This is going to be very long, TLDR at bottom. Thank you all for reading. I don’t know what else to do. Formatted on mobile.

Let me preface this by saying that I knew this person and grew up with him, and I lost both grandparents within about a year of each other (all important to story).

In May of 2022 I lost my grandma and in June of 2023 my grandfather. When I lost them it was like losing my parents. I had a really shitty childhood filled with abuse and mistreatment, so my escape was their home. It was the only place I felt safe. When I lost them, my mental health issues spiraled crazily out of control. I was at the mall to get my nails done for college graduation, and ran into the person who would eventually try to take my life. I never saw him until the next day, but he texted me from a number I didn’t recognize. He had gotten out of jail, and wanted to see me. We met up the next day and he made the promises to me that he would do what he needed to do while being on parole. Which included NA meetings and trying to find a job.

During the day he was all about me, ignored phone calls from everyone. Telling me that no one else matters when he’s with me. Love-bombing and telling me everything I wanted to hear, especially after what I went through.

Now, when my grandparents died I inherited a decent sum of money and property. He found this out, and proceeded to change everything up about what was going on and the image he was presenting.

It started small, asking for some money to get some clothes and shoes since he’d been away for so long. Then it became the money he was asking for and what he was bringing home wasn’t adding up. I confronted him a few times about it and it was always an excuse about how something specific was more expensive but when I asked for receipts what he showed me, wasn’t the price he told me it was. It got into “you don’t trust me. I’m telling you what it cost, I don’t know why you don’t believe me”.

Then I found out he was hanging out with someone who I had never met, and got a horrible vibe from. I didn’t like him, everything about his presence felt off. I told him i wasn’t comfortable with him around and that was the first time he threatened me. “Don’t tell me who I can’t be around. I don’t care if you don’t like him”.

With him being on parole, he wasn’t able to be around guns. I inherited a good many from my grandparents and the best decision I ever made was to take those out of my house and put them temporarily in a storage unit.

I was asleep in the back room with my dog after we were at my house and this guy that I don’t like showed up without me knowing. I come out to the living room because I hear talking and I know my friends/roommates weren’t awake at that time, to find them smoking some sort of white substance out of a skinny glass pipe (which I later figured out to be crack). I asked him what was going on and I got screamed at to “go back to the bedroom bitch, don’t worry about it.”

It got so much worse. It got to the point where he was stealing my phone at night when I was asleep to send himself and whoever else thousands of dollars. He got so addicted and violent that he would go into my bank with me so tweaked out that I would be visibly scared and no single person in the bank said anything.

He later took me to the courthouse and forced me file for a self uniting marriage license (don’t need a pastor in my state). He even yelled at me and I visibly shrunk and flinched in front of the clerk of courts and they still let it go through. We did the waiting period and he forced me to sign it and watched me place it in the mail so he knew it got sent.

This is when it got really bad. Everything was a threat, and I couldn’t get away. Eventually I ran out of excuses to tell my job and had to go back. At the time I was a scrub tech at a hospital.

While I was at work it was constant texts and phone calls with anger and threats that I wasn’t answering to send him money when I was scrubbed into a surgery. One night, on a weekend he got into a HUGE fight with his cracked out buddy and demanded I go get him a gun from the storage unit. I lied and told him that they aren’t open at night and there was no way I was giving him a gun. I wasn’t going to give him the tool to kill me. He even tried to convince me to help him kill and hide the other dude he was fighting with. He would tell me that he was responsible for unsolved murders in the bigger city close to us and he was going to make me the next, and I believed him.

There were other instances during this whole thing, out in public where people watched. Even made eye contact with me. I even gave the hand signal For help (thumb tucked and fold 4 fingers down over), and no one helped me. His mother knew, her boyfriend knew, and when I asked them for help I was ignored. He would get mad at me if I went anywhere with out him after work. He didn’t have a DL so he forced me to drive him to unsavory places for whatever he was doing. I was never allowed in and I had to stay in the car. He would watch out windows to make sure I didn’t leave.

He finally did something to get himself arrested. He was ignoring his parole officer for days (I could never find her information to contact her myself). I was at work when the chief of police called me. I explained to them that I didn’t know where he was. I only knew where I dropped him off at a few days before. At this point I had not seen him for four days because he was on such a crack binge that I couldn’t contact him, but I was still so scared that he’d show up at my door with a gun that he found from somewhere or with many people to take advantage of us in my own home.

Once he was arrested, I was finally able to get safely away from him and convince him to divorce me because I wanted to move on with my life. Have not contacted him since our divorce has been finalized, and I hope he rots to death in jail and dies there.

After going through all of this, I have a new partner now and he’s absolutely amazing and he’s trying to help me work through this and was going to support me with going to the police to press charges on him for what he did to me. Come to find out in a commonwealth state after you are married That even if your spouse does not have permission or access to your account and they steal your card and force you to take out money the way he did that he cannot be processed because of the way marriage is defined in the state that I live in. State police pointed me towards my bank to report him for fraud and to see if they can help me in anyway. The total he stole from me was over $100,000 in cash between physical threats and him stealing my phone and debit card to send money himself And now there’s no way I can legally hold him responsible for it.

So now I’m here venting on Reddit, thank you all for taking the time to read this very long post. I really appreciate everybody taking your time. I really just wanted an outside perspective and thoughts and advice from anybody who may have gone through something like this for how to get past it Because I still wake up with nightmares, and my poor partner has to deal with so much fallout From it, and we could be much further in our lives than we are right now.

TL;DR My ex abused me, threatened my life, stole over $100k in cash from me, and I can’t legally do anything because of it happening in a commonwealth state.