I see that Debra was born in Seattle, but where was she raised and what was childhood like for the family. Did you all stay in the same area, move around a bit?
After Seattle (1969) we moved to Wenatchee (1970), where our brother, Steve Hamilton, was born. From there we went to Upper Michigan (1970-72), then to Green Bay, WI (1972-73), to Ohio (1974), back to Upper Michigan (1975), to Missouri (1976-80), and then to Omaha, NE (1980-87). Debbie graduated from Ralston High School (Ralston is a suburb of Omaha) in 1987. In short, we moved a lot.Where does Debra fall in the sibling line? Is she the oldest, youngest, in between? I see you have the names posted of Debra’s children, but what are the names of all her siblings?
To characterize our childhood…
Essentially it was not so great. We moved a lot, and even when we stayed in the same city, we moved to different houses or back and forth between our mom, dad, and relatives. Our mom was essentially a single parent of 3 kids, working the evening shift as a nurse. Our biological father, Alex Hamilton, was an alcoholic, and was in and out of our life sporadically. Our parents divorced when Debbie was 3, and our mom remarried when Debbie was 5. Our step-father, Del, was controlling and abusive. Somehow, our family weathered the bad times, went through a lot of counseling, and stayed together. My mom and Del are still married today, and he has transformed his life. But the difficulties from childhood hit Debbie harder than anyone else. She was, I suppose, predisposed to alcoholism and depression. She was especially sensitive and sweet as a child, and she seemed to attract bad people. It was a deadly combination.
In her own words (from a autobiographical essay she wrote): Home was never a welcoming, safe place, but rather a dreaded destination. From the outside, I’m sure we looked like a typical upper middle class family. On the inside, we were individuals coexisting under a regime of intimidation and secrecy. As a result, the loving, innocent, outgoing personality I entered this world with was transformed. I became insecure, fearful, and painfully shy.
Debbie discovered alcohol when she was 13 or so, when she began a self-destructive path. Throughout her teens, she struggled with alcohol abuse, eating disorders, cutting, and risky sexual behavior. She also had an abusive boyfriend for a couple years, a relationship which we tried repeatedly to get her out of. She went to in-patient treatment a couple times and was also hospitalized for depression while we lived in Omaha. She had her 18th birthday while in treatment and ended up in a halfway house after that. She never returned home to live with the family.
I struggled with my insecurities and could not stand to be alone. My eating disorder had a strong hold on me, and it seemed I always had to be doing something self-destructive. I longed to be in a relationship, but always went after the wrong kind of guy. After 18 months, I relapsed. Within a matter of a few weeks I had been in a car accident, gotten kicked out of my apartment, had my stomach pumped (again), was assaulted, and was raped by four men I did not know. I had three different encounters with the police, but was let go each time. Oh yeah, I was also introduced to cocaine.
If you know, how long did her first marriage last?Tammy, Cindee, and Michele are Del’s children from a previous marriage. They lived with us during the summer throughout our childhood. Aimee is our mom and step-dad’s daughter who lived with us. Our brother, Steve, lived most of his life with our biological father in Upper Michigan.
- Michelle Freeland (nee Hamilton), sister, Minneapolis, MN
- Tammy Hurt, step-sister, Charlotte, NC
- Debbie
- Cindee Campbell (nee Hurt), step-sister, Apex, NC
- Steve Hamilton, brother, Cartersville, GA
- Michele Kennedy (nee Hurt), step-sister, Fort Lewis, WA
- Aimee Hurt, half-sister, Missoula, MT
Debbie met her first husband in AA in Omaha. They left Omaha for Seattle where they had their first child and then got married in 1989. They had three children together (Brandon, Emily and Olivia) and were married for about 10 years.Her obituary said that Debra was an early childhood and special needs teacher. Can you tell me how she got into that line of work, why she liked it, and maybe the most recent places she worked?
This from my mom: “Ever since I can remember she’s taken care of kids, and loved babies. Her dream was always to work with special needs kids. She worked with difficult kids and even adults. I think she always had a feeling of wanting to protect these kids.”I gathered that Debra at one time dealt with a drinking problem, and I would interested in hearing what you would be willing to say about how she beat it, and how she coped.
It is ironic that I will be parenting her children now, because I always felt like Debbie was the more natural mother—endlessly patient, organized, loving. It was like she was created to love and nurture children. But ultimately she was too damaged to do it all—to save them and save herself too.
Debbie always worked in early childhood jobs, and especially had a passion for working with special needs and medically fragile children. In 2000-01, she was a single parent, working full-time and getting her degree in education at Central Washington University. She graduated Magna Cum Laude, with an Early Childhood Education major; Elementary Education minor; Washington State Initial Teaching Certificate, Endorsements: P-3, K-8. Other education and volunteering: CPR and First Aid Certification, Suicide Intervention Training, Literacy tutor for adults, play therapy volunteer with disabled youth. This last year in Seattle, she also volunteered at a women’s domestic abuse shelter.
To our knowledge, she did not work outside the home in this last year. Before that, she worked as an Instructional Assistant at the Children’s Institute for Learning Differences in Mercer Island, WA. I’m afraid I don’t have much more information on her specific places of employment.
I guess I pretty much covered this already. But during the time that she was married to her first husband, she seemed to have it under control. She had a stable long-term job, a great house, and was doing what she was great at—being a mom to her kids. But she was never happy in her relationship, and as it turns out, all the chaos was still there, just beneath the surface.
Somehow, not even the love I felt for my children or their love for me could fill that empty place inside of me. I always felt like I was on the outside of life looking in. I was well respected and liked at my job as a preschool teacher, but I felt like an imposter. I thought if the parents only knew who I really was they wouldn’t want me around their children. But I was good with kids. It was my passion. I was very attentive and involved with my children and tried to give them the childhood that I did not have.
After 10 years, my marriage ended. It was a relief and it was devastating all at the same time. It meant letting go of the dream I had for our family. It meant being alone. It meant facing the unknown. Instead of using drugs and alcohol to get me through, I turned to God. I began going to church, singing in the choir, and I was baptized. I started exercising and playing the piano. I started learning Spanish. I started becoming my own person.I’d like to find out how she met her current husband, Juan Carlos, and what the family thought of him at first. Also, did he go by Carlos?
The next year and a half were filled with extreme ups and downs. I got involved with a married man, I graduated from college top of my class, I went through a bitter custody dispute, I bought my own house. The roller coaster ride was accompanied by my true best friends, drugs and alcohol. I was drinking pretty much every day, but in small quantities. I also started doing cocaine on a daily basis. I usually snorted it, but I also learned how to smoke it. It wasn’t making my life any easier, but I was caught up in the lifestyle of a single woman. I was doing what most people do in their early twenties, but I was 31 and had three children.
After that, the addictions took over, so the short answer to your question is that she didn’t really beat it. But in this last year of her life, she had been working on trying to beat it in a way that we had never seen before. It was like she was really serious about making a change. She was seeking and getting help for herself. She was starting to make better decisions and was hopeful. We all were.
She met Carlos (yes, he goes by Carlos) through a friend at a party or bar where she would go salsa dancing, don’t remember exactly which. The family’s first interactions with Carlos were not positive. He didn’t seem to be good for Debbie. He couldn’t hold a job, hadn’t finished high school, had addiction issues, all the kinds of things that a family would hate, right? But, Debbie loved him, and he did have some good qualities. He was an excellent cook (I tried to encourage him to go to cooking school), he was artistic, and he was a talented, though unschooled, writer. He had promise, and since Debbie loved him, we tried to accept him into our family. We worked with him to try to help him get jobs and to finish his education. We bought the family a van, so Carlos would have transportation to a job. I’m sure we enabled them as much as we helped them. It was so hard to know how to help. Even now, however, I’m having trouble mustering up a hatred for Carlos. His story is also tragic. There’s plenty of dysfunction all around, and it’s a tragedy for Carlos’s family as well as ours.How much did the family know about the abuse that was going on and how did Debra cope with it?
Of course in hindsight, it’s obvious that the abuse was going on for most of their relationship. At the time though, Debbie hid most of it from us. It wasn’t until they lived in Minneapolis in 2003-04, that we discovered that he was abusive. Carlos was jailed during that time for beating Debbie, while she was pregnant with Isabella. He also threatened to kill her. Debbie told me that he said to her that she should get into the tub so he could kill her. We got involved then and tried to get Debbie whatever help she needed to leave Carlos and be on her own. It was one of those toxic relationships that neither person can walk away from. I don’t think Carlos was happy either. I’m sure he wanted a different life for himself too, but because he started using drugs at a very young age, (age 9 he told me once), his development was completely stunted. He is really still a child. As for how Debbie coped with it—I just don’t know. Her life and mine were worlds apart, and I could never really understand how she could keep living that way, and especially how she kept going when things seemed to bleak. She had an amazing sense of humor and a way of laughing at herself and her life. She was insightful—she could cut through the crap and get right to the heart of a matter. She was smart and creative and witty. But she couldn’t untangle herself from her own sad circumstances, and she couldn’t overcome her demons.I saw that last year she got that protection order. The judge ordered Juan Carlos to attend a batterer’s intervention program, get chemical dependency treatment, attend a parenting class, and visit the children only at a special visiting center made to protect women in her situation. I did call that agency, it's called Safe Havens, and learned that Juan Carlos never contacted them. Did he do any of the other things he was supposed to do?
To our knowledge, he did not do what he was supposed to, which seems to be his nature. I understand that part of what they were arguing about the night he killed Debbie was that he wasn’t doing the things he was supposed to be doing (the things you mentioned above).I also noticed that they changed addresses a few times in the past few years, living in Minnesota and Alaska before returning to Washington state. Was this because of the legal troubles Juan Carlos was in? Or where there other reasons for the moves?
I would say that the moves were not specifically in response to Carlos’s legal problems. He never got in as much trouble as he should have for the things he had done, so he could easily serve a little time, and it didn’t seem to make much difference to him. I do know that Debbie was constantly seeking a fresh start. Each time she moved, she was hopeful that this would be the time that it would work out. She was especially hopeful in this last move to Seattle. She told my mom that she felt like she had come full circle in her life since she was back where she had been born and back where she and Carlos had first gotten together, and she was feeling stronger and motivated to make a change.I don't know how much you know about the legal aspect of everything Debra tried, but she apparently told Meri that protection orders were pointless. Do you know why she would have said that and what her experiences had been in trying to deal with Juan Carlos' abuse?
I think what Debbie was getting at is that protection orders don’t address the real problems, such as her inability to stand firm in getting Carlos out of her life, her fear of being alone, her insecurities about being loved, Carlos’s disregard for the protection orders. She always felt that he would either break his way in, as he had in the past, or that she would let him in, as she had in the past. It wasn’t her first protection order—she’s had many of them.I also want to be able to describe in the story the kind of mother, daughter, sister she was, and how her children are dealing with all of this.
I think like all abused women, she felt to some extent that she deserved the abuse she was getting. She was incredibly smart, but at her core, she was afraid and full of self-loathing. Carlos demeaned her about the weight she had put on and at the same time constantly accused her of cheating on him. She was dealing with health problems (high blood pressure, chronic bronchitis, chronic back pain from a disk injury, as well as a lifelong struggle with depression and anxiety), had five children, and was approaching 40. I know she felt like she could never find someone else to love her, and that terrified her.
She has stayed in domestic abuse shelters before but just never found her way out of the situation. It’s incredibly complex, and people that look at it as a simple stupid decision that she made to stay with an abusive husband are naïve at best. This is a story of a woman who suffered one loss after another, yet kept going. People are calling my husband and me heroic for taking the two youngest children into our home, but we are not heroic whatsoever. Not like Debbie, who pushed ahead day after desperate day, and who was in the end, still hopeful. Despite everything she had experienced in life and despite all the negative influences around her and despite physically and emotionally debilitating conditions, she was still hopeful. That is fucking heroic.
I think I’ve mostly covered how she was as a mother. When she was sober, she was amazing. We don’t kid ourselves about the reality though. When she was using, she was not available to her kids in the same way. But she still did her best. She gave her kids baths every night and made sure they brushed their teeth. It’s small things like this that show me that the mother in her was still there, taking care of the babies, even when the walls seemed to be crumbling around them.
As a sister, Debbie was challenging. Mostly because I didn’t know how to help her. I could never really figure out what my role should be. I had worked hard to overcome my life circumstances, but I wasn’t saddled with the addiction issues that she had. I didn’t want to seem like the perfect sister who had all the answers. I worried that she would think I thought I was better than her, which I never did. In our family, Debbie has always been the one to bring the family problems to light. Through her behavior, she always revealed the cracks in the façade, and we all had to deal with things that we mostly wanted to ignore and forget about. I don’t want to idealize Debbie or the relationship we had. In the last year, I had been unable to maintain a relationship with her. Her problems were too painful, as I had to again revisit old wounds, so I kept her at arm’s length. Of course, now I wish I had swooped in and forced her to do it differently. At the same time, I know that doesn’t work. We tried it repeatedly, and it never worked. I do know that I owe the life I have now to Debbie though. Because she wouldn’t let us ignore the problems our family had, I had to face things, and I had to make a choice about what I was going to do about it, and I chose to change my life. I don’t know where I would have ended up if not for her. In some ways, and not to be overly dramatic, but I feel like Debbie made the sacrifice, so that the rest of us could be saved.
How Debbie was as a daughter (from my mom):
"Never wanting to worry me or concern me about her life. Never wanting me to feel scared or frightened for her. She always listened to my concerns and expressed being hopeful that it could be better. She kept what was going on in her life private to protect me and the family because she didn’t want to hurt us. She definitely felt like she was the black sheep in the family. She was very warm and loving. I mostly just remember the warmth of her hugs and how genuine it felt. One thing that always struck me is that no matter how many times she moved as an adult or we moved when she was a child, she always made a home for herself. She hung pictures on the wall and decorated, even if the location was temporary. It was like she was always searching for a home. In the past year, while we were all hopeful, it also felt like things were escalating in terms of the violence. I lived in a state of constant dread that I would get the phone call that I did end up getting on April 18," [when the police called to say Debbie had been critically injured by her husband].
In terms of how the kids are coping, I think the short answer is remarkably well, but I don’t know that they really understand the finality of the situation. I can’t speak about the older kids who aren’t in my care, but the little ones are doing well. They cry at night, because they are scared or lonely, so they sleep together and also often sleep with us. It is especially difficult for Vince, who is almost 6, and who was strongly attached to Debbie. But nights are getting better, and during they day, they are playful and loving. Overall, we are optimistic that they will overcome what they’ve experienced and can be happy. They are what’s left to us of Debbie, and for once, I know exactly what my role is and how I can help.
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