ABC News has reported that a woman, claiming her husband subjected her to almost two decades of insults, threats and physical abuse, shot him to death in an act of self-defense.
B.S. is on trial for the February 18, 2008 murder of her husband and is using the battered-woman defense.
Her attorneys are expected to argue that B.S. was led to shoot and kill her husband, while he stood shaving in his bathroom, due to a long abuse history.
The couple had two children together. B.S. worked as a school secretary in Queens. N.Y. and her husband, R.S., was a retired policeman.
Of the incident, B.S. testified, "I knew he was positively going to kill me. He would always chase me and catch me. So I knew he would catch me. So I shot the gun. I don't know how many times I shot. I just fired. I stopped firing when I didn't feel threatened anymore. I grabbed the guns, closed the door and ran downstairs."
B.S. has been released on bail – $1 million – since 2008. She gave an interview to ABC News at that time, and gave her account of a beating that occurred while the two were on a vacation in 2007.
B.S. said, "The walls in the hotel were like cinder block and he kept banging my face into it until my head cracked open. There was blood all over the room, and I wound up in the hospital on the island of Jamaica."
It was another fight, and the threat of having to take another vacation with her husband, that B.S. said caused her to kill her husband. R.S. had allegedly put a gun to her head – when she refused to accompany him to Florida – on the same morning that his gun would be turned on him.
After R.S. threatened B.S. she took off to a friend's house. Returning home some hours later, she discovered a still-angry R.S. in the bathroom.
B.S. said she was "thinking maybe he wouldn't shoot me if I had the gun" when she picked up one of the two guns her husband owned. But then, per B.S., R.S. "said he was going to kill me" and came towards her with another gun.
B.S. said, "So I shot the gun I had in my hand. He had the big gun, I had the little gun. I don't know how many times I shot it. I couldn't aim it. I just shot. I never shot a gun before."
As her husband slid to the ground, still alive, B.S. took his weapon from him and unloaded what was in the gun's chamber into him. She said, "I didn't intend to kill him. I just wanted him to stop and not kill me."
B.S. has claimed that since her husband was a retired police officer, she never sought help from the police department.
Several times in court the prosecution said the that abuse was "alleged" and that B.S. had "shot and killed" R.S.
Gloria Allred is defending B.S. Of her case Allred said, "It's not easy. A battered-woman defense is always an uphill climb. There are a lot of questions her lawyers are going to need to answer for the jury. Why didn't she report the abuse? Did she tell anyone?"
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