TORRINGTON – Twenty-five years later, Tracey Motuzick still remembers the twist of her estranged husband’s dirty buck knife in her neck, and tears wet her cheeks.
She could not have imagined this life – not the constant ache and disability from her injuries, not the fear still deep in her heart. But even as she cries, she wants women to pay attention, to learn the story of the attack she survived.
Motuzick, through her pain, embraces this: What happened to her on June 10, 1983, and the changes it inspired in domestic violence laws, could save another woman’s life.
A reluctant hero, Motuzick does not readily share the horrific details. The memories are as permanent as the scars that remind her of 13 stab wounds, and as undeniable as her lurching gait, the result of partial paralysis from the moment her husband stomped on her head and broke her neck as she lay helpless in a growing pool of blood.
Back then, she was Tracey Thurman, 22, a high-school dropout with a soft, pretty face and long brown hair that matched the color of her eyes. After five years of abuse she had steeled herself to file for divorce from her husband, Charles “Buck” Thurman. She had been doing laundry at a friend’s apartment on Hoffman Street in Torrington; son C.J., 22-months-old, was napping.
For eight months before that June afternoon, Buck Thurman had harassed, stalked and threatened his wife, irate that she had dared to leave him. Despite a restraining order, he arrived at the apartment, ranting in the backyard. He wanted to be a family. He did not want anyone else to raise his son, he yelled.
His wife called police. By the time Buck Thurman was arrested 20 minutes later, Tracey Thurman had been stabbed in her face, shoulders and neck. Her husband’s bootprint marked her bruised and bloody face. He had sliced three holes in her esophagus. Her lungs were filled with blood.
“At Hartford Hospital, they told me I wouldn’t walk again,” she said. “I didn’t want to hear it. They considered me a quadriplegic. I said, ‘No, I’m not.'” Her life became consumed with learning to overcome her handicap and the emotional trauma of the attack. She still struggles with both today.
During eight months of hospitalization, she learned how to eat and walk again. Nerve damage left her with sensation but limited control on her right side and control but no feeling on her left. Michael Motuzick, her husband of 13 years, sometimes must turn down the water temperature when she washes dishes. When she uses her functioning arm, her left, she cannot feel scalding water.
What has helped her most in making peace is knowing her suffering has not been for nothing.
The rage Buck Thurman unleashed that afternoon catapulted the largely ignored issue of domestic violence to national attention. Tracey Thurman sued the City of Torrington, saying the police department failed to protect her, and her legal victory in 1985 led to dramatic changes in domestic violence laws, and in how police and prosecutors handle domestic violence. In Connecticut, the Thurman case led to the 1986 Family Violence Prevention and Response Act, which requires police to respond aggressively to complaints of domestic violence. (They are now required to take the abuser into custody.) Nationally, police departments changed policies based on the case.
Tracey Thurman came to represent the inadequacies of domestic violence laws and the absence of support networks for victims. Motuzick, 47, now remarried and using her husband’s name, knows that her disfigurement and disability are permanent.
“If the laws hadn’t changed, I might be at a different place in my life now,” she said. “I have that to look forward to, that a lot of good has come out of something so bad – just knowing that I probably could have saved someone’s life that I don’t even know about.”
“I can’t just get up off the ground on my own.”
People around Torrington, in the supermarket, at the post office, still recognize Motuzick. Mostly, she says, they thank her. Or, she’ll hear them whispering, asking each other if she is Tracey Thurman.
She’s recognizable because of her distinctive walk. She pulls her right leg behind her and slows to force every footfall to a heel-to-toe movement; her paralysis causes her foot to slap the ground slightly. She uses her left hand to control her right and has learned to make the arm and leg she can’t feel appear to be functioning. In conversation, she weaves her fingers together, making sure to match visually the hand she can’t feel with the one over which she has little control.
Her right leg and arm ache. Her right shoulder couldn’t be replaced precisely in its socket. Her back hurts as a result of her awkward gait. Chores like hanging laundry or bringing garbage cans from the curb risk a loss of a balance and a fall.
“I can’t just get up off the ground on my own,” she said. “I probably should be back in a leg brace, but emotionally I don’t want to go there. It would be going backward.”
Motuzick, who is 5-foot-8 with broad shoulders and a sturdy build, has devised a diligent exercise routine to maintain the mobility she worked so hard to regain. She lifts weights and walks on a treadmill at a local gym three days a week. Putting a treadmill into an incline forces her right foot into movement that no longer comes naturally. She trips a lot.
“I try not to think of the future,” she said. “As far as physical, I know it’s going to get worse.”
Motuzick does not work outside the home, partially because of her physical limitations and also, she says, because she never graduated from high school. She dropped out of tenth grade to care for her mother, who died of cancer at age 44 when Motuzick was 17. She sometimes thinks of one day returning to school to study to be a therapist.
Her therapist has played an essential role in helping her sort through what happened, Motuzick said.
“I was really angry at what happened to me. I was angry with the police department for a long time,” she said. Her breathy voice is low and raspy, another result of her injuries. “I felt sorry for myself,” she said. “I was pissed that I’m not going to ever be the same physically, emotionally … just that one day changed me and my son’s whole life.”
Time has allowed her to laugh at the memory of her sister, Cheryl, who died of cancer in 1996, driving manically trying to follow the ambulance to Hartford. Smiling, she sees how irrational she was during five months of rehabilitation at Gaylord Hospital in Wallingford, where she feared men on her ward – themselves paralyzed and unable to walk – would attack her.
Today, she is poised and gracious, but casual. She speaks her mind in colloquial language; she isn’t shy about cursing when she talks about the attack. She wears no makeup. The well-kept home she shares with Michael is decorated in pinks and greens, and as she entertains visitors, her easy smile curls into the right side of her face. Her eyes dance faster than she is able to turn her scarred neck. She laughs easily and whistles in exclamation.
Reminders of what happened come in the most unexpected places. In 2006, Motuzick had thyroid cancer and her thyroid was removed. During one of two surgeries, doctors found two stray pieces of her thyroid, one behind her collarbone and one in her lung. Thurman had sliced them off during the attack.
“Just as I think I can forgive, something like that happens. It gets brought right up like it was yesterday,” Motuzick said. “He still has a hold on me.”
A fear of Thurman haunts her. He never expressed remorse, she said. The last words he spoke to her were in court, when he said before a judge that he would leave her and their son alone. He served nearly eight years in prison and five years probation. Now a resident of Easthampton, Mass., he carries a lifetime restraining order which forbids him from returning to Torrington.
Thurman declined to comment for this story.
“I’m not going to ever rest until I know he’s not around,” Motuzick said. “The hardest thing is having to live with the fact that someone you loved and loved you and had a child with would hate you that much to want you dead.”
“It seemed like he cared. He was protective of me.”
It’s clear to her now that her relationship with Thurman had telltale warnings. They met when Motuzick fled Torrington at age 18 after her mother’s death in 1979. She found a job in Florida cleaning a motel where Thurman was staying with his construction crew. Strong, confident, 5-foot-10 with thick, curly locks, he told her he loved her. They shared an immediate and strong physical attraction.
“It seemed like he cared,” Motuzick said. “He was protective of me. I can’t believe this, but I did actually feel safe.”
He hit her for the first time a few months before she became pregnant with C.J., who was born in August 1981. The violence and obsessive behavior grew worse. “At the time, I wasn’t afraid of him,” she said. “The first time he smacked me, I smacked him back.”
“He would punch the wall,” she said. “Back then, I just thought, ‘You’re an ass – – – .’ I used to think, ‘You’re an immature jerk.’ I didn’t look forward to see that that could be me instead of the wall.”
He was apologetic. She married him when she was four months pregnant. “I didn’t want to get married, but I wasn’t ready to leave,” she said.
She left him for the second and final time in October 1982. In the next eight months, Motuzick called police 19 times. Thurman, who worked at Skee’s Diner in Torrington, was arrested once, in November. He smashed her windshield with his fist at a red light on Main Street after his wife left a meeting with the city’s social worker about custody of C.J.
She look classes through legal aid and filed for her own divorce in April 1983.
Motuzick still recalls the details of June 10, 1983 vividly. Her friend Judy had invited her over to save her a trip to the laundromat. She had just checked on C.J. when Thurman arrived.
She called police at 1:20 p.m. She stayed inside for the next 15 minutes but went into the yard as Thurman became increasingly agitated.
“He’s yelling, ‘Get your f – – – ass down here or I’m coming up,” she recalled. As she approached him in the yard, she saw a police car driving up the street, 20 minutes after her call for help. “Buck turned around and looked and said, ‘You called the cops. You called the f – – – cops. I saw him reach into his back pocket and it dawned on me. I knew he carried a knife.” She tried to run but bumped into a parked car. It slowed her down. Thurman grabbed her by the hair. In his left hand was the buck knife he always carried. The next thing she knew, “he was all over me.”
On the ground, bleeding profusely, she heard Thurman run into the apartment. She feared he might kill their son. “I heard him say, ‘I killed your f – – – mother,’ “she said.
Thurman came back outside, C.J. in his arms, and delivered the boot stomp that broke her neck. During the trial, testimony showed that the officer who responded, Frederick Petrovits, had arrived just as Thurman was stabbing her. The officer left Thurman alone and without restraint as he locked the knife in the trunk of his cruiser. Thurman, meanwhile, went into the apartment, grabbed his son, came back out and delivered the full force of his 171 pounds in a crushing blow to her face and neck.
Petrovits retired shortly after the attack, after 35 years with the department. He died in July 2007. “I believe this incident haunted him until the day he died,” said Torrington Police Chief Robert Milano.
“I don’t want him to know what I look like.”
In a jail cell on the first floor of City Hall, Thurman yelled to his father, to whom he made his one allowed phone call, that he would finish what he started, and he swore revenge on his wife for sending him to jail, recalled former Torrington police officer John Pudlinski, who left the department shortly after the stabbing to become a state trooper. He was one of the 24 officers named in the lawsuit.
Since Thurman was released from prison April 12, 1991, Motuzick has, for the most part, avoided speaking publicly about domestic violence, only reluctantly agreeing to a few appearances. She fears the revenge Thurman once promised could still come. She did not want her photograph taken for this article. “I don’t want him to know what I look like, he can’t see my face.”
Privately, however, she has counseled dozens of women in abusive relationships. For several years, Motuzick volunteered at the Susan B. Anthony Project, the Torrington-based domestic violence agency and emergency shelter. The project opened only months after the attack, and Motuzick wishes she had had a resource like that to help her.
“What’s so significant about Tracey was that she was injured so badly but lived to help other people,” said Barbara Spiegel, executive director of the project. “She has said, ‘If I can do something that can help other people, I would.’ And she did.”
Motuzick is glad now she had the strength to sue the police department. She isn’t sure she would have done it without her sister, Cheryl, and attorney Burton Weinstein of Bridgeport, whom Cheryl called. Pain medication turned Weinstein’s first visits into something of a blur. “I didn’t do it for the money,” she said.
Weinstein remembers meeting her in Hartford Hospital. She was unable to speak, a tracheotomy in her throat. Weinstein put his finger over the tube so she could talk.
“As I drove home to Stratford, I said. ‘There’s got to be a case. I don’t want my daughters growing up in a community that allows this to happen,'” Weinstein said.
The attorney claimed in federal court that police violated Motuzick’s 14th Amendment rights by failing to protect her. He also argued police failed to give her complaints the same weight as other criminal cases because it was domestic violence. She won a $1.9 million settlement, more than $100,000 of which went toward her medical bills, and one-third of which went to Weinstein.
It was the first time a federal court had allowed a suit against a police department in a case of domestic violence.
“I have great admiration for her. She’s a very strong person,” Weinstein said. “It was by sheer will she overcame the sensory loss. It took an awful lot to be able to try to take care of C.J. while he was growing up, and look after herself.”
A made-for-television movie, “A Cry for Help, the Tracey Thurman Story,” came out in 1989. Motuzick was paid a $70,000 consultation fee and flown to meet with producers researching the case. When the show aired, hundreds of letters poured into Torrington from around the country and overseas. Motuzick has kept them in their original envelopes.
In the handwritten letters, women explained personal experiences of abuse, and offered to help Motuzick with a place to stay if she ever needed it. Some offered to kill her ex-husband. Many were addressed to Norwall Street, her fake address in the movie. Others simply had her name, and Torrington, Connecticut. She never wrote back, but read every letter.
The day the movie aired, the Torrington Police Department was flooded with hundreds of calls from viewers chastising police for their lax response.
“He will always have a way to justify that I made him do what he did.”
In Torrington, a place where Motuzick once felt isolated and in harm’s way, she is now comforted by friends and relatives. Her husband, Michael, whom she married in 1989, has family in the area that has accepted her and C.J. as their own. They met at his sister’s wedding. The Torrington Police Department staffed officers at their wedding, after someone threatened harm to Tracey.
Michael, who never wavered from the challenges of the situation, is still smitten by his wife. He calls her the most honest woman he ever met.
“I feel kind of like it’s safer,” she said of living in Torrington. “(Buck) has more fear in coming here, plus the police department’s aware of everything… If I went somewhere else, I’d have to dredge it all up.”
C.J., who was adopted by Michael, is serving a seven-year prison sentence for third-degree assault against an ex-girlfriend and violation of probation. The sentence followed several years of crimes that included handgun and drug paraphernalia possession, and stealing $22,000 in gambling proceeds.
Like any loving mother, Motuzick sees the good in her son, now 26, and believes, despite his assault conviction, he is nothing like his biological father. She looks forward to perhaps one day seeing him settle down and have children of his own.
“He made some bad decisions,” she said. “I think he’ll do well in the end.”
For Motuzick, what is still most haunting about the ordeal is what she believes is a conspicuous absence of remorse on Thurman’s part, and what that says about men who abuse women. Laws may have changed and offer more protection, but laws don’t necessarily change behavior.
She worries for the safety of Thurman’s current wife. “He will always have a way to justify that I made him do what he did,” she said.
