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Krystal Sundstrom-Hebert, a 30-year-old University graduate student, stood in a Lane County courtroom as she told her husband – who just two months ago had beaten, sodomized and threatened to kill her – that his future was in his hands.
“You can blame everyone else,” she said, listing his father, mother, stepfather and herself. “In doing that you give away power that you have. You could also blame yourself too much. The middle ground is to accept responsibility and move on.”
She found out she is pregnant with their second child just three weeks after she was beaten. Her husband, John Joseph Hebert III, will go to prison for 80 months; she’s left alone to raise their 5-year-old son and give birth to their second child.
“I wasn’t planning on losing my husband,” she said. “But there’s never any excuse for domestic violence.”
It’s a bitter lesson she learned the hard way.
“Back when things first started happening (earlier in the relationship) I didn’t even see them as, ‘Oh wow, this was a relationship that had abuse in it,” she later told the Emerald. “I didn’t realize the verbal threats qualified as abuse. I didn’t quite realize the cycle had started.”
Stories of domestic abuse are common, but often go untold.
This is why Sundstrom-Hebert wanted to use her name in this story. She wants to give strength to other women who have been abused, and to “show that there’s life afterward.”
“I think that often we think this was someone else’s problem and it could never happen to us,” she said. “And the reality is that it is everybody’s problem. … It’s important to put a name on it and a face on it so we recognize that it’s everywhere.”
Many women remain quiet because they are ashamed of being abused, said Elaine Phillips of Womenspace, a nonprofit agency dedicated to helping victims and preventing domestic abuse. Many women feel they are somehow responsible, or they don’t think an emotionally abusive relationship will turn into a physically abusive one, Phillips said.
Domestic abuse is not limited to married couples and those who live together. It includes any physical or emotional abuse in romantic relationships, and it occurs in 20 percent of dating couples, according to the American Psychology Association.
Counselors at the University Health Center saw 100 cases of domestic abuse last year. In 2004-05 there were 131, and in 2003-04 there were 178, which is roughly 10 percent of all cases the center sees, according to a counselor at the center.
“One of the reasons people don’t leave is because they think it was a blip in the screen,” Phillips said. “(They think) if I just shape up then he’ll be the loving person he was.”
Her story
The couple met in 1999 while working for AmeriCorps in California. She said they got along well; he was fun to be around and “a sweet man.” When she found out he was abused as a child, he told her he would never abuse anyone.
Hebert proposed to her after they learned she was pregnant in 2001. They married in 2003 and moved to Eugene in 2005 so she could be closer to her family and attend the University to earn her master’s degree. But they had their arguments.
He owned several guns, which was a “sore spot” between the two. He had been in the military and had been around guns his whole life. She was from Lane County and her parents were “liberal hippies.” Guns weren’t a part of their lifestyle, she said. He also struggled to find work, and she held up the finances.
A week before the attack, they had an argument and he pointed a gun at her and said, “Don’t disrespect me,” his wife said after the sentencing.
After that, she thought she had plenty of time to end the relationship.
Those same days she was thinking about leaving, he was drinking and sulking about being unable to find work as a mechanic.
The attack

Around 11 p.m. on Feb. 27, as she lay in bed reading, he sat in the desk nearby, drunk. He had a gun.
As she drifted off to sleep, she heard him say, “I see you laying in bed and I’m gonna to put a bullet in your head.”
She sat up.
“Yeah I’m talking to you,” he said.
Then he walked over to the bed, took his pistol and slammed it against her face.
For the next three hours, he slapped her repeatedly. He sodomized her twice. He threatened to kill her. She heard him say things like, “Now I know why my stepdad beat my mom up.”
Meanwhile, the couple’s 5-year-old son slept in his bedroom nearby.
“I was scared and I just wanted to get out of there and have it come to an end,” she said. “And it didn’t seem like the end was coming at all.”
During her husband’s sentencing, she told him: “It was the most terrifying experience of my life. I didn’t know whether I would live or die.”
Eventually, he passed out and she lay awake. She arose around 6:30 a.m. and contemplated shooting him because “that was the only way I thought I’d ever be free.”
She tried to escape with their 5-year-old son, but he was too big to carry out through the window, so she sped to the Springfield Police Station alone. They sent the SWAT team and arrested him.
Through the iron bars of the Springfield jail, he apologized for his actions, but was still not himself, she said. He told her “he needed this,” and he questioned why she called the police.
A plea deal allowed him to avoid Measure 11 mandatory sentencing for two counts of sodomy, unlawful use of a weapon, felony assault and kidnapping relating to the late-night attack. He could have faced up to 30 years in prison.
Instead, a Lane County judge sentenced her 30-year-old husband to 80 months in prison for coercion and attempted kidnapping in the Feb. 27 attack.
At his sentencing on May 8, he sat hand-cuffed, hanging his head while his wife stoically told him she hoped he could learn from his mistakes and move on.
After she finished her speech, he responded, “I have no one to blame but myself. I just hope to have another opportunity to be a father.”
The missed signs

Before the attack she thought her husband had never shown signs of abuse, but after researching domestic abuse she learned she was mistaken.
Her husband – who was considered to be “one of the most likable people” by defense attorney Brad Cascagnette – had been severely abused as a child by his stepfather. He was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in court evaluations.
“This is a result of his past,” she said. But then there were the red flags she missed.
With abusers, “you see a pattern of manipulating and controlling behavior,” said Margo Schaefer, community outreach director of Womenspace. “Just because there’s not physical violence doesn’t mean there’s not an abusive and controlling relationship.”
Her husband had threatened physical abuse in the year before the attack, but she said she was usually more controlling than he was. She didn’t know any of it was a sign that he might beat her.
“I am definitely more aware of the very first glimmers of it in retrospect,” she said. “I’m also starting to realize how widespread it is.”
The two had moved quickly into their relationship, which can sometimes show signs of future problems. There were also threats and verbal abuse.
“That was red flag that I missed,” she said.
But for the most part, she said their relationship was “pretty positive.”
“We did have some key issues,” she said. “Same stuff coming up. But we never really fought or argued. We would talk about stuff and the other one would get annoyed and say, ‘What’s your problem,’ but we never had any yelling fights.
“We always talked about how in comparison to other couples we were doing really good,” she said.
Her future

Now, after the judgment, she feels resolve, but she still must graduate, search for a job, give birth and raise their children on her own.
Nevertheless, she remains positive.
“I’m alive,” she said. “I’m safe. I’ve always been a pretty strong and confident woman. A lot of things happen for a reason and it’s kind of up to us to take a situation and turn it into something positive.”
She hasn’t told her son the whole story, yet.
“He still has a good image of his dad and obviously the truth will come out down the road and it’s important it does so he understands what he did,” she said.
She said he was a good father, and that she wants her husband to be a part of her children’s lives.
More than anything, though, this experience has made her aware of how prevalent domestic violence is, and that she hopes to change that.
“The problem is bigger than we realize,” she said. “More needs to be done and I need to do more (to raise awareness).”
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