APPLETON, WIS. — A Wisconsin woman whose harrowing 27-hour ordeal of spousal abuse generated national media attention on the issue of domestic violence shares her amazing story of survival Thursday, Oct. 11 in a presentation at Lawrence University as part of Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
Teri Jendusa-Nicolai recounts her experience and discusses the warning signs of domestic abuse at 8 p.m. in Riverview Lounge of the Lawrence Memorial Union. The event is free and open to the public.
Jendusa-Nicolai was five months pregnant in January 2004 when she went to pick up her two children from her ex-husband’s house in Wind Lake, Wis. Lured inside, she was beaten by her ex-husband with a baseball bat, bound with duct tape, stuffed into a plastic garbage container packed with snow and loaded on to the flatbed of a pick-up truck.
With her two young daughters sitting on the front seat of the vehicle, Jendusa-Nicolai’s ex-husband drove to an unheated storage unit in Wheeling, Ill., where he dumped the container, leaving his ex-wife for dead.
She was discovered the next day — alive — but she lost her all of her toes due to frostbite and her injuries resulted in a miscarriage. Her nightmare experience of abuse and attempted murder was recounted in a segment on ABC’s “20/20” program and helped raise the national consciousness on the issue of domestic violence.
She has since remarried and earlier this year gave birth to her third child, a son. She serves on the board of a Racine women’s shelter and her efforts in speaking out about domestic violence and encouraging women to seek help earned her a Courage Award from the Governor’s Council on Domestic Abuse in Wisconsin.
Jendusa-Nicolai’s appearance is sponsored by the Lawrence University Diversity Center and the Student Organization for University Programming.
