By Faustine Colin

Mildred Muhammad wanted the audience in Torp Theatre to know that her story is not just specific to her.

She was a victim of domestic abuse, and is the ex-wife of the man called the D.C. sniper, John Allen Muhammad, who was convicted in on seven counts of murder and the perpetrator of a wave of sniper shootings that took the lives of 10 and wounded three.

Though there was not enough evidence in court to uphold her prosecutor’s argument, Muhammad believes that her ex-husband’s shooting sprees, along with a teenager named Lee Boyd Malvo, were a plot to kill her and the people around her. She spoke last Thursday and retold her story, an attempt to warn those listening of the signs and actions leading up to domestic abuse.

“Domestic violence has no race, no religion,” Mohammad advised on Thursday, which also marks the approximate seven-year anniversary of the shootings in the D.C. area. She encouraged people who find themselves the victims of domestic abuse to speak up.

Her nightmare began when she asked for a divorce from John Allen Muhammad, who she explained had previously served in Iraq. She said that he wouldn’t let her go and began playing mind games. She said that the abuse doesn’t always have to be physical. He would also come in the middle of the night and scare her.

Though she wasn’t completely aware of it at the time, he was already demonstrating violent and abusive behavior; he threw her new clothes away, he messed with her hair. Ultimately, he told her that she had become the enemy, in military terms, and he planned to kill her.

Muhammad also told the audience her ex-husband is evidence that war does have a real impact on the soldiers as well as on the family.When he returned from Iraq, he wasn’t the same and wore a an external “nice guy” mask, but internally he was looking for ways to control and upset the people around him.

“It is not just a story; it is one of the many stories built on the experience of domestic violence and the depths of its terror,”Muhammad said.

Her story continued when her then husband took their three children and left the country for 18 months, out of the reach of American authorities. He supposedly called her and ordered, “You either come back to me and die or you won’t see your children again.” When Muhammad had tried to seek help from her brother, telling him that her husband threatened to kill her, he refused to believe it.

When her then-husband returned to the country with her children, she departed from her home in Maryland, flew to Seattle, filed the necessary legal documents and regained custody of her children. But D.C. area the shootings began after their return home, which she believes were part of a plot to kill her and the people around her so Muhammad’s death would not seem targeted. She believed that his plot go kill her was also one to gain custody of their children as a result of her death.

After 10 lives taken and four people injured, the police caught John Muhammad and Malvo.

Mildred Muhmmad published a book title Scared Silent and established a non profit organization called afterthetrauma.org to aid survivors of domestic violence.