Michigan woman shot in face by stepdad is haunted in dreams, tortured with hypotheticals
He came out at night, haunting her dreams, like a monster lurking in the shadows, resting all day, then appearing only when she fell asleep.
David Somers, the man who shot Amedy Dewey in the face with a shotgun and killed her mother, kept attacking her, night after night, in her dreams.
“He's always there,” Amedy said, of her dead stepfather. “He's there laughing, and he's gripping my mother; and he's like, 'I won. I won.’
“And it devastates me.”
The dreams turned into night terrors. Amedy would fall asleep and the dreams would start — "I won; I won!" — and she would start screaming and crying and thrashing, trying to escape. Sometimes, if someone tried to wake her up, Amedy would attack them, as if trying to protect herself.
The dreams and reality seemed to blend together — as if one horrible night was playing on an endless loop — never ending, never beginning again, just always there, the pressure building like a volcano deep within.
Amedy started having thoughts of suicide.
“The first time I actually like tried to do it, to take the pills, I heard his voice,” she said. “He said, ‘Just finish it. Just finish it, just finish it, finish what I started.’
“And that's all I heard. I passed out and I came to, and I'm like, ‘OK, I don't want to die. No, you're not gonna kill me.’ ”
Amedy experienced multiple PTSD episodes that always started the same way. She saw a flash of fireworks, or, maybe, it was the flash of a gun.
“I was like, I need air, I need to get out of here,” she said. “I just remember looking in the distance. And then again, fireworks, and I just straight collapsed.”
While walking across a bridge at a hot air balloon festival in August 2019, fireworks went off.
“I was paralyzed,” she said. “The thoughts going through my head — shotgun after shotgun after shotgun. Just going off, going off. I seriously thought about jumping over the bridge. Just to make it stop.”
Amedy experienced another episode during her brother’s wedding a month later, during the mother-son dance. Amedy took her mother's place while dancing with her brother. “It was very, very hard for me,” she said.
Another time at a gas station, a tractor-trailer went by, and when she felt the whoosh of air, it took her back to the scene of the shooting, standing by the side of Interstate 96 in Michigan trying to get help, her ears ringing, bleeding profusely.
“I just get this wave of panic,” she said.
She thought: I'm gonna die.
Another time, she had an attack at the beach.
“I was sitting there and I just exploded,” she said. “I was bawling. I was screaming and my friend wanted me to call the suicide hotline and I told him that if he did, I'd book it to the lake and purposely drown myself. I was that unstable. I felt so alone like a freak.”
What if?
Amedy tortured herself with hypotheticals.
What if she didn’t go on the cruise? What if she would have stayed in Midland and went to a cheerleading competition? Would her mother still be alive?
In essence, she was blaming herself.
Amedy’s mother and stepfather invited her to go on a cruise for her 18th birthday — a long-planned trip — but Amedy was conflicted about going because it forced her to miss a competitive cheer competition. Amedy loved being on that Midland High School team, loved her teammates, loved how much skill they had, loved how she felt a part of the school, a part of something new, even if that school was massive and it was so hard to navigate and not get lost.
“The team really needed me,” Amedy said. “And I was very conflicted about going. So, my cheer coach is actually the one who said, ‘Hey, you're going to be 18 soon; you only get one chance. Just go.’
“So I did.”
It caused all kinds of guilt: What if she didn’t go? Would her mother still be alive?
She churned through several therapists, didn’t find any relief and checked into a mental health crisis center.
After a weeklong stay at a “mental place,” as Amedy called it, one of the conditions of release was accepting a referral to a therapist. So, she started working with Barbara Forgue, who specialized in working with trauma patients.
Forgue's office in Ludington, Michigan, was spacious and comfortable. There was a Maltese therapy dog named Ziggy, and the walls were covered with paintings by the therapist herself.
Amedy was skeptical that Forgue could help.
“I sat down, crossed my arms and I had RBF face so bad — Resting Bitch Face,” Amedy said.
Beginning to treat the mental scars
During the first session, on Oct. 2, 2019, Amedy told Forgue about the shooting, describing what happened with no emotion.
“I was blown away,” Forgue said. “When she came in, she was kind of thinking, ‘there's no hope.’ She was in a dark place at the time. She had just been through some really rough stuff.”
It was as if Amedy was able to stand outside her body and watch the events unfold, narrating the story like an impartial observer, which is how Forgue imagines Amedy was able to deal with the shooting.
But there was something surprising. Amedy told the story in a detached voice.
“People who are in deep trauma sometimes are so trapped in the trauma that they have no perspective,” Forgue said. “She has this unique ability, although she was trapped in the trauma, to still be able to step outside of it and look at it. That's her unique talent. Her ability to be an observer to herself was actually one of her strengths. It surprised me.”
Forgue wrote in her notes: “Amedy was spectacularly resilient after multiple complex traumas.”
The complexity had several layers. Amedy was dealing with the shooting, the death of her mother, survivor’s guilt, abandonment, the loss of trust, feeling unprotected, the physical pain with its many surgeries, the loss of herself and her imagined future.
“Before the incident, Amedy was a cheerleading, cool, bopping around school kind of kid,” Forgue said. “After this — totally different.”
With so many issues to address, Forgue broke it down into steps.
So, they started dealing with her nightmares.
“First, we would talk about whatever the dream was, and kind of look for the insight of that dream,” Forgue said.
Forgue tried to unpack the dreams, digging through the layers for meanings, knowing that “language can be messy,” and dreams are not literal.
More than anything, Forgue believes night terrors are a release, like an internal emotional volcano that explodes, releasing negative thoughts and emotions. It might be messy, it might be jarring and painful, but Forgue views them as healthy.
Amedy was also dealing with several emotional triggers.
A simple headache or a normal toothache — just feeling pain in her face again — became a trigger, taking her back to the shooting.
If she was outside and it was cold — just feeling a different sensation on her face — she would go right back to the shooting and felt like she was going to die.
“Traumatic triggers are everywhere, smells, feelings, it bombards you from all sides,” Forgue said.
Every time Amedy had another surgery, every time she felt discomfort in her face, it would take her back to the shooting.
So, Forgue and Amedy tried just about everything to cope with it, trying to understand it, having deep discussions, meditation and even using a tuning fork, pressing it against her leg to “reconnect her.”
“Part of the healing is learning that when you get hijacked by a trauma trigger, it's short-lived,” Forgue told her. “It's gonna pass, and you just have to get through it by using the tools you've learned.”
The more Amedy worked with Forgue, the more she got relief. Amedy was starting to rebuild her life, rebuilding her friend group, rebuilding trust in others, as well as herself.
Forgue taught her to recognize when the triggers were hijacking her emotions, to weather the storm. “Until she's back and in control of things,” Forgue said.
Finding a new life at 'blind school'
Before the shooting, Amedy was a social butterfly. A competitive cheerleader at Midland High, she had the confidence and personality to go up and talk to anyone.
But the shooting changed everything.
Forgue was concerned that Amedy’s life shrank after the shooting. Her circle of family and friends was tight, and she didn’t have tools to venture outside of it.
How would Amedy live without her sight?
How would she learn to function and do everyday things, like cook or shop?
How would she even cross a road?
Forgue urged Amedy to go through training at the Bureau of Services for Blind Persons Training Center, a residential facility in Kalamazoo.
“Her world was very small,” Forgue said. “Her world was grandma, dad, and people who weren't very healthy for her right here in town, and that was her world.”
Forgue told her over and over:
“You cannot stay in this little world.”
“You need to spread your wings.”
“You need to become comfortable in the world.”
Forgue kept reminding her how miserable she was most of the time "because her world was so tiny.”
So Amedy went to “blind school,” as she called it.
She stayed there for five months, learning how to cook by sound, cross a street with a cane and become self-sufficient.
And everything clicked. Her world opened up almost instantly and she started taking classes at a local community college.
“She met new people, both good and bad,” Forgue said. “She had new experiences, learned new technologies and began finding her voice.”
When the world shut down because of COVID-19, Amedy and Forgue stopped meeting in person and relied on phone calls.
“She used to call every time she crashed,” Forgue said. “I wouldn't hear from her and then she called me and it would be because she had just run into some horrible situation, been taken advantage of, or something happened.”
But that changed over time, as Amedy started to get healthy.
“Then she started calling me to tell me good news,” Forgue said.
At least, most of the time. Amedy still had rocky moments.
It all came flooding back
It was Mother’s Day, 2020 — certainly, that was part of it — and Amedy was in a dark place. A vivid dream left her spiraling. So, she tried to reach Forgue around 10 o’clock at night.
“I’m struggling, not gonna lie, could be the one,” Amedy texted. “Are you available for a session?”
Amedy felt horrible. She didn’t want Forgue to work on a weekend. But Forgue could sense the imminent danger.
“It's like, 'Ah, OK. I know, we need to talk now,' ” Forgue said. “There may not be a tomorrow.”
They talked for more than an hour.
“You were talking about how you were feeling vulnerable,” Forgue said to Amedy recently while reviewing her notes about that meeting. “You were really grieving your mother. It was Mother's Day. And I think it was just too much. You were scared, tired. Then Mother's Day hit, and then all the memories, and then you had this horrible dream, and it kind of pushed you over the top.”
Forgue explained the dream was a release of pent-up emotional energy.
“It’s kind of like an earthquake building,” she said. “There's a lot of tension, and finally you cracked, poof ... everything came out. And then you're like, 'OK, Oh, I feel better now.' ”
Forgue has a mantra: “Happiness is temporary, and sadness is temporary. It's like a river. It just keeps going on and going. Some days were better than other days, and you just have to have faith that everything's gonna be OK.”
After an hour of processing, Amedy was in a better place.
She continues to piece her life back together. Continues to have surgeries to fix her face.
And in the summer of 2023, she wanted to fix one more thing.
Her nose.
This is the fourth chapter of a five-part series in which Detroit Free Press columnist Jeff Seidel shares the story of a Michigan survivor of gun violence. Contact Jeff Seidel: [email protected] or follow him @seideljeff.
Chapter 5 of Amedy's Story:Getting a new nose, a new life