Cargreen

CHEYENNE – Friends and family of women lost to domestic violence in Wyoming walked in silence Monday to remember their loved ones.

Participants in the Zonta Club of Cheyenne’s annual Silent Witness March carried images and silhouettes representing their loved ones from the Wyoming Supreme Court Building on Capitol Avenue to the Laramie County Library, where domestic violence survivor Mary Billiter shared her experiences with abuse .

Billiter met her abuser in her early 20s. She said he was handsome and made more money than her. At the age of 26, Billiter fled with him.

“It was very small because he did weddings for a living, so he hated weddings,” Billiter told the crowd. “He controlled the whole thing. I mean, looking back, all the signs were there.”

As she went through a slideshow of photos and documents from her 10 years of marriage to her abuser, Billiter continued to tell the crowd how during her second pregnancy, after she gave birth to twins and was pregnant again with twins, her husband would hit. even kicking her pregnant belly.

Billiter gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl, two months earlier, in April 2001. Her son did not survive, and her daughter weighed only 3 pounds, 9 ounces.

“(My abuser’s) wedding ring fit on her wrist,” Billiter told the crowd. “You don’t know how small that is.”

“It was dead quiet in the (operating) room,” Billiter said. “They pulled (my son) out and his head was completely bashed in. The priest came and he had holy water in a seashell and gave him (and his sister) the last rites.”

Billiter has two other twin boys, and at one point one of her sons was repeatedly beaten by her abuser, leaving a handprint on his face. They were living in Arizona at the time and child protective services was called, and Billiter thought someone would finally help.

The claim was classified as “unsubstantiated” because Billiter’s abuser signed papers telling CPS that his family did not need help.

“Are my twins, at 5 years old, going to say something to their father? … No, it doesn’t,” Billiter said. “When I got kicked in the stomach in my second trimester and he picked me up by the neck until I passed out? I came to with blood (on me) and my sons standing over me. And when one of them ran to the neighbor’s house, their father picked them up like a bag of trash and said, “We won’t tell anyone about this.”

Billiter and her children were abused by her former husband until she was able to leave in 2004.

Billiter is Roman Catholic, and when she was finally able to leave her abuser, her abuse was so well documented by the church that she was able to get an annulment, which is incredibly rare in Catholicism.

Billiter’s first marriage was not her only experience with abuse. Her second marriage was also abusive.

Billiter joked that she married a cowboy with a gun because she thought he would protect her; however, she was unaware of his undiagnosed mental health issues.

She was able to share her experiences as a survivor, but many attendees were there to mourn their loved ones who did not survive their abusers.

A large group of family members joined the march to remember Angela Marie Elizondo, a Cheyenne woman who was murdered in 2019.

“She worked at the hospital, she worked as a waitress, she volunteered for Meals on Wheels, she helped the homeless,” Angela’s mother, Cecilia Elizondo, told the crowd. “… We are very proud of our daughter.”

Cecilia was supported by her husband and Angela’s father, Ricardo Elizondo, as she spoke briefly to the group about her daughter.

Elizabeth Juarez also told the story of her daughter, Victoria Juarez, who was murdered and found in the basement of Anong’s Thai Cuisine in southern Cheyenne.

At the time of Victoria’s death, she left behind a 2.5-year-old boy; the man who killed Victoria was not the father of her son. Elizabeth originally didn’t want him to call her mother because she didn’t want to erase her daughter, she told the crowd. It wasn’t until years later, when she and her grandson talked about it, that she was okay with being called mom.

“He told me, ‘I have a mother in heaven, and I have a mother here,’” Elizabeth told the crowd.

According to the Wyoming Department of Health, 33.9% of women and 30.5% of men in the state experience physical violence from intimate partners, sexual violence from intimate partners, and/or stalking from intimate partners in their lifetime.

According to Billiter, it is important to share these stories to support each other and help alleviate the guilt and shame that abuse can cause.

“A young woman came to me and she lost her cousin, and she said, ‘You know, I heard you still carry the shame that you picked a bad one,’” Billiter told the Wyoming Tribune. Eagle. ‘She said, ‘It is not your shame to bear that you have not chosen a bad one. He picked a good one. ”

For Billiter, it was liberating to hear that another woman who had lost someone to abuse was not her fault.

“He sought me out because I was good, and there was something liberating about that,” Billiter said. “Because all the time I thought there was something fundamentally wrong with my choices and the impact they had on my children. I never thought he saw anything in me that he could manipulate, control, and coerce, and ultimately abuse and try to destroy, until I left in the middle of the night with my three children.

Telling these types of stories is about breaking cycles of abuse, Billiter said.

An exhibit of the victims’ silhouettes and a brief account of their deaths has been set up in the library and will remain there for the rest of the week, according to a news release. This exhibit will be available to the public along with proclamations from Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon and Cheyenne Mayor Patrick Collins on ending violence against women.

The exhibit features the stories of Victoria Elizabeth Juarez, Teresa Zimmermen, Crystal Town, Janessa Rae Spencer, Robin Munis, Ashley May Craig, Angela Elizondo, Kary McKinny, Lynne Poole, and a silhouette honoring Wyoming’s missing and murdered indigenous women.

The march and presentation on violence against women are among the activities organized by the Zonta Club of Cheyenne during the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, which runs from Nov. 25 to Dec. 10, the news release said.

Started in 1991 by the Women’s Global Leadership Institute at Rutgers University, the initiative is recognized by activists around the world as a time to raise awareness in their communities and call for the elimination of all forms of gender-based violence. the release. More than 6,000 organizations from 187 countries participated in the campaign.