"Just leave." This woman did - and the system still almost cost her life

By Krista Schade

Trigger warning: Article discusses violence.

Imagine fleeing your home in your car with a screaming, terrified two-year-old and having no idea where to drive to. Too scared to head to your parent’s house, knowing that’s too obvious, and too far away.

Hiding out in the streets of your hometown, praying your ex-partner wouldn’t spot your car in the dark. Keeping your car lights off, trying to comfort your baby, while the town slumbers all around you, oblivious to the frightening scenes playing out, just outside the row of homes.

Then image the terror of being spotted, chased and almost rammed by your tormentor's car.

It sounds like fiction, but this very incident happened in our town, just over 12 months ago.

Violence at the hands of a partner, ex-partner or a family member is on the continual rise in Australia, but those who have the good fortune to have no experience of feeling unsafe are often baffled at the complex issue.

“Just leave”.

“Go to the Police”.

This is the story of one woman, Sechia Darlow (pictured above), who lived a reality almost too harrowing to believe.

I met Sechia in her small lounge room, which still bears the scars of an unhappy past, with patched walls and damaged paint.

The first thing I did was to offer to tell this story under a cloak of anonymity, and leave her an unnamed source, but Sechia’s response was instantaneous.

“I did nothing wrong.”

And if one positive thing shone through in the two tough hours I sat with the 31-year-old, it’s that Sechia is an unapologetic survivor. She readily acknowledged her past mistakes when we spoke, yet she hums with a quiet strength that seems born from not allowing herself to become another of Australia’s tragic domestic violence fatalities.

Because that’s how close she came.

When she described the horror of that night to me, I asked what she thought would have happened if she hadn’t been able to flee in a car.

“Oh I’d be dead.”

The matter-of-fact response is heart-wrenching.

Sechia’s journey to that night is long and fraught with missed opportunities for her to be helped. By the end of this, I think you’ll agree - we, Australia, let her down, and we keep letting down victims of family violence.

While Sechia’s previous influential relationship wasn’t physically violent, it was controlling and involved ongoing financial abuse. She is still slowly paying down the debt of their shared electricity bills, some five years later.

“Whenever we had an argument, he’d call the cops and the ambulance, and try to make me look bad,” Sechia recalled.

The behaviour continued, and her self-worth eroded further and further.

Their relationship came to an end when Sechia snapped and police arrived to find her atop her partner, hitting him. The pair parted ways and Sechia escaped to her mother’s home, outside Hay.

Her ex-partner’s parting gift was to tell local drug dealers Sechia had snitched on them to the Police, making it dangerous for her to even pack up her home.

Eventually Sechia was allocated a Housing NSW tenancy and moved to their present home in 2019.

While the move seemed a big step forward, the untreated emotional damage had taken a toll.

That afternoon in her lounge room Sechia didn’t pull any punches, when she talked about her descent into drug use.

“My mental health suffered. I didn’t want to ask for help.

Her voice dropped. “I was scared. I didn’t want to let anyone down.

“There’s a lot I can’t remember about that time,” she said.

“I’d wake up to a trashed house. I just didn’t care. I used meth to block everything out.”

Fearing she was losing the battle Sechia made her first attempt at getting clean.

But getting off methamphetamines was never going to be easy. The very nature of the drug makes it incredibly addictive. Her self-worth was shot, and Sechia spiralled.

It took months before a support worker at Intereach was able to convince her that rehab was her chance to get off drugs for good. At rock-bottom, Sechia agreed to sign herself into a residential drug rehabilitation service.

If only it had been that easy.

There were two options available to her; the drug rehab place said she was ineligible because she had managed to stay away from meth for two weeks prior, so technically she wasn’t a drug user.

The other was a mental health service, but they were unable to allow her in because she was a drug user, with a record of violence, thanks to her former partner’s numerous calls to Police.

“I wasn’t good enough to go to rehab,” she said. “Or I didn’t do enough drugs.”

The system failed to recognise the efforts she was making and she slipped between the cracks.

Her efforts to seek help had failed, and her belief in herself and the system was shattered.

Sechia’s relapse further into drugs was almost inevitable.

“Meth makes your brain scrambled. You don’t eat. You don’t sleep. You are just completely different.

“At the time, I wanted to be a different person.”

Self-harm followed and there are more blanks in her recall of that time.

“I went back and did some telehealth consultations and the rehab said they would accept me but I was so far gone,” she said.

“They told me I wouldn’t be able to see anyone or speak to anyone for six weeks.

“Not my family, not mum. No one.

“They said it was a residential program, behind locked doors, so pretty much prison for something I didn’t do.”

Sechia didn’t go to rehab and instead met up with a new partner, a friend of a friend on the drug scene.

He had his own long-running battles with drugs, mental health and anger issues and had alienated himself from his family. The pair were almost destined to find each other.

When he was thrown in gaol for attacking his former partner, Sechia stood by him.

“I knew the attack didn’t happen because I was with him, at the time,” she said.

That set the pair up for their future - Sechia believed him to be the victim of a malicious ex, and so saw him differently to everyone else who tried to warn him off.

“She broke into his flat and stole a heap of stuff of his and mine, and I had a phone call from a family member, because road workers found a bag of clothes out on the road, with my name on the bag.

“We drove to Narrandera to get it and from the Birdcage (a rest stop 80 kilometres east of Hay) to Narrandera were my socks, my underwear, my shirts, my dresses, everything scattered across the road.”

When I suggested none of what she was describing was anything like a normal life or healthy relationship, Sechia gave a small shrug.

She travelled to visit her new boyfriend in gaol during his six-month sentence.

On one trip she fell gravely ill and presented to the Nowra hospital, only to have emergency surgery to remove an infected gallbladder.

She was released from hospital but collapsed during her next visit to the goal, and diagnosed with a septic infection from the surgery.

Once well enough to return home to Hay, Sechia worked hard to get meth out of her life.

“I already knew rehab wouldn’t take me. I knew I had to do something and that I’d have to do it myself.

“So that was my kick to get off the meth. I’d smoke pot (marijuana) because I still needed something but at least it wasn’t as bad as meth.”

When her partner was released, both he and Sechia were clean. He had undergone the methadone program in gaol, receiving a needle once a month.

But that program wasn’t available to him on the outside.

“On the outside world they have to go to the chemist and get their dose,” Sechia said.

That means many can’t return to work, because the daily trips to the chemist take priority.

“Some on the program get given takeaways (several doses) if they say they need to work, but then they can sell them and go back to meth.”

It didn’t take long before Sechia’s boyfriend relapsed.

“His exact words to me were ‘If I was on the needle still, I probably wouldn’t go back to drugs’. “

The needle dosage means it is required only once a month, so recovering addicts can live more normally, and have nothing to tempt them to sell, and relapse.

Despite her partner turning back to drugs, Sechia stayed clean from meth and continued to use marijuana to self-medicate, but life was not easy. Money was tight and the pair discovered they were expecting a child, a son, born in August 2021.

She describes the time around bringing their new baby home as a ‘honeymoon’ period.

“It was good for a bit.”

But her partner’s drug use continued to escalate.

“He was using drugs to stay awake and stuff and watching me sleep and sh*t like that. It was creepy. He was paranoid and so then I didn’t sleep.”

The paranoia grew.

“When I was in the shower, he’d think I was in there on the phone talking about him. Or cheating on him.”

Sechia rang the police one day when she stepped outside to have a cigarette and her partner locked her out of the house, barricading himself inside with their infant.

“While I was on the phone to the police, he’s inside yelling abuse and telling me to hang up the phone.

“Then he just came out and punched me in the side of the head.

“He had our son in his arms. I grabbed the baby and just legged it.

“He ran back inside and got a bag and some stuff and was gone.

“The police came, he got arrested and went to gaol again.”

“I started screaming at him ‘You are going to kill me.’

He was in that rage that he didn’t even see the two trucks coming.”

Sechia and her young son are still recovering. The young mother says she feared they would be killed.

This time he stayed for about a year, and when he got out, Sechia was at odds with what to do.

“My son really loves his dad. He was clean but I told him he had to prove himself.”

At this time Sechia was even weaning herself from marijuana, so she could regain control over her life.

“I had my last cone (smoke) at, like, 2.30 in the morning. When I woke up, that was it. I cleaned the house up and threw out everything. Bongs - everything like that was all gone.”

Meanwhile her partner was living in a motel after leaving goal, with limitations on approaching Sechia or their son, given the assault.

But the pair fell into old habits and Sechia allowed him to visit them at her house, despite an AVO (Apprehended Violence Order) being in place.

Then the cycle began again.

“Drugs were back in (his life). And I said no drugs in my house, no drugs near my house. I wasn’t having it. I just had this feeling and I said no more.”

But her ex-partner’s behaviour became increasingly erratic.

“He kept coming back, making excuses, like he needs clothes or something,” Sechia said.

“He’d break in the back door. I woke up one night and he was just standing there.”

She reported all these events, building a case of repeated breaches of the AVO, and made a statement to Hay Police.

Her partner spent three weeks evading police, while Sechia and her son spent the time staying at a motel, so he didn’t know where they were.

“I was so scared one night I rang DV Line and they got onto Linking Communities (Linking Communities Network) and they put me into a motel for a week. We packed and used the taxi so no one knew where we were.

“I took my son to the park and he spotted us. He was on a pushbike, but luckily another lady was there at the park with me.”

Sarah Lugdsin (former Hay Police officer) was off duty and just happened to be walking her dog in the area, and Sechia was able to raise the alarm. Sergeant Lugsdin called on-duty police but they drove past him and he disappeared.

“I was heading back to the motel and my phone rang and it was the police. They said, ‘Do you want to help us set him up?’“

The police had additional officers in town, carrying out other arrests.

“They said to me ‘If you want to do it and do it safely, now is your chance’.”

Like a TV drama, Sechia worked with the police, who parked an unmarked car near her home while two officers hid inside. They then had her message her ex-partner and tell him where she and her son were.

“They (the police) parked in the laneway and three of them jumped the back fence and came in.

“I kept my son in the front yard so he didn’t see them at all.

“He (the ex-partner) rode around the corner on his push bike and headed straight through the front yard and into the house.”

He needed to act quickly, so no one saw him breach the AVO again, so he paused only to say a brief hello to his son, before hurrying inside.

“The officers launched,” Sechia said. “They tackled him in this lounge room, and arrested him.

“I said ‘I’m sorry but enough is enough. I couldn’t keep being scared. I couldn’t be out of my own house anymore. I want to come home, and you are making it unsafe for all of us, so I’m sorry.’”

He stayed in gaol for two days before being bailed to Mathoura, and banned from coming within 25 kilometres of Hay

“The DV lady rang me and told me he got bail and I said to her ‘He’ll be back in Hay. He will come back here’.”

Within two days Sechia says he was back.

“He terrorised me down the street, yelling at me, throwing things at me. I reported it to police straight away, and they did a curfew check at the address in Mathoura and because he wasn’t there, he was breached.”

Being in Hay, missing curfew and not checking in with police that day counted as three separate breaches of his bail, so he was taken to Deniliquin station, spoken to and released.

Sechia says he was “out in ten minutes.”

“I rang them and said ‘what has to happen before you do anything? Do we have to be seriously hurt or killed before anything happens?”

And she was right. The worst was yet to come.

Sechia says there were other small incidents, where he’d arrive for a random reason, wanting this item or that, and she says she reported most of them.

“One night I had to physically force him back out the door and I rang the police but they arrived at 10.30 the next morning.”

At the time, neither she nor the police knew she would be fleeing out that same front door, a mere two nights later.

“He turned up here in the middle of the night, carrying on, saying he wanted the motorbike. I didn’t know what he was on about.

“He was carrying on and he walked there, into the kitchen,” Sechia motioned to her right, “and then my son appeared over there,” Sechia motioned to her left.

“He came out of the kitchen with a knife and held it to his throat. He was screaming ‘Is this what you want you stupid sl*t? Do you want me to kill myself in front of you?’

“I just kept saying ‘you have to leave, you have to go. Get whatever you want and just go.’ ”

Sensing the danger Sechia made the decision to flee.

“I grabbed my son and the car keys. The car was parked at the front door, so I legged it, slammed the door behind me and locked us both inside the car.

“He’s outside, banging on the car windows, yelling at us as I reversed out.

“My son was on my lap - I put him in his car seat and buckled him as quick as I could and took off.

“I didn’t know where to go because he was in a car too. If I went to the hospital, I still had to pick up a phone and I still had to stand there and wait for them to open the doors. Glass doors.

“It was unsafe to try and get to mum’s because she lives 40 kays out the road and it’s 4.30 in the morning and he knows that would be my first option.”

Sechia drove around for ten minutes before parking between Pocock Park and a caravan park, in South Hay.

“I parked in the dark, so that I could still see everything coming over the bridge, and rang triple zero.”

As that call ended Sechia saw the car come over the Hay Bridge. She watched him go around the roundabout, past the service stations, before looping back over the bridge.

“He didn’t see me.”

Sechia spent the next 20 minutes trying to calm her distraught son and lull him to sleep in the back of the car, all the while watching for the car.

“I was looking at that bridge because it’s the only way in and out.”

But in her distress she’d missed it.

“I saw headlights coming towards us between Toyota and the pub, and I was like ‘We’re good. It’s probably someone getting up to go to work.’”

But the lights illuminated her and the vehicle suddenly headed straight for her.

“I started the car but by the time I got the car started and triple zero on my phone, he was on top of my car.”

It was her ex-partner and he had used his car to block her exit between his car and the fence and was now out of his vehicle.

“I was screaming into the phone that he was trying to break the doors.”

The Triple-0 operators were desperately trying to raise the on-call officer, who was not responding.

“I had to keep going forward and back, forward and back until I could turn my car sideways.”

When he moved to try and get in the passenger side of her vehicle, Sechia was able to flee.

She drove around the corner into Lang Street, before turning down Flood Street, trying to get back to the main highway. He almost hit her car coming from Russell Street at speed, then again blocked her with his vehicle, once they both turned onto the highway.

She manoeuvred her car around him, but he blocked her again, this time on the roundabout with trucks coming in both directions.

“Triple zero was telling me to get to the police station but I was screaming at them there was no point. They were telling me they couldn’t wake the officer.

“There were two trucks coming and I was stuck across all the lines. I said to triple zero ‘He’s about to kill me and my son. Get me some help and get me out of here.’

“I started screaming at him ‘You are going to kill me.’ He was in that rage that he didn’t even see the two trucks coming.

“I said ‘There’s trucks coming in both directions.’ He turned and looked and ran to his car.

“I put my foot down and the back of the car sort of went off the tar. I had to let the first truck go past, and he got me again and he was (out of the car) pulling on the front of the car, and grabbing hold of the bar light and trying to rip it off.”

Finally Triple-0 had good news. They told Sechia to get to the police station - they had raised an officer visiting from Hillston. By chance, he had chosen to stay the night before heading back, and they had roused him at his motel.

They asked if Sechia could get to him, or whether she wanted him to come to her.

“I said ‘I can’t do anything. Get him to come to me.’ And then he (ex-partner) threw himself under the front of my car. I’m stopped at this stage, like I can’t go anywhere. He’s in front of my car and his car is behind me. I could not go anywhere.

“(Then) he came around and was trying to break my son’s door and by this stage I was like, I don’t care if I hurt you. I’m on the phone to triple-zero - they can hear everything. I just put my foot down. I’m pretty sure I ran over his foot but I really don’t care.”

Once again, Sechia fled, back across the bridge at speed, but this time she was heading to safety and had Triple-0 operators on the line for support.

“I was still on the phone and I was telling her ‘Yes. I can see the police car next to me but I’m not getting out until he’s standing next to me, telling me that I’m ok.’”

The next day, Sechia’s two-year-old son asked the police to go with them, to check their house, which he did, putting the traumatised child’s mind at rest.

So it seems there are brilliant individual police officers, but the system is broken. Once again, Sechia was let down - and her life put at risk - by the system that allowed multiple breaches of bail conditions and AVOs.

Despite leaving town the night of the attack, Sechia’s ex-partner was arrested the next day.

“He was sentenced to 20 months or something,” Sechia said.

“But he took it to the District Court because he thought the sentence was too severe.”

He was released in February 2025, so served around 12 months in total.

Upon release, he was bailed to an address in Hay, just around the corner from where Sechia is trying to piece her life back together.

Sechia says he had a friend contact her via social media, on his behalf, and she took screenshots of that directly to police. But because the friend refused to make a formal statement the police were unable to breach the parole conditions.

The police told Sechia they suspected he was involved in a stolen motorbike, which could be at her premises.

“Sure enough, there was a motorbike in my shed that was stolen.”

Police told her he had not been charged over the stolen bike, so they sent forensics in and Sechia made a statement about who had access to her shed. Apparently, police can now tie him to the offence, so he is wanted for the theft charge.

“(The police said) if I give a statement he will be charged with stealing and they will revoke his parole.

“But how f*cked is that? They’re going to revoke his parole and lock him up again for a stolen motorbike, but let him out when he nearly killed his son and ex-partner.”

I asked Sechia if she knew how to fix the broken system and cut through the rising rates of violence. Like the experts, she doesn’t have the answers to the complex and all too often fatal mixture of mental health, addiction, violence and our struggling legal system.

“I don’t know how many domestic violence courses and stuff he’s done in gaol,” she said.

“Even the parenting ones they do in there - they don’t work.”

The ongoing trauma from that time still shows up, even now.

For months, Sechia had to continually reassure her two-year-old, that the knife used on that dreadful night was still safe in the drawer.

“I couldn’t get rid of it because if I did, I couldn’t show him that it was safe in the drawer and he was safe.”

Her child still has what she calls silent seizures following the assault.

“(During the seizures) he was gone. He was not there at all. He wasn’t sleeping, he wasn’t eating and he wouldn’t leave my side.

“I had to sometimes go to the toilet with him sitting on my lap.”

She is appreciative of those who did cut through red tape to support her recovery.

“Jean at the Aboriginal Medical Centre went above and beyond for that little boy.

“She got us into counselling that I couldn’t afford and my son is slowly getting back to himself.”

Today, Sechia is celebrating five years since touching meth and four years since she last smoked pot.

She is committed to being the best parent she can be, and is building a new life for herself, one day at a time.

She is a valued SES volunteer, and is continually working on upskilling herself.

Yet behind the quiet, unassuming demeanour is someone who has endured so much and emerged ready to give back to her community.

We may say “just leave”. But Sechia did.

We may say “go to the police”. Sechia did that, too many times.

And it made little difference. Everything she has managed to do; she has done by herself and for herself.

It is time for the rest of us to advocate for change and to make the difference our country needs.

According to the ABS, in Australia 1 in 4 women (27 per cent) and 1 in 8 men (12 per cent) over the age of 15 experience violence by an intimate partner or family member.

Data recorded by NSW Police in 2023 shows that 1 in 10 victims of domestic assault are young people, and Aboriginal women are eight times more likely to be recorded as a victim.

If we sadly assume many cases never make it to the point of a police report, Australia is in the middle of one of the biggest social and health crises we have seen.

If this story has raised issues for you or someone you love, help is available;

Linking Communities Network: 02 6964 4804

Intereach: 1300 488 226

NSW Domestic Violence Line: 1800 65 64 63

1800 Respect national helpline: 1800 737 732

Full Stop Australia: 1800 385 578

Women's Crisis Line: 1800 811 811

Men's Referral Service: 1300 766 491

13 YARN: 13 92 76

Lifeline (24-hour crisis line): 131 114

Relationships Australia: 1300 364 277