At the beginning of May, University student Bethany Schuster answered a call from a private number, expecting to hear her father. She heard someone else instead. It was a voice she’d heard thousands of times before in a thousand different places, but on that day it was the most horrifying voice she could have heard.
It was her stalker, Warren Haley, fresh out of a California jail for possession of methamphetamines, saying he was in Eugene.
It was a crisis, but for Schuster, it was a familiar one. He’s been hunting her since last July when she broke off their eight-year relationship.
In the past few weeks he’s left dozens of messages, in one calling her a “fucking coward” telling her “you can make everything worse, gonna make me explode.”
In another, he just whispered: “You can’t have your life.”
She said his goal, warped as it may be, is to make her fail in school so she’ll come back to him.
She didn’t want to go to the Eugene Police Department for help, because she said she doesn’t trust them. The last time she did – when he broke into her house and tried to strangle her – she said the officer who arrested Haley told her, “We’re understaffed, buy a gun.” So when Haley turned up again, she turned to the Office of Student Life. She wishes she did so sooner, because for Schuster, justice has moved slowly and she’s suffered all the way.
She decided to go public with her story, she said, to help others know about how the University has kept her safe and enrolled in school.
In a moment of gallows humor, she said, “You can be stalked and still go to UO.”
Her advocate from Student Life helped her get into counseling. Her advocate got her in contact with the Department of Public Safety. When Schuster was too embarrassed to tell her teachers why she had to miss class, her student advocate went with a uniformed DPS officer to explain to the teachers that one of their students was trying to manage a stalker, showing them his mug-shot and telling them to keep their eyes open for suspicious characters. Her advocate also helped her achieve some leeway with keeping up with her schoolwork. Until recently, it was out of character for Schuster, a double major in psychology and political science, to be doing poorly in school.
The Descent
Last June, Schuster said she was teaching ballet, training ballet three hours a day, five days a week and was earning a 4.0 GPA as a full-time student at Lane Community College. At the same time, her eight-year relationship with Warren Haley was ending.
They’d never been the ideal couple. In fact, it may seem hard to believe the relationship was ever healthy, but toward the end she’d started to see how mean and controlling he’d been. He’d destroyed friendships of hers and made her and her family miserable. In late July, she told him it was over.
He didn’t like that.
Schuster said from Haley’s point of view, “I was such a lowly being, how could I break up with (him)?”
He spent the next few months harassing her over the phone while she was enrolling as a student at the University, but it wasn’t until around Halloween that he became violent. Her story goes like this: Haley’s dad died. He got permission from the state to go to Wisconsin for the funeral, but he left early and returned to Eugene. That night he went on a rampage outside her mother’s house, screaming for hours “I love you! I’ll kill you! I love you! I’ll kill you!” and demanding she open the door. When she finally did, she said he reached in and grabbed her hard by the throat. She slammed the door on his arm, then on him and called the police. They booked him, she said, and she filed a restraining order.
Authorities confirmed what they could of Schuster’s version of events. According to court documents, Haley pled guilty on Nov. 9 to misdemeanor stalking and is currently on probation in Oregon. The District Attorney’s office in Sonoma County, Calif. said Haley entered jail on Jan. 11, is under probation for felony drug charges until 2008 and is not allowed to leave the state. The Main Adult Detention Facility in Santa Rosa, Calif. said Haley was released on May 2.
The catastrophe their relationship became begs the question of why she stayed with Haley for so long. She said she loves too completely. He was always controlling and manipulative, but even after the abuse, the terrorizing, the stalking – even after all that, Schuster said it took until January for her to finally decide she’d never get back together with him. She was willing to forgive the years of misery if he’d just treat her with a modicum of respect and speak to her with civility. But he couldn’t.
“I gave him chance after chance and all he did was tell me what a horrible person I was,” she said.
She said she doesn’t regret it because she learned so much, but she’s ashamed. She feels stupid. After she said so, she had to stop talking so she wouldn’t start crying.
As if living through those horrors wasn’t enough, Schuster underwent them in nearly constant physical pain. During her years of ballet, Schuster didn’t just dance her heart out, she danced away much of the tissue connecting her legs to her hips and severely damaged her shoulders.
“Yeah, no, I trashed my body,” she said. “I definitely trashed my body.”
Her injuries restrict her walking to short strides, and she can’t sit in normal desk chairs. She has to fluctuate between extreme pain and the mental cloudiness that comes with painkillers. The University has helped her here too, she said. She’s now in physical therapy that she said is doing wonders for her.
Schuster pushes herself. She said she has a high pain tolerance.
She said, “If I’d contacted Student Life at the beginning of the year, I’d have the GPA I deserve because I’d be able to work the way I deserve – which is hard.”
But now, she can’t. She can’t keep up with her upper division courses. She needs extra time to finish her work, she said, but Student Life has worked to make that happen.
Slow Justice
While incarcerated, the Sonoma County DA’s office said Haley would have had access to a phone, and Schuster said he called her frequently.
The terms of her restraining order protect her not only from physical harassment, but telephonic harassment, Director of Lane County Victims Services Lori Silano said: “That’s visual contact, verbal contact – plan and simple – no contact. Period.”
Schuster said she’s since seen Haley twice on campus and has fled both times. Now, she sleeps in safe-houses, which she switches every three days. Though the University is easing the stress, Haley still called at least five times a day up until the beginning of June, and Schuster looks toward the future with a large degree of cynicism. She said he’s going to continue harassing her, and there’s little she can do until he comes within 100 feet of her. EPD spokeswoman Kerry Delf said Haley’s probation officer in California has been contacted about the violations of the restraining order, but those working on the case believe he’s in California and unless the authorities find him in Oregon, there’s little to be done.
“If he returns to Oregon, I’m sure he’ll be arrested,” Delf said. But “we’re not going down there to arrest him.”
Even worse, Schuster said, Haley has been in and out of both state and federal custody and has no fear of returning, and this last stint inside has done little to temper his behavior. But EPD and the Department of Public Safety have put in some work, and short strides are being taken to keep her safe and in school.
But Director of Victims Services Lori Silano said enforcing restraining orders isn’t high on the police’s priority list.
“The reality is that they aren’t dealing with these cases,” Silano said.
And everyday they don’t deal with this case, Schuster suffers.
STOP YOUR STALKER:
1. Call the police – 911
If you’re in immediate danger, they may be able to protect you
or make an arrest.
2. Get a lawyer
Contact ASUO Legal Services at (541) 346-4273 or on the third floor of the EMU in their office, suite 344. They provide free legal advice for students.
3. Contact Lane County’s Victims Services Program at (541) 682-4523. They can be found in the District Attorney’s office at 125 E. 8th Ave., Room 400.
Among the litany of support they offer, they’ll help you file a restraining or stalking order. You’ll need proof of two or more repeated, unwanted contacts that made you feel afraid, alarmed or coerced, director Lori Silano said. Judges only hear these orders weekdays at 10 a.m., so claimants should be at the Victims Services by 9 a.m. Earlier is better; Victims Services brings about 200 people to the court every month, Silano said.
Stalking orders are more stringent, but both make varying degrees of contact an arrest-worthy offense.
4. Contact The Office of Student Life at (541) 346-3216 or at their office in 164 Oregon Hall.
Associate Director of Student Life Sheryl Eyster said the office can help support students in crisis. They offer referrals to the Counseling and Testing Center and they can get students in touch with the Department of Public Safety. When a student comes to them with a crisis, part of Student Life’s job is to help professors understand what’s going on without being too intrusive, Eyster said; but every student is different and has different needs.
“Anyway that we can make a student feel safer on campus – we’re gonna try to do that,” Eyster said.