New paint will go on the walls at Nicole Beverly's Ypsilanti Township house in the coming weeks.At least no one will ever call her racist, right? What madness is this?
She'll rip down the boards she nailed to the windows by the front door, too. Beverly put them up several years ago as a safety measure to ensure her abusive ex-husband couldn't break the glass and then reach inside to open the door.
"When he was stalking us, we literally had to do anything we could to slow him down," she said. "We nailed a board over each of my side windows. I had to replace my basement windows with glass block because the windows were big enough for him to get in. My friend's partner installed the safety lights in the back on the outside of the shed. We had an alarm system installed.
"It was as safe as it could be. ... I bought that house myself. … The house, for me, was independence from him. It was, you know, a fresh start.”
Beverly, 44, is preparing for the day this summer when she and her boys will have to leave that home and escape to a new life somewhere else, somewhere with better laws to protect survivors of abuse.
And that somewhere, she hopes, will be a safe haven not only for her, but for her two sons. She’s being forced out of Michigan and into hiding by an ex-husband who, she says, is intent on killing her and by weak laws that fail to protect survivors like her.
Kevin Beverly, 44, is serving out the end of his sentence on a 2012 aggravated stalking conviction involving his ex-wife. But even from prison, the threats have continued.
Four times in four years, he allegedly tried to hire people to kill Nicole and their children from prison or threatened to kill them himself when he’s released.
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