than it will take you to read it: ``He shot me three times in the head and once in my left breast.''
Two of the three bullets are still in her head, one in her jaw and the other next to her cerebellum - too close to remove. Amy is 24. She cannot walk. The left side of her body is paralyzed.
It's been that way since the night of July 10, 1992, when Peters' then-husband, Jimmy Steele, tried to get her to come home to him and, hearing her refusal, pumped four bullets into her body.
He is in prison, convicted of malicious wounding, sentenced to 27 years. His first parole-eligibility hearing is scheduled for September 1997; his mandatory release date: July 9, 2006.
Amy, meanwhile, serves her own life sentence - in a wheelchair. She needs help just to take a bath. She has a hard time getting dressed.
But she lives in a West End apartment, alone for the first time in her life.
And she loves it.
``I'm happy with where I am,'' she says. ``I'm doing better in this wheelchair than I ever was before. I don't have to answer to anybody.''
Amy was 12 years old when she met Jimmy. He was 21. She was attracted to him, she says, ``because he was cool. And a lot of times I wasn't getting along too good with my parents. I was trying to get away from home.''
She found her way out when she became pregnant - at 15, a ninth-grader at James Madison Middle School.
She knew Jimmy wasn't the right man to marry. ``Even then he used to get in fights all the time.... But I don't believe in abortion and I was pregnant, so I felt like I had to marry him.''
As a teen-age wife, mother and school drop-out, Amy felt trapped into staying with a husband who beat her. It was the typical domestic-violence scenario, her counselors say: He'd beat her, then apologize; she'd leave, then he'd find her and show up crying. She'd take him back.
In 1992, she was working two jobs as a housekeeper - one at a nursing home, the other at Tanglewood Mall - when she thought she'd left her husband for good, fleeing to a friend's house in Craig County.
That's where he found her that night. That's where he took the .25-caliber automatic pistol he'd once taught her to use - for protection - and used it to shoot her. Four times.
Amy has lived in eight places since then: Lewis-Gale Hospital in Salem, Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center in Fishersville, with her mother in Roanoke, with some relatives in Florida, in an area group home. She was living with someone she considered a family friend - who ended up taking her money and withholding her medications - when she met Joan Way with Blue Ridge Independent Living Center.
``I have seen her in some pretty adverse situations, places that were totally inaccessible,'' Way says. ``I have seen her have to leave her wheelchair in the hall to drag herself to the bathroom. She's done whatever she's had to do, whether she was physically able to or not, just to keep from going back into a group home.
``And she has never, not once, been bitter or angry. I find that completely remarkable.''
Way helped Amy move to the Turning Point shelter. There, says Linda Jackson of the shelter, Amy proved even more remarkable.
``She was always willing to laugh, to talk. She was always willing to cry with the other women,'' Jackson recalls.
``We had women here who had started [to leave abusive husbands] as many as seven times. And it just shocked them to see Amy and hear her story.
``I can say, without a doubt, she got at least six women not to go back.''
In August, Amy became the first to take advantage of a new city-operated, federally funded program called Shelter Plus Care, which helps subsidize rent for homeless people with disabilities. Bob Fetzer of Building Specialists placed Amy in one of his newly renovated low-income homes, making it handicap accessible.
``A whole lot of people thought she couldn't manage living alone,'' Way says, adding that Amy does receive daily visits from personal-care attendants. ``But she's ready and willing to prove people wrong.''
Last weekend, for instance, she cooked macaroni-and-cheese, vaccuumed her living room and mopped her kitchen floor - just to see if she could do it. She has earned her GED and recently began doing production work folding garbage bags for Goodwill Industries.
Some day, she says, she'd like to find another housekeeping job. Some day, she'd like to take computer classes at Virginia Western Community College - she's had a photographic memory for numbers ever since the shooting, with the ability to recite upon request any phone number she's ever dialed.
But her immediate goal is to regain custody of her 9-year-old son, who has been living with her ex-husband's sister since the shooting. She wants to get him into family counseling, so he can sort out how he feels about his father.
``I've just got to prove to everybody that I can take care of myself first,'' she says. ``And I think I'm doing a darned good job.''
For all she's lived through to tell about, Amy Peters feels there's nothing she can't do. And she may be right.
At the very least, she sends a powerful message to other battered wives:
That being independent is better than the alternative - even when the price is having two bullets lodged in your head.
LENGTH: Long : 110 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS\Staff. Amy Peters' former husbandby CNBshot her four times. He's in prison and she's in a wheelchair - but
she says she's happy with her independence and her new home. color.