Amanda Simpson had three children.
Four-year-old Drake, six-year-old Caydence, and Odin, 8.
All three were killed inside their home earlier this month in what police say was a shooting carried out by 39-year-old Justin Painter, their father and Simpson’s ex-husband.
Painter also killed the 29-year-old mother’s boyfriend, Seth Richardson. And then himself.
The shooting took place May 16 in Ponder, an area outside Dallas with a population of roughly 2,000.
Simpson was shot and injured, but that was no accident. She told HuffPost in an interview at Painter wanted her alive.
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“Seth’s dead. The kids are dead,” Simpson recalled Painter saying. “And you’re going to have to live with it.”
Simpson also spoke out in a Facebook Live video earlier this month from her bed in a hospital in near Denton.
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In the video, Simpson expressed anger with the judge in her divorce suit, whom she said ignored her warning about her husband.
“Because I don’t know if anybody knows, but Justin tried to commit suicide a year ago. And I made it very clear to the judge that he was mentally unstable,” she said. “And they didn’t listen, so now I don’t have my babies.”
“You guys know they were my everything, my purpose to breathe.”
After the divorce, Painter had hoped for reconciliation “and I told him I couldn’t. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it,” Simpson said. She was planning a life with Richardson, and “Justin couldn’t accept that,” she said.
Judge Nancy Berger, who heard the case, released a statement on Simpson’s video denying her claims.
“The parties chose to amicably settle and finalize their divorce dispute through a mediated settlement agreement with an attorney/mediator,” the statement, reported by the Denton-Record Chronicle read.
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Berger added neither Simpson nor Painter brought up mental health issues during the divorce, which was finalized in March.
Simpson said in the Facebook video that she is now facing the impossible challenge of moving on — somehow.
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“They want me to sleep,” she said of her doctors and nurses at the hospital. “I can’t sleep. Every time I close my eyes, you guys don’t want to know what I see.”
“Every time I close my eyes, I see my babies. I see them dead.”
Simpson says she eventually plans to move back to Virginia, but for now, is grappling with planning and paying for funerals.
Domestic violence in U.S.
Domestic violence, or intimate partner violence, involves abuse from a current or former partner.
According to the American Psychological Association, at least one in three women in the U.S. have experienced “rape, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime.”
About 74 per cent of murder-suicides in the country involve an intimate partner, and overwhelmingly, the women are the ones killed.
— With files from The Associated Press