Mother of kids slain by abusive father encourages others to seek help (Tampa, Florida)

A very sad tale, but also a very brave tale of survival. I just wish that killer dad BOB O'MARA had been locked up for his violent behavior BEFORE he managed to gun down his ex-wife and murder their two children. Law enforcement has got to change on this. Or start allowing mothers and children to kill in self-defense--if the authorities refuse to help.

http://www2.tbo.com/content/2010/oct/15/151159/mother-of-slain-kids-encourages-others-to-seek-hel/

Mother of slain kids encourages others to seek help
Patty Parra-Perez Andrews was shot in the head by her ex-husband, who then shot both their children. He had to chase his 13-year-old daughter down the street. Patty survived, and now is speaking out against domestic violence.

BY DONNA KOEHN
dkoehn@tampatrib.com
Published: October 15, 2010
Updated: 33 min. ago

TAMPA They called themselves The Three Musketeers.

Patty Parra-Perez, daughter Lauren, 13, and son Sean, 12, were bound by their gentle natures, their mutual devotion and their terrible, terrible family secret.

In December of 2004, that well-kept secret exploded into strangers' homes all over the Tampa area via newspaper and television reports. Bob O'Mara, Patty's abusive ex-husband, the children's father, had waited in ambush behind a tree outside their townhouse. When Patty and the kids headed out to the car for a quick trip to Barnes & Noble that Friday night for a book for Sean, O'Mara stepped out and shot them all. One detail of the crime was so horrendous it stunned a public often jaded by tales of domestic violence. While mother and son lay bleeding on their driveway, a panicked Lauren, who ran track for Martinez Middle School, took off for a friend's house a few doors down. Neighbors heard her blood-chilling scream.

In her terror, the young girl ran out of her silver flip-flops, leaving them behind on the sidewalk. Bob O'Mara gave chase, and shot first Lauren, then himself, on a neighbor's doorstep. Only Patty lived.

"My surgeon said not many of his patients have survived after being shot point-blank in the head by a .38-caliber handgun," she says. "He told me I really was a miracle."

Quick action by two neighbors with medical backgrounds and a rapid response by paramedics kept her alive until she reached St. Joseph's Hospital for brain surgery. She was in an induced coma for weeks.

Doctors also believe she lived because she was in spectacular physical shape. She ran every morning, she says, her only escape from a home in which her husband could curse her, knock her down or blacken her eyes with his fists for any reason – or no reason at all.

"When you're running all by yourself on a seven-hole golf course, you can scream and cry as loud as you want and no one will hear you," she says.

The abuse was relentless and began early in the marriage.

"I was naïve. It's so cliché, but I felt if I loved him enough, I could change him," she says. "Then I thought if I had a child, I would change him. Then I thought when I had a boy it would change him. "I was wrong."

The children grew up witnessing their father's abuse and their mother's repeated attempts to escape. Bob, a mortgage broker, kept the family moving from state to state so Patty wouldn't make friends, and he often took away her car keys to keep her under control at home. When she drove, she had to tell him where she had been so he could check to see if the mileage matched up.

Once Patty got away with the kids to a hotel, but Bob knew her credit card number and tracked her down. He made such a commotion, the hotel manager made them leave. Rather than go home with him, she and her children slept in her car. They washed up in public restrooms and the kids went to school, acting as if nothing were wrong. She hid an extra car key and kept packed bags for herself and her children hidden away. She slept as little as possible, always wary, waiting until he passed out from drinking to finally allow herself to sleep. She became convinced she could not escape from him. He would always find her. She was terrified to speak to any men outside the home. When she and the children returned from outings, their father asked them who Mommy had talked to. When they were little, they volunteered the information, happy to have some attention from a man who otherwise ignored them. "Once at the beach, I couldn't get an umbrella open," Patty recalls. "Lauren told me to ask 'that man' to do it. I told her no. She couldn't understand why I couldn't; but I knew what would happen if one of them told Bob I had been talking to another man."

As is often the pattern in domestic violence, her husband would give her flowers or a card to try to make up after he had beaten her.

"I remember one time, I was pregnant with Sean and I was giving Lauren a bath. I had two black eyes. He brought in a card, to apologize. I told him I wished I could believe the words on the card, but look at me! How could I?"

She recalls another time he tormented her by driving through red lights in a busy part of Tampa. "He said, 'What do you think will happen to your kids without a mother?' I just prayed that I would not die."

The couple divorced in late October of 2004, but he continued to harass her and break in to her home. Every night, she and her children pushed a coffee table loaded with boxes of dishes against the front door. Somehow he got in anyway, and tried to push Patty down the stairs. Sean called the police, Bob ran, and Patty hid in her son's closet.

According to Kathleen Heide, Patty's therapist and an expert on domestic violence, victims are most at risk when they attempt to leave their abuser.

Patty says Bob never hurt the children. They were not important in his life, she says.

"When we moved to the townhouse, I was worried that he would try to hurt me. I never, ever thought he would hurt them."

Patty was brought out of the coma on Christmas Eve. "When people told me Sean and Lauren were dead, I didn't believe it, not for a long time," she says. "I really kept thinking, every time a door opened, one of them would be there.

"Bob took away everything, 13 years of my happy memories of my children. Suddenly I had no more soccer games or church plays or band concerts. I was left with nothing."

For a while, she had no memory of that night. But her memory has returned. She remembers hearing Bob tell her to get in the car, remembers Sean trying to run back to the safety of their home. She remembers Lauren's scream. "I wish so much that I did not," she says. A memorial for the children was held the following February, when those around Patty felt she finally was mentally and physically strong enough. She stayed in a separate room from the services, away from the eyes of family, friends and the children's classmates. Although it's a beautiful spot, she finds it difficult to visit a memorial tree planted at Martinez by students who went to school with Sean and Lauren, kids who are young adults now. Patty by nature is a private, quiet person, whose soft, lilting voice carries the trace of an accent from her native Mexico. Eighteen years of living with a man who tortured her physically and emotionally taught her to speak quietly, tread lightly, smile often. Feeling a misplaced sense of shame, she shunned the spotlight after the slayings, refusing interviews and hiding not only from reporters, but from anyone at a store or restaurant who might recognize her.

Yet her life has moved on. Physically, her recovery is complete. After surgery, she had to relearn how to walk and speak – "just like I was a child."

She has recovered the use of her hand, which was injured as she tried to shield herself from the bullet. The only trace of the tragedy is a small, dime-sized dimple on her forehead, barely visible when she speaks. Patty also is back to work as a paralegal, a job requiring intelligence and organization.

"People ask me how I lived through it," she says. "I prayed and I talked to God. It was minute by minute."

She married Troy Andrews, the lawyer she was dating after her divorce, two years after the tragedy she repeatedly refers to as "2004."

"I told him up front, I needed to be a mom," she says. "I didn't know if I could still conceive, but I would either have my own or I would adopt them. He was fine with that."

Not long after her honeymoon, she felt sick and went to the doctor. He told her she would be feeling much better in nine months. So accustomed to bad news, she asked if she had cancer. No, the doctor said, she was pregnant.

Kailey, 4, a fearless child who engages easily with strangers, was joined by brother Kyle two years later.

"God has blessed me again with two children," Patty says. She and her ex-husband had put up their house in Lutz for sale when they divorced, and she and the kids moved to the townhouse not far away. After the tragedy, no one would buy the first home, so she moved back in.

"There were a lot of good memories of the children in that house," she says. "Baking cookies and singing."

She kept some of Lauren and Sean's belongings as sentimental keepsakes, but repainted their rooms for Kailey and Kyle.

Kailey knows she has a big sister who loved music and loved to run and now lives in heaven. Kyle is too young to know anything.

In Kailey, she sees Sean's love of animals. Patty fostered that nurturing spirit in her quiet son, who had been growing up the antithesis of his angry father. Someday she will share with her two children what happened to their older siblings.

"Besides what I went through in 2004, that's my biggest challenge," she says. "I don't want them to fear their own dad. But it's something they have to hear from me. I hope God will give me the courage when it is the right time."

Troy is loving, she says; protective in the right way. With him, she has learned that she can disagree with a man. If he walks toward her, she doesn't automatically back away. She can drive wherever she wants. "It is refreshing," she says. She knows he only wants to shield her from any additional pain. But for Lauren and Sean, this private woman plans to expose the darkest secret of her life. Today, she tearfully recounted her journey at a news conference to promote the Bay Area Legal Services' Cup of Hope fundraiser to benefit domestic violence survivors. She will be the key speaker at the kickoff Nov. 6.

Sometime after that, she will appear on a Dr. Phil episode about domestic violence.

These things scare her. So does walking to her car at night, but she does it. So did the plush landscaping she used to love to tend at her house, before it became a place a killer could hide. She cut it down.

After feeling so oppressed and small, she is learning, with the help of a therapist and her loving family, that she is strong.

"I need to tell other women that there are so many services out there for them, things I didn't know about," she says. "I know they're embarrassed to say I'm living with someone who hurts me.

"I know I can't stop the killings. I just don't want any woman to go through what I did."