“He told them she had shot herself and needed to go to the hospital.” Doe then drug Ms. Vega’s limp body to the car they shared, grabbed a bag and fled, leaving the children behind. He never answered phone calls. He never showed up to the hospital. He never returned to the residence. “I was in disbelief. The rumor was that he shot her, and the scene indicated that it happened in front of two children. They had just had a 10-day-old baby that was in the neonatal unit at the same hospital holding her body. There’s no way he did this. They were so in love,” Byars recalls thinking with her eyes filling with tears. “It was unbelievable.” After a week or so later, warrants were issued for Doe’s arrest. Another week later, on the day the family gathered to mourn her passing and celebrate her life, he was captured. Every person, no matter what they are arrested for, is presumed innocent until proven guilty and the case remains the same for John Doe. Besides, no one wanted to believe her death was at the hands of her boyfriend, the person she couldn’t even talk about tacos without mentioning. Her true love was looking more and more like her worse nightmare. A few stories started going around about things bystanders had seen suggesting that life wasn’t right behind closed doors. People saw the signs while sitting in traffic; people heard banging around their house. Vega would become distant from her friends
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and family. Doe even stopped Byars at the door three days before the tragic event, promptly letting her know that, “She is sleeping. She’s very tired.” “I really wish I had insisted on seeing her that day,” Byars recalls solemnly. Crystal Vega’s family members noticed emergency room visits that did not quite add up. Injuries from falling down the stairs, dressers falling on her, running into walls and other incidents were a clear sign that maybe someone should have spoken up and investigated the well-being of the young mother of five. She even showed signs of abuse leading up to the birth of her last baby, an infant who was still in neonatal care at the time of the tragic events. “We never heard about any of the horrible things until after she passed,” Byars says. While this story had a fatal ending, how often do parts of other people’s stories of domestic violence line up perfectly with the story of Crystal Vega? UNSURE “After the tragic event, a lot Crystal’s friends came to my house. A few of the ladies were shaken, and we talked about how the incident scared us. We talked about how it could have been us. They started to admit that they were going through similar struggles with their men. I was driven to do something about domestic violence, and to do something to honor my sister’s name. After thinking hard about it, I realized that the silence of her abuse is what
provided me the perfect name. I wanted to call the organization Lips UnChained,” says Byars. “It’s time for people to speak up and speak out against domestic violence.” With October being Domestic Violence Awareness Month, Byars decided that this would be the perfect time to kick start her movement. She started by designing a T-shirt and then having it printed with a picture of Crystal Vega on the front along with a number to call a domestic violence hotline. The shirt sales took off and people started asking questions. “People started contacting me thanking me for taking a stand and trying to raise awareness. They also thanked me for giving people someone to talk to about a very scary and sensitive issue, problems in their lives and lessons learned from the abuse of others,” says Byars. “The T-shirts bring a lot of attention to what we hope to accomplish using the Lips UnChained platform.” For obvious reasons, domestic violence is hard to detect because the crime isn’t reported. Victims don’t feel like they are victimized, so there is no witness to report the wrong doing. Murder, robberies and other deadly crimes are usually easier to detect and viewed less through taboo lenses by the witness. Domestic violence occurs with women, children and men. Yes, men are victims of domestic violence also. Most victims won’t report domestic violence