Behind a Pink Badge

By Debra Funston

Behind A Pink Badge: A Harrowing Tale of a Police Officer Held Captive by Her Enraged Boyfriend, deals with a national issue that is not fading, especially in America’s failing economic time and with our participation in a seemingly endless year war. Behind A Pink Badge is a harrowing tale of a veteran police officer held captive by her enraged boyfriend, who ended the nine-hour ordeal in his suicide. In her compelling story, the author honestly shares her life and days leading up to that fateful night, even when painful to recount, and allows readers inside her world as it was turned upside down and her extensive police experience severely tested.
This emotional account will shed a very unique perspective on the topic of domestic violence told from “the mind of a cop and from the heart of a victim”.

The author’s desires are to offer hope to the victims that healing can take place and also educate others directly involved with situation including: police, paramedics, ER personnel, and other attending medical and mental healthcare professionals. By reading Debbi Funston’s story, family members and others close to the victim can understand how to avert such a situation or help afterwards during the time of healing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debra Funston
• Release date: May 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301224821

Book preview

Behind A Pink Badge

By Debra Funston

To my son, Bryce

Bearer of my Heart

Behind A Pink Badge Copyright  2013 by Debra Funston Published by Debra Funston at Smashwords

Cover by Sun Bottom Design www.sunbottomdesign.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval system, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews without permission in writing from its author.

Behind a Pink Badge

Table of Contents

Chapter One - A Glimpse into Myself

Chapter Two - A Tattered Shell

Chapter Three - Programming a Victim

Chapter Four - Falling Apart

Chapter Five - Stubborn Foolishness

Chapter Six - The Nine Hour Countdown

Chapter Seven - Mind Splitting

Chapter Eight - Hanging on till Dawn

Chapter Nine - Silence and Chaos

Chapter Ten - Removing Shrapnel

Chapter Eleven - Healing is Itchy

Epilogue

"I pull my boots off, throw my weapons on the floor

Cry my eyes out in my private little war.

Well, it seems I’ve been a soldier, heaven knows I’ve been no saint.

In my camouflage and armor, cold heart and grease paint.

To you, this has no meaning the Armistice laid down.

The armies are all quiet and the guns don’t make a sound

‘cause you melted the steel walls, tore down the barbed wire,

filled in the trenches, demanded a cease-fire.

And now you’re leaving, there’s nothing I can do.

I want you to know you’re gonna take me with you.

Well now, three on a match is suicide in the foxhole of my mind

and way off in the distance air raid sirens whine.

And they sing your song of rescue to my tattered worn out shell.

You drag me to your safety from this my front line hell.

The blood that was spilled in the heartache before

left roadmaps of scars that I never could ignore."

From the Album Misguided Roses, Edwin McCain

Chapter One - A Glimpse into Myself

March 29, 2001

It is time to write…

12,843 days since my birth

5,656 days since the birth of my son

13 years of basic American Education

137,592 hours of married life (give or take a few questionable years)

12 years 148 days as a police officer

9 hours as a hostage in my own home

35 years 67 days 12 hours and 50 minutes as a woman (51 minutes, now)

BANG! The noise rips through me like a shockwave tearing through a calm sea. Is it over? I am sucking air through my nostrils. My face is pressed deep into the burnt orange carpet of my bedroom floor. My eyes are wide open, straining to look upward towards the soles of his feet. I blink.

My eyes are burning. Do I move? I feel no one in the room, just a strange empty silence. I gasp for air and feel the dryness in my lips. They are cracking and I feel tiny nylon rug fibers sticking to my lips being pulled in and tugged outward with every breath.

I blink, again.

Now is the time, that one second of chance that I can make it out alive. I jet my eyes upwards hard into my sockets for one last look. His toes are still, one foot slightly cocked to the side. I look back to the carpet ignoring my eyes and trying to sense feeling in my arms and legs. I cannot feel my hands but I wiggle my toes ever so slightly. I move my hands to the carpet, slowly, slowly. Still there is nothing. No sound.

I turn my head to the side lying on my ear. I look at my left hand through the mangled pieces of hair left hanging down in front of my face. It seems white and dry from being positioned on the back of my head for the last few hours and I can feel the pin pricks of life coming back. It is time. I take a breath in, push up with my hands and my knees curl under me simultaneously. I am focused on my feet as they have been drained of their blood from being bent upwards from the knees. I bring one foot forward and push up with my hands. I am standing. Awkwardly, I turn, no time to look. I must run as time is standing still for the moment, giving me a second’s head start. He will be behind me soon. I became a hostage long before the guns were drawn. This is my story.

In an effort to help you to understand, I will speak for Rick. I can only try to understand what type of war he was fighting and what my part was within that war. I believe for a short while I melted the steel walls, tore down the barbed wire, filled in the trenches, demanded a cease-fire, and gave him a safe haven to catch his breath.

As he lay next to me crying, helplessly, begging for my touch, he told me he was tired of fighting. The battle was over. I realized he was his own soldier, losing his own war.

I need to tell the story; set the stage, so to speak. How did I arrive here, a prisoner of his war? The history behind this relationship, even as short as it was, is important to know to help understand how I got here on my bedroom floor.

My life is changing, growing, and gaining speed and strength. I am facing a divorce after 15 years of marriage to the same man. It is a cheating relationship as far as he is concerned and he chose to throw me away, like trash. He has moved on and left me to wonder what I had done wrong. So here I am, a crushed high school sweetheart with no experience in the dating arena, whatsoever.

I grew up in the small, agricultural rich town of Montrose, Colorado. I was an average kid, I think, growing up in the 70’s and 80’s. I was there when skateboards first became popular and I was there when Woodstock was fading out. I went to church on Sundays and swam at the local pool during the summers. I remember listening to Jesus Christ Superstar on my sister’s record player and thinking how cool I would be if I had an 8-track player. Athletic and the only girl in the neighborhood, I was soon dubbed a tomboy. I was always involved in sports and actually quite good at them. Not being the stereotypical little girl, I liked snakes and was not afraid of spiders. I never owned a Barbie and my mother struggled to get me into a dress. I had a bike, spray painted yellow, with a banana seat and a sissy bar.

You’ll paint it yellow and like it ‘cause you’re a girl ya know. My mom would say, teasingly.

I think my mother finally gave up on raising a prissy girl after one of my crying episodes when I was not allowed to sign up for team football. She found humor in my obsession with bugs and worms made of frosting being the only decoration I wanted on my birthday cakes. My summers were spent outside with the boys in the neighborhood playing games like Kick the Can, Sardines,, and Smear the Queer as it was called back then.

It wasn’t until Junior High that boys interested me in anything other than a potential playmate or competitor. Suddenly, they seemed cute in a junior-high-boy-kind-of-way. I had a poster of Leif Garrett plastered to my wall right next to Cha-chee from Happy Days. Going out with a boy for more than a week was almost considered common law marriage to us. My sex education consisted of my mother handing me Erma Bombeck talks to Kids about Sex through the opening in the bedroom door. I’ll be in the kitchen if you have any questions.

Life was good as a kid.

High school came and the summer visits to the pool became full time lifeguard jobs. 8-Tracks were replaced by cassette tapes and The Carpenters were replaced by REO Speedwagon and The Police. My sissy bar bike was replaced with a 10-speed and eventually a yellow VW bug. I assume it was yellow because I was still a girl. In 9th grade I started dating Shawn. He was two years older than I, so it made him an attractive fellow. (It was cool back then to be dating the older boys). Even cooler when he came back from college the next two years and we could still announce that we were dating. Shawn came from a family very strong in religion. His first year of college was spent at a Christian College in the hills of Tennessee outside of Chattanooga. I was still in high school and very devoted to our relationship. Sports had always been a huge part of my life and seemed a natural distraction while he was away at college. He came home during the summers and worked, mainly for his father at a family owned motel in Montrose. When I graduated, he was attending the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. I received a scholarship to play basketball at that university, so no questions were asked when I announced that I would go there. We were two kids away from home, in love, and living the college life.

Sex had not been a part of my high school life. I suspected that it was a big part of my friends’ lives, but it was not normally a topic of discussion with me. Sex was not an option after the countless Sunday school classes and youth groups I attended that preached about the sins of premarital sex. Of course, like any teenager, it was always on my mind, but not an option for experimentation. And it was definitely not a dinner table topic at my house. We used to laugh at my father’s attempt to subtly change the T.V. channel if two lovers were smooching on screen. Simply, premarital sex was not something my family would expect that any teenagers in the family would be engaging in. I must have abandoned all of those lessons and that mindset when I moved out of the house. That February, Shawn and I announced we were expecting. I had sinned.

Rather than send us to a monastery in a foreign country, it made more sense to have a shotgun wedding and hope that no one did the math. I was nineteen and Shawn was twenty-one when we wed that April in his parents’ home, a white cottage on several acres surrounded by enormous cottonwood trees. It was a very small wedding with only family and close friends attending. My basketball career was over, my short college life was over, but now there was something new to look forward to.

I gave birth to a son, Bryce, that September.

Everything about Bryce was perfect. Perfect in the sense that a mother looks upon her newborn as the most beautiful being ever conceived. He was average in size, but possessed the most beautiful brown eyes and an abundant head of soft brunette hair. Being two weeks overdue I would tease by saying, Yes, you are well done for sure! It was amazing to me that this little angel looked like me and looked up to me for survival and protection. I knew I would do anything to protect him.

Once our families got over the shock of our sinful college evening, they welcomed Bryce into the family with open arms. All of the disappointments felt prior to his birth seemed insignificant now. It made sense to put my hopes and dreams on hold. I had a son and a marriage to focus on now. I had a purpose. It was important to be the best wife and mother that I could be. I would show them that Shawn and I were meant to be together despite the whole