[Times photo: Lara Cerri]
Danita O'Neill bears the scars of facial and head cuts inflicted by her estranged husband in May 2000. He is to be sentenced Wednesday for aggravated battery and two lesser charges.

By BILL COATS, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published January 29, 2002

LUTZ -- In the days following Jim O'Neill's attack on his wife, reporters often said he "slashed" her.

But Danita O'Neill vividly remembers an attack too methodical and deliberate to be called "slashing."

That day in May 2000, her estranged husband pinned her to the ground and first made a long cut along the left side of her neck. Then one on her left cheek. In her shock, she felt only the metallic pressure. She feared he held a gun.

O'Neill paused to show her his weapon: a gold box cutter. Then, as his wife screamed until she fell limp, he resumed cutting.

"He took a lot of time," Danita O'Neill said. "It was like artwork to him."

This week, Danita O'Neill hopes to lock away a big part of that experience almost 21 months ago. Her 37-year-old husband is to be sentenced Wednesday for aggravated battery and two lesser charges. He could receive up to 36 years in prison. Already, he has a 20-year sentence for a rampage in Pasco County that followed the attack on his wife in Lutz.

Domestic violence has been targeted during the past two decades with improved police procedures and stiffer laws, yet it is still common. In 1999, women in the United States were assaulted or robbed some 670,000 times by boyfriends, husbands or ex-husbands, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Neither Jim O'Neill, his parents nor his attorney would comment for this article. But Danita O'Neill, 35, now living in St. Petersburg, had been waiting for the chance. When her husband signed a guilty plea last month, he eliminated the possibility of a jury trial that could be complicated by pretrial publicity. Only then, she felt, could she talk about what happened.

Venom and kindness

They met in her hometown of Baton Rouge, La., attended Louisiana State University, circulated in the same concertgoing circle of partiers. They were friends for years.

She moved in with him in 1995, and got pregnant in 1996. They argued briefly over Jim's desire that she get an abortion, but mostly over their meager finances. Danita said Jim smashed her laptop computer, stomped a coffee table to pieces and kicked a window out of their car.

"If things didn't go exactly the way they were supposed to, Jim didn't know how to deal with it," she said.

Eventually, Jim's venom would give way to kindness. "When he was good, he was very, very good," she said. "Just as sweet as pie."

That scenario is typical, said Mary Samuel Reid, director of the University of South Florida's Victims' Advocacy Program, which would eventually help hide Danita from Jim.

"Folks who are abusive almost have to overdevelop their charming, seductive side to get what they want," Reid said.

Danita was pregnant when Jim flung a plastic tool box at her belly, she said. But Liam O'Neill was born healthy, the first grandchild for both sets of grandparents. His arrival brought marriage pressure.

In 1997, Jim and Danita exchanged vows at the home of a Louisiana justice of the peace. Then they played volleyball at a friend's house. "That was my honeymoon," Danita said.

Jim lost his job a few months later. His parents, who had moved into a new house in Wesley Chapel in Pasco County, invited the family to move into their old one on the same 4-acre property. Danita, who has an anthropology degree from LSU, had heard about USF and fancied getting a master's degree. "I thought, yeah, let's go to Florida," she said. "Let's start a new life."

Scarred, devastated

In Florida, Jim's violence turned from smashing objects to hitting Danita, she said.

In 1999, an argument started over how to discipline Liam. Jim choked and threatened Danita.

"He told me I had five minutes to live," Danita wrote in a court affidavit, "but he couldn't decide how to kill me (without a bloody mess)."

She talked him down, promising not to call police. But when she left the next morning for her job at USF and to take Liam to day care, she knew she wasn't coming back.

For the next few months, the USF Victims' Advocacy Program found her and Liam safe and secret places to live. They helped her get a court order that Jim must stay 250 feet away from her. O'Neill was allowed to pick up Liam every other weekend at the USF campus police office.

Near the end of 1999, Danita rented part of a secluded house in Lutz. "I felt like that was a good place to hide," she said.

But Jim knew her cell phone number. He called on Jan. 14, 2000, and threatened to come to USF with a shotgun and blow her head off. She reported that to deputies, which made her address part of the public record. Within weeks, Jim knocked on her door. By then she had filed for divorce and thought Jim was beginning to accept it. She was dating a man she met at a Megadeth concert in Ybor City. The handoffs of Liam were becoming routine. Jim began picking him up at Danita's place.

The night of May 1, 2000, he called. Then he showed up, his face serious and body rigid. He crushed Liam's toy train track underfoot.

They sat outside, Liam in Danita's lap. Then Jim struck. Danita suddenly was face up on the ground, with Liam beneath her and 6-foot-2 Jim on top. Liam, 3, squirmed free. He watched as the cutting began. Jim shoved him into the apartment.

Danita remembers most vividly that Jim laughed maniacally. That he said, "That cute little nose of yours, it's gone." That he choked her into a painless blackness and asked, "Do you want to live?" She tried to nod yes.

Jim dropped Danita and drove away with Liam.

Jim's blue Dodge van broke down outside San Antonio in Pasco County. He blasted the door of a house with his shotgun, then walked away. He entered another house, fired into the ceiling and ordered a 79-year-old man to give up his Crown Victoria. But the gear shift stuck, and Jim walked, carrying Liam and the gun.

A deputy arrested him after a standoff in an orange grove.

Danita woke up in Tampa General Hospital six days later.

"Is Liam alive?" she asked a friend.

He was.

"Do I have lips?"

She did.

But she was covered with stitches and staples. She could not rest her head without pain.

She peeked into a bathroom mirror. "I was totally devastated," she said.

Despite three sessions of surgery, she remains badly damaged and scarred. Parts of her face are numb. Her eyes won't close completely. Her smile is constricted. Efforts to patch her nose with tissue from her ear, and later her cheek, did not succeed entirely.

One day out of the hospital, Danita saw Sheryle Baker, director of the LIFE Center of the Suncoast in Tampa. Baker's nonprofit center counsels people traumatized by crime or a serious illness.

Baker used talk and sensory stimulation techniques to help Danita distance herself from some of the worst memories and the distress about her appearance.

"I wasn't a beauty queen," Danita said. "But I was damn cute."

Baker said an important part of Danita was "impenetrable, unscarred."

"She had an amazing ability to say, "I'm not going to let this get me down."'

Years of prison

On the nine charges related to the Pasco County rampage, O'Neill reached a plea deal last spring.

His parents asked the judge for mercy, saying Jim had mental problems and severe mood swings. The judge levied the maximum allowed by the plea agreement: 20 years.

Mental health may be an issue in Jim's Hillsborough case, too. A sheaf of documents in his court file is sealed under state statutes that deal with mental patients' rights.

O'Neill faces 36 years, and the equally important question of whether the Hillsborough sentence will be served concurrently with the Pasco sentence or after it.

Danita wants him locked up until he is too old to harm her or their son.

At 5, the lanky, auburn-haired boy resembles his dad. Danita says she sees in him some of the same temper and violence.

"When he gets frustrated, he acts out on other children," she said.

The pair now live with Danita's boyfriend, the man she met in Ybor City. Danita said it hurts "when guys won't give me the attention that they used to."

But she gets more attention from women -- battered women. Friends of friends direct them to her. Danita is thinking of becoming a counselor.

Reid, at USF, believes she could be effective.

"When someone like Danita talks about domestic violence," she said, "I would imagine that most rooms would fall very silent."

-- Bill Coats can be reached at 269-5309 or coats@sptimes.com.

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