The owner of a manicure shop next to the launderette I patronize was murdered a week ago Sunday. Mai Banh was found dead in her workplace, where she spent 10 hours a day, six days a week, so she could give her children a better life. Her two sons, ages 4 and 8, were placed in the custody of Child Protective Services after her estranged husband admitted to bludgeoning her to death. He had reported her missing, although they no longer shared a home, and was also the one who "found" her body. Jeff Nguyen led police to her shop at 10 p.m. on April 15th, telling them he had found her dead on the floor. The victim's uncle had also arrived and was sobbing uncontrollably while her husband acted as if nothing had happened. Suspicions aroused, the police recovered his wife's wallet and jewelry from his garage. His vehicle also yielded evidence of his involvement in the crime. He is being held on one count of murder.
I hope their children have relatives who will raise them and love them so they don't have to be farmed out to strangers as they have now lost both their parents. It's impossible to understand why someone would murder his spouse, the mother of his children. The end of a marriage should not mean the end of life for one of the partners. Nobody has the right to determine when another's life ends. How hard a concept is that to master?
Years ago, I managed a domestic violence shelter in North Carolina. It was my job to counsel the clients as well as to keep the building running. The hours were long, and I often had a police escort home after midnight because of death threats. Some men were displeased that I stood between them and their human punching bags.
The officer would follow me home and check out my house for intruders before allowing me to enter. Since I lived on a remote dirt road in the country, it would have been easy to attack me after he left, but we went through the charade anyway. It made him feel safer.
To work in the domestic violence field is to have your heart broken every day. One of my clients was a woman whose two daughters, ages 11 and 13, had watched their father string her up above a wood stove and beat the bottoms of her feet with a hose, then burn her breasts with a blow torch. He raped her with a bottle while they screamed for their mother. The rope broke and she fell onto the stove, where he left her. A relative brought her to me. Most of our counseling sessions concerned her intense feelings of guilt because it was her fault he'd been arrested. His whole family was mad at her.
I tried to make her understand that she didn't deserve to be abused, and she finally agreed to be relocated to another state with her children. A month later, she left the shelter I had sent her to, bailed her husband out, dropped all charges, and returned to domestic bliss with him. He murdered her that night.
Another client I still remember was cute, blond and pudgy, a young Natalie Maines look-alike. She arrived at the shelter on Christmas Eve with three small daughters, a diaper bag, and a large plastic shopping bag filled with wrapped presents. She asked if I had any band-aids because "Stretch marks bleed if you get hit on them."
My eyes filled with tears, and I looked down at the toddler in my lap. "Cindy, I have to ask if you have any drugs or weapons with you," I said. She shifted the baby slightly and dug into her shopping bag. She extracted a package wrapped in bright green paper with Santa Claus hugging Rudolph all over it, carefully removed the paper and handed me a .38 Special. "It was the only way I could get it out of the house," she giggled. "It's my husband's. I was afraid he'd shoot me if I didn't take it."
When I took her and the children to their room, she proudly showed me a tattoo on her butt of Garfield raising a beer stein. It said "BOTTOMS UP" in large letters under the picture. Later that night, I called the police because her husband climbed onto the roof while his mother and two brothers stood in the street hurling rocks at our windows.
Another client asked me if I had ever been beaten by a man. I told her that I hadn't. She regarded me with pity, her big, dark eyes filled with sadness. "But you're so sweet and beautiful," she said. "I can't believe that no man has ever loved you enough to beat you."
