Lynchburg-area woman reclaims her life after attack

Eight years ago this month, Ella Mae Brown began the first small steps from rock bottom to where she is today.

She had just been released from the hospital after a severe stabbing by her longtime boyfriend. Her physical wounds were starting to heal, but the emotional wounds were a different story.

Though Brown and her boyfriend had separated before the day she was stabbed, she long had believed that she couldn’t make it, couldn’t raise her children, without him.

It took the bloody altercation in her living room to make her realize she was wrong.

In the years that followed, she found redemption. Now she wants other women in abusive relationships to know that they can, too.

“I had to make it,” she said. “I have no other choice … I make it and I make it with the best of me.”

Brown and James A. Murrell, who spent seven years in prison for the stabbing, had six children together. They had bought a house in Campbell County together. They once had loved each other.

That shattered in the blood- soaked living room of her Rustburg home on a spring evening.

Murrell had been by the house on Reynolds Drive several times on April 11, 2001, Brown said.

They had been bickering about the insurance payment for their daughter’s car and the familiar refrain of whether Murrell could come back home.

Then the knife appeared. The first strike landed deep in her shoulder and she fell back, her arm going through a china cabinet. Another hit her in the mouth, splitting her tongue and knocking out several teeth.

“I couldn’t see anything in his eyes,” Brown said. “When I hit the floor, I literally thought, ‘this is not real.’

“I really thought that he loved me so much that he wouldn’t do this. … At that point, I think there was nothing in his mind. If there was something in his mind and it was love, he wouldn’t have done it.”

Brown was stabbed eight times, according to testimony during Murrell’s guilty plea in October 2001 in Campbell County Circuit Court.

Shannon Brown, her son, was 20 years old at the time. He was in the basement and heard the commotion. He hit Murrell in the head with an iron, and then a lamp, Brown said. He, too, was stabbed.

“My son left him in the floor in protection of me,” Brown said. “If my son hadn’t been there, he would have killed me.”

Dwayne Wade of the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office, who was one of the first on the scene and the lead investigator, said he was familiar with the tensions between Brown and Murrell. Deputies had responded to other domestic disturbances at their home.

“I’ve been to murder scenes with less blood,” Wade said. “We thought she was going to die when we first saw her. We thought we were taking a dying declaration.”

Brown spent four days in the hospital. She underwent physical therapy for the nerve and muscle damage in her arm. She’s still missing her front teeth.

Murrell — who did not want to comment for this story — ended up hospitalized for 17 days.

He pleaded guilty to aggravated malicious wounding and two counts of unlawful wounding in October of that year and by January 2002 was sentenced to serve seven years of the 25-year sentence. He was released last year.

Both Brown and Murrell had felony convictions prior to the stabbing. Many of the Campbell County deputies are familiar with their names, but in the eight years since, Brown has not faced charges of any kind in the Lynchburg area.

When now-retired Campbell County Circuit Court Judge Samuel Johnston Jr. presided over Murrell’s case in 2001-02, he saw a spark in Brown.

She had changed in the aftermath of the stabbing — she no longer wanted to put herself in a position to be hurt again. She wanted to help herself, and that made the judge want to help her, too.

Johnston worked with her to put the pieces back together.

“All I know is before, she was bruised, battered and stabbed. Now she’s a working woman, trying to get her life back,” Johnston said.

“I went to bat for her.”

One of the steps the judge took was getting back her driver’s license, which had been suspended repeatedly years earlier.

She made steps to secure her life while Murrell was in prison, beginning with changes within herself. She let go of thoughts of revenge, put her faith in God and started attending church.

Eventually, she gained full custody of her children, and decided to let the house she had lived in for 21 years go into foreclosure to move to another county.

Brown worked to secure herself and her children for fear of falling into the same pattern when Murrell was released from prison. He has court-ordered visitation with the children who still live at home, so she still has some contact with him.

“I will never take that chance of him doing that again to me,” she said. “I never thought he would do it the first time and I can’t give him the opportunity to do it the second time. I cannot.”

She used to think that maybe he did it because he loved her, or that they would get back together because of their grandchildren.

“I had to accept his absence,” she said. “I wish that when my grandchildren get old, I wish this was a story that I didn’t have to tell them, but I will.

“I have four granddaughters. I don’t want them, or any woman, to go through what I had to go through.”

She struggles, but with her job at Peaks Slaughter House, she is handling her finances. She now rents a farmhouse in Forest.

“Things may not ever be the way I want them to be, but I know one thing, I feel better about myself. Anyone that thinks that they can’t make it afterwards, they can.

“My life is not exactly it, but I feel like Ella.”