From 'hero' to 'monster' Domestic abuse survivor tells story

Editor’s note: The Western News published an article on Jan. 31 titled “Lincoln County domestic violence in numbers.” Lynette Haines, a survivor of domestic violence, came forward to The Western News last week wanting to tell her story of abuse and how she was saved by law enforcement. She wanted to tell her story in hopes of commending the law enforcement officers who saved her life and to remember Sheena Devine, a victim of domestic violence who was murdered by her boyfriend last year.

“People don’t understand the battle that men and women have to go through to get out of these relationships,” Lynette Haines said. “This is about Sheena Devine. She needs to be honored. It could’ve been me — it could’ve been anyone.”

In the beginning, Haines was saved by her “hero,” in the end, she and her son would come to refer to him as a “monster.”

Haines is a survivor of domestic violence who came close to death when her now ex-husband allegedly broke into her home and beat her. Her ex-husband was arrested, and was recently sentenced to 10 years in prison with five years suspended.

This same man, she said, saved her from an attack from her second husband in Washington state.

In a letter to the Department of Corrections, Haines wrote in reference to him saving her, “Four months after this incident we had fallen in love, four months after that, expecting a baby … four months after that … began a nightmare.”

Haines claims that the abuse started when she was four months pregnant. Her boyfriend became depressed, demanding, selfish, cruel and stoic, she wrote in her letter. She wrote that he would allegedly spend all of their money on alcohol and methamphetamine.

Since, she wrote, her boyfriend could not maintain employment, they moved into his mother’s basement.

“There I was completely isolated,” Haines wrote.

Her boyfriend increasingly became more enraged, irrational and unpredictable — one night he allegedly destroyed their room because he believed she had taken their only lighter.

Within days, Haines found her small dog cowering in the corner. Later, her boyfriend would admit to her, laughing, that he had shot the dog with his pellet gun.

Haines then gave the dog away for it’s own protection.

Not only this, but her boyfriend would find the quarters that she had managed to hide for laundry and supplies — forcing her to wear the same clothes over and over again. She claimed that he would spend those quarters on alcohol or drugs.

One night, Haines said, her boyfriend was leaving to go buy drugs again, when she told him she “couldn’t live like this anymore.”

Following her saying that, was the first time she claimed he physically assaulted her.

“He was silent as he knocked me onto the concrete floor belly first and slammed his heel into my hand,” Haines wrote in the letter. Afterwards, she went to the hospital to make sure her child was unharmed.

She left the hospital, and feeling that she had nowhere else to go since she was alone in Washington — she returned to the basement.

Haines said in an interview that at the time she left the hospital, she thought to herself, “I love him, maybe it was an accident. It couldn’t have been on purpose, who would do that? He loves me.”

It wasn’t long before her boyfriend allegedly tortured her again. On a cold, December night, Haines was taking out the garbage when her boyfriend locked her out of the house.

Without a coat, she stood there, knocking for two hours.

Recalling how he acted when he opened the door, Haines wrote, “he held me impersonally as I shivered, saying he had not known I was there and could not hear me.”

She knew then she had to find somewhere to go, but then their church helped them into a new apartment.

Her boyfriend proposed and found a job.

Things were starting to look up.

That’s when her boyfriend’s father came to live with them.

“They would drink and laugh, wait to be fed. If I wasn’t keen on being a daily bender, they would both join forces to ‘put me in my place’,” Haines wrote, noting that they would then often compare her to pictures of pornography with sarcasm.

If she argued, she said her husband would destroy the house.

It wasn’t before long when Haines had enough and attempted to leave with her three-month-old baby.

Her husband was blasting music and destroying their house at the time, she noted that these tirades were often used as punishment so her and the baby couldn’t sleep.

She wrote that she put the baby in the car seat and went to leave.

As she walked towards the door, her husband allegedly pointed a .45 caliber to the back of her head.

“I was threatened with death or the death of all three of us as a ‘family,’ should I attempt to leave,” Haines wrote in the letter.

After that, he would block her in the room, so she couldn’t escape.

“I remember sobbing, exhausted in the closet corner while holding my crying baby, praying the cops would come,” Haines wrote.

Her husband would be arrested a few months later, after allegedly strangling her nearly to death while holding their baby in his arms — just days before their one-year wedding anniversary.

Haines said that she lost total control over her bodily functions and needed to be revived by officers who responded to the scene.

For two weeks, Haines said she couldn’t speak clearly.

Her husband was then given three months in jail and a restraining order effective until 2025.

She moved back to Libby, in hopes of raising her son in a healthy and stable environment.

“We began to heal,” she wrote.

In May, 2016, her husband found her.

“He claimed to have changed, promised to find work, claimed the restraining order had been dropped or would be soon and just wanted to be a family,” Haines wrote.

“I was terrified.”

Within two months, Haines said her husband had fractured her cheekbone, severely damaged her right hand with a heavy window, ruptured her right eardrum and rapidly began escalating his regular drug and alcohol use.

But in Libby, she was no longer alone.

She went and stayed with her family for a week, and when she returned to her house, he had allegedly destroyed it once again. He then left to avoid the police.

Haines changed the locks and secured the windows. As an extra measure of security, she asked the sheriff’s department to waive the “knock and entry” should they receive a 911 call from her phone.

On his third attempt to gain access to their home, her husband allegedly kicked the back door to her house open.

Editor’s note: the following contains graphical depictions of violence and may be difficult for some readers.

“He demanded sex and tore at my clothes until I was near naked,” Haines wrote. “I told him to wait in the bedroom and I raced, fumbled, shaking and terrified with my phone for 911. My son woke up in the commotion and I scooped him up as the call went through. I was funnelled into the bathroom and cornered as he screamed for the location of my phone, which he immediately found and smashed.”

“[My husband] is a blue belt in Martial Arts. I never stood a chance as I held my baby.”

From then on, Haines wrote that she doesn’t remember the alleged beating, but does remember looking up once in the mirror and not recognizing the woman covered in blood.

The Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office arrived on the scene in under two minutes.

“They saved my life and likely my son’s,” Haines said.

Her son wasn’t injured in the attack, but she was taken to the emergency room.

Haines received 14 stitches to her right brow. Her eyebrow bone and cheekbone were fractured. Her sinus cavity was shattered, her upper palate cracked and her nose was broken in two places.

Some injuries, however, haven’t healed.

Ongoing balance issues, a stutter, comprehension and memory are due to a traumatic brain injury.

She has also been diagnosed with PTSD and has agoraphobia and social anxiety.

“I cannot bear to be hugged by a stranger or alone in a room with a man I don’t know,” Haines said. “I wake up with panic attacks. I cannot endure crowds, loud noises, bright lights or sudden sounds or movements.”

On top of this, her panic attacks cause vomiting and the damaged nerves send “erratic signals of lightening like pain” to the right side of her face.

The bones in her face, she said, are damaged beyond reconstructive repair.

Her right eyelid droops from the continued nerve damage and will require surgery to keep it from impeding her vision.

Her son, she wrote, knows that “dada is in time out for a long time for hurting mommy.”

Haines said she knows that her husband was out to kill her, kidnap her son or kill them all.

A few weeks after Haines was assaulted by her now-ex husband, Sheena Devine, a resident of Libby, was the victim of deliberate homicide by someone she was in a relationship with.

“A lot of people fall through the cracks, and a lot of people aren’t helped,” Haines said in an interview with The Western News. “I’m not looking to be a poster child. This is to help the next girl. I just want her to be safe and the child she may be carrying to be safe.”

Now, Haines is the owner of her first home, and has started a group called Loyal Libby Locals to help people from Libby stay in Libby by encouraging local businesses to hire people within the city. She also is working to set up a plaque in remembrance of Devine and all the other men and women who also “fell through the cracks.”

Haines said she fought to get her ex husband a longer sentence. Originally, she said, he was going to receive six months.

Haines requested a thank-you to be included with the article to Captain Bo Pittman, Sergeant Brandon Holzer, Deputy Steve Short, Sheriff Roby Bowe, former District Court Judge James Wheelis and several others who helped her in her time of struggle — she said if it wasn’t for them, she wouldn’t be here.