Detective: I was a victim of sexual, physical abuse

Editor's note: This story is part of an eight-day series on domestic violence in Central Louisiana. 

When Natalie Brown was a child, she learned to fear the time ticking off a clock.

Her stepfather got off work at 5 p.m. If her mother wasn’t there when he got home around 5:30, “I knew I would be raped.”

Brown endured years of sexual and physical abuse, alongside her mother and younger brother, from the man she knew as her father.

There were heads split open, faces slashed and guns pointed at them.

Once, Brown and her brother set their stepfather off by shooting BB guns at old cars in the woods, so he made them kneel while he beat them with a belt over and over.

So when a woman in an abusive relationship says Brown doesn’t know what she’s going through, Brown gently corrects her.

I know exactly what you’re going through, Brown tells them, because I went through it myself.

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“Of course I’m not happy it happened to me,” said Brown, now a detective overseeing domestic cases with the Rapides Parish Sheriff’s Office.

“But my past has brought me exactly where I’m sitting today.”

Domestic calls can be among the most dangerous and frustrating situations for law enforcement officers.

At least one of the subjects is normally highly agitated, sometimes desperate. They may be willing to do anything to hold on to control of their spouse or partner.

“Every time you go on a domestic call, there’s a likelihood it can go bad,” said Miranda Collura, a detective with the Pineville Police Department.

Collura said nearly 10 percent of the department's reports involve domestic incidents.

Even when officers do everything right, there can be issues with prosecuting abusers.

Maybe the hold an abuser has over a victim is too strong. Maybe the victim feels helpless, like they have no place else to go. Maybe it’s just all they know.

FROM VICTIM TO VICTOR: How I survived domestic abuse and lived to tell about it

“Sometimes you hear an address come over the radio and it’s like, ‘Here we go again,’ because you know you’ve been there five or six times,” Collura said. “She might be mad and scared enough to call us, but when the investigator contacts her, she shuts down. He’s back home and everything is OK.

"You don’t get mad at them, but you do worry when you talk to a victim over and over and you want to help them.”

Brown has a unique perspective on how survivors feel, and why many of them try to protect their abusers.

She was 6 when she moved in with her mother and new stepfather (she spent the first few years of her life living with kindly neighbors, who she still considers family).

Soon after, he started raping her.

She remembers how he would call for her, how she knew what was coming and would beg him not to do it. She remembers dreading his alcohol-fueled rages.

Through it all, she felt pity for him.

Like many abusers, he could be loving and kind when he wasn’t abusive. During the times between incidents, it was easy for the family to tell themselves he had changed.

“When he wasn’t intoxicated, he would give you the shirt off his back,” she said. “Everybody loved him.”

Brown’s mother never pressed charges against her husband.

Not when he slashed her so bad with a knife that “he cut her ear almost off,” Brown said.

Not when he brandished a shotgun and threatened to kill her or other family members.

Brown lived through the abuse for several years, until her mother discovered the sexual abuse. She was removed from the home and placed in foster care — “it was the safest I’ve ever felt,” she said — but her mother never truly made a clean break from their abuser.

Brown and her mother still don’t speak. She resents that her mother chose her stepfather over her, and remains angry that her mother has never admitted wrongdoing.

She did make peace with her stepfather before he passed away.

He was drunk and waiting for her mother outside a bar when Brown confronted him.

If anyone has cause to wish you harm, it’s me, Brown told him. And I’m telling you to leave or it will go bad for you.

You’re right, he responded. I shouldn’t have done what I did to you. Then he left.

It was a cathartic moment for Brown, who talks now about the years of abuse she endured with no pain in her voice.

She found her niche in law enforcement, joining RPSO in 2003 and working her way from school resource officer to patrol deputy to detective. She works out of the Family Justice Center, where multiple agencies work to support domestic violence survivors.

“It’s easy for me to talk to survivors, because I know what they’re going through,” Brown said. “I tell them, ‘I’m not here to judge you, I’m here to help you.’

"We can’t judge who someone loves.”

How to report domestic violence:

Domestic violence can be reported by the Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence hotline at 1-888-411-1333 or the national hotline at 1-800-799-7233.

Child abuse and neglect can be reported to the state Department of Child and Family Services at 1-855-4LA-KIDS (1-855-452-5437).